Privy Speech: Sacred Silence, Dirty Secrets in the Summoner's Tale

Abstract

Privy Speech:Sacred Silence, Dirty Secrets in the Summoner's Tale Mary Hayes In the Summoner's Tale Chaucer presents a satirical portrait of a gluttonous friar who--to put it bluntly--spreads the Word as a means of enhancing his own flesh. Friar John's sermon to his lay charge Thomas, an excessive performance that consumes more than half of the tale, shows that he preaches in order to get donations from lay people and, more broadly, to exert his authority over them. As has often been noted, Friar John's preaching style reveals his particular affection for glossing, a form of scriptural interpretation that, according to the friar, compensates for the comprehension problems that will indubitably confront his lay audience.1 The friar thus evokes late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century debates on scriptural glossing and vernacular translation, practices that, in accommodating popular understanding, seemed to entail a loss of clerical control over sacred texts.2 Although Friar John speaks to these medieval lay-centered initiatives, he himself does not gloss to enable lay access to scriptural meaning but rather to secure his clerical power, which is evident, for instance, in his appeal to a nonexistent scriptural passage that contains Christ's special blessing of friars.3 Scriptural interpretations meant to sanction the friar's own authority pervade his sermon to Thomas, who responds by presenting Friar John with an equally illustrious, if vulgar, gift. Thomas's donation, a fart delivered into the friar's hand, has inspired a great deal of scholarship, some of which has regarded it as an echo of the friar's own long-winded performance.4 Following this critical impulse to read the fart as a defiant response to the friar's sermon, I consider what else their exchange discloses about how clerical and lay subjects speak, hear, and control sacred discourse. In this essay I contend that the Summoner's Tale reflects Chaucer's investment in representing sacred verbal performances, which perhaps is most obvious in the friar's self-serving sermon yet also apparent in the tale's allusions to a specific type of medieval devotional ritual: eucharistic prayers. To understand the significance of Chaucer's references to eucharistic prayers in the Summoner's Tale, we must first acknowledge how they were performed in the medieval liturgy. From [End Page 263] the time of the early church until the Protestant Reformation and, in Catholic worship, until Vatican II, the celebrating priest recited the Mass's Canon, the twelve prayers that comprised the eucharistic consecration, in an inaudible whisper.5 In addition to its various allegorical meanings, medieval liturgical commentaries offered a practical reason behind this silence: to keep these prayers secret from the lay worshippers who, it was presumed, would vulgarize the eucharistic formula or misunderstand the sacred mysteries.6 Although scholars have frequently addressed how the Latin language impeded lay understanding of Scripture and the liturgy, they have overlooked almost entirely the importance of this devotional practice and its impact on lay participation in the Mass. Chaucer's interest in late medieval discourses on scriptural glossing and vernacular translation suggests the nature of his interest in liturgical silence.7 This devotional practice epitomized how clerical power entailed control over sacred discourse, a paradigm mirrored in Friar John's homiletic performances that promulgate his authority over his lay charges even while misleading them. Chaucer's allusions to liturgical silence thus illuminate the tale's depiction of lay-clerical relations, particularly as these involve access to sacred discourse. More specifically, however, the tale interrogates the terms of clerical knowledge about and lay exclusion from eucharistic secrets. It ultimately endorses lay private devotional speech, which Chaucer portrays as subversive of clerical authority. Furthermore, he questions whether any human speech can communicate with the divine or aptly articulate sacred mysteries. In the first part of this essay I attend to how Friar John insinuates references to the silent Canon when preaching to Thomas and his wife in order to bolster his claims about clerical superiority and lay degeneracy. Besides exposing the friar as an appallingly bad homilist, his lengthy sermon shows that he defines his clerical power in terms of his mastery of sacred...

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