Chaucer at AU

Wife of Bath Quotes

2009-05-03T14:32:00.000-07:00

Good afternoon, classmates. After gathering a small set of quotes for my final paper, I felt like it'd be polite to share a select few with all you who are studying for the final. So without further ado, I present to you the best of the Wife of Bath:

On Solomon and his wives:

“Sholde lete fader and mooder and take to me.

But of no nombre mencion made he,

Of bigamy, or of octogamye;

Why sholde men thane speke of it vileynye?”

Lo, here the wise kyng, daun Salomon;

I trowe he hadde wyves mo than oon.

As wolde God it leveful were unto me

To be refresshed half so ofte as he!

Which yifte of God hadde he for alle his wyvys!

No man hath swich that in this world alyve is.

God woot, this noble kyng, as to my wit,

The firste nyght had many a myrie fit

Wit ech of hem, so wel was hym on lyve.

Yblessed be God that I have wedded five!” (31-44)

On Genitals:

“Glose whoso wole, and seye bothe up and dou

That they were maked for purgacioun

Of urine, and our bothe thynges smale

Were eek to knowe a female from a male,

And for noon oother cause – say ye no?” (119-123).

On controling her husbands:

“By sleighte, or force, or by sm maner thyng,

As by continueel murmur or grucchyng.

Namely abedde hadden they meschaunce:

There wolde I chide and do hem no plesaunce;

I wolde no lenger in the bed abyde,

If that I felte his arm over my side,

Til he had maad his raunson unto me;

Thanne wolde I suffer hym do his nycetee” (405-412).

On Jankyn:

“And ever shall, until my dying day.

But in our bed he was so fresh and gay,

And therewithal he could so impose,

What time he wanted use of my belle chose,

That though he’d beaten me on every bone,

He could re-win my love, and that full soon” (497-502)

“After that day we hadden never debaat,

God helpe me so, I was to hym as kynde

As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde,

And also trewe, and so he was to me” (822-825).

The Ending of her Tale:

“A thousand tyme a-rewe he gan hire kisse,

And she obeyed hym in every thing

That mighte doon hym plesance or liking.

And thus they lyve unto hir lyves ende

In parfit joy; and Jhesu Christ us sende

Housbondes meeke, yonge, and fresh abedde,

And grace t’overbyde hem that we wedde;

And eek I praye Jhesue shorte hir lyves

That noght wol be governed by hir wyves” (1254-1262).

I hope all this helps. Good luck tomorrow.

Paper Topic Also

2009-05-01T12:57:00.001-07:00

I ended up exploring the insecurities of the Wife of Bath and how her conceptions of sovereignty, religion and sexuality all played into that. The most difficult part about writing about the Wife of Bath, in my opinion, is that she is ripe with inconsistencies. Scholars have interpreted her in so many different ways that it was a challenge to firmly plant my feet in an overall stance regarding my beliefs about the Wife of Bath. Later this weekend, once I'm recovered from 17 pages of Chaucer writing, I'll post some quotes that I think will be beneficial to all those who are taking the exam.

Paper Topic

2009-04-29T07:30:00.000-07:00

Hey Jason...I am doing my paper on the Pardoner and the notions of sympathy, revulsion, terminality (meaning the state of being a body which is terminal, not reproductive) and homosexuality. I am trying to blend the scholarship I've read to get a clean picture, however vague, of the Pardoner and why the description of his body - and questionable sexual disposition - fits well with his admission of his deceitful practices and his tale of death, essentially a tale of what it means to be a terminal body.

SO far that's the best I can do to describe this paper.

Paper Topics

2009-04-27T18:42:00.000-07:00

I would assume everyone has already at least started their paper, and a few of the more ambitious among us may have even finished it already. Since part of the stated purpose for this blog is to encourage discussion, I thought it might be helpful to post our paper topics here in case any of us are doing parallel research so we can compare notes, help each other out, or maybe even spark ideas for those that haven't started yet or for any undergrads who actually read this thing.
For mine I am covering the religious and religously affiliated characters in the tales.
My thesis is:
The Canterbury Tales’ multiple religious characters, from the tale tellers themselves to characters in their narratives, display a wide range of attributes but share a common theme of a clergy becoming increasingly self-involved and over-indulgent towards the end of the Ricardian era.
In my paper I am hoping to explore how the attitudes of the nobility and their hangers-on (like Chaucer) had begun to shift away from unquestioning loyalty to the traditional Catholic church. I think some of the attitudes and themes Chaucer expresses in the tales are subservisive at worst and "constructively critical" at best against the church and clerical figures.
On a related note, I will not at all be surprised if I'm the only one that's still checking the blog, let alone posting his paper topic.

Preachy Chaucer

2009-04-27T09:42:00.000-07:00

Frankly I think it's pretty funny that the Canterbury Tales doesn't end with a tale, but instead a sermon about penitence. It was probably a good thing that the entire reading of Parson's Tale since the structure stayed the same the whole time, and there wasn't much different between the tale itself and a Medieval Sunday mass.

Chaucer's intentions with this piece were, as always, a bit unclear. Maybe G.C. wanted the reader to walk away remembering to live a sin-free life. Maybe he wanted to establish himself as a religious man and give props to Jesus for the completion of the tales. It can't be for certain, but what Chaucer does accomplish with this tale is completing small anthology of the various types of tale-styles. Looking back through the Canterbury Tales, we definitely read through a gauntlet of genres (the hag tale, the martyr tale, etc.) and the last horizon for Chaucer needed to explore at the end of the Canterbury Tales was the full-blown sermon. Obviously Chaucer had further intentions with his religious dialogue at the end of this piece, but at least he completed the genre set.

The Rejoysynge of the Devel

2009-04-26T21:07:00.000-07:00

The word “devel” and its derivatives pop up repeatedly in the Parson’s Tale. It is not only a frequently used word in the tale, but probably the most frequently used noun in all the tales based purely on its repeated usage in the Parson’s Tale.
I thought it might be helpful to explore the medieval concept of Satan to provide a fuller context to its usage in this tale. And if my previous posts haven’t been obvious enough, I’m all about context.
Since Satan’s physical appearance is never discussed in the Bible, depictions of the devil and his characteristics have been the subject of considerable improvisation over time. During the Middle Ages, depictions of Satan were usually based on pagan traditions of horned gods such as Pan and Dionysus. In this way, the devil both embodied evil and chaos while avoiding being so sinister as to overshadow the medieval concept of “fear of God”.
A number of medieval Gnostic groups, such as the Cathars, identified Satan with the Old Testament God, asserting that the character of the Old Testament God was markedly different from that of the New Testament God, and was in some ways incompatible with the teachings of Christ. This idea obviously didn’t sit well with the Catholic Church
I think that the “devel” repeatedly referenced in the Parson’s Tale is in line with the medieval concept of Satan following pagan traditions. Though all of the sins referenced are serious, the way the “devel” is referenced as being amused or interested with them all suggests more of a mischievous and roguish manipulation of the human soul than an insidious and evil force. It would also be difficult for Satan to assume a truly polar opposite composition and power to God without diminishing God’s power through this juxtaposition. If Satan were truly as powerful as God then there would be little incentive to avoiding the seven deadly sins in favor of the Parson’s seven virtues. But I am not a theologian.
I think the bottom line is that we see the word “devel” so much because the Parson is looking to repeatedly present this concept of sin and evil and define its parameters. In this way, the “devel” we know is less fearsome than the God we do not.

When to Speak

2009-04-26T17:06:00.000-07:00

What I found intriguing in the Manciple's tale is the conundrum that questions when exactly it is good idea to speak and when it is a good idea to keep your mouth shut. For example, if the crow hadn't blabbed about Phoebus's wife's indiscretion, Phoebus's wife would not have been murdered, the God of Poetry wouldn't be brought down to a human level and maybe we'd have a couple different colored crows in the world.

However, the irony lies in the fact that the moral "know when to keep quiet" is presented after reading twenty-some tales from people who felt like sharing stories. There is a sense of caution to be derived from the tale that story telling can only take you so far. At the end of the day words can have consequences, and sometimes they're consequences that are beyond your control.

Chaucer seems to preach against what many of his pilgrims are doing, and warns the reader about when storytelling is appropriate. Yet, for some reason, Chaucer feels that his Canterbury Tales are appropriate to tell. Chaucer definitely describes some taboo subjects for the time, but feels that he should tell his stories.

I can't think of Chaucer's justification for when it is not appropriate to tell except in the situation where it will damage someone's reputation and/or put his or her life at risk. Still, that seems too simple.

Artistic representations of Chaucer

2009-04-25T12:27:00.001-07:00

The 1410 Ellesmere portrait of Chaucer

For my tenth post, I thought I'd do something a little fun — not that the first nine posts haven't been fun in their own right — something a little off the beaten path of academia.

Throughout the semester, we've been talking about Chaucer's textual representations of everything — the various pilgrims, the characters in their tales, elements of English society, himself, et cetera et cetera. However, Chaucer's representations have served more than one role in the afterlife of the Canterbury Tales. Not only has his text helped readers imagine his world, and the individuals within it, but it has also played a role in helping various artists continue the tradition of manuscript illustration of the Tales by creating their own representations. In Chaucer as Children's Literature, Velma Bourgeois Richmond surveys adaptations of Chaucer's Tales into children's literature from Victorian England through modern America, mainly around the turn of the century, and she includes a great deal of discussion about art and illustrations in those books. It's fun to look at how painters, illustrators and lithographers translate their own ideas of what Chaucer's pilgrims and characters looked like onto canvas and paper, particularly for children who aren't quite up to the task of reading the original.

I've pulled some of these images off the Internet for you all to enjoy, along with the appropriate lines from our text. Click on links for the image sources — some of which offer prints for sale!

First, Walter Appleton Clark's illumination-like paintings that appeared in the 1904 The Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer, by Percy MacKaye.

"The Pilgrims Set Out"

Amorwe, when that day bigan to sprynge,

Up roos oure Hoost, and was oure aller cok,

And gadrede us togidre alle in a flok,

And forth we riden a litel moore than paas

Unto the Wateryng of Seint Thomas.

(p. 18, 822-826)

"The Wife of Bath"

Upon an amblere esily she sat,

Ywympled wel, and on hir heed an hat

As brood as is a bokeler or a targe ...

In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe

Of remedies of love she knew per chaunce,

For she koude of that art the olde daunce.

(p. 13, 469-471, 474-476)

"The Knight's Tale"

In goon the speres ful sadly in arrest;

In gooth the sharpe spore into the syde.

Ther seen men who kan juste and who kan ryde;

Ther shyveren shaftes upon sheeldes thikke;

He feeleth thurgh the herte-spoon the prikke. ...

Ne in Belmarye ther nys so fel leon,

That hunted is, or for his hunger wood,

Ne of his praye desireth so the blood,

As Palamon to sleen his foo Arcite.

(p. 42, 2602-2606, 2630-2633)

"The Squire's Tale"

Whil that this kyng sit thus in his nobleye,

Herknynge his mynstralles hir thynges pleye

Biforn hym at the bord deliciously,

In at the halle dore al sodeynly

Ther cam a knyght upon a steede of bras,

And in his hand a brood mirour of glas.

Upon his thombe he hadde of gold a ryng,

And by his syde a naked swerd hangyng;

And up he rideth to the heighe bord.

(p. 152, 77-85)

"The Pardoner's Tale"

"If that yow be so leef

To fynde Deeth, turne up this croked wey,

For in that grove I lafte hym, by my fey,

Under a tree, and there he wole abyde" ...

And everich of tise riotoures ran

Til he cam to that tree.

(p. 182, 760-763, 768-769)

Next up, W. Heath Robinson's illustration of Griselda and Walter for the 1906 Stories from Chaucer Told to the Children, by Janet Kelman. Richmond writes that the two figures are separated "to sign both social difference and romantic longing in the 'Clerk's Tale'" (84).

"She Rose to Curtsy to Him"

Upon Grisilde, this povre creature,
Ful ofte sithe this markys caste his eye,
As he on huntyng rood paraventure.
And whan it fil that he myghte hire espye,
He noght with wantowne lookyng of folye
Hise eyen caste on hir, but in sad wyse,
Upon hir chiere he wolde hym ofte avyse,
Commendynge in his herte hir wommanhede
And eek hir vertu, passynge any wight
Of so yong age, as wel in chiere as dede.

(p. 122, 232-241)

A more thorough explication of various artistic and literary re-representations of the Clerk's Tale can be found at "Retelling the Clerk's Tale."

The 1912 edition of The Modern Reader's Chaucer contains magical fantasy renderings by Warwick Goble of various tales, such as the Squire's Tale, the Tale of Sir Thopas, The Clerk's Tale and the Merchant's Tale.

"Cancee and the Falcon"

Ther sat a faucon over hir heed ful hye,
That with a pitous voys so gan to crye
That all the wode resouned of hir cry …
She swowneth now and now for lakke of blood,
Til wel neigh is she fallen fro the tree.
This faire kynges doghter Canacee,
That on hir fynger baar the queynte ryng,
Thurgh which she understood wel every thyng
That any fowel may in his leden seyn,
And koude answeren hym in his ledene ageyn,
Hath understonde what this faucoun seyde,
And wel neigh for the routhe almoost she deyde.
And to the tree she gooth ful hastily,
And on this faucoun looketh pitously,
And heeld hir lappe abrood.

(p. 156, 411-413, 430-441)

"January Helping May into the Tree"

"Thanne sholde I clymbe wel ynogh," quod she,
"So I my foot myghte sette ypon youre bak."
"Certes, quod he, theron shal be no lak,
Mighte I yow helpen with myn herte blood."
He stoupeth doun, and on his bak she stood,
And caughte hire by a twiste, and up she gooth --
Ladyes, I prey yow that ye be nat wrooth;
I kan nat glose, I am a rude man --

(p. 149, 2344-2351)

Anne Anderson also did watercolor paintings for the 1912 Gateway to Chaucer, images of which can be found at the Children's Books Illustrators and Illustrations Gallery. Too many of those for me to post here!

In parting, I'll leave you all with one final image, of Dorigen and Aurelius, from the Franklin's Tale, by Mary Haweis, in 1876, for Chaucer for Children.

"Dorigen and Aurelius in the Garden"

So on a day, right in the morwe tyde,
Unto a gardyn that was ther bisyde,
In which that they hadde maad hir ordinaunce
Of vitaille and of oother purveiaunce,
They goon and pleye hem al the longe day.
And this was in the sixte morwe of May,
Which May hadde peynted with his softe shoures
This gardyn ful of leves and of floures …
Upon this daunce, amonges othere men,
Daunced a squier biforn Dorigen
That fressher was, and jolyer of array,
As to my doom, than is the monthe of May.
He syngeth, daunceth, passynge any man
That is or was, sith that the world bigan ...
This lusty squier, servant to Venus,
Which that ycleped was Aurelius.

