ABSTRACT
Although the Man of Law's Tale comes fifth in the order of the Canterbury tales in all but one manuscript, 1 readers often detect something initiatory about this performance. The Host's astronomical calculation of date and time in the Introduction to the tale sounds like a “new beginning” to Derek Pearsall, 2 and Cooper speculates that the Introduction, which implies that the storytelling has not yet begun, may once have stood at the head of all the tales, following the General Prologue. 3 Cooper also finds that the lawyer's tale of Custance, the Christian missionary bride, “certainly makes a new start”:
after the ever more sexually active women of the first fragment comes the saintly Emperor's daughter …[;] after the vagaries of Fortune and the frenzied human disorder of the preceding tales comes a story that insists throughout on the providential control of events. 4
