Friar Huberd, Saint Francis, and the Observance of Gospel Perfection

Abstract The second of the book’s two chapters on Geoffrey Chaucer’s Friar provides a sustained and extended interpretation of his portrait in The General Prologue. The analysis focuses on one particular detail—the Friar’s avoidance of the company of lepers—which the chapter argues is a deliberate allusion to an episode from the life of Saint Francis, in which Francis’s fear of lepers was transformed by God’s grace into love and compassion. The chapter argues that, on one level, Chaucer’s allusion to Francis can be read as a straightforwardly satirical attack on the Friar, whose failure to follow Francis’s example reveals his lack of Christian charity. But the chapter goes on to argue that Francis’s example can be interpreted not just as a condemnation of the Friar but as an implicit reproach to the social world that Chaucer represents in The General Prologue, which shares the Friar’s worldliness and self-interest.