(p.162-3, 901-908, 925-930, 937-938)

For analyses of these illustrations and paintings, you should check out Richmond's book. She goes much more into depth about each artist, as well as a dozen others, and analyzes why they chose to create their representations of settings and characters the way they did.

Richmond, Velma Bourgeois. Chaucer as Children's Literature. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Company, 2004.

"The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng"

2009-04-23T08:34:00.000-07:00

Whereas in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, with alchemy, we got a metaphor for authorship, in the Manciple's Tale, we get a blunt argument about language, meaning and the relationship between the two.

The Manciple begins his argument by digressing from his story just as he is relating the wife's affair with her "lemman," or lover. He begs the other pilgrims to forgive him his "knavyssh speche" — his error in applying a churlish term to a gentlewoman, or lady, and not a commoner (205). He pursues this digression by explaining the theory that words must match their meaning, action or subject. Referencing Plato, he says, "The word moot nede accorde with the dede. / If men shal telle proprely a thyng, / The word moot cosyn be to the werkyng" (208-210) Basically, "lemman" belongs to the sphere of fornication among commoners, not to the sphere of love among nobility — he should have used a word that carried with it implications of nobility and "gentilesse."

The phrase that the word must be cousin to the working, or deed, was actually coined by Boethius, through whom Plato's arguments in the Cratylus "came down to the Middle Ages" (Cooper 60). The question of the relationship between language and meaning is one that has been debated by philosophers for centuries, and Helen Cooper briefly touches on this debate in her review of John Fyler's work, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun. She writes that Aristotle disagreed with Plato, "arguing in On Interpretation that names are bestowed ad placitum, at the whim of the individual language, effectively at random" (60).

Chaucer would seem to agree with Aristotle that words are assigned arbitrarily. Through the manciple, he undercuts Plato's argument about language by baldly saying that, whether noble or common, cheating is cheating and differences in words can't conceal that common element:

"Ther nys no difference, trewly,

Bitwixe a wyf that is of heigh degree,

If of hir body dishonest she bee,

And a povre wenche, oother than this—

If it so be they werke bothe amys."

(l. 212-216)

The manciple then proceeds to discuss the arbitrary application of specific terms according to class and status. A noblewoman has a lover, and is still called a lady, but a poor woman is called a wench or lemman. Fundamentally, the manciple says, men lie the one as low as the other, and sex is all the same, whatever the appellation (222). He continues this argument about arbitrariness in lines 223 through 234, but steps back by claiming that he's not a learned man: "I am a man nought textueel / I wol nought telle of textes never a deel" (235-236). Here, we again see Chaucer forcing his characters to falsely testify their ignorance and causing us, as readers, to realize that the manciple, among other characters who've recanted, are themselves arbitrary creations through which Chaucer the narrator/author is speaking.

Chaucer creates a metaphor for this falseness when Phebus accuses the crow of lying and strips him of his ability to speak. Ironically, we are now aware that words don't accord with the actions they refer to, and that the sign can be divorced from the thing. This principle allows the manciple/Chaucer to create a scene in which Phebus calls the truth a lie, a scene the manciple follows up with a warning to "taketh kep what that ye seye" because once spoken, words escape the speaker's control and can be manipulated and re-labeled.

Perhaps Chaucer, near the end of his Tales, is cognizant of the fact that once he completes his written work and releases it upon the world, "he may by no wey clepe his word agayn. / Thyng that is seyd is seyd, and forth it gooth" (354-355). Thus, the copious amount of denials and retractions he writes into his characters' tales — either he is covering his bases, or he is playing with the reader, pointing to the malleability and arbitrariness of language. Funnily enough, he refuses to listen to the manciple's advice to "be noon auctor newe / Of tidynges, wheither they been false or trewe ... Kepe wel thy tonge and thenk upon the crowe" (359-360, 362). Like the crow, Chaucer tells his reader all the flaws and foibles of medieval English society. But unlike the crow, he seems to have avoided punishment for his "wikked tongue."

Cooper, Helen. "Untitled review." Essays in Criticism. LIX:1, January 2009. 59-65.

Ernest into Game

2009-04-23T07:19:00.000-07:00

I was interested by Euge's post below unpacking some of the eucharistic implications of the Canon Yeoman's Tale - another resonance of the theme of transmutation and changing one substance into another. In particular, this struck me because I had been thinking about the Manciple's Tale in exactly these terms.

I remember flipping through this book once as an undergraduate (it was a friend of mine, a philosophy major, who was actually reading it), and one of the points made therein is that whenever any characters in a story share food and drink, it's communion. Specifically, I have in mind the reconciliatory gesture made by the Manciple to the Cook:

And wite ye what? I have heer in a gourde
A draghte of wyn, ye, of a ripe grape,
And right anon ye shul seen a good jape.
The Cook shal drynke thereof, if I may,
Up peyne of deeth, he wol nat seye me nay (82-86).

This sharing of the "wyn...of a ripe grape" restores the communal bonds frayed by the Manciple's first abusive speech, an imperilment of the associational form that the Manciple himself will revisit at the end of his tale: "A tonge kutteth freendshipe al a-two" (342). As partaking of the eucharistic wine makes members of the Church into one body, so the Manciple's sharing of wine with the Cook reintegrates the two into the harmonious body of the pilgrimage. Indeed, the "good drynke" (96) (echoes of the miracle at Cana here too) works a transmutational miracle precisely like eucharistic transubstantiation, of the kind, moreover, that so conspicuously evaded the Canon and his Yeoman: it turns lead to gold, "rancour and disese," to "acord and love" (97-98).

Of course, the mystical solemnity of the Eucharist could not be farther from the mood of this scene, in which the Manciple, in the spirit of a "jape" (84), gets the already sodden Cook still more drunk. But this is precisely the point, too: "Bacus," besides turning the dross of communal discord into the gold of renewed "freendshipe," also "kanst turnen ernest into game," solemnity into a jape - sentence into solas? The Manciple's Tale works such a transmutation on its predecessor, turning the embittered declamations of the Yeoman into a general air of lighthearted japery. The narrative styles of the two speakers, for example, are both highly non-linear and digressive, but for opposite reasons: the Yeoman couldn't stick to his story and the Manciple, it seems, won't. Where the Yeoman tells his tale as he lives his life, methodically trying to conclude and perpetually unable to, with the Manciple we get a sense, as we did with such other consummate performers as the Wife of Bath or the Nun's Priest, of the sheer pleasure of tale-telling, the joys of delaying the conclusion and prolonging the "game." Where the Yeoman spoke "for noon oother cause" than to deliver his sentence about the impossibility of transmutation, the Manciple, I propose, subordinates sentence to solas and thereby effects a transmutation of the Yeoman's "ernest" into "game."

What clinches this, for me, is the manner in which the Manciple delivers his sentence at the end of his tale. He repeats, rephrases, and stretches out his moral in a way that I find impossible to take seriously. It's moral overkill, to a parodic extent. This highly overstated and overdramatized conclusion satirizes the Yeoman's failure to conclude, as the Manciple packs all of the Yeoman's repetitive restatements of his "poynt" into the kind of emphatic narrative and moral climax that eluded his predecessor.

It may seem difficult to square this interpretation of the Manciple as performer, a narrator who speaks more for the joy of narrating than to deliver any particular point through his narration, with the content of the tale itself. The story of the crow is an injunction against unguarded speech, a warning to "taketh kep what that ye seye" (310), and, in an important sense, a story about the end of story that sets the stage for the end of the Canterbury tale-telling itself. After the crow learns his lesson about the perils of unpragmatic speech, the rest, except for the Parson's very pragmatic and sentence-driven tale, is silence. I think it's important to note, though, that the crow only gets into trouble when he tries to deliver a message. It his attempt to convey a sentence to Phebus that ruins everyone - crow, Phebus, and Phebus' poor wife. When the crow is just singing - "Therwith in al this world no nyghtyngale / Ne koude, by an hondred thousand deel, / Syngen so wonder myrily and weel" (136-138) - there's no problem. What is more, when all it is doing is performing beautifully like this, the crow is described in terms altogether relevant to the Canterbury narrators: "And countrefete the speche of every man /He koude, whan he sholde telle a tale" (134-135). The crow here sounds, if anything, like Chaucer himself, counterfeiting the speech of twenty-eight different personae as he composes the Canterbury Tales. The point, I think, is that the point isn't everything. "Singing" should not simply be a means of delivering morals or messages: pleasure, beauty, solas, the joy of telling a tale for its own sake, matters as well.

The Manciple's Tale, in other words, close to the end of the pilgrimage and the collection, is still engaged in the debate over the proper roles and functions of narrative that has been going on since the beginning, when the Host requested "Tales of best sentence and moost solaas." The Manciple transmutes the Canon's Yeoman's sentence into solas, "ernest into game," and thereby demonstrates the ability to transmute that the Yeoman sought and never found. But it is surely significant that this miraculuous transmutation and the mock-eucharist that signals it takes place under the sign of "Bacus." Practically a stone's throw away from Canterbury, "worshipe and thank" is being offered not to Becket but to this pagan "deitee" (101). This implies that the narrative theory offered in the Manciple's Tale, as attractive and powerful as it may be (particularly compared to its predecessor), falls short in its own way, thereby setting us up for the Parson's Tale.

Le Roman de la Rose

2009-04-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

Chaucer references this French poem in many of his tales. For more information about the background and authorship of the poem, as well as excerpts: http://romandelarose.org/#rose
To briefly catalogue, utilizing the notes provided by Larry D. Benson in our text, (and I’m sure this is not exhaustive):
In the General Prologue, the portrait of the Squire, especially the descriptions of Mirth and Love and the list of accomplishments at court owe much to Le Roman de la Rose. The Prioress’s table manners are modeled on the advice of La Vieille (the Old Woman) in a speech she makes advising young women how to attract a husband. A character called Faus Semblant in Le Roman de la Rose is a direct literary ancestor to the Friar. When the narrator of The Canterbury Tales is describing the Clerk, he says, “Somnynge in moral vertu was his speche,/And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.” In Le Roman de la Rose, Plato is said to have taught a similar sentiment, that man was given speech to teach and to learn (345). The list of medical authorities in the description of the Physician is a lengthier version of a similar list in Le Roman de la Rose. The Wife of Bath’s portrait is based upon a monologue delivered by La Vieille, with other references to the poem as well (“oother compaignye”, “la vieille daunce”) (352). The apology/confession/”disclaimer” offered by the by the narrator himself is similar to one in Le Roman de la Rose:
“But first I pray yow, of youre curteirsye,
That ye n’arrette it nat my vileynye,
Thogh that I pleynly speke in this mateere,
To telle yow hir wordes properly,
For this ye knowen al so wel as I:
Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,
He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan
Everich a word, if it be in his charge,
Al speke he never so rudeliche and large,
Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe,
Or feyne thing, or fine wordes newe.
He may nat spare, although he were his brother;
He moot as wel seye o word as another.
Crist spake himself ful brode in hooly writ,
And wel ye woot no vileynye is it.
Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede,
The wordes moote be coryn to the dede.” (lns. 725-742)

References to Le Roman de la Rose also pervade the Tales themselves. To keep this relevant, I’m going to note the references just in the last few tales we’ve read.

“The Monk’s Tale” is essentially a collection of tragedies befalling great men (and a few women). Le Roman de la Rose is one of Chaucer’s closest models for the tale. Additionally, the emphasis on Fortune and its unlimited power seems to be taken directly from the French poem, “where modern as well as ancient instances are used to illustrate the capricious workings of the goddess” Fortuna, who operates independently of both the divine and the agency of man (452). Chaucer also frequently references Boccaccio in this tale.

The references to Le Roman de la Rose in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” lie in the references to trusting a woman (or hen, I suppose):
“But for I noot to whom it might displese,
If I conseil of women wolde blame,
Passe over, for I seyde in it in my game.” (lns. 3260-3263)
and the desires held dearest by a true lover:
“And in thy seryce did al his poweer,
Moore for delit than world to multiplye” (lns. 3345-3345)

I expressed confusion over the Second Nun’s warning against “ydelnesse” in her Prologue. I briefly addressed this in an earlier post, but the explanatory notes of our edition offer another important point. Idleness, in Le Roman de la Rose, is the gatekeeper of the Garden of Love, where ydelnesse is “the yate of all harmes” (463). This exemplifies its status as a sin, and indeed sloth is one of the seven deadly sins.

The exempla involving a caged bird, cat, and wolf used by the Manciple in his tale can be found in Le Roman de la Rose, as well as in other sources. Chaucer references the poem especially in his description of the she-wolf . The sentiments expressed in lines 148-154,
“A good wyf, that is clene of werk and thought,
Sholde nat been kept in noon awayt, crtayn;
And trewly the labour is in vayn
To kepe a chrewe, for it wol nat bee.
This holde I for verray nycetee,
To spille labour for to kepe wyves:
Thus written olde clerkes in hir lyves”
are similar to those found in Le Roman de la Rose.

Obviously, Chaucer was greatly influenced by this poem, begun by Guillaume de Lorris around 1230 and continued by Jean de Meun approximately forty years later. I urge you to check out the website I linked above.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: Complete. Benson, Larry D., ed. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston: 2000.

Connecting the Beginning and the End of "The Canon's Yeoman's Tale"

2009-04-22T09:10:00.000-07:00

To go along with my previous post, I found an article by William Komowski discussing the connection between alchemy and religion, as well as providing some connection between the beginning and the end of the entire tale.

"To a large extent, the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is a sequence of scenes in which clergymen attempt to change one substance into another. But their failures to do so, along with their deliberate feigning of the transformation, suggest that they do not entirely believe in the very miracle they seek to perform. In other words, their situation comically parallels the graver predicament of some priests" (Komowski, 17).

Early on in the tale, the Yeoman discusses the failures of his master and of the alchemist in their works. Also there is a the mention of God and how even though God has given the alchemists hope, they continue to fail in their tasks. At the end of the Tale, the Yeoman advises to end the pursuit of the philosopher's stone.

"How that a man shal come unto this stoon,
I rede, as for the beste, lete it goon.
For whoso maketh God his adversarie,
As for to werken any thyng in contrarie
Of his wil, certes, never shal he thryve," (1474-1478).

Therefore, there is a connection between the hunt for the philosopher's stone and the quest of the alchemist.

