READING CHAUCER'S MONK'S TALE

The disjointed repetitiveness of the Monk's brief tragedies has irritated and bored many readers. The tragedies, however, become much more appealing if one reads them like a monk. Boredom, as an ascetic challenge and as a component of meditative relaxation, is an integral feature of the long monastic tradition that Chaucer inherits. Chaucer's "An ABC" and Deguileville's Pelerinage de la vie humaine exemplify the monastic poetics informing the Monk's Tale. Monastic literature encourages readers to assimilate themselves to the texts they read, and the repetitiveness of the Monk's Tale performs such assimilation, which monks imagined as rumination: the reader is like a cow chewing the cud. Nabugodonosor, who eats grass like a ruminator, is the Monk's only protagonist to escape destruction. His son Balthasar fails to learn from him. The Nabugodonosor-Balthasar sequence both models ruminative reading and dramatizes the misreading that has dogged the Monk's Tale.