What ails Chaucers' Cook? Spiritual alchemy and the ending of The Canterbury Tales

Michael Kensak. Philological Quarterly. Iowa City: Summer 2001.Vol. 80, Iss. 3;  pg. 213, 19 pgs

Abstract (Document Summary)

The answer to what ails the Cook in Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales" reveals the spiritual state of the pilgrimage as the company nears its destination, demonstrates Chaucer's masterful use of technical discourse and provides a glimpse into the poet's final conception of "The Canterbury Tales." The key to the Cook's condition is context.

Full Text (7060   words)

Copyright University of Iowa Summer 2001

[Alchemy] treats of the imperfect bodies of minerals, and teaches how to perfect them. . . . We compose this book of things perfecting and corrupting . . . because contraries set near each other are more clearly manifested.

Geber, Sum of Perfection

In the Manciple's Prologue, Chaucer describes the following scene: two miles outside of Canterbury, Roger the Cook lags behind the company and falls asleep atop his horse. Seeing this, the Host begins to "jape and pleye" and selects the Cook to tell the next tale. Harry Bailly asks for someone to awaken the Cook and then poses this question: "what eyleth thee to slepe by the morwe?"1 The Manciple, kitchen steward at the Inns of Court, steps forward to "doon ese" to the Cook but ends up berating him instead. He mocks Roger for his dazed eyes, pale visage, and sour breath, and reviles him as a "stynkyng swyn!" The exasperated Cook can only gape at the Manciple and then plummet from his horse. In his tirade, the Manciple glosses the Cook's condition as drunkenness, an explanation adopted by the Host and Chaucer the pilgrim.

Generations of readers have also accepted the Manciple's interpretation-a popular guide to The Canterbury Tales calls the Cook's "extreme drunkenness" a "basic point for readers"-and for good reason.2 We know from the General Prologue that the Cook has a penchant for London ale, and later in the Manciple's Tale Roger accepts a mollifying "draghte of wyn" from the Manciple's gourd. Chaucer the pilgrim sees little need of this since "He drank ynough biforn"-though the Host cannot say whether it was "wyn or oold or moysty ale." The pun in Harry Bailly's question-what ale-eth thee to sleep in the morning?-- even supports the Manciple's interpretation. In all likelihood the Cook merely suffers the effects of an alcoholic bender the night before.

Chaucer's text, however, does not yield up this explanation easily. Instead of establishing the Cook's inebriation up front, Chaucer makes Roger's condition the subject of inquiry and conversation throughout the Manciple's Prologue. The Host follows his initial question with three reasonable explanations:

Hastow had fleen al nyght, or artow dronke?

Or hastow with some quene al nyght yswonke,

So that thow mayst nat holden up thyn heed?

(16-18)

An answer comes not from the Cook or the narrator but from the Manciple, a crafty embezzler who delights in deceiving his learned masters at the Inns of Court (567-585). After promising the Cook that he shall "nat been yglosed," the Manciple pours forth a cascade of accusations that bury the Cook in glosses.

Other drunken characters in The Canterbury Tales require no such glossing. Before telling his tale, the Miller himself makes "protestacioun / That I am dronke" (3137-38). The announcement is hardly necessary, for the signs of his inebriation are palpable. The Miller hears intoxication in his altered "soun," and the Host, who later has such trouble reading the Cook, "saugh that [the Miller] was dronke of ale" (3138, 3128). Likewise, the Pardoner announces before telling his tale, "I [have] dronke a draughte of corny ale" (456), and the Friar begins his story of Cambises by declaring, "Irous Cambises was eek dronkelewe" (2043). In each of these cases, drunkenness is unambiguously established at the beginning of the narrative.

Instead of declaring his inebriation or protesting his sobriety, however, the Cook appears sincerely perplexed by his condition:

Roger mentions wine, but only by way of comparison, and he pleads ignorance about the intense heaviness that has befallen him. The first two voices in the tale cannot-or at least do notexplain what ails the Cook. Only after the Manciple silences Roger and asserts his own explanation do the pilgrims accept the Cook's inebriation as fact.

