by Geoffrey Chaucer is a late-fourteenth-century
fabliauand anti-mendicant satire, which features a learned but hypocritical friar who gets his comeuppance at the hands of his social inferiors, an angry churl, and a clever squire. Written in rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, the 586-line poem is disposed last in Fragment III of
The Canterbury Tales, following
The Friar’s Tale. It is preceded by a 44-line prologue, which records the Summoner’s angry reaction to
The Friar’s Tale, which is about a wicked summoner who foolishly swears brotherhood with a devil and is damned. Most of the prologue consists of the Summoner’s short story of a friar who is given a vision of hell, where he sees twenty-thousand friars swarming in and out of “the develes ers”…
2522 words
Citation: Greene, Darragh. "The Summoner’s Tale". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 27 July 2022 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=39387, accessed 22 November 2024.]
