ABSTRACT
According to Kenneth Olwig, 'from Classical times to the Enlightenment, nature had meaning primarily as process; a norm, a principle, of development'.1 In this version of events, nature and narrative share the same essence: that of process, of movement as opposed to stasis. It is not surprising, then, to discover that one of the effects created by the references to the natural environment in the two Canterbury Tales under consideration here is to drive the narratives onward. Thus in The Knight's Tale' the third and fourth parts of the text arise directly from Theseus's decree that the rivalry between Palamoun and Arcite must be settled by formal tournament, rather than unsupervised fighting in a grove, while the whole plot of 'The Franklin's Tale' hinges on Aurelius's attempts to fulfil the apparently impossible conditions imposed by Dorigen in making all the rocks round Brittany disappear. This alone would make the study of the effects of the environment in these tales worthwhile, but when Carolyn Merchant's assertion that nature itself is a social construct that changes over time2 is set next to Olwig's description, we have a rich doubling of this principle of movement which may serve to draw our attention to aspects of these texts which are too easily read in simple, if not actually simplistic, metaphorical terms.
