For the shortest tale, we sure had a lot to say about it! After introducing Roger (aka Hogge) of Ware and discussing “The Cook’s Tale” the first episode in this mini-series, we’re keen to share with you even more about the Cook. More than you would ever care to know! We start with Alice bringing her cousin-in-law on to discuss her career as a line cook in Los Angeles for a number of knee-slapping, riproaring, and sometimes scary stories from the kitchen. After, the hosts discuss additions to the Cook’s Tale as found in Bodley MS 686 as well as the Tale of Gamelyn. For those unfamiliar, its a tale post-Chaucer’s death attributed to the Cook in some manuscripts and features a character from the extended Robin Hood universe!

Sources, Show Notes & Further Reading

• Alice and her cousin have the same first name
• Bowers, John M., Consortium for the Teaching of the Middle Ages., and University of Rochester. The Canterbury Tales : Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions. Edited by John M. Bowers. Medieval Institute Publications, 1992.
• Knight, Stephen, Thomas H. Ohlgren, and Thomas E. Kelly. Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales. Published for TEAMS in association with the University of Rochester by Medieval Institute Publications, Western Michigan University, 1997.

Join our regular hosts Alice, and Shannen for a delicious, aromatic conversation on this unfinished bawdy tale, its additions and adaptations with Jo King (PhD candidate, UC Santa Barbara)! We got everybody’s favorite Cook, Roger of Ware, and the shortest Canterbury Tale! Despite that, it has a varied manuscript and adaptation history which makes this shortest episode potentially our longest so far — so much we had to cut it into two episodes!

Show notes, sources, and further reading:

Dubin, Nathaniel E., trans. “The Knight Who Made Cunts Talk” from The Fabliaux : A New Verse Translation. First edition. Liveright Publishing Corporation, A Division of W.W. Norton & Company, 2013.

Edwards, A. S. G. “Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale, 4422.” Notes and Queries (Oxford) 64, no. 2 (2017): 220–21.

Mannyng, Robert, Idelle Sullens, and William. Handlyng Synne. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983.

Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Trilogy of Life, including The Canterbury Tales (1971)

Pecan, David. “[Un]Licensed Riot: Prodigality, Hypocrisy, and Guild Discourse in Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale.” Nalans 10, no. 20 (2022): 281–92.

Wang, Denise Ming-yueh. “Old Pies, Stray Flies, and Possibly Poisonous Parsley in the Cook’s Prologue and Tale.” Ex-Position (Taipei) 45, no. 45 (2021): 27–45.

Content warning: issues of consent, violence

Description

“The Reeve’s Tale” is a complicated tale — a hodgepodge of different accents, stumbling actions in the dark, and no clear moral for the modern audience. In this episode, we get together to sort out the wheat from the chaff with our guest, Elisha Hamlin (PhD student, UC Davis). We open with the nutso astroweather and the Kings of Swords before moving onto whether or not the Reeve was a cringe Brony! If you aren’t familiar, “The Reeve’s Tale” (his rebuttal to “The Miller’s Tale”) centers around the misadventures Symkyn the miller, his wife, and kids experience when they host two Cambridge students, John and Aleyn, before there’s a dark turn where the lines of consent are notoriously blurred. Despite this, this tale was a favorite of J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote on it as an undergraduate as well as a professor.

If you’d like follow up on some of the quotes or line numbers, please see the edition on the Chaucer Harvard website: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/reeves-tale

Show Notes

https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/reeves-tale

Crocker, Holly A. "Affective Politics in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale: “Cherl” Masculinity after 1381." Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 29, 2007, p. 225-258. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sac.2007.0000.

Feinstein, Sandy. “The ‘Reeve’s Tale’: About That Horse’. The Chaucer Review, Summer, 1991, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Summer, 1991), pp. 99-106. Available at: jstor.org/stable/25094185.

Waymack, Anna Fore. Speaking Through the “Open-Ers”: How Age Feminizes Chaucer’s Reeve. 2013. University of Texas at Austen, Master’s thesis. Available at: repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/ea72fe5b-c927-47da-a434-b875ac69ee73/full