In The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer often depicts diverse pilgrims interpreting diversely, and a central joy of reading the Tales is joining with them in a community of readers. We are guided in forming our opinions by the many characters who misinterpret stories and miss the meaning of events. Chaucer's characters often play the part of Chauntecleer. The learned rooster of the Nun's Priest's Tale dreams of a predator with reddish-yellow fur, black ears and tail, and glowing red eyes-yet for all his learning, he cannot identify the fox. After discoursing at length on prophetic dreams, Chauntecleer ignores his own dream and ends up in the jaws of Russell the fox. The Manciple's Prologue provides another instance of this pattern, in which the pilgrims misread a living text. What ails the Cook? The answer to this question will reveal the spiritual state of the pilgrimage as the company nears its destination, demonstrate Chaucer's masterful use of technical discourse, and provide a glimpse into the poet's final conception of The Canterbury Tales.

The key to the Cook's condition is context. Prior to the events of the Manciple's Prologue, the pilgrims encountered two alchemists, a threadbare Canon and his vagabond Yeoman. The two arrive seeking investors (or victims) among the pilgrims, but when the Host questions the Yeoman's "discoloured" face and the Canon's "sluttish" appearance, the Yeoman abandons his sales pitch and launches into an expose of their fruitless alchemical quest. Like a penitent confessing his sins, the Yeoman recounts the vile effects of alchemical experiments on his body and mind. For seven years he has tended his master's furnace, and the work has left its mark on his complexion: "it hath chaunged my colour" (667). Noxious exhalations, the Yeoman explains, have transformed his appearance: "wher my colour was bothe fressh and reed, / Now is it wan and of a leden hewe" (727-728).

Although the alchemists have not succeeded in turning lead into gold, another kind of transformation has taken place. The Yeoman has himself been transmuted from the red of vitality to the pallor of illness. Ironically, he has undergone a color change opposite to that of a successful alchemical transformation. The idolatrous pursuit of gold, in short, has turned the Yeoman to lead. He constantly interrupts his own story to bemoan his wasted life and rail against the hellish operations of alchemy. From his detailed account of alchemical processes, vessels, and ingredients emerges a portrait of the Yeoman as vivid as any in the General Prologue. As Joseph Grennen observes, Chaucer characterizes the Yeoman by moving "from the world of alchemical treatises to the world of stupid, greedy, even sacrilegious human beings."3

Alchemical characterization occurs not just in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale but also in preceding tale, the Second Nun's life of Saint Cecile. Since Charles Muscatine first contrasted "St. Cecile, unharmed in her bath of flames, conquering fire through faith" and "the blackened, sweating believers in earth, whose fire blows up in their faces," two generations of readers have mined the tales for parallels and demonstrated beyond a doubt that Chaucer conceived of them together.4 The remarkable list of alchemical echoes between the Second Nun's and Canon's Yeoman's tales bespeaks a high level of poetic intentionality and supports the theory that "Chaucer was primarily interested in alchemy as a symbolic language."5

Just as the Canon's Yeoman is depicted as alchemical lead, Saint Cecile is depicted as alchemical gold. Cecile wears a golden robe, and her husband finds faith after reading a book written with golden letters (132, 210). Spiritual purity characterizes the saint just as alchemical purity characterizes gold. Through the word "unwemmed" (unstained, unadulterated), Saint Cecile is associated with the Virgin Mary, who "nobledest so ferforth oure nature" and purified the "contagioun" of the nun's body (137, 47, 40). Like the Philosopher's Stone in alchemy, Cecile exerts a transforming influence on those around her, Through Cecile, Valerian is "purged" of his sin, Tiburce is "changed ... al in another kynde," and Maximus receives a vision of "angels ful of cleernesse and of light" (181, 252, 203). Unlike the alchemists who labor in vain, Saint Cecile effortlessly transforms leaden souls into spiritual gold.

