Survival
A fragment of The Pilgrim's Tale exists only within The Courte of Venus, which is significant as the first printed anthology of coterie poems. The Courte of Venus itself exists in only three printed fragments whose identities and origins are elusive. It was first printed sometime between 1535 and 1539, probably by Thomas Gybson/Gibson. It was partially reprinted between 1547 and 1549, probably by William Copland as A Boke of Ballettes. It was printed again, probably by Thomas Marshe, in the early 1560s. Marshe's edition uniquely draws upon another source text independent of the other two known printed editions.
No surviving version of The Pilgrim's Tale names its author, but it says its author was an Oxonian, as Chaucer was known to have been, and it contains numerous references to Chaucer's works. A "comely priest" joins the narrator in criticism of the church, recommending that he read some anticlerical and prognosticatory lines in Chaucer's Romance of the Rose (Benson ed., 7165ff.), which are quoted. The Pilgrim's Tale also alludes to The Wife of Bath's Tale and Arthurian legend in describing a monk whose "mumbling of his holy thinges" banished the faeries and the queen elf but brought in seven worse spirits. Some see in the tale's characterization of Christ — "and first he dyd yt, and after he taght" — an allusion to Piers Plowman.
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Famous quotes containing the word survival:
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“We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.”
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“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
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