According to literary scholar Larry Scanlon “The Nun’s Priest’s tale”, “has been the recurrent site of the central controversy in Chaucer studies: are we to read Chaucer allegorically or ironically?  Patristic scholars, taking literally the tale's parting injunction, "taketh the fruyt and lat the chaf be stille,"… Despite the real differences in this debate, both sides share one overriding assumption-- the assumption that allegory must be unequivocal. However, what does it mean to take the fruyt and lat the chaf be stille? To answer this question, we must examine the motif that pervades this entire tale, dreams. Chaucer directly mentions dreams or dreaming 46 separate times in the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale”. This alone is evidence enough that Chaucer seems to be indicating something important about the idea of dreams. However, this is complicated by the fact that this idea is trapped within both a frame narrative and an allegory, so it’s unclear how much of this exploration is an allegorical necessity. However, a deeper exploration of the frame narrative, the tale’s allegorical conventions and the actual discussion of dreams should show Chaucer’s true intent. Namely that, Chanticleer and Pertelote’s meditation on dreams is Chaucer’s way of evaluating the human tendency to miss the intended value of stories, when they become obsessed with interpreting it. To best understand Chaucer’s meditation, we must first explore the frame narrative that surrounds this tale.
Before we begin to explore this question properly, we must first address the frame narrative that envelops this tale. The Nun’s priest’s tale comes about at the behest of the Knight who claims that “for me, it is a greet disese,/Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese,/To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, allas!/And the contrarie is joye and greet solas/As whan a man hath been in povre estaat, /And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunat, /And there abideth in prosperitee. /Swich thyng is gladsom, as it thynketh me, /And of swich thyng were goodly for to telle”. The interesting thing about the Knight’s injunction is that it attempts to take away agency from the storyteller and align it with his own desires. We never get a chance to hear the Nun’s Priest’s intended story and are instead given a story meant to appease an audience.  So already, Chaucer is challenging the audience to ask what makes a storyteller tell a story, and what gives that story value. If we appeal to secondary scholarship, P.J Field has his own interpretation of this frame narrative in his essay “The Ending of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale”. 
In his essay, Field argues that Chaucer’s ending passage is really echoing a similar sentiment found within the New Testament.  He States that “Nor is that the only difficulty. The Nun's Priest's words appear to conflate two passages from St Paul: first, this is the will of God, your sanctification', and second that God 'will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth”. What can we gain from approaching this tale with scripture in mind? From earlier passages, we have already gleaned that the Nun’s Priest has a habit of ignoring or misinterpreting thing that involves her duties to the religion. If we take her conflation of these two passages as another example of this, then this entire tale might be a misplaced conflation of the ideas of sanctification and knowledge of the truth. Meaning once again we see the authorial challenge from Chaucer to not only interpret the tale but to enjoy the tale for what it is. As noted earlier, this tale was not just made with a moral in mind, but made with the intent to please in the audience, something that should not be ignored in our interpretation of the tale. Which leads us to the other aspect of the tale that might cloud our interpretation, the tale’s status as allegory.