What ails Chaucer's Cook? To answer this question, we must first note how Chaucer extends to the Manciple's Prologue the technique of alchemical characterization developed in the preceding tales.6 Like the Canon's Yeoman and unlike Saint Cecile, Roger the Cook is spiritually leaden. He exhibits all four of lead's distinctive qualities and suffers from a spiritual condition consistent with allegorical interpretations of lead. Before examining the particulars of the Cook's leadenness, though, we must first demonstrate that Chaucer had sufficient knowledge of alchemy to employ such a technical device.

Chaucer's Yeoman catalogues accurately, though not infallibly, the tools, materials, and processes of alchemical experimentation.7 To gather this information, Edgar Duncan demonstrates in a series of articles, "Chaucer made significant use of the alchemical treatises and other writings about alchemy available to him at the end of the fourteenth century."8 Among the works Duncan argues Chaucer knew is the Sum of Perfection, a thirteenth-century text attributed to Geber. Duncan finds "the lists of alchemical substances, apparatus, processes, etc., thrown out by the Yeoman more nearly paralleled in Geber's Sum than in any other treatise."9 Of the approximately eighty alchemical terms used by the Canon's Yeoman, all but six are illustrated in Geber.

At one time, the apparent expertise of the Yeoman even led to claims that Chaucer himself had practiced alchemy. In 1652 Elias Ashmole included the Canon's Yeoman's Tale in his Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum and named Chaucer a "Iudicious Philosopher . . . [and] a Master" of the hermetic mysteries.10 As late as 1924 S. F. Damon believed that Chaucer "possibly knew (and if so, respected) the famous secret [of alchemical transmutation]."1 Although this notion has been dismissed as part of the late-medieval Chaucer-mystique, the poet's conversance with alchemical minutiae should not be underestimated. If Chaucer did not practice alchemy in a laboratory, he must have composed the Canon's Yeoman's Tale with alchemical references at hand.

More significant than Chaucer's knowledge of individual texts is his familiarity with alchemical lore in general. Textual study may reveal the exact source where Chaucer found items listed in a specific order, but the poet's primary source should be understood as the corpus of alchemical writings. Throughout its two-- thousand year history, alchemical theory remains remarkably consistent, and alchemical texts are notoriously derivative. Most manuals are, in fact, "less singular documents than momentary coagulations of inherited materials, exhibiting in their emergence and reconfiguration the world of endless transmutation they represent."12 We can rely, therefore, on the most widely disseminated texts for information Chaucer likely perused, without claiming the poet knew that incarnation of alchemical lore per se.13

To understand how Chaucer characterizes his Cook, we must first join the hermetic brotherhood in their understanding of lead, the basest metal. Geber, whose Sum of Perfection is closely reflected in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, defines lead as "a Metallick Body, livid, earthy, ponderous, mute, partaking of a little Whiteness, with much paleness."14 Not all of these qualities are unique to lead: livid is a common trait shared by tin, copper, and iron; mute and ponderous are shared only by gold, from which lead is easily distinguished; earthiness and pallor pertain to lead alone. Lead's distinctive characteristics, therefore, are heaviness, earthiness, pallor, and muteness-the four qualities that define Roger the Cook in the Manciple's Prologue.

Like the heaviest metal, Roger the Cook is remarkably ponderous. As we have seen, the Cook labels his condition not sleepiness or drunkenness but "heavynesse." As if afflicted by an abnormally strong gravitational pull, he has trouble holding up his head and threatens to "falle fro his hors atones." When he does fall, the Host japes that "Dun is in the myre," referring to a children's game involving a heavy object stuck in mud. Once on the ground, the Cook remains there until laboriously rehorsed by his fellow pilgrims:

Ther was greet showyvng bothe to and fro

To lifte hym up, and muchel care and wo,

So unweeldy was this sory palled Boost.

