Proprieties of Work and Speech: ‘The Second Nun's Prologue’ and ‘Tale’, ‘The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue’ and ‘Tale’, ‘The Manciple's Prologue’ and ‘Tale’, and ‘The Parson's Prologue’

The Tales draw to an end amidst antitheses between busy occupation and idleness or sloth. The Second Nun and her Tale dramatise a complex ideal of morally productive work. This chapter shows how the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale contradicts that ideal through a misplaced ‘unfruitful’ obsession with inchoate fragmentary matter. Alchemy comes to represent hectically idle work (while at the same time it is gendered distinctively masculine). The twinning of these tales also concerns speech, its efficacy, or fruitlessness: the very question that takes centre stage in the last extant Canterbury Tales. ‘Sins of the tongue’ are not incidentals in the context of Chaucer’s poem. Rather, they constitute both the besetting vice and the imaginative inspiration of the entire tale-telling game.