ABSTRACT
Most critical accounts of "The Nun's Priest's Tale" have been fairly limited in range; they usually praise its mock-heroic wit and its breadth of reference, but hesitate to investigate more deeply its possible meaning or the details of its construction. Two well-known critics have, however, gone further and have imputed a specific meaning to the tale. J. Leslie Hotson has expounded it as a political allegory about Chaucer's contemporaries, but he does recognize the mock-heroic character of the tale as well, and says that the contemporary references would add:
In a more single-minded reading Mortimer J. Donovan regards the tale as a Christian allegory; he takes the animal plot as a pure fable and allows little value to the mock-heroic interpretation of the poem, saying firmly that as a whole it is "a sermon on alertness to moral obligation:'(Donovan 1953, 498) In comparison with other tales, relatively little has been said about the story-teller; this may be partly because the priest is barely mentioned outside his tale and its links, and so Arthur T. Broes and R. M. Lumiansky have had to depend on internal evidence for what light they have cast on this issue. As a result both have based their findings on rather speculative and thin arguments.!