(53-5)

We should pay careful attention to the Cook's gravidity, Isidore of Seville suggests, for of all the means of determining an object's nature, "weight reigns over all."15

In his Reductorium morale, a collection of moralized lore based on Bartholomaeus Anglicus's De rerum proprietatibus, Pierre Bersuire allegorizes lead's heaviness. When lead is fired together with silver, according to alchemical lore, the lead is burned away leaving the silver purified. Bersuire interprets this process in spiritual terms:

Silver is the spirit, and the lead which weighs it down is sin, which, insofar as it weighs, makes one to descend into hell. Silver, therefore, is the man who is purged of vices and sins in the furnace of tribulation and penitence, and, in the fire, is not greatly injured or weighed down by them.16

The weight of sin can only benefit a man, Bersuire continues, if it fosters humility and penance, elevating the individual through recognition of his sinfulness. Nothing in the text suggests that the Cook suffers from excessive humility, while his salacious tale of Perkyn Revelour and his willingness to drown his heaviness in wine suggest a spiritual component to his ailment.

Lead's second distinctive characteristic is earthiness. Unlike gold, lead contains a great deal of brimstone or sulphur, which gives it a dirty quality. Bartholomaeus describes it this way: lead "smorchep his honde Pat towchep it . . . [and] Pat brymstone Perof is euylle vapoure and stynkynge. Perfore it freseth not well atte ful"-lead besmirches the hand that touches it, and its brimstone has an evil, stinking smell; therefore, it does not completely solidify. To transmute lead into gold, this earthiness must be removed through refining processes like burning and washing. Removing lead's impurities is no simple task, however: "wip wiping and clensing, Pis vnclenes of lead may be taken away for a tyme, but neuer for alway, a man may wipe of De vnclenes but alwaye it is lead Dough it semeD siluer."17

Lead's earthiness, according to Bartholomaeus, involves four qualities-filth, contagion, unpleasant odor, and inability to solidify-which also describe Chaucer's Cook. To begin with, Roger has a running sore on his leg:

But greet harm was it, as it thoughte me,

That on his shyne a mormal hadde he.

For blankmanger, that made he with the beste.

(385-87)

Chaucer's wry juxtaposition of Roger's blankmanger stew with the pus dripping from his leg makes him seem filthy indeed-not the kind of Cook the merchants want preparing their meals. The Cook's gangrenous sore suggests not only lead's filth and odor, but also its inability to solidify. What's more, this memorable detail associates Roger with failed alchemical transformation. Geber insists on the cleanliness and health of the alchemist's body and warns against skin diseases: "if the body of the 'artist' is weak and sick, like bodies of people with fever or leprosy, whose limbs fall off ... he will not achieve the completion of the Art."18 In the Aurora consurgens, similarly, alchemical transmutation is described metaphorically as cleansing the leper. Given the association of skin disease with failed alchemical transformation, the Cook's mormal suggests more than physical illness. It suggests alchemical, and therefore spiritual, leprositas.

The Cook's mormal, Walter Clyde Curry explains, is likely the result of an immoral lifestyle.19 In Chaucer and the Medieval Sciences, Curry quotes Bernardus de Gordon on mormals: "Malum mortuum is a species of scabies, which arises from corrupted natural melancholia ... the marks of it are large pustules of a leaden or black color, scabbed, and exceedingly fetid."20 The same associations which prompted Bernardus to describe mormals as "fetid" and "leaden" prompted Chaucer to give his fetid, leaden Cook a mormal.