"Thus, the Yeoman’s tale ends with a comment on the alchemical miracle that parallels comments emerging elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales concerning spiritually related miracles: they do not happen anymore; the contemporary clergy are incapable of working any such miracles for either material or spiritual ends" (Komowski, 18).

Komowski, William. (2002). Chaucer and Wyclif: God's miracles against the clergy's magic. The Chaucer Review, 37(1), 5-25.

Ignotum per Ignocius

2009-04-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

The Canon Yeoman's Tale is a moral one, so far, in my opinion, one of the most clearly moral of all the tales. It is about deceit in art, in words, in life and relationships which "concluden everemoore amys". I don't see the art of transmutation, in this context, as a distinct metaphor for writing but a metaphor for all pursuits which attempt to explain truth. It is the interminable art of multiplication that confounds the beholder but - because of its allure to explain the truth of things - provides a tempting source for hope: "But that good hope crepeth in oure herte/Supposynge evere, though we sore smerte" (lines 870-871). The Canon - whoever he is - can tempt even the most innocent priest into believing in his craft so much so that the priest participates in a kind of witchcraft, renouncing all he should hold dear in the name of god. Fortunately this yeoman, however exceedingly bitter, has seen the truth of the lie, and perhaps even a glimmer of the Truth. He says in lines 842-849:

In lernyng of this elvysshe nyce loore,
Al is in veyn, and parde, muchel moore.
To lerne a lewed man this subtiltee --
Fy! Spek nat therof, for it wol nat bee.
And konne he letterure or konne he noon,
As in effect, he shal fynde it al oon.
For bothe two, by my savacioun,
Concluden in multiplicacioun

This learning (any learning?) concludes in multiplication meaning it concludes by never concluding, never distilling itself into one pure, rarefied thing. There's no gold to come. Gold is gold and coal is coal. That's all the learning that is made finally. But men are not made of gold; they are made of carbon, more like coal. And since we have an unmitigated desire for our own bodily transmutation - perhaps through Christ - we seek it out, this power, in ourselves to no avail. And we look to the philosopher to enlighten us but also to absorb our disdain for his craft. He/She is expected to carry the burden of human confusion but simultaneously be rid of it. The philosopher (whatever form he/she takes: writer, artist, politicain, etc.) is both indispensable and meaningless. The Yeoman has mostly words of spite for the philosopher, however, he/she is a bit rectified at the end: honor restored to the philosophical pursuit. It is at this point that Plato is brought into the scene, who, famously was a philosopher of the spirit, of the intellect and he has the penultimate word:

The philosophres sworn were everychoon
That they sholden discovere it unto noon,
Ne in no book it write in no manere.
For unto Crist it is so lief and deere
That he wol nat that it discovered bee,
But where it liketh to his deitee
Men for t'enspire, and eek for to deffende
Whom that hym liketh; lo, this is the ende. (lines 1464-1471)

So the secret is something protected by Christ, by god himself and philosophers are its keepers here on earth but they are sworn to "discovere it unto noon" and can only describe it by multiplying the message, describing the unknown with more unknown. We ought not to look to the philosopher for the answers, not only because he won't tell us but because he is incapable of doing so. We must seek an explanation for ourselves. And wherever we look, we must be careful not to believe anything too innocently.

The Canon's Yeoman is subdued:

Thanne conclude I thus, sith that God of hevene
Ne wil nat that the philosophres nevene
How that a man shal come unto this stoon,
I rede, as for the beste, lete it goon.
For whoso maketh God his adversarie,
As for to werken any thyng in contrarie
Of his wil, certes, never shal he thryve,
Thogh that he multiplie terme of his lyve.
And there a poynt, for ended is my tale.
God sende every trewe man boote of his bale!

At last the Yeoman essentially says, since god will not allow the philosophers to name the secret, it is best to give it up if you are not a philosopher, but all one can hope is for god to grant each deserving man "boote of his bale" or as the notes explain, a remedy for his suffering. There's only one thing to remedy man's spiritual suffering and that's philosophy.

Also about the Yeoman

2009-04-20T09:24:00.000-07:00

Though I agree with Tara in that alchemy in Cannon's Yeoman's tale is metaphor for writing, along with the art of storytelling, I am hesitant to say that Chaucer is subtly making a reference to himself in the tale. Reason being is that there the language referencing alchemists is often scathing. The Yeoman claims that the alchemist seem to always fail, "We faille of that which we wolden have,/ And in oure madnesse everemoore we rave" (958-959). I doubt Chaucer considered himself such a failure, and think that this tale is more to serve as a critique on many of the pilgrims in the story. I say that simply becasue of the recurring concept of money in the tale.

In the second part of the tale, a Canon makes money off of trickery and decet, and in the end escapes any and all punishment. Who's to say that any of the pilgrims aren't wrongly profitting from their crafts. Physicians from Chaucer's day based their medicines off religious teachings, and characters like the Pardoner made a living from swaying people from sin. These acts were just as treacherous as alchemy, but still were highly profitable. The Yeoman says that nothing is what it seems - "He that semeth the wiseste, by Jhesus,/Is moost fool, whan it cometh to the preef;/And he that semeth trewest is a theef" (967-969) - so it seems like Chaucer is presenting the question of what exactly constitutes decet and what is considered honest.

The Alchemy of Writing

2009-04-19T14:42:00.000-07:00

Max commented that while he was reading the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, he was struck by the issue of narrative sterility, inconclusiveness, repetition and failure. I was also struck by the issue of language in the Canon's Yeoman's Prologue, and read the newest pilgrim's description of alchemy as a metaphor for the art of writing — both require labor and control, are seemingly creative acts but ultimately deceptive.

The yeoman begins describing his master, the alchemist, with these words:

"Ye wolde wondre how wel and craftily

He koude worke, and that in sondry wise.

He hath take on hym many a greet emprise,

Which were ful hard for any that is heere

To brynge aboute, but they of hym it leere"

(603-607).

Like the alchemist, who takes on large projects, Chaucer has tackled the gigantic Canterbury Tales, and is now, through the yeoman persona, reflecting on himself as a writer and perhaps even flattering himself a little, very subtly. He's taken the English's vernacular, or the ground/dirt, and turned it "up-so-doun, / and pave it al of silver and of gold" (625-26). With Chaucer's craftiness, the vernacular has become beautiful and valuable.

Chaucer then admits his deceptions — he passes himself off as lesser in public, and lets his products shine rather than taking the glory for himself. Like the Canon, he rides in dirty, "sluttissh" clothes, and the yeoman responds, "he shal nevere thee! ... He is to wys, in feith, as I bileeve. / That that is overdoon, it wol nat preeve / Aright" (641, 644-45). In short, the Canon knows, wisely, that making his actions accord too well with the yeoman's accounts of him would not turn out well — it'd be seen as a vice. Like the Canon, if Chaucer showed off his power with words too much, he'd put himself in danger because of the widely-thought maxim that "For whan a man hath over-greet a wit, / Ful oft hym happeth to mysusen it" (648-49). Too much preening and showing off could trip up both the Canon and Chaucer.

More comparisons can be drawn as the yeoman continues describing his master to the other pilgrims. The alchemist and his helper, like an author and his language, "to muchel folk ... doon illusioun" (673). And, like alchemy is an imperfect science, so is language slippery and difficult to control:

"Yet is it fals, but ay we han good hope

It for to doon, and after it we grope.

But that science is so fer us biforn,

We mowen nat, although we hadden it sworn,

It overtake, it slit awey so faste."

(678-82).

Both alchemists and authors are constantly in danger of their materials and work exposing themselves for what they are: illusions and deceptions. We've seen throughout the Tales incidents in which Chaucer slyly reveals various pilgrims' attempts to create illusions through language. The alchemist demonstrates this concern with the maintenance of his deceptive image as he rides over to see what his yeoman is up to, and meantimes handily provides us the notion that language is dangerous and potentially deceptive when he threatens the helper: "Spek no wordes mo ... Thou sclaundrest me heere in this compaignye, / And eek discoverest that thou sholdest hyde" (693, 695-96).

In the Middle Ages, language "represented a human equivalent to the Word that had created the world, and humankind and language within that" (Cooper 59). Like an alchemist, Chaucer creates a whole little world of his own through language, and like the Canon tries to turn dirt to gold, Chaucer tries to turn vernacular English into the Word for a fictional world.

Maybe it's force-fitting two pieces of a puzzle that don't match to try to read this prologue as a metaphor for the magic of writing, but I couldn't resist. We've seen too many examples of slippery language, deception and illusions and failure to control meaning throughout the Tales for me to relinquish the notion that Chaucer might view writing as similar to alchemy — illusory and even dangerous if taken too far beyond one's limits of wit, or knowledge.

Cooper, Helen. "Review: The Word and the World." Essays in Criticism, LIX:1. Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2009.

The Second Nun's Stand

2009-04-17T13:50:00.001-07:00

Like Jason and Euge, I think that many of the discussions of the second nun in class deserve further comment. Because I completely missed the references to idleness in the tale, I reread it knowing to look for warnings against idleness in the praise of its opposite: business, activity, agency. Another topic we addressed in the class discussion was, for lack of a better term, exactly “how much” agency Cecile exhibited. Jason mentions in his post below, and I agree, that she may have acted less defiantly if she were not certain of the eventual affirmation of her faith. In class, someone else recommended Cecile as a foil of Custance. Which female lead commands more respect at the end of the tale? Which is more memorable? The Man of Lawe idealizes Custance in a very different but equally passionate manner, but the reverence of the nun to the saint recommends Christianity in a way, I argue, unseen so far in the Tales. The prominent position of this hitherto ignored nun’s tale is one of the first things I noticed when reading the tale. Thematically, it recalls other tales. Chaucer wrote other tales of religion in rime royal. Why another tale of the same sort? Knowing, at this point, Chaucer’s tendency for layered menaings, we must search further.

First, the tale provides another warning against sin and recommendation to virtue. Second, Cecile is another female fated to die at the hands of unworthy men, as so she joins the other active and passive heroines as a proponent of woman and her rights. Third, at the end of the tale it’s hard not to be inspired. Whatever one’s personal leanings, Cecile trusts and never wavers, while representing herself as a woman who acts of her own accord and without fear of consequences.

To idleness and Cecile the “bisy bee”. The notes at the back of Benson’s edition of the Tales mention the first 28 lines only to say that they are “conventional and may be based on a variety of sources” (462). This warning against idleness could be directed at Christians who maybe are not as strong or as dedicated in their faith as they should be… but why would the nun direct this warning at those voyaging to a cathedral? Unless, perhaps the nun, having listened to the bawdy fabliaux and the tiresome exempla throughout the tales, as well as many tales dealing with very earthly vices, she has concluded that what the pilgrimage truly needs is a reminder of God’s greatness and the power he bestows upon those that blindly trust Him. This also serves as a response to Euge's post below: perhaps the tale is situated so close to their destination to remind both the pilgrims and the readers of the true purpose of their pilgrimage.

"We concluden everemoore amys"

2009-04-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

I amused myself while reading the Canon Yeoman's Tale by identifying the ways in which his complaint could basically be a description of life as a graduate student. Serving a rigorous apprenticeship/servitude for "seven yeer" (not quite at that length yet, but I will be before this is over), toiling away continually in arcane pursuits that consume monetary resources with no return to show for it, amassing and rattling off a huge repertoire of professional jargon ("termes...so clergial and so queynte" [752]) with little or no practical utility... it all hit pretty close to home. As we roll into term paper season, it's nice to know that Chaucer understands our pain.

Anyway, there's plenty more than just self-pitying personal identifications to hold one's interest here. In particular, the marked sterility and inconclusiveness of the Yeoman's life and work, so insistently reiterated throughout his prologue and tale, casts a rather sinister shadow when we remember that both characters and author are, at this point, approaching their own conclusions: the pilgrims of their pilgrimage (the Canon and his Yeoman join the party just five miles shy of Canterbury) and Chaucer of his work. The Yeoman's embittered admissions of failure - "For evere we lakken oure conclusioun" (672); "we concluden everemoore amys" (957) - raise the possibility of a similar inability to find a determinate or satisfying ending on the part of both pilgrims and poet. And, in fact, both pilgrims and poet will lack or be denied (deny themselves) the conclusion we have expected or anticipated for them: the pilgrims will never reach Canterbury because Chaucer will retract and disavow the narrative that promised to take them there. So in that sense, the Yeoman does seem to diagnose a generally applicable condition: pilgrims, author, and readers all lack "oure conclusioun," at least in one obvious and expected way. Whether this lack also implies that the pilgrimage/Chaucer have concluded "amys" is a different question.

Sticking with the Yeoman a little further, though, his professional dissatisfaction opens out onto a more general and more troubling skepticism about, and failure of, narrative and fiction. Beyond applying (maybe) to the Canterbury Tales as a whole, the Yeoman's complaint that "we concluden everemoore amys" characterizes his own tale equally well. The emphatic "poynt" (1480) on which he finally decides to end has in fact been stated, in its essentials, any number of times in the previous 900 lines: alchemy doesn't work, and you will waste your money and life trying to make it work. The way in which the Yeoman keeps constantly circling back to this "poynt" and reiterating it in itself substantiates the point: he really cannot conclude, and cannot structure his thoughts and words in such a way as to conclude. Tellingly, he says things "as they come to mynde, / Thogh I ne kan nat sette hem in hir kynde" (788-789). The Yeoman, in fact, might be the most digressive and nonlinear narrator we've seen since the Wife of Bath, straying several times from his invective against alchemy to wearingly catalogue various alchemical accessories and terms of art. His speech becomes more straightforward and coherent only when he shifts from his personal cri de coeur to his fictionalized narrative, and even then he returns again and again to belabor the mendacity of his fictional canon. The Yeoman himself recognizes how repetitive and narratively sterile he is being: "It weerieth me to telle of his falsnesse, / And nathelees yet wol I it expresse, / To th'entente that men may be war thereby, / And for noon oother cause, trewely" (1304-1307). And his self-diagnosis about being unable to conclude satisfactorily applies also to this mini-narrative, which has a curiously anti-climactic ending. The revelation to the dupe of the canon's duplicity is telescoped into a few terse and prosaic lines: "whan that this preest shoolde / Maken assay, at swich tyme as he wolde, / Of this recit, farwel! It wolde nat be" (1383-1385). Then it's back to the invective against alchemy, with a fresh inconsistency: the Yeoman continues to insist that there is no profit to be had in the practice, despite the fact that his own story has just shown someone who does pretty well for himself by it.

