ABSTRACT
The Second N un’s Prologue begins the Fragment numbered eight in the Ellesmere order and is not connected with any preceding tale. It has already been discussed as The Life of St Cecilia (above, pp. 1312). It comes after The N un’s Priest’s Tale, and is followed by The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, and here we may merely note its placing, and the lesson it has o f the ongoing, fluid state of The Canterbury Tales in many o f its stages before its firm but abrupt conclusion. The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, clearly with its Tale an inspired afterthought, begins with a reference to The Life of St Cecilia, so there is no doubt that Chaucer meant to link the two in piquant contrast. But he had hesitated. In Hengwrt (written, it will be re membered, by the same scribe as he who wrote Ellesmere, at an earlier stage, or with a different version, of Chaucer’s order of tales) St Cecilia with the simple tide ‘The N onne’ comes after The Franklin’s Tale after a blank half page, and before The Clerk’s Prologue and Tale, with no link. So Chaucer clearly intended the already written story o f St Cecilia to be told by the N un who accompanied the Prioress as her chaplain. But Hengwrt does not include The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale. It must have been written, but not included, because it was an afterthought and presumably stored else where, away from the bundle o f texts from which the Hengwrt scribe copied. (There is no reasonable doubt that The Canon’s Yeo man’s Tale is genuine.) At some stage it was realised that The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, because of its beginning, was intended by Chaucer to follow the St Cecilia, and so it was inserted in the more splendid, and more edited, Ellesmere manuscript. Chaucer, as already noted, had written St Cecilia for a man, but had not had time to make the necessary adjustments at the beginning — unlike the situ ation with The Knight’s Tale, whose beginning he had adjusted. There seems no doubt that he would ultimately have adjusted the story of
St Cecilia to the Second N un — second, that is, after the Prioress. Attribution to a woman teller is suitable because of the subjectmatter, though the very possibility of change shows that there was neutral ground shared by both sexes.