Unfortunately for his traveling companions, the Cook's unpleasant emanations are not limited to the sore on his leg. As the Cook yawns, the Manciple observes that his breath "ful soure stynketh" and warns that it "infecte wole us alle" (32-39, my emphasis). The Manciple here borrows the Yeoman's sulphurous description of an alchemist to characterize the Cook: "His savour is so rammyssh and so hoot, / That though a man from hem a mile be, / The savour wole infecte hym" (887-89, my emphasis). The verb infecte, besides referring to a fourteen th-century theory of plague transmission, also denotes an alchemical process. The Latin verb inficere is the technical term for "the corruption of metals and acids by inferior substances."21 According to Vincent of Beauvais' Speculum naturale, "lead's vapor breaks down [frangit] gold and coagulates living silver."22 Bersuire confirms this description and offers the following moralization:

Such is the true sinner, especially a lecherous man . . . for through a sinful life and practice and through his bad examples, he stains, taints, and corrupts his companions, because whatever something unclean touches it makes unclean.

(11.112)

As Margaret Hallissay argues, the Canon's Yeoman's Tale is a "story of spiritual damnation," and the Manciple implies that the Cook's spiritual condition could spread plague-like among the pilgrims." This smelly infection would be the opposite of an olfactory redemption in the Second Nun's Tale. Valerian claims, "The sweete smel that in myn herte I fynde / Hath chaunged me al in another kynde" (251-2).

A final element of lead's earthiness is its unhealthy effects on human beings. Lead, according to medieval authorities, is the least medicinal of all the metals. In her Physica, Hildegard von Bingen writes that "Lead is cold and injures a man if he somehow takes it into his body."24 In addition to threatening others with his pestilential breath and questionable cooking, the Cook himself suffers from a kind of alchemical lead poisoning. Roger's "visage is ful pale," his "eyen daswen eek," he "fneseth fast," and his stinking breath suggests he is "nat wel disposed" (30-33, 62). Based on these symptoms, the Manciple concludes that "he hath the pose" (62)-he has a cold.25 Ironically, the Cook exhibits such ill health within an hour's walk of the shrine of Thomas ; Becket, "The hooly blisful martir . . . / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke" (17-18). Chaucer's Cook, to summarize, exhibits the filth, stench, inability to solidify, and contagion that constitute the earthiness of alchemical lead.

Lead's third distinctive characteristic is pallor, and Roger the Cook is strikingly pale. The first reference comes in the Host's quip "Dun is in the myre." In the children's game, the heavy object Dun is metaphorically a horse, which takes its name metonymically from its color, light gray or pale. Next, the Manciple remarks that Roger's "visage is ful pale," and Chaucer calls the Cook a "palled Boost" who is, again, "ful pale." When Chaucer clarifies "ful pale" by adding "and no thyng reed," he invokes a familiar dichotomy from the preceding tales and from alchemical literature. Three times the Yeoman laments his "leden heave," leading us to conclude that a Cook who is "dun," "palled," "pale," and "no thyng reed" is likewise leaden.26

Pallor also had spiritual significance in the Middle Ages. Bartholomaeus defines pallor as "a mene colour [that] bygynnep fro white and passes out of kynde toward blak" (19.13). Bersuire describes it as "declining from white into black" and offers a moralization predictable to anyone with a bent for allegorical thinking:

To speak morally, such pallor may designate the condition of sin, in which the person recedes from the whiteness of innocence, and moves towards the eternal darkness of death, and blackness. (13.2)

Along with his dirtiness and heaviness, the Cook's pallor suggests an unredeemed man teetering on the brink of spiritual death.27

In the minds of medieval readers, the pallid Cook may have suggested another pale horseman. In his discussion of pallor, Bersuire directs the reader to the sixth chapter of the Apocalypse: "Behold the pale horse, and the name of him who sits on it" (19.12). The rider's name, of course, is Death. The association may seem at first unlikely-an impaired Cook is hardly a Horseman of the Apocalypse-but here again some remarkable parallels arise. The Cook is repeatedly described in equestrian and eschatological terms, suggesting that we are intended to associate Roger with the ultimate failed transformation: spiritual death at Doomsday. First, Chaucer emphasizes Roger's horsemanship. After the Cook falls from his horse, the Manciple mockingly calls him "sire Cook" and jokes that he is well-shaped to joust at the quintain. The Manciple terms his fall a chyvachee, a chivalric terms denoting an impressive feat of horsemanship.28