The fictional canon, of course, profits from alchemy only by embracing its unreality and emptiness; instead of vainly seeking after the real secret of transmuting substance and producing precious metal, this canon contents himself with pretending to do so in order to deceive others. This constant condemnation of the fictional canon's fraudulence, "his falshede" (1274), seems to indicate yet another connection between the Canon Yeoman's Tale and Chaucer's larger project. Does the Yeoman - does Chaucer himself - invite us to equate the fictional canon's falsehood with the falseness of narrative fiction, the kind of stories that produce no true gold, no genuine moral or meaning, stories of the type exemplified by "Sir Thopas" that are all solas without sentence? The Yeoman, conversely, appears to value narrative for its sentence alone and pays little heed to solas. To return to the lines I quoted a little earlier, the Yeoman continues to hold forth about the canon's falsehood, even though it wearies him and, most likely, his audience, "[t]o th'entente that men may be war thereby, / And for noon oother cause, trewely" (1306-1307). Narrative, speech, language are delivery mechanisms for morals and messages, nothing more; pleasure, emotional effect, and aesthetics don't enter into it and would, I think, in the Yeoman's eyes be of a piece with the canon's reprehensible "falsehede." The Yeoman's deficiencies as a narrator, in other words, really indicate his suspicion of narrative - a suspicion that is hardly confined to his own character and that may, in fact, contribute to or parallel Chaucer's own imminent failure or refusal to conclude his collection of narratives.

And, since it's late and I'm tired, and in the spirit of form following content, I also will conclude this post inconclusively - "amys," if you like.

False Idols and the End of the Journey

2009-04-15T08:58:00.001-07:00

Out of all the intriguing aspects about the Second Nun's Tale, the one issue that I still am struggling to understand is why the placement of the tale is close to the end of the Canterbury Journey. It is interesting that we are presented with a Saint's tale, but I've tried to analyze the morality of the tale to perhaps get a better grip on the entire tale's purpose.

Although the tale has a focus on faith and religion, like numerous tales before it, this tale explicitly preaches one lesson: don't worship false idols. I hate to latch on to the most obvious moral of the story, but I can't help thinking it has something to do with the fact that our pilgrims have almost reached their destination.

Diverse Folk Diversly They Post

2009-04-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

And now, for the most eclectic blog post thus far:

First of all, in reference to the Second Nun's Tale and today's class discussion, I think there is a very large difference between the martyrdom of the little Clergion and Cecelia. The little boy's death does not strictly meet the traditional definition of martyrdom. According to the Catholic Church (and most other Christian churches that recognize martyrdom) in order to become a martyr, one must be killed for one's religious beliefs, knowing that this continuation of the religious practice or belief in question will most certainly result in death. Because the little boy in the Prioress' Tale dies more so because he ignorantly wanders through a "bad" neighborhood arbitrarily singing a song he doesn't understand, he would not actually be considered a martyr. The bottom line, martydom must be the result of a deliberate choice, and not simply a set of unofortunate circumstances. Also, there is no evidence that the anonymous Jews killed the young boy simply for being a Christian. The text (ie. the Wasp's nest quote and references to Satan) suggest they killed him because of their own evil status.

In reference to discussion of Cecelia as being one of the few female characters thus far with true individual agency, I think it is worth noting the source of that agency. Just as chivarly provided a sort of agency to earlier female characters in the tales, Cecelia's agency in this instance is provided by Christianity. It is difficult to imagine she would have been as brave and upright if she had been standing up for anything other than her Christian beliefs. Especially when viewed within the context of her continued "life after death" to preach the gospel, it is difficult to determine where Cecelia's agency ends and her "holy spirit" provided by Christianity begins. Therefore, I think in some ways that her agency is much less than other female characters because she derives this agency from a universal application of Christian righteousness to believers.

Lastly, I looked up the Simon and Garfunkel song "Cecelia" after class. Apparently, Paul Simon named the song in reference to St. Cecelia, patron saint of music in Catholic tradition. The romantic connotations in the song are more an allusion to the difficulties an artist has maintaining his relationship with the muse than any actual physical liasons. The best way I can relate this to class is that St. Cecelia's connection to music led to the connotation "way for the blind" and her blind faith in the church is what led to her martyrdom. Therefore, Paul Simon may be at risk of becoming a martyr of pop music. Just kidding. Cecelia's blind devotion demonstrates the Christian concept of maintaining a relationship with Christ at all costs, just as Paul Simon struggles to stay in touch with his muse.

What Dreams May Come

2009-04-13T10:22:00.001-07:00

The Nun's Priest's Tale incorporates several themes running throughout the Canterbury Tales, such as textual authority, what women desire in marriage, and the value of wifely advice. However, in this tale, we also get an emphasis on another theme: dreams and their significance. Chaucer's incorporation of dreaming is significant because it is an addition to the original sources we've looked at in class — Marie de France and Robert Henryson's poems mention nothing about dreams as messages from God or warnings of disaster. Whereas, Chaucer expends more than 200 lines focusing on Chaunticleer's dream and providing several "swiche ensamples olde maistow leere / That no man sholde been to recchelees/ Of dremes" (3106-08).

The lewed take

Chaucer's examples give us a good feel for how his contemporary common folk viewed dreams as harbingers of joy or fearful portents sent by God (predominantly the latter, however). The first thing Chaunticleer says when he's awoken by Pertelote is, "By God, me mette I was in swich meschief / Right now that yet myn herte is soore afright. / Now God ... my swevene reeche aright, / And kepe my body out of foul prisoun!" (2894-97). In this statement, he both attributes the dream to God and pleads with him for protection from what he views as "notice in advance, explicit warning of what will come" (Raffel 466, lines 293-95). Pertelote ridicules Chaunticleer, using textual authority by quoting Cato's dismissal of dreaming: "Catoun, which that was so wys a man, / Seyde he nat thus, 'Ne do no fors of dremes'" (2941-42). Chaunticleer defends himself by quiting her use of textual authority, asserting that even more texts argue the contrary, saying:

"men may in olde bookes rede
Of many a man moore of auctorite
Than evere Caton was, so moot I thee,
That al the revers seyn of this sentence,
And han wel founden by experience
That dremes been significaciouns
As wel of joye as of tribulaciouns
That folk enduren in this lif present.
Ther nedeth make of this noon argument;
The verray preeve sheweth it in dede."
(2974-82).

Chaunticleer follows this by quoting several examples of men who failed to heed their dream-warnings and wound up the worse for it — stories we probably can assume were traditional tales among the commoners of Chaucer's time. Chaucer suggests that Chaunticleer may be reciting anecdotes he overheard rather than read — even though the rooster attempts to prove his literary acumen by pointing out that the second story specifically follows the first in the same book. However, Chaunticleer mistranslates the Latin phrase "In principio, / Mulier est hominis confusio." Anyone with sufficient textual learning to read books most likely would be able to tell the difference between confusio (woe, ruin) and felicitas (happiness). The Oxford English Dictionary shows that the Middle English for ruin (confusion) was almost exactly identical to the Latin, so any reader of the Nun's Priest's Tale would be able to recognize immediately that Chaunticleer was either faking his learning or deliberately insulting Pertelote — which, if she is also even just a little educated, as she seems, would not have been a wise move. Thus, Chaunticleer seems to be repeating tales he's heard elsewhere, a circumstance reminiscent of the Pardoner's statement that he tells his audience "many oon / Of olde stories longe tyme agoon. / For lewed peple loven tales olde; / Swiche thynges kan they wel reporte and holde" (Pardoner's Prologue, 435-38). The exchange between Chaunticleer and Pertelote about his dream and dreaming in general is reminiscent of a commoner, worrywart husband henpecked by his wife, who has more earthly concerns than to worry about intangible portents and signs.

Talking theology

After establishing this dynamic of Chaunticleer-Pertelote, Chaucer then moves away from the chickens, digressing into a theological discussion about dreams as signs from God. Before I analyze this section, I'll provide some context from the religious culture in medieval England:

Dream poems were part of medieval literary culture, whether originating from saints or laymen. The Church recognized that lay people could have significant dreams full of divine implications or meaning, and incorporated documentation of some of those dreams into Church culture. Although the most focus remained on saintly dreams, some recognition was given these lay dreams: "It is commonly stated, and correctly so, that the most frequently reported dreams of Antiquity and the early Middle Ages were those of saints and kings. However, the unprofessed laity, 'ordinary' Christians of the Christian community, were also dreaming religious dreams that were represented in Church writings, if less often than saintly dreams (Moreira 1). The fact that some of these dreams were included in Church documents and texts lends them some significance to contemporary religious authorities: "That lay dreams were recorded in religious writings of the era ... suggests that they held a noteworthy place in Christian religious culture and that the religious elite believed these dreams to be worthy of religious interpretation" (Moreira 2).

Medieval dream poems were very unlike much of the narratives about dreams we have seen since the early modern age. They were "rooted in classical and biblical concepts of dream and vision that imbued dreaming with the potential for august, profound, even divine meaning" (Phillips 374). Helen Phillips argues that with the Roman de la Rose, or Romance of the Rose, dream poetry began to be taken more seriously, as a:

"visionary and learned genre ... used for exploring the subject of human sexual passion, taking the experience of desire as a subject for serious literature in a serious genre. ... It is within the dream genre that medieval writers were able to treat the subject discursively as well as experientially, and to sift, debate and contemplate the complexities and contradictions of passion and the states of consciousness it creates. By the late medieval period the dream poem and other types ... were also arenas for the exploration of further subjects such as masculine identity, unhappy marriage, misogyny and feminism. Dream poetry seems also to have stimulated self-conscious and metafictional experimentation in the treatment of issues like the relationship of reader and writer to text, time in narrative, the fictional self, textuality and fiction" (Phillips 374).

This passage from Phillips raises interesting questions about Chaucer's use of dreaming, and subsequent theological discussion about it. Chaucer uses Chaunticleer's dream and debate with Pertelote to explore the theme of misogyny and female authority — "Wommennes conseils been ful ofte colde; / Wommannes conseil broghte us first to wo / And made Adam fro Paradys to go" (3256-58).

He overlaps that theme with a humorous monologue reflecting on the lay and spiritual perception of the value of dreams. In a mocking tone, Chaucer, through the Nun's Priest, admonishes Chaunticleer for failing to heed his dream: "Thou were ful wel ywarned by thy dremes / That thilke day was perilous to thee" (3232-33). He touches on the practice of recording dreams and interpreting them as irrevocable portents of divine origin: "What that God forwoot moot needs bee, / After the opinioun of certein clerkis" and interjects himself into the debate among learned scholars about whether "that Goddes worthy forwityng / Streyneth me nedely for to doon a thyng," by declaring that "if free choys be graunted me / To do that same thyng, or do it noght, / Though God forwoot it er that I was wroght" (3243-44, 3246-48). Burton Raffel translates these lines sardonically as:

"Or even determine if God, with his future knowledge,
Obliges me to go where his knowledge knows. ...
They say that freedom of choice has been granted me,
So I can do my thing, or refuse to do it,
Despite God's knowledge — in any case, I'll rue it!"

Thus, through discourse about dreaming, Chaucer questions the omnipotence and omniscience of God, the free choice of humanity and the value of dreams ... but at the last minute backs away from making any claims, interjecting that "I wol nat han to do of swich mateere ; / My tale is of a cok" (3251-52). However, he's opened the Pandora's box, and it is up to the reader to draw what he may from the tale as a whole answers to several questions:

1) are dreams really portents of what will happen?
2) are they of divine origin?
3) if they are, are they unalterable? Do we have free choice?
4) if they don't come true, what does that say about God's power? Is he really infallible?

Chaunticleer's dream stops short of showing his final fate, so Chaucer leaves the door open for us to conclude what we may. The cock doesn't die in the dream, so there is no final, incontrovertible answer for us about whether dreams can tell us our fate. However, interestingly enough, the dream portents a reddish-orange fox, while the actual fox that seizes Chaunticleer is coal-black.

Perhaps the devil's in the details?

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Trans. Burton Raffel. New York: The Modern Library, 2008.

Moreira, Isabel. "Dreams and Divination in Early Medieval Canonical and Narrative Sources: The Question of Clerical Control." The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 89, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 621-642

Phillips, Helen. "Dream Poems." A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture, c. 1350-c. 1500. Ed. Peter Brown. Wiley-Blackwell, 2007. 374-386.

The Tale the Monk Doesn't Tell

2009-04-08T20:22:00.000-07:00

First of all, I must apologize for being so far behind the curve on this one - I'm still playing catchup from several weeks of studying for the comps. (Apologies too if any or all of this has already been brought up in class.)

The Monk, alone among the Canterbury narrators that we've seen, second-guesses his initial choice of tale. (Chaucer and the Man of Law both apologize for having only one tale to tell, but all others seem pretty certain of their stories when they begin.) Before he decides to recite his litany of tragedies, the Monk broaches the possibility of telling "the lyf of Seint Edward" (1970). I found this change of narrative, together with some of the implications and associations of the original choice, very striking - doubly so because of the poor quality and unfavorable reception of the tale the Monk does end up telling. His original option is a suggestive road not taken; would it have made for a better and more congenial story?

The Monk's proposed "lyf of Seint Edward" is particularly interesting in historical and narrative context. The saint in question is probably Edward the Confessor, last king but one before the Norman Conquest and legendary for his piety. Edward's insular English associations, particularly with the insular English monarchy, made him a resonant political symbol. The critic Lynn Staley has written about the Confessor's appropriation by later English kings eager to consolidate their power and give it a religious luster (one already possessed, to their great political advantage, by the kings of France): "Henry III had perceived the need for a royal cult and had attempted to create in Westminster Abbey [originally built by Edward the Confessor and rebuilt by Henry] an embodiment of English royal identity. His efforts to use the figure of St. Edward as a model for English kingship did not outlive his own reign" (264). "Seint Edward" had a renewed symbolic presence and force at Chaucer's time, however, thanks to the efforts of Richard II to redeploy him in a similar effort to give the English monarchy a divine role and justification. By pointing to this precedent of an English saint-king, Richard can claim that his office is innately holy and that its authority derives not upward from the people (who, in the 1380s and 90s, are being unruly at just about every level) but downward from God. Hence the presence of Edward the Confessor in such (admittedly gorgeous) pieces of Ricardian propaganda as the Wilton Diptych, wherein he is the second of three saints (including another English monarch, Edmund the Martyr) presenting Richard to the Virgin Mary as her representative on earth.

