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Seeing red: the Ellesmere iconography of Chaucer's Nun's Priest

We are accustomed to attributing our familiarity with Chaucer’s motley band of pilgrims to the nearly continuous availability of the Canterbury Tales since the advent of printing in England. Offered for sale in 1477, the Canterbury Tales was one of the first four books to roll off William Caxton’s Westminster press. But readers owe much of their intimacy with Chaucer’s fictional figures to their long history of visual representation, a history that has recently gained attention with the critical turn to early modern book production and material textuality. With Caxton’s second edition of the Tales in 1483 begins an extensive print history of illustrating Chaucer’s narrative poem, a story collection voiced by a variety of pilgrim narrators, who are initially described in its scene-setting General Prologue. William Morris’s 1896 Kelmscott Chaucer offers only the most famous of these illustrated editions, which now appear in as many children’s versions as those produced for adult or student readers. Moreover, this tradition of illustration extends back further than the poem’s print history to medieval manuscripts, seen in the much-reproduced portraits of the Ellesmere manuscript (Huntington Library MS El.26.C.9) and beyond, as the fragmentary remains of a potentially larger manuscript tradition will show. No matter the kind of illustration — medieval manuscript miniature, early modern woodcut, modern book illustration — the tradition of depicting the pilgrims originates with Chaucer himself and the descriptive catalog of these figures offered by the General Prologue. Because of the debt such visual portraits owe to the Prologue’s terms, we might find surprising the prominent appearance of the Nun’s Priest in various editions of the Tales, since he is a pilgrim virtually invisible to the General Prologue’s readers. Situated at the tail-end of the elaborate description of the Prioress, the Nun’s Priest appears in merely summary form: ‘Another nonne with hire hadde she,/That was hir chapeleyne and preestes thre’ (1.163–4). Despite being part of an anonymous group of ‘preestes thre’, the Nun’s Priest is one of the most oft-depicted figures from the poem. Because his tale, a hilarious version of the fable of the cock and the fox, is so perennially popular, particularly in selections of the Canterbury Tales offered to juvenile audiences, the Nun’s Priest has appeared more regularly in the poem’s illustrated tradition than the General Prologue would lead us to expect. The fact that the Prologue fails to describe him makes the details of his appearance in such editions all the more notable. How do readers picture a pilgrim the Tales’ narrator has never bothered to describe? And what might the choices illustrators make under these circumstances suggest about reading habits with respect to Chaucer’s poem? Tracing the pervasive image of the Nun’s Priest through the illustrative history of the Canterbury Tales, I will excavate an interpretive practice responsible for this picture of him, a compelling relation of word and image different from those typically found in the General Prologue. Then, looking into the critical history of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, a history of reading remarkably focused on visualizing its narrator, I will correlate distinct images of this pilgrim to show the similar kind of reading practices upon which such histories unconsciously rely. By analyzing various imaginative visual renderings of the Nun’s Priest in relation to what critical accounts claim about him, we will see that, despite his ‘invisibility’, Chaucer’s readers have a long history of seeing the Nun’s Priest and of reading him, much like the host of the pilgrimage, in relation to his tale’s protagonist, the red-topped rooster Chaunticleer.