The Parson's Tale is the final "tale" of Geoffrey Chaucer's fourteenth-century poetic cycle The Canterbury Tales. Unlike the other tales, it is not a narrative at all, but a treatise on penitence and the Seven Deadly Sins, a kind of spiritual "self-help" manual for personal use. This was a popular genre in the Middle Ages; Chaucer's is a translation and reworking that ultimately derives from the Latin manuals of two Dominican friars, Raymund of Pennaforte and William Perault. Modern readers and critics, however, have found it pedantic and boring, especially in comparison to the rest of the Canterbury Tales. While some scholars have questioned whether Chaucer ever intended the Parson's Tale to be part of the Tales at all, more recent scholarship understands it as integral to them, forming an appropriate ending to a series of stories concerned with the value of fiction itself.