With all this in mind, it is surely significant that the Monk eschews the tale of an English national saint and emblem of what amounts to an early bid for the divine right of kings in favor of a generalized and universal history. A saint's life, which by definition ends in sanctification and heavenly glory, seems the generic opposite of the Monk's tragedies; by telling the tragedies "first" (1971), does the Monk want to heighten the contrast with Edward's redemptive life, to which the contemporary English monarch has laid claim? Or, conversely, does he want to cast the shadow of various other once-proud "kynges" (1986) and their inevitable downfalls over this current emblem of divinely-sanctioned royal power?

It's also worth thinking about the Monk's change of mind in the context of the wider narrative pattern of Fragment VII (although I freely concede I'm probably over-reading here no matter how you look at it). Immediately previously is the Tale of Melibee, which, among other things, is a treatise on the art of government with advice to spare on how rulers should act, whom they should consult for advice and when, how they should treat subjects and defeated foes, and so forth. The Melibee, it seems, reaches a kind of middle ground between (to use terms we have been periodically returning to) absolutist and associational politics: Melibeus wields authority alone, of himself, with an obligation to "[b]iwrey nat youre conseil to no persone" (1140) and a responsibility not to be swayed by "the moore part and the gretter nombre" (1256), but he also emerges from the tale with various responsibilities to consult the right people, act patiently and with forgiveness instead of arbitrarily, and to "have moore love of the peple than drede" (1191). This enunciation of a political theory with direct relevance to contemporary England may be not least among the factors that give the Melibee such appealing "sentence."

Similarly, following the Monk's Tale we have the Nun's Priest's, which, in Lynn Staley's interpretation, advances another politically relevant point. Staley reads the Nun's Priest's Tale as a humorously disguised allegory of Ricardian claims to sacral kingship and their political cost: "Chauntecleer is the very image of a royal rooster," but his "fascination with his own magnificence almost brings his realm into utter ruin" (293) - an uproar that Chaucer describes in part through a reference to that real violent upsurge of associational politics, the 1381 Rising.

Bracketed by these two relevant and politically charged stories, the Monk's Tale seems conspicuously apolitical, concerned to demonstrate the way in which impersonal and inevitable forces brought about the downfall of various luminaries either long ago or far away (or both). The Monk's narrative inconsistency and incoherence mute any political moral one might take away from his examples; sometimes Fortune is a force of providential and even divine justice, punishing the hubris and tyranny of people like Antiochus and Nero, and at other times she is "False Fortune" (2669), piteously reducing great and honorable men to shameful deaths. The Monk flattens the difference between these two outlooks into a monotonous and fatalistic picture of inevitable mutability without coherent political content. In marked contrast to the echo of a real political crisis in the Nun's Priest's Tale, when the Monk describes a popular revolt - "The peple roos upon [Nero] on a nyght" (2527) - it is due to the will (whim?) of Fortune, who "lough, and hadde a game" (2550). There is no lesson here that might be at all relevant or interesting to the Canterbury pilgrims and the real world they inhabit, just lachrymose and abstract speculations that deprive them of agency.

The point, I guess, is that by foregoing a tale about a highly charged political symbol and choosing instead to drone on and on about tragedies, the Monk sacrifices the political relevance and applicability to contemporary England that the tales around him demonstrate and that, judging by the positive reception accorded to those tales and others like them (the Knight's or Clerk's, for example, with their similar political subtexts), the audience of pilgrims looks for. He opts out of the conversation and debate - out, that is, of associational politics itself.

Works Cited: Staley, Lynn. "Translating 'Communitas.'" In Kathy Lavezzo, ed. Imagining a Medieval English Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004. 261-303.

Further Commentary on the Nun's Priest

2009-04-08T18:06:00.000-07:00

“The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” is certainly one of the funnier tales. There is a very interesting juxtaposition between the qualities fitting an elaborate fable, such as humor and morality, and the elusive “other quality” the reader recognizes as depth. This “meaning”: the debate on the significance of dreams, the irony of the choice of tale teller, and/or the conflict between Chauntecleer and Pertelote is concealed beneath a simple type of tale, the fable. This is a literary device used by Chaucer with the fabliaux and the knightly romance as well. He plays with the reader’s idea of what to expect from a tale that seems familiar and predictable.
From the handout distributed on Monday, we can see the variety of meaning attached to the story of the fox and the cock. According the Ann Payne in Medieval Beasts, the fox is symbolically the deceitful Devil and the cock is symbolic of hope and optimism. The fable’s moral end both warns of false flattery and praises cunning. The joining of the beast epic characteristics and the heavier undertone at the end is characterized in the Nun’s Priest’s reaction to his tale’s receptions. R.T. Lenaghan wrote in “The Nun’s Priest’s Fable” that “Chaucer's speaker meets the objection that his tale is frivolous by enjoining the good men who object to heed the moral. He does not, it should be noted, specify precisely what that moral is. He affirms his general seriousness simply and pleasantly. As a result, although only a hundred lines back he was making an elaborate joke and only twenty-five lines ago he was putting morals in the mouths of the cock and the fox, his devout conclusion is now entirely credible” (302).
Essentially, the Nun’s Priest somehow manages an inoffensive, enjoyable, mirthful tale that also contains a legitimate moral and much interesting discourse. In class many of us pointed out the possible meanings of Chauntecleer and Pertelote’s arguments. It is, as Professor Wenthe suggested, often difficult to remember the the main characters are animals. Not only are they animals, but a cock and a hen which neither by their typical position in our minds as stupid nor their actions seem respectable. This assumption is corrupted again and again as while reading the wide-ranging thoughts of Chauntecleer the responses and his favored swevening partner one forgets these are animals. Only with the introduction of the fox does the plot seem to suit animals and our preconception of moralistic fables. This conclusion rejects the distinction of the tale as a fable, even an elaborate or exemplary one. Unlike Chaucer’s use of the fabliaux, with which he employs conventions of the genre, the fable-like characters and structure are secondary to the themes and discussion within the tale.

The final forty or so lines of “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” offer a final useful message: be vigilant, be wary, keep your eyes open and your mouth shut. This man barely mentioned by Chaucer the pilgrim in “The General Prologue” manages to end the lengthiest fragment of the Tales with the mirthful and yet impressive story the Host has been asking for.

Lenaghan, R.T. “The Nun's Priest's Fable”. PMLA 78:4. (Sep., 1963): 300-307. Modern Language Association. JSTOR. 08/04/2009. .

Fortune Favors the Church

2009-04-06T10:01:00.000-07:00

The Monk’s Tale reintroduces the idea that God or the gods exert a large amount of authority on the lives of mortals. As we had previously seen in The Knight’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale, the gods are more than capable of assuming a direct role in the unfolding of events in these tales. Instead of providing us with a fictional account of such an intervention, the Monk provides part of a long list of real-life examples of this occurrence.
With the exception of Lucifer, all of the protagonists the Monk introduces were considered mortal men. The tragedies of all these men can be attributed to them becoming victims of their own fortunes. What is most interesting is that none of these are “average” tragedies concerning freak accidents or unfortunate mistakes. Each of the protagonists the Monk mentions experience rises and falls with immense repercussions for their given circumstances. Drawing a line of connection between the tragedies of biblical figures like Lucifer and Adam and Roman emporers and Egyptian pharaohs accomplishes two things.
First of all, it continues a tradition of Western civilization based on a line of succession from Adam to the emperors, with each bearing a part of the burden of inherited responsibilities associated with great patriarchs. Second, it provides a context where the tragedies of great man can be equated with those of commoners. Though this connection is not explicitly drawn, the acknowledgement that kings are subject to the same concept of fortune as peasants reinforces the idea of a higher power than any earthly office.
This suggests that a great chain of being applies the principle of fortune to us all equally, even a fallen angel like Lucifer. Also, the idea that fortune can inflict tragedy on anyone, no matter whether high or low, deserving or undeserving, reinforces the authority of the church as the only authority capable of providing meaning to tragedies great and small.

The signifier and the prologue to the "Tale of Melibee"

2009-04-02T08:35:00.001-07:00

“When Chaucer excuses himself, something suspicious is always happening.”

In this case, we can suspect Chaucer in his prologue and “Tale of Melibee” of taking liberties with language, mocking allegory and reliance on textual authority, separating signifier from the signified and exposing the unreliability and elusiveness of language by manipulating his translation of a translation of a collection of quotes. In this post, I’ll focus on the prologue to the tale, and throw out a bit of graduate student, Derridaean gobbledygook.

Chaucer’s play with language begins in the precursor to the “Tale of Melibee,” when he claims that the same story told by different people and in different ways are basically the same “sentence,” or their substance and essential meaning are the same (see footnote for line 947). He plays with the meaning of the word “sentence,” confusing the reader as to whether he means substance or essential meaning, or even wise saying or maxim. Does he mean the content (words) or meaning (message) of his tale, the elusive signified, remains the same, whether the verbal expression, or the signifiers, change? This issue evoked in my mind an image of the signified as an arrow, the signifiers on a partitioned, spinning wheel and Chaucer as Pat Sajak, spinning and choosing words arbitrarily and telling us that every word earns the same amount of money. (Maybe a bad allegory, but you get the idea.)

This arbitrary declaration becomes even more so when Chaucer uses the example of the four gospels to argue that “hir sentence is al sooth, / and alle acorden as in hire sentence, / al be ther in hir telling difference … douteless hir sentence is al oon” (946-48, 952). Basically, according to Chaucer, even though the apostles tell the story of Jesus differently, the substance is all the same. However, the gospels are told differently, with different anecdotes and using different words, which forces the reader to determine whether these differences alter the gospels’ substance or their general meaning. This echoes Chaucer’s treatment of “Tale of Melibee,” in which he translates from the French translation of a Latin treatise, arbitrarily choosing which English words to use. Despite his denials — “blameth me nat; for, as in my sentence, / Shul ye nowher fynden difference / Fro the sentence of this tretys lyte / After the which this murye tale I write” — Chaucer’s choice of words decidedly influences the ‘sentence’ or substance of the tale (961-64).

Thus, before he launches into the long-winded, rambling “Tale of Melibee,” Chaucer declares the premise that whatever his arbitrary word choices in translating, the substance/meaning/message of his tale is identical to the Dominican friar Reynaud de Louens’ translation of Albertanus’ Liber consolationis et consilii, a collection of wise sayings, or “sentences.” I don’t know about contemporary readers, but modern readers are well aware of the errors and mistranslations that can occur, as well as mistakes in transcription when copying manuscripts. Chaucer’s adamant (but sarcastic) avowal about sameness places the issue on the table for us readers to judge, and we would do well to keep in mind Helen Cooper’s statement that “when Chaucer excuses himself, something suspicious is always happening” (311). Chaucer tells us he’s not distorting or changing anything in the tale, but as we will see in the Tale, he then goes on to manipulate language, playing at will with sign and signifier, creating anxiety in the reader about his meaning and intentions.

Cooper, Helen. "The Tale of Melibee." Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996. 310-322.

Textual authority, continued

2009-04-02T06:56:00.000-07:00

In my post "Textual authority and the Franklin's Tale," I discussed in depth textual authority in the Franklin's Tale, touching briefly on the Wife of Bath, and suggest that Chaucer seems to be questioning the value of depending on and referring to texts to lend authority to statements and stories. Throughout the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer portrays the use of texts as potentially dangerous and misguiding.

What, then, are we to think of the Tale of Melibee and its bombardment of quotes, proverbs and references to classical and biblical authorities?

In the prologue, the host passes judgment on Chaucer-the-Pilgrim's language and genre, criticizing his choice of rhyme in Sir Thopas: "Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche. / Now swich a rym the devel I biteche! / This may wel be rym dogerel" (923-25). He then begs of Chaucer a moral tale in prose, a tale that at the least "ther be som murthe or som doctryne" (935). Seemingly offended, Chaucer quites the host in the extreme, launching a loquacious, long-winded bombardment of name-dropping, classical and scriptural wisdom, advice and proverbs.

The host's request and the structure of the Tale of Melibee is reminiscent of something the Pardoner said during his prologue — while betraying his methods and strategy, the Pardoner tells his traveling companions that he tells his congregation old stories of long-time-ago because it's what they like, remember best and repeat. Insultingly, he says, "Thanne telle I hem ensamples many oon / Of olde stories longe tyme agoon. For lewed peple loven tales olde; / Swiche thyngs kan they wel reporte and holde" (435-39). Thus, references to classical and biblical tales and authorities appeals to the "ignorant and unlearned" (footnote, 177). The Oxford English Dictionary offers several other meanings of "lewed" in use during Chaucer's time — "Belonging to the lower orders; common, low, vulgar, ‘base'." Essentially, Chaucer in an earlier tale to Melibee suggests that people who love tales olde, or references to textual authority, are potentially idiots. Thus, by quiting the host with the Tale of Melibee, Chaucer questions his intelligence and status by exposing his preference for "tales olde" of morality.

The excess of textual referents in the Tale of Melibee is also reminiscent of the Wife of Bath's prologue, in which Alison both deplores and uses textual authority. Peppering her monologue with references to Solomon, the apostle Mark, Ptolemy and Darius, Alison subverts her criticism of male usage of textual authority to subjugate women. The Physician's Tale also exposes a concern with textual authority, striving to convince his (lewed?) companions and us readers that his story "is no fable, / But knowen for historial thyng notable" (155-56). The Franklin emphasizes that his narration is based on text, repeating "as the bookes telle" (1378).

The Tale of Melibee is just another link in the chain Chaucer is slowly building of a sentiment against textual authority, as well as a questioning of the stability and reliability of language. In the prologue to Melibee, Chaucer begs his listeners/readers to trust his translation of Melibee, asserting that "as in my sentence, / Shul ye nowher fynden difference / From the sentence of this tretys lyte / After the which this murye tale I write" (961-64). Chaucer asks us to believe that he has translated directly from the origin its perfect meaning. Even if the language, the sentence itself, the structure of his utterances, is different from the original, the meaning supposedly remains the same. We can quite his claim by asking him, again: Even if the sentence (word choice, grammar) changes, the sentence (meaning) does not?

The Oxford English Dictionary also lists under "sentence," the meanings "opinion, authoritative decision, judgment, quoted saying of some eminent person or a maxim." Thus, if Chaucer's sentences change, but his sentence remains the same, do his sentences change or remain the same? Is he conveying accurately the sentences of these wise people, learned sources, classical and biblical figures and stories?

There are at least two examples in which he is not. By introducing changes and alterations from the originals into his tale, Chaucer directly questions his listener's/reader's dependence on his use of textual authority and quality of his translation from the translation of the original. Cooper writes that "Chaucer's claim that different versions of a story proclaim the same message despite the verbal forms tthey take, as the Gospels do, is irrelevant to the change of language involved in his translation of Melibee (311).

