Preview: Section 2
Reading boundary
Start: There was also a Nun, a PRIORESS,
Stop after: was call’d Huberd.
The narrator turns to three religious figures: a Prioress, a Monk, and a Friar. Their formal offices are familiar, but Chaucer builds each portrait from manners, possessions, habits, social contacts, and small choices about how to live.
The portraits often praise while placing a revealing detail beside the praise. Church rules, elegant possessions, food, animals, speech, and performance create tensions between religious vocation and worldly style without reducing all three figures to the same kind of character.