Second, apocalyptic imagery surrounds the Cook. Like his eschatological counterpart, the pale horseman of the Manciple's Prologue is a "sorry palled Boost" and a "cors"-a ghost and a corpse. The Cook's infectious breath associates him with Death, as does his gaping mouth threatening to "swolwe us anonright" (36). After the hellish imagery of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, we are prepared to view the Cook's situation anagogically. Roy Pearcy finds in the Host's "Awake, thou Cook" "a suggestion of the archangel's summons on the day of judgment," and he links the Cook with the Parson "as figures associated with the damned and the saved at the LastJudgment.""Pearcy also hears an echo of the hell-mouth in the Cook's gaping yawn, sees the moral torpor of the damned in his stupor, and reads the fall of the souls from the left hand of God in his tumble from his horse. Other critics have glossed the Cook in terms consistent with this interpretation: Trevor Whittock describes him as "possessed by sin," and Mark Allen finds represented in "the Cook's fall on the Canterbury way . . . a failure to confess."30 As the Parson notes in his prologue, the time grows short, the end draws nigh, and the Judgment that may or may not lead to "Jerusalem celestial" awaits just around the bend.

Lead's fourth distinctive characteristic is muteness. When a plate of forged lead is struck with a mallet, that is, it emits little resonant noise. Likewise, Chaucer's Cook remains silent when struck, so to speak, by the Manciple. In the entire prologue, the Cook speaks only four lines, and once the Host and Manciple begin reviling him, he can only nod furiously for "lakke of speche" (48). This reticence is surprising given the Cook's demeanor earlier in The Canterbury Tales. In Fragment I, the Cook (or an earlier draft of the Cook) requited the Host's insults with a retributive tale about a "hostileer." In Fragment IX, however, the Cook is leaden: like the basest metal, he is heavy, earthy, pale, and mute.

In the Manciple's Prologue, the Cook finds himself at a crossroads. Like the intermediate color of pallor, his spiritual condition might darken into the blackness of lost souls at the Last Judgment or brighten into Cecile's "whitnesse . . . of honestee" (87). Some optimism in this matter is suggested by both the allegorists and the poem. Bersuire interprets lead's light color in bono as the virtuous product of a transformed sinner (11.112), and Vincent of Beauvais writes that lead is really nothing other than gold into which a noxious impurity has entered (7.42). Though the Cook is clearly stained by noxious impurities, his one speech in the Manciple's Prologue suggests the potential for reform. Roger responds to the Host's abuse by asking God's benediction upon himself: "So God my soule blesse" (21). Whatever his activities the previous evening, this morning the Cook disavows any interest in wine. At worst this is the morning-after morality of a hungover drunk; at best it is the beginning of a lost soul's regeneration. Instead of encouraging words or sound doctrine, however, Roger gets the Manciple, whose promise to "doon ese" soon degenerates into "Fy, stynkyng swyn! Fy, foule moote thee falle!" (25, 40).

That the Manciple's tirade fails to convert the leaden Cook into gold goes without saying, yet another kind of transformation does occur in the Manciple's Prologue. In the beginning of the Prologue, the Cook was reflective, communicative, and possibly penitential. Only after his altercation with the Manciple is Roger fully transformed into the unvoiced zombie most readers recall. For this human transformation, alchemy once again provides a counterpart: if Saint Cecile's gentle suasion can transform lead into gold, the Manciple's scathing castigation can transform lead into dirt.

