Reflections of the Book of Job and Gregory’s Moralia in Chaucer’s “Monk’s Tale”

In one of the crucial scenes in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man an appalled Stephen Dedalus is listening to the Lenten homily on the pains of hell that await unrepentant sinners. The Jesuit preacher is implicitly echoing the same despairing outcries from Righteous Job about the darkness of hell that Chaucer’s Pilgrim-Parson explicitly recalled on the road to Canterbury some five centuries before. The two preachers have the same purpose: to arouse so overwhelming a sense of contrition in the sinner that heartfelt repentance and unrestrained confession will pour out. Both are also well aware of the central place occupied in the Office of the Dead by lectiones from the Book of Job. As Lawrence Besserman explains, Job became "the principal biblical figure in the fully developed Office of the Dead of the High Middle Ages," and the text of the office in use at Salisbury Cathedral, the so-called Sarum Use, well known of course to Chaucer, "had gained wide acceptance and had what amounted to official recognition from Rome.".