The first example: Cooper points out an omission from the original Tale of Melibee — Among all his advice on politics and war, Chaucer leaves out a quote from Solomon "found in the original, that laments the state of the land where the king is a child: a text that would hardly have been tactful in late fourteenth-century England" (311). This omission from Chaucer's translation cannot help but alter the total sense of the corpus of wisdom/opinion in the Tale of Melibee by subtly altering the political judgment of the text. By using the Tale of Melibee to convey a political message, Chaucer places himself "among the wise counselors of the treatise, not among the flatterers" (Cooper 311). However, by altering a key element of the translation, Chaucer calls into question the reliability of his own advice. Chaucer, by interjecting himself into his tale, has extrapolated it to apply to reality, and his questionable treatment of textual authority brings into question the whole message of the Tale of Melibee.

A second example comes in Chaucer's merging of two different proverbs into one maxim: "What is bettre than gold? Jaspre. What is bettre than Jaspre? Wisedoom. And What is bettre than Wisedoom? Womman. And what is bettre than Womman? Nothyng" (1107-08). The original proverb in Latin gloss is, "Quid melius auro? Jaspis. Quid Jaspide? Sensus. Quid Sensu? Mulier. Quid Mulier? Nihil" (Explanatory notes, page 448). In Chaucer's version, mulier, or "good" is substituted with Woman. So, here, we have at least one example each of sentence (structural) change and sentence (meaning/opinion) change.

One last thing I want to point out before I wrap this up is to point out the humor of the husband-wife dyad relationship, in which Prudence adopts the guise of a masculine know-it-all, bombarding her hen-pecked husband with proverb after maxim after quote after name. Ovid, Seneca, Jesus ... practically all the poets, philosophers, disciples and apostles who ever penned a sentence of advice. After several pages of this inundation, Melibee protests, "Certes ... I se wel that ye enforce yow muchel by wordes to overcome me in swich manere that I shal nat venge me of myne enemys ..." and goes on to dissent from her opinion on vengeance (1426). And he ultimately issues a smackdown, telling her that after all her blathering and quoting and citing, she has yet to advise him on how to act in his emergency: "I see wel, dame Prudence, that by youre faire wordes and by youre resounds that ye han shewed me, that the weere liketh you no thying; but I have nat yet herd youre conseil, how I shal do in this nede" (1672-73). Prudence has inflated her language, repeated the same basic ideas over and over, expended much energy only to make the simple point that she doesn't like war. Chaucer's mocking of this repetitive waste is visible underneath Melibee's reminder that Prudence has yet to give him her advice simply and in a nutshell, so to say.

Much like Prudence, Chaucer uses bombastic language, excessive references to textual authority, inflates language, all to make the point that people should not rely on incessant references to long-dead philosophers and religious authorities, but come to the point and give their advice, straight-up. It's up to us, now, whether to separate Chaucer the author from Chaucer the pilgrim and take his advice to heart, or dismiss it on the same basis we are inclined to dismiss Chaucer-the-pilgrim's moralizing.

Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

All this Melibee Talk

2009-04-01T08:51:00.001-07:00

Even though it is dull as all hell, the Tale of the Melibee is definitely one of the more intriguing tales we've read so far. So many questions arise when trying to analyze the piece. Why is the Chaucer character telling this tale? Is it a parody or commentary of sorts? What's with all the dialogue? We've pondered all of this and have come up with several possibilities as to Chaucer's motivations.

As for me, I'm in agreence with Michael Foster. "I would like to suggest that Melibee itself casts doubt on such a binary opposition because it disregards a schism between oral and literate communication, and it embodies the spirit of publicly performed and interpreted literature; in my view, the style of the Melibee combines with its content—the debate on revenge versus forgiveness—to invite a communal response" (411).

In his article, Foster discusses the value of the shared-experience amongst medieval readers and how a tale filled with so much moral discourse and discussion would inevitably lead to numerous debates between said medieval readers.

So maybe, Chaucer was just giving the people of his time a thick tale to chew on...

Foster, Micahel. "Echoes of Communal Response in the Tale of Melibee." The Chaucer Review 42.4 (2008): 409-430. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chaucer_review/v042/42.4.foster.html.

"Sir Thopas" and "The Tale of Melibee"

2009-03-27T11:40:00.000-07:00

Perhaps more than with the Squire, it seems strange Chaucer this pilgrim would tell such tales. I posted early in the semester regarding estate satire; possibly here Chaucer is mocking the overly- romanticized tales of quests and jousts and battles: the second estate. In “Sir Thopas: The Puppet’s Puppet”, originally published in The Chaucer Review, Ann Haskell asserts that Geoffrey Chaucer the author used his own character as the mocker of and a mockery of his Tales themselves. She says “Chaucer the Pilgrim as a puppet, manipulated by Chaucer the Poet, whose action was perhaps relayed to the public with appropriate motions by Chaucer the Reader” (253).

“Sir Thopas” is a poorly expressed burlesque, or a mockery of romance. Other analogues of the tale are noted in the back of our book. In “The Narrator of The Canterbury Tales” Ben Kimpel draws a comparison between this “humble, stupid narrator” and narrators in other works such as The House of Fame, The Parliament of Fowls, and The Legend of Good Women and suggests that Chaucer the poet used this literary device in both “Sir Thopas” and “The Tale of Melibee”. Though “Melibee” is not a burlesque, it is logically told by a simple teller, and like “Sir Thopas” it is expressed not as Geoffrey Chaucer’s original ideas but as something he’s heard: “it reflects his taste rather than his talents” (Kempel 84). “Melibee” drags along slowly and the reader is left to wonder why this tale is allowed to be told in its entirety. Has Chaucer the pilgrim tricked his fellow travelers, blinding their reason with intelligent-sounding proverbs? I’d like to ask what my fellow blog posters make of Chaucer’s largely uninteresting tales and why he of all pilgrims would tell them.

Haskell, Ann S. “Sir Thopas: The Puppet’s Puppet”. The Chaucer Review 9:3 (Winter 1975). 253-261. Penn State University Press. JSTOR. American University Library. 20 Mar 1009. < http://www.jstor.org.proxyau.wrlc.org/stable/25093312>.

Kimpel, Ben. “The Narrator of the Canterbury Tales”. ELH 20:2 (Jun 1953). 77-86. The Johns Hopkins University Press. JSTOR. American University Library. 24 Mar 2009. < http://www.jstor.org.proxyau.wrlc.org/stable/2872071>.

The Prioress's Prerogative

2009-03-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to say more about my claim in class to see The Prioress's Tale as an Easter fable. I say fable because the story cultivates a clear villain in the Jews, which though I think chosen particularly, has an obvious tone of untruth with regard to their illustration (though not obvious to the Prioress). This feeds into the notion of a phantasmagoria Prof Wenthe discussed early on in class such that Jews, in this story, are spectre-like, more metaphor than actuality, a perfect "other" to embody a threat to Christianity.

I think Jews were chosen as the villain in this story for - what seems to me to be - an obvious reason: the denial of Christ as Messiah. I do not claim to know the biblical historicism involved with this age-old, mythologized and propagandized notion that the Jews were "the cause of Christ's death" and that is obviously important because this Christian propaganda is ignorant and scornful because, though it trys to validate Christianity it really just condemns Jews, but the idea that Judaism must maintain itself (or something important about itself) only by denying Christ - even more earnestly since Christ himself was a Jew - is more applicable here. Since I see this tale as an Easter fable - in the redemption of the innocent lamb of a child from his violent death, maintained post-death in life as a message to the Christian mother and Abbot who rescue him (read the Church) - the implicit message of her tale (not Chaucer's) is that death is not the end of life...for Christians.

This is not to excuse the overt anti-Semitism but to put it more into context. I don't know: would Chaucer play off the idea of Jews as Christ-deniers in order to make a Christian tale more poignant to Christian readers? I thought it was interesting at the end of class when Prof Wenthe discussed the usage of Jews killing Christian children while invoking King Herod and the Massacre of the Innocents, flipping it on its head for what? To further the metaphor of the Judeo-Christian tension over the Messiah? Herod killed innocent Jewish children because he was afraid of the Messiah coming to usurp his throne so it is fitting for Chaucer to illustrate Jews killing Christian children in a tale about Christian redemption?

Geoffrey the Pilgrim

2009-03-26T05:58:00.000-07:00

The character of the pilgrim, Geoffrey Chaucer, is a subject of limitless possibilities for discussion. The tales he tells are disappointing, because the reader expects Chaucer the pilgrim to reflect the talent of Chaucer the poet. Here I discuss why we have these standards and why they are unmet.
The most interesting analysis I found regarding Chaucer the narrator of the Tales traces the presence of the narrator throughout the poems, citing his first identification in the “General Prologue” (Kimpel 78). In “The Narrator of the Canterbury Tales”, Kimpel immediately argues that the prologue introduces Chaucer the pilgrim as congenial and approachable, for he must have spoken to these pilgrims in order to have gleaned such rich descriptions. He concludes from Chaucer the pilgrim’s interspersed comments on the other tales that he is a man who holds virtue over vice, simple and good-hearted (81-82). His humility is foreshadowed when he excuses himself, “My wit is short, ye wol understonde” (“General Prologue” ln.758). He is portrayed as a man who sees and then faithfully reports, for obvious reason (81). As narrator, too much opinion or even intelligence could change the dynamic of the story. By telling tales without the poet's trademark ironic rhetoric, etc. the pilgrim establishes a quality of omniscience, presence without opinion.
I am not the first to note the irony of Chaucer telling such dreary tales with excessive irrelevant detail. From the start the rhyme of “Sir Thopas” is flat and simple, a sharp contrast not only to the Prioress’ heartfelt faith just preceding but to the varied rich rhyme schemes throughout the Tales. “The Tale of Melibee” is literally difficult to read, for me mostly because as soon as it begins to pick up, you suddenly realize you have been reading the same thing for 200 lines. As with the Squire, the interruption is welcome. The Host’s involvement is, I think, much more pointed and interesting that the sniveling Franklin: “Namoore of this, for Goddes dignitee” (“Sir Thopas” ln. 2109). But unlike the young and pretty Squire, Geoffrey responds indignantly and yet with frank composure (in keeping with his character, as I discuss below), demanding his just turn like the other pilgrims. Then Geoffrey Chaucer exposes his intentions; the one section I highlighted when reading the conversation between Chaucer and the Host was his ominous declaration, “As thus, though that I telle somwhat moore/ Of proverbes than ye han herd bifoore/ Comprehended in this litel tretys heere,/ To enforce with th’ effect of my mateere” (lns. 955-958). I think he knows he can command the audience as others have before him with an exemplum, however deficient, and by exposing his intelligence through a kind of “auctoritee”; of course the use of proverbs as a representation of intelligence is ineffective, but characteristic, perhaps, of this man who repeats faithfully what he has heard without cogent judgment.
I will continue my discussion of the tales in a following post.

Kimpel, Ben. “The Narrator of the Canterbury Tales”. ELH 20:2 (Jun 1953). 77-86. The Johns Hopkins University Press. JSTOR. American University Library. 24 Mar 2009. < http://www.jstor.org.proxyau.wrlc.org/stable/2872071>.

The Pardoner and the Prioress

2009-03-21T10:24:00.000-07:00

Bracketing the Shipman's Tale (wherein the questions of sex and money dealt with more disturbingly or didactically in the surrounding tales receive a more lighthearted and tongue-in-cheek treatment), I want to see what happens when we align the Pardoner's and the Prioress's tales. These two make for an odd couple indeed, with agendas, mentalities and narrative styles in more or less direct conflict. The Prioress straightforwardly and sentimentally advances ideas and themes that the Pardoner thoroughly and systematically unsettles: the stability and effectivity of language, seen in the ability of the little clergeon's song to name and evoke the Virgin whom he praises; the possibility of a miraculous triumph over death, denied to the Pardoner's deluded rioters but achieved by the Prioress's little hero; and the validity of relics, affirmed at the end of the Prioress's tale when the "litel body sweete" (682) is apparently enshrined as such. Also, there seems to be an unusually pronounced gender differential between the two. Despite (or because of?) his ostensible emasculation, the Pardoner seems to possess a thoroughly and exclusively masculine imagination. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think his is the only tale we've seen so far without a single identifiable female character. This makes the contrast with the Prioress's Tale all the more dramatic; not only does a woman narrate this tale, she does so in the name of and with constant reference to another woman, the Virgin Mary.

This point highlights the larger point of contrast and connection that I want to discuss. The Virgin is the ultimate embodiment of (pure and non-sexual) fertility: "the roote / Of bountee," as the Prioress calls her (465-466). Unfolding thus under the sign of the "mooder Mayde, . . . mayde Mooder" (467), the Prioress's Tale dwells recurrently on related themes and ideas of inspiration, growth, and rejuvenation: the Prioress's opening appeal for divine guidance in her "song" (487), the schoolhouse setting and emphasis on education, the centrality of the figure of the innocent child (Lee Edelman and reproductive futurism, anyone?), the movement from death into life, and above all the miraculous song seeded into the dying body of the boy by the "greyn" (662) planted on his tongue by "Cristes mooder" (656). In its emphasis on the miracle and mystery of fertility, of the ability of seeds to animate life and words in apparently dead matter, the Prioress's Tale thus connects right back to those famous opening lines of the General Prologue.

Seed, however, is, if we take seriously the Host's threat to his testicles or Chaucer's earlier implication that said testicles were absent to begin with, exactly what the Pardoner lacks. The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale emphasize sterility, not fertility; the "venym" of the Pardoner's words (421) and the "poysoun" featured in his tale (867) instead of divine inspiration, miraculous "greyn," or shoures soote. If the Virgin Mother praised by the Prioress is the root of spiritual bounty, the material bounty unearthed in the Pardoner's Tale yields only death, and the only root the Pardoner describes is the radix malorum, cupiditas. The Pardoner's repetitive fixation on that theme - "My theme is alwey oon, and evere was" (333); "Therefore my theme is yet, and evere was" (425) - itself demonstrates his sterility and lack of spiritual/linguistic seed.