Though it has not survived in our popular notion of alchemy, the transformation of lead into earth is described at length by Bartholomaeus Anglicus and Vincent of Beauvais, and moralized by Pierre Bersuire. First Bartholomaeus' scientific account:

Hermes seip if pou hongest lede ouer vynegre it schendep it, for pe vinegre schal pule Pe substaunce perof and tome it into ponder and into white colour of flour of led. And if pou heldest vynegre per-vpon it destroyed Pe might of Pe vynegre. Brande lede bredep reed colour and dym, and if pe fuyre is more strong it tornep into cytryn, and perafter wip steryng and druyeng and temperynge wip vinegre it tornep into white colour of flour of lede. And if Pou makest strengere fuyre it tor-nep alle into Pe firste matiere of lede and is ymade erpe, as it is yseide here. (16.80)

In Bersuire's interpretation, lead represents the sinner and vinegar the bitter confrontation with his sin. Just as lead is whitened by a gentle mist of vinegar, a sinner is purified by moral words charitably spoken. Poured vinegar and excessive firing, however, signify the overly caustic chastisement that destroys a leaden soul rather than amending it:

If a great fire continues too long, then it is totally destroyed and converted into and returned to earth, ash, and its original material. Fire is harsh correction, because truly even if a man is lead, and sinful and black in color, and in bad practices, still the power of the correction of fire and tribulation makes him beautiful and red in color and charitable. Nevertheless, if the fire lasts too long, that is, if tribulation or correction is excessive, then he is corrupted and destroyed through desperation and commuted into his original material, a vicious person and sinner once again. (11.112)

The Manciple's words are as poured vinegar and a raging furnace to the leaden Cook. Having teetered on his horse before, the Cook plummets to the earth once the Manciple chastises him. The heaviness Roger complained about before now proves intractable, just as lead "keeps not its proper weight in Transmutation, but is changed into a new weight."31 In his description of lead's pulverization, Vincent of Beauvais writes that lead cannot withstand the hearth's blaze. Translating more literally, Vincent writes that "its nature cannot stand before the hearth" ["natura eius ante focum stare non potest"] (7.42, my emphasis). The Cook's pallor is also magnified by the Manciple and culminates in the corpselike paleness of the "sory palled Boost." Finally, if Roger spoke only once before the Manciple's words, afterwards he does not speak at all. If lead is little sounding, dirt is completely silent.

The Manciple's fire of tribulation has left the Cook charred to spiritual ash. As Earle Birney has demonstrated, Chaucer's "gentil Maunciple" is a vicious moralist who roasts the Cook out of his own perverse need for verbal display.32 When the Host reprimands the Manciple-"thou art to nyce, / Thus openly repreve hym of his vice" (69-70)-he speaks more wisely than he knows. The real danger, of course, is not that a sober Cook will avenge the humiliation, but that the Manciple has done irreparable harm to the Cook's soul. Having stripped Roger of his voice, his tale, his sobriety, and any possibility of redemption, the Manciple turns the leaden Cook ot dirt and leaves him pulverized on the road to Canterbury.

Besides acquainting us more thoroughly with Chaucer's Cook, what are the implications of this interpretation? To begin with, it irons out apparent wrinkles in the narrative. No reading of the Manciple's Prologue has explained why Chaucer introduces the Cook's condition as a conundrum rather than a narrative fact. Presenting the Cook as an enigma invites the reader to delve further into the significance of his state, to see past the limited vision of the pilgrims into the spiritual condition of a human being in distress. The apparently banal repetition of details such as the Cook's heaviness and pallor also finds justification as the key to a literary-scientific puzzle. Unraveling the complex semiotics of the Cook's characterization will hopefully aid in the ongoing revalorization of a part of The Canterbury Tales often considered "not Chaucer's best work."

The altercation of the Manciple's Prologue also sheds light on the state of the pilgrimage as it nears its destination. The Cook falls from his horse near Harbledown, a small village two miles above Canterbury, which marks the beginning of the approach to the shrine of Thomas A Becket. The leaden Cook is transformed into dirt, in other words, just as the walls of Canterbury are coming into view over the trees of the Blee forest. Instead of preparing for their arrival, several pilgrims engage in a parody of the healing and transformation an orthodox Christian might expect at the conclusion of a pilgrimage. In fact, the Manciple's Prologue concludes with the Host irreverently rededicating the pilgrimage to the god of wine:

O Bacus, yblessed be thy name,

That so kanst turn ernest into game!

