Tiburce's kiss and other extraordinary happenings in Chaucer's Second nun's tale

The following is a close reading of Chaucer's Second Nun’s Tale. The goal of this reading is to note the humor and sexuality that can be found in the Tale. As I surveyed the critical literature and studied the tradition of hagiography of which the Second Nun's Tale is a part, I found an overwhelming tendency among critics to either dismiss the Tale as insignificant or to regard it with a stone-faced seriousness. I hope that I have established in the following pages that the Second Nun's Tale is an integral part of the Canterbury Tales and has within it much of the same humor, sexuality and thematic complexity found in the tales told by the other pilgrims.