And yet it can just as easily be said of the little clergeon that his theme is always one, and ever was. Alma redemptoris comes to be every bit as repetitive and monotonous as was Radix malorum est cupiditas, and if the little clergeon supposedly recites his formula with all the authenticity and guilelessness that the Pardoner so conspicuously lacks, he also does so "by rote" (545), without comprehending what his words mean. The ability of this rote formula still to convey meaning and achieve its effect thus echoes the ability of the Pardoner's empty words to inspire belief and contrition in others. And if we note that, we must also note that, among these two speakers, it is the sole prerogative of the supposedly sterile Pardoner to bring about repentance and change. The Prioress describes a remarkably flat and static world: the Jews (and Satan) are evil and irredeemable, while the Christians are pure and sinless. The "grete mercy" of God that the Prioress ends by invoking (689) actually has no place in her story; it is not permitted to the demonic Jews and not needed by the innocent clergeon or his pure and blameless coreligionists. The Prioress refuses to recognize or acknowledge the broader possibilities of the fertility, potentiality, and openness to change that she invokes. Repentance, conversion, and the movement from sin to grace apparently have no reality or at least no necessity for her - as they do, in a perverse but compelling way, to her otherwise sterile and seedless counterpart.

The Existential Gauntlet

2009-03-19T12:43:00.000-07:00

More on the Pardoner's Tale...Prof Wenthe asked in a follow-up question to my assertion that the Pardoner is essentially offering the pilgrims a choice between despair and hope, which, however quaint an analysis, I think moves toward answering his question which was, in effect: How does the Pardoner's quandary (or contradictory personage) offer any bigger challenge to the pilgrims than they've already had?

I think the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale are the most challenging to us -and, if the Host's reaction is any indication, though he is personally attacked, one could presume to the pilgrims - is because he provokes, one can only guess with what ultimate intention, the crisis of existence when immaterial (or ultimate) truth and faith in those truths is confounded by or reduced to the material (either in language or relics). He claims, (since he is material of flesh and language and what is material corrupts the immaterial because of the material limitations of difference*) that he is corrupt, but it shouldn't surprise us or the pilgrims since they are not excluded from this predicament; we are also corrupt (we sin; we are delimited by our limited faculties in difference or separation from ultimate truth*), but since he is also a seller of pardons (or of hope, of faith) he maintains a belief, however tenuous, in the existence of immaterial truths which are worth investing in material relics. He acknowledges that material things both have and have not value and it is our decision to give or deny value thereby challenging our beliefs to be described or known to us through language (or relics). This is the ultimate problem for the believer who questions his/her beliefs. And since this is a holy pilgrimage, it is a problem for each pilgrim which questions or quytes! all of them.

*The content of this rationale utilizes however roughly the logical form of Thomas Aquinas's Being and Essence.

The Pardoner and the Commodification of Religion

2009-03-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

Looking back on my first blog entry, where I discussed the economic aspects of pilgrimages to Canterbury, I have noticed the reemergence of this theme in the character of the Pardoner and his tale.
It is interesting that the Pardoner openly admits that the relics he peddles are fakes and forgeries (pig bones and common metals). The selling of religious items and relics, along with the related distribution of indulgences and pardons, was an important part of the medieval pilgrimage. Chaucer’s pilgrims would have encountered numerous examples of these practices en route and at their destination. Not only would it have been common along their path, it would have formed an important and integral part of social and economic practices in villages along the way. Canterbury itself would have been a veritable religious marketplace full of Pardoner-like characters.
Because the Pardoner is presented as such a poor example of spiritual purity, it is difficult not to view Chaucer’s inclusion of this character and his “business” as an indictment of the overt commodification of spiritual practices. When this is combined with the content of the Pardoner’s tale, the implications become even more damning. If greed for material possession is sufficient to lead to the demise of the three men, then what fate awaits those that combine this same greed with the corruption of religious traditions and offices?
I think that at this point in the tales Chaucer offers an indirect but scathing criticism of this commodification and by implication the inherent and growing corruption of the church.

The placement of the Physician's Tale

2009-03-16T09:25:00.000-07:00

The content of the Physician's Tale — a recycled story of a virgin killed to maintain her sexual honor — makes for interesting discussion, but even more so when we consider it within its textual context. Its placement in our text between the Franklin's Tale and the Pardoner's Tale suggests thematic connections with both tales.

Although in our text, the Physician's Tale follows the Franklin's Tale, some manuscripts have placed it after the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, a story of alchemy, greed, "trouth" and trickery. The scholar Robert Pratt uses manuscript evidence to argue against this particular ordering in his article "The Order of the Canterbury Tales," available on JSTOR.

The content of the Physician's Tale further supports the conclusion that our text contains the more appropriate placement, as its plot echoes Dorigen's list of women who commit suicide or die rather than sacrifice their virginity or honor. The allusions to Roman anecdotes in the Franklin's Tale and the Roman setting of the Physician's Tale — disregarding the anachronistic references to Christianity — remind the reader that "female sexual honor ... was of supreme importance in Roman culture, and as the stories of Lucretia and all those other women cited by Dorigen indicate, its loss was literally a fate worse than death" (Cooper 252). However, Chaucer's treatment of these two Tales cast doubt on this belief in the primacy of sexual honor. The seeming excess of Virginius's murder of his daughter echoes the sense of hesitation in the Franklin's Tale about valuing too highly tales of virginal martyrs. Chaucer's apparent disagreement with the degree of "gentilesse" emphasis on virginity and sexual honor echoes the confusion within the medieval Church about sexual honor and morality, and whether suicide or murder, when conducted to avoid loss of honor, is theologically justifiable (Cooper 253).

Furthermore, both Dorigen and Virginia are assigned passive roles in their fates. While Dorigen takes a more active role in putting herself in a difficult situation by making a flippant promise — as opposed to Virginia, whose natural beauty is her downfall — both women wind up subservient to male authority. Dorigen lays her problems at Averagus's feet and abides by his judgment that she keep her honor/promise, and Virginia accepts her father's decree that she must die rather than surrender her honor/virginity. She tells her father humbly, "Dooth with youre child youre wyl, a Goddes name!" (250). An elemental difference between these two women rests in what their male guardians believe about honor and which they value more, troth or sexual purity. Thus, the Physician's Tale naturally follows and engages in a debate with the Franklin's Tale about honor and sexual purity — the Physician seems to be challenging the Franklin's stance that keeping troth is more valuable. And, both tales cast light on the unenviable position of women as passive and powerless to solve problems created by male lust.

Although the Pardoner's Tale does not address the issue of sexual honor, it is a natural successor to the Physician's Tale. Both tales deal with the dangers inherent in gifts of Fortune and Nature. After the physician completes his tale, the Host grieves for Virginia and says, "I seye al day that men may see / That yiftes of Fortune and of Nature / Been cause of deeth to many a creature" (294-296). Virginia's "beautee was hire deth" (297). The Host further opens the door for the Pardoner to craft a tale of the dangers of gifts of Fortune, by saying, "of bothe yiftes that I speke of now / Men han ful ofte moore for harm than prow" (299-300). As someone who makes a living on sermonizing, the pardoner can hardly pass up this opportunity to use his skill to "quite" the physician and Host on this particular issue and, perhaps, make some money off the other pilgrims, especially when these pilgrims shout down the Host's request for a funny tale. After a prologue in which he ill-advisedly reveals his strategy and greed, undercutting his moral authority, the pardoner recycles an oft-told tale of three foolish men who meet their deaths through a gift of Fortune. Thus, the Pardoner's Tale dovetails nicely with the physician's story of a fatal gift of Nature.

Pratt, Robert A. "The Order of the Canterbury Tales." PMLA 66:6 (Dec. 1951). 1141-1167.

Cooper, Helen. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1996.

Two Tales Enter, One Post Leave

2009-03-15T20:20:00.000-07:00

For this blog post I thought I would present some final thoughts on the pre-Spring Break tales. Both the Squire’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale present a few concepts we have already seen in new ways.

First of all, I think the Squire’s Tale was purposefully made to be so “interesting” to reflect the youth of the teller. We’ve got talking birds that wear sandals, magical mirrors, and a sword that is literally double-edged. Chaucer is either poking fun at the Squire or poking fun at the sort of tale the Squire is telling. There is just way too much going on for the tale to fit properly within Chaucer’s format. It reflects the noble education of the teller while also proving that too much education can be downright boring. If the Squire is to be taken at face value as a generalist and future master in the tradition of his father, he also has to be viewed as a punk kid with a hell of an imagination and a short attention span. Chaucer not only opens up the Squire to be interrupted by the Franklin, he is also providing an example to support his own monopoly on tale-telling. He appears to be reinforcing the idea that though many of the pilgrims are more than capable of telling well-constructed and entertaining tales, at the end of the day it is best that tale-telling is left to professionals, or at least those mature enough to stick to the plot and keep the time reasonable. It is both a criticism of over-eager youth and the misuse of education.

As far as the Franklin’s Tale goes, it is refreshing to see a tale where no one gets swyved, literally or figuratively. It is the first tale where no one gets punished, destroys themselves or others, tricks someone into doing something they dont want to, or generally making a mess of things. Everything comes out happy in the end and everyone demonstrates self-control and mutual respect. Therefore it is probably the most boring tale and I can almost picture the pilgrims rolling their eyes at one another as the Franklin tells of Aurelius' change of heart at the end. It provides a solution to many of the issues with marriage we have seen up to this point, but it stops short of allowing the woman complete agency. Despite having an “ideal” marriage, she is forced to give up her public rights in order to maintain this private arrangement. Also, a large measure of her capital is committed to preserving her husband’s reputation and the sanctity of her marriage, which is the primary source of conflict in the tale. In many of the previous marriage tales (Wife of Bath, Clerk, etc.) we see a marriage that starts with conflicts of social status, beauty, and behavior that must be reconciled with marriage, while this tale starts with a marriage that must be reconciled with external conflict. The tale presents an opposing conflict to the others we’ve seen because the marital chicken comes before the social egg. Instead of figuring out how to get along with each other, like Walter and Griselda or the Knight and the Old Woman, Arveragus and Dorigen have to figure out how to make their arrangement work within their social context.

Heere taketh the makere of this post his leve.

Three ways of seeing the Pardoner

2009-03-12T08:46:00.000-07:00

The Pardoner is a complex pilgrim but that's not to suggest he's also shrewd, though his humor is possibly misinterpreted. And why should the host have the final say of the Pardoner's intention? I propose that there are at least three ways of reading the Pardoner and his tale with no evidence for any particular interpretation:

1-He is a drunk fool who decides to do a little truth-telling, forgets all that he's said and proceeds to act as if he were anywhere and asks for a contribution. His tale, after all, reads very much like what we might expect his business to sound like. He was drunk, forgetful, foolish to begin with, and caught up in his act.

2-He is wise and crafty but merry-making like the others and - read as irony - the end to his tale, since he clearly remembers that he has told all the others his scheme, is a funny way of capitalizing on the absurdity of his job (and his performance), self-aware and on the look-out for fools who would still buy a pardon but careful by being so obvious. The anger he displays after the anger shown by the host would then be interpreted as anger at the host, not for calling him out as the fool "he really is" but going so far with the condemnation without seeing the humor of the intention. In this case the host is the fool.

3-He is a desperate fool, who might be a little drunk and really does try to pull one over on the other pilgrims. In this case he is too stupid to think they might have remembered his admission and tries to get a little money out of them after telling, what he thinks, is a solidly intimidating tale apt to convince the pilgrims of their sin. In this case the host is totally justified in his anger and the anger the pardoner shows is boarder-line psychotic.

The Physician and the theme of "pitee"

2009-03-11T13:26:00.000-07:00

The Physician’s Tale has been largely ignored, and often censured. Its position between two of the favorite tales, the Franklin and the Pardoner, is only one of the reasons the tale has been dismissed. The main reason it has earned a negative reception is that it seems such a half-hearted and lacking modified retelling of existing good stories, such as The Legend of Good Women and, again, Roman de la Rose. The Physician is described in the General Prologue as a man of little knowledge, (ironically): “His studie was but litel on the Bible (ln. 438). From this the reader may expect a somewhat wanting tale, and may judge that the Physician is a man, like the Squire, whom does not understand his materials and therefore produces a story that emerges as relatively deficient.
This said, there are many interesting aspects of the tale. The analogues are noted in the notes of our edition and in various other places and I will not recount them here. However, after discussing the themes of “gentilesse”, humility, “pitee”, etc. in class over the last few weeks, I want to point out the theme of “pitee” in the tale. Thomas B. Hanson noted three uses of the theme in his article “Chaucer’s Physician as Storyteller and Mobilizer” (1972). First, when the knight Virginius makes his sorrowful speech to his young daughter, the Physician states that he had “pitee stikynge thurgh his herte” (ln. 211). Second, when Virginius brings Virginia’s head to Apius and is at first condemned, the people of the town intervene, “for routhe and for pitee” (ln. 261). Third, Virginius against exhibits his “pitee” when he asserts that the conniving Claudius shall be exiled, rather than hanged (ln. 272). Apparently, the Physician considers pity a noble quality, for he attributes it primarily to the knight Virginius, whom he has established as a very worthy man and an honorable knight (Hanson 135-136).
The Physician’s attached importance to “pitee”, differently from in other tales in which it does seem to indicate nobility, here seems misguided and/or misinterpreted, arguably due to the Physician’s own flaws. He emphasizes the virtue of the worthy knight, but dispatches his even worthier heroine, Virginia, with shocking haste. Virginius pities Claudius enough to let him live, unlike his ruling over his own daughter, who has committed no sin. Unlike the other tales which highlight these noble virtues, the virtue of “pitee” as demonstrated here does not translate as an admirable quality.

Hanson, Thomas B. “Chaucer’s Physician as Storyteller and Moralizer”. The Chaucer Review 7.2 (Fall 1972). Penn State University Press. 132-139. JSTOR. Accessed 10 Mar. 2009. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/25093221>.

The Decameron

2009-03-10T07:40:00.000-07:00

Here is a link to the London Review of Books which reviews a recent translation of Boccaccio's Decameron. It is an interesting review, as are most LRB reviews (typically real academics write reviews of books in their field) which mentions the last tale of Decameron as the basis for Chaucer's Clerk's Tale. Interesting 1350's foundation for Chaucer's 1390's tales.

I am a member of the site and I signed in for this link; hopefully it works.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n05/burr01_.html

It's not working so here is my user name and password if you want to log-in to read it in full:
Username: jcclarkeru@yahoo.com
Password: 84SN9ZC5

Textual authority and the Franklin's Tale

2009-03-05T08:09:00.001-08:00

Scholars tend to focus their analysis of the Franklin's Tale on either of two themes: its role in the marriage group or the franklin's focus on status and gentillesse. However, Chaucer incorporates in this tale another, minor theme shared with other tales in the Canterbury Tales as well as some of Chaucer's other works. Amidst the franklin's depiction of a loving marriage and questioning of the connection between gentillesse and nobility, Chaucer weaves a sarcastic thread of a questionable dependence on textual authority that leads its adherents down the wrong path, spiritually and morally.