Worshipe and thank be to thy deitee!

(99-101)

The Cook has just accepted a drink of wine from the Manciple, defusing the situation and restoring harmony among the pilgrims. "Ernest" has been turned into "game" at the expense of Roger the Cook, however, and the Host's proclamation suggests that some of the pilgrims will be disinclined to accept the Parson's reinterpretation of their "viage" as the "parfit glorious pilgrymage / That highte Jerusalem celestial" (49-50).

The final significance of this argument is the glimpse it provides into Chaucer's intentions for structuring The Canterbury Tales. Geoffrey Chaucer died in 1400 leaving the fragments of his masterwork in disarray. Scribes and editors have spent six hundred years attempting to discern the author's intentions for arranging the fragments. The preceding interpretation of the Manciple's Prologue depends on the freshness of the Second Nun's and Canon's Yeoman's Tales in the mind of the reader-- and in the mind of the Manciple. Only with this proximity can Chaucer expect us to view the Cook in light of alchemical characterization. The Second Nun's and Canon's Yeoman's Tales, however, constitute Fragment VIII (Chaucer Society G), and the Manciple's Prologue and Tale constitutes Fragment IX (Chaucer Society H) of The Canterbury Tales. No internal evidence connects the two fragments.

A significant issue in the tale-order debate is the position of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, and a significant question is whether it should be placed next to the Manciple's Prologue. Larry Benson, upon reexamining the evidence gathered in Manly and Rickert's prodigious study of the manuscript tradition, discerns two original tale orders:

[A]11 forty-seven mss listed on Manly and Rickert's Charts I, II, IV, and V derive ultimately from one of two ancestors, which, so far as the ordering of the Blocks is concerned, differ only in the position of G:

The two orders are obviously related to one another, since it is nearly impossible that two scribe-editors, working independently, would have hit upon two arrangements that differ so little.

Based on this analysis, Benson posits the circulation of two distinct versions of The Canterbury Tales late in Chaucer's lifetime or shortly after his death: a "working draft (or, possibly, actual publication)" lacking the Manciple's Prologue and a later version including the Manciple's Prologue with Fragment VIII (G) moved into a revised position adjacent to it.33 The preceding argument supports this theory. If the Manciple's Prologue was composed late and Fragment VII (G) was late moved into apposition with it, Chaucer must have intended to connect the two. Although Chaucer's final intention for the order of The Canterbury Tales remains a matter of speculation, the alchemical characterization of the Cook provides thematic evidence that during the final period of his work on the Tales Chaucer invested a great deal of time and effort in connecting the Canon's Yeoman's Tale with the Manciple's Prologue.

Every reader of Chaucer knows that his tales grow in significance when read in connection with each other. The Miller's Tale stands alone as a delightfully bawdy romp, but takes on untold depths of meaning when read as a rejoinder to the Knight's Tale. The tales of the Second Nun and Canon's Yeoman have less to recommend them individually, but considered as contrasting tales of sight and blindness, ethereal transcendence and coarse materialism, they reveal a multifaceted interlace structure that has kept critics busy for forty years. In Geoffrey Chaucer: Building the Fragments of the Canterbury Tales, Jerome Mandel documents the multitude of ways the poet "joins two tales that are completely different in genre, tone, meaning, significance, narrator, and psychological relevance of tale to teller" using "parallels and balances . . . echoes and ironic inversions." Mandel omits from his consideration, however, fragments consisting of only one tale, including the Manciple fragment. His rationale: "Since Chaucer did not connect them with any other tales, they can offer no evidence of his ideas on the artistic unity of a fragment."" Learning what ails Chaucer's Cook will hopefully serve as an invitation for scholars to search out additional thematic interlaces which bind together the final fragments of The Canterbury Tales.