Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and <i>Troilus and Criseyde</i> Book

Sort of an average Fragment of The Canterbury Tales - very short too, just one prologue and story. In the prologue, the host asks the Cook to tell a tale, but he's too hungover / drunk to tell one and so the Manciple (the person in charge of food and other provisions in a monastery) steps into the breech. His story is fairly simple - a story, like so many of Chaucer's others, based on Ovid's Metamorphoses. Phoebus has a pet bird, a white crow that can speak intelligently. Phoebus's wife is having an affair and the crow tells Phoebus all about it - who then proceeds to murder his wife. In his grief afterwards, Phoebus blames the crow for his own dickishness and curses it to be forever nothing but black and to be bereft of speech. And that's it.

It's an interesting little tale - certainly better than a lot of the second half of the Tales as a whole. And now there's only the Parson's prologue and tale to go (which is likely to be pretty heavy going).