ABSTRACT
In her chapter on Sir Thopas in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, L. H. Loomis concentrated on identifying among the mass of Middle English metrical romances the particular objects of Geoffrey Chaucer’s imitation. Loomis dismisses that side of the family in a single sentence: Sir Thopas, she asserts, ‘follows no previous pattern of burlesque or parody, either social or literary. Chaucer could read English, French, Latin, Italian, and also possibly Flemish and Spanish; so a survey of all the burlesque or parodistic writings that he might have known would be a laborious task. In the chapter, the author deals with a more general point of comparison between the two poems: what he shall call the ‘direction’ of their comedy. Readers seem to need to know which of the two worlds is to be understood as the main target of the comedy.