The Franklin's Tale could qualify as one of Chaucer's most sarcastic in the Canterbury Tales, and he applies his irony with a liberal brush to the issue of text. During the Franklin's Prologue, the franklin appears humble and self-deprecating, portraying himself as "a burel man" (716). While the footnote offers disparate meanings — uneducated man or layman — the implication is that the franklin wants to depict himself as uneducated. He adds that he "lerned nevere rhethorik" and that "colours of rhethoryk" are strange to him (719, 726). We need not wait to hear his tale to sense his duplicity; sandwiched between these two statements are references to Mt. Parnassus and Marcus Tullius Scithero. An uneducated, rude man would hardly be familiar with these elements of Greek and Roman history.

The franklin further undercuts his assertion of burelness throughout his tale. While he begins his tale plainly enough, without incorporating any references to myths or texts, he surprises the reader with an aside on line 813: "the book seith thus." The franklin is telling his fellow pilgrims and us a tale straight out of a book! As he proceeds with the tale, as more plot details emerge, Chaucer's contemporary readers — particularly those in his circle of friends — would have recognized the story as very similar to one by Boccaccio, which he wrote in two versions, one for his Decameron and another for Filocolo (Cooper 233). Thus, less than a hundred lines into his tale, the franklin has betrayed himself as at least middling educated.

The franklin, however, waits a couple hundred lines to begin completely dismantling his image of himself as burel. During Aurelius's plea to Apollo, he refers to a less well-known Greek goddess, Lucina, and as he languishes in grief, the franklin refers to a thirteenth-century poem about Pamphilus and Galathee (1110). During Aurelius and his brother's visit with the magician-clerk, the franklin again attempts to portray himself as ignorant, but Chaucer quickly and sarcastically reveals his falsehood. The franklin claims, "I ne kan no termes of astrologye" (1266). A few lines later, he rushes headlong into a manic list of astrological terms: tables Tolletanes, collect and expans yeris, rootes and geeris, centris and argumentz, proporcioneles convenientz, Alnath and Aries, and the heavenly spheres (1273-1282). Then, on line 1243, he again reminds us he's repeating a story he read: "this was, as thise bookes me remembre." The fatal blow to the franklin's posture of ignorance and illiteracy comes during Doringen's anguished lament, in which myth after story after myth about suicidal women tumbles out, again, "as the bookes telle" (1378).

Through the mouth of the quite educated franklin, Chaucer reintroduces the question of textual authority. It's a theme he has raised earlier in the Tales, particularly during the Wife of Bath's prologue in which Alison verbally espouses experience over education, but undercuts her own argument by citing Scripture and other texts. He continues this theme outside of the Tales, as well, in his shorter poems and envoys. Specifically, in Envoy to Bukton (see earlier blog post "Getting Personal: Chaucer's Envoy to Bukton"), he sarcastically cites the five-times-wed Alison of Bath as an established textual authority on marriage.

In the Franklin's Tale, Chaucer portrays the use of texts as dangerous and potentially misguiding. Aurelius goes astray by pleading with Apollo, a heathen god straight out of Greek mythology with whom educated people would be familiar. For Christians, this act is tantamount to making a deal with the devil. The squire Aurelius's brother, a clerk, further leads him down the path of self-destruction through the aid of book-learning. While trying to figure out how to help his brother with his grief, the clerk remembers his studies at Orleans, where clerks eagerly pursue arcane topics, and specifically recalls a book "of magyk natureel ... Which book spak muchel of the operaciouns / Touchyne the eighte and twenty mansiouns / That longen to the moone" (1125, 1129-31). The moon's 28 stations is a Far East, Buddhist tradition, and contradictory to Christian doctrine and teaching. Chaucer further emphasizes the danger of magic and astrology in connection with learning by portraying the magician-clerk Aurelius and his brother meet on the way to Orleans as a young, learned clerk who greets them in Latin (1174). This magician-clerk has a study full of books, a fact Chaucer tells us twice in 10 lines, on lines 1207 and 1214: "In his studie, ther as his bookes be" and "Into my studie, ther as my bookes be." With the aid of unChristian learning and texts, the magician-clerk enables Aurelius in his folly, and Aurelius' foolish trust in textual authority to win him his desire leads him to make a rash promise of 1,000 pounds of gold.

Aurelius is not the only character who textual learning leads astray and to a nearly tragic end. Dorigen, after Aurelius informs her the rocks are gone and reminds her of her troth, recalls a dozen examples from mythology and history of women who commit suicide rather than lose their virginity or honor. She uses these examples to support her argument with herself that she should also commit suicide to get out of the trap she built for herself through her hasty, foolish promise to Aurelius. What she is forgetting, and what Chaucer's contemporary readers would have known, is that suicide is prohibited by Christian doctrine. The franklin earlier establishes Dorigen as a Christian woman who laments to the Lord about the rocks (876), so her forgetfulness of Christian doctrine is inexcusable. Her reliance on the wrong kind of textual authority nearly leads her to commit a grievous sin.

With a couple twists, the franklin manages to end his story happily. Aurelius has a change of heart and releases Dorigen from her promise, and the magician-clerk subsequently releases Aurelius from his bond. However, Chaucer's warning is clear. Relying on the wrong kind of textual authority is dangerous and leads only to trouble and woe.

It is beyond ironic, then, that the franklin (and Chaucer) attempt to teach us a lesson by using a story from a text.

The Squire Shows His Rank

2009-03-02T08:24:00.000-08:00

It is clear from the General Prologue that the Squire is a young man, twenty years of age, and that he is the son of the Knight. Not all squires became knights in the 14th century but one could assume that Chaucer's squire not only represents his rank as a group of men in the 2nd estate but further represents the inchoate knight because he as a young squire (some men only became squires later in life after proving the worth of their service) has as his aim to mimic the courtly solidarity and narrative panache of his father and other famous knights.

It might be expected - because of his familial tie to knighthood - that his tale would imitate the style of the The Knight's Tale and it does: there is a knight who comes to a foreign court presenting enchanted objects of war and plunder i.e. the exclusively obedient, machine-like brass horse, the omniscient mirror, the undefeated sword, etc. We also get the impression that he's heard many knight's tell their tales as in many spots the squire refers to them, "Eek in that lond, as tellen knyghtes olde," as his predecessors, "That Gawayn, with his olde curteisye" as his influences, "Who koude telle yow the forme of daunces...No man but Launcelot, and he is deed," as his ideal.

We also see his limitations as a courtly story-teller but the extent and reasons for which the squire seems at least partly aware as when he describes the characteristics of the brass horse's powers: "The hors vanysshed, I noot in what manere,/Out of hir sighte; ye gete namoore of me, " shows his inexperience as a knight (or his lack of authority as a squire) and, "The knotte why that every tale is toold,/ If it be taried til that lust be coolde...I sholde to the knotte condescende,/And maken of hir walkyng soone an ende" for his inexperience as a courtly narrator.

The most glaring imitation is the reuse of the line, "That pitee renneth soone in gentil herte" spoken by the enchanted, injured she-falcon in Canacee's lap but there is an elaboration which seems to depart from the usage in The Knight's Tale. It is firstly interesting that the Squire would put these words into the mouth of an enchanted creature, perhaps because he had heard it used so often before that it had become garnished with a sprig of idealism and history beyond his years so somewhat immortal rather than political as its connotation seems to be in The Knight's Tale; but the she-falcon extends the ideal of what constitutes a "gentil herte" as "Is preved alday, as men may it see,/As wel by werk as by auctoritee;". This seems significant in that it extends the characteristic to being "preved alday" (by giving it a broader scope of time, it lends the ideal to a broader scope of people?) by "men" and through "werk" (not just noble authority). This has the flavor of a proletariat - or a young, more modern and future knight - ingeniously voiced via an enchanted animal so not to disrupt the human hierarchy or disturb his father's sensibility.

The structure of the tale further indicates the "inchoateness" of the Squire's narrative art. There are two stories here; one, about a valiant knight with a dusting of enchantment (there's a rather fascinating, long-winded tale); and one about Canacee, the beginning of which is all that is managed. They are two concentric circles in orbit but barely overlapping instead of engulfing one, another. He is saved from his disorganization by the Franklin who, at the moment of the third onslaught of loquacity, his knightly ambitions are relaxed, "In feith, Squier, thow hast thee wel yquit/ And gentilly. I preise wel thy wit,". The host steps in as to say, "Franklin, don't interrupt, he's not finished!" but we get the sense that this is just a deferral to the young Squire's pride and the Franklin takes over the narration.

Getting Personal: Chaucer's Envoy to Bukton

2009-03-01T20:07:00.001-08:00

During class on Thursday, Professor Wenthe mentioned briefly a short poem Chaucer wrote to a friend referring to the Wife of Bath. My curiosity piqued, I decided to ferret out this poem — known as the Envoy to Bukton — and any information surrounding it and Chaucer's other short poems.

Chaucer apparently was fond of penning shorter verses to his personal friends, offering them advice in a very tongue-in-cheek, familiar, playful manner, and participating in a literary culture of poetic exchange at the Ricardian court. A few of Chaucer's poems survive, including Envoy to Scogan, Envoy to Bukton, The Balade de Bon Conseyl (Or, Truth) and Wordes unto Adam. In The Balade de Bon Conseyl, for instance, Chaucer cautions his friend Sir Philip de la Vache about the ups and downs of life at court (Epstein 2). Chaucer's poems were addressed to specific individuals, but this was a pretense and rather than being private, the poems would have circulated among Chaucer's friends in London. The existence of these poems "confirm the existence of an 'inner circle' of Chaucer's audience which was on intimate and confidential terms both with Chaucer's store of literary devices and with Chaucer the person" (Strohm 12). Furthermore, the voice in the poems seem to echo that in the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer's other works, a point Robert Epstein uses to support his argument that "the continuity of this poetic voice with that in the Chaucerian opus at large and the allusion in Bukton to his great work in progress provide further evidence that Chaucer's primary audience, real and ideal, was in that shifting coterie of friends and associates — educated professionals, minor aristocracy and servants of the royal bureaucracy" (2).

Thus, we can imagine a 'Chaucerian circle' of friends who read and exchanged not only Chaucer's shorter poems, but also drafts and copies of his Canterbury Tales. Tentative dating of some of these shorter poems suggests Chaucer wrote them while or after he wrote the Canterbury Tales. In Envoy to Scogan, Chaucer refers to weather events taking place in fall 1393, and he alludes in Envoy to Bukton to an English expedition to Friesland in 1396 ("so may hap, / That thee were lever to be taken in Frise") (Pollard 46). The timeline in our textbook estimates Chaucer wrote the "marriage group" between 1392 and 1395, shortly before he wrote the Envoy to Bukton (xxv). So, the Wife of Bath would not only have been on Chaucer's mind when he referred to her in Envoy to Bukton, but she would also have been a familiar figure to Chaucer's friends and audience.

In his Envoy to Bukton, Chaucer warns his friend against wedded life, playfully referring to the "sorrow and woe that is in marriage" and contradictorily says he "will not say how that it is the chain / of Satanas, on which he gnaweth ever." This attitude to marriage seems to echo that of the narrator in the Canterbury Tales, but more strikingly, Chaucer includes the maxim — which we've discussed in class — "lest thou do worse, take a wife; / bet is to wed than burn in worse wise." However, although he concedes it's better to marry than to burn in hell, Chaucer returns to hammering home his point that married life stinks, saying that experience will teach his friend Bukton such lessons that he would rather be taken captive in Friesland than marry again.

In a completely satirical remark in the final stanza, Chaucer tells Bukton to go read the Wife of Bath as further proof of his argument: "The Wife of Bath I pray you that you read, / of this mattre which that we have on hand." By referring to Alison of Bath as a published authority, Chaucer imitates and mocks her (and his own) approach to her prologue of supporting her claims with scholarly works by referring to Scripture and classical texts. Much as she haphazardly tosses out those references in her prologue, Chaucer, seemingly as an afterthought, appends his reference to her near the end of his Envoy to Bukton.

Thus, in the Envoy to Bukton, Chaucer continues at least two themes from the Canterbury Tales — the trap of marriage and the debate about textual versus experiential authority — and polishes it all off by resurrecting the very recently invented Wife of Bath character as an 'established' textual authority.

Epstein, Robert. "Chaucer's Scogan and Scogan's Chaucer." Studies in Philology. 96.1 (Winter 1999): 1-21.

Pollard, Alfred William. Chaucer. Ayer Publishing, 1970.

Strohm, Paul. "The Social and Literary Scene in England." Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. Second Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 1-19.

The Debate on Marriage in the Merchant’s Tale et. al.

2009-03-01T16:20:00.000-08:00

By now, the debate on marriage that comprises the first half of the Merchant’s Tale is obviously part of a series of such debates. The Wife, the Clerk, and now the Merchant have presented cases of marriage rife with irony, double meaning and with dream-like/fairy tale qualities. The actual voiced debates on marriage in the Merchant’s Tale between Justinus and Placebo and later Pluto and Prosperene reflect the debates between the pilgrims themselves. We begin to identify two sides, those who believe women and men are implicitly good and faithful and those who view marriage as a never-ending journey of mistrust and chicanery. An incomplete and possibly controversial listing:
Pro- marriage: The Wife, the Clerk, Placebo, Griselde, The Franklin
Anti-marriage: The Merchant, Justinus, Emelye, Walter, Prosperene
Some of the conflicts between men and women in marriage include the propriety or otherwise of marrying more than once (the Wife), whether the old ought to marry the young (Januarie), and the tendency of women toward adultery/sin (Alison, May) or complete lack thereof (Griselde).
Marriages were arranged mostly for economic reasons, and the Church’s position was that marriage was for procreation, according to an essay on marriage and divorce in the Middle Ages by Jo-Ann McNamara and Suzanne F. Wemple. Few married for love, and we can see in the Tales that lust and desire not to sin are more often reasons for marriage than mutual love and respect. Indeed, the Merchant’s Tale is essentially a tale about sexual opportunists: both Damyan and Januarie can be described this way. Like the other tales in the “marriage series”, including the as yet un-discussed Franklin’s Tale, the married couple at the end eventually find peace with one another. What differs is the mode of this eventual stalemate (cynicism intended, both by me and Chaucer, I believe). The Wife of Bath suggests that only after the surrender of maistrye to the woman can a marriage be at peace. The Clerk paints the simplest marriage as one in which the women is obedient to the point of supplicating, then mocks this ideal of his in his brilliantly- crafted envoy (as Max has interestingly shown above). The Merchant highlights the sins of women using both Biblical and pagan references (the Garden of Eden, Prosperene ate the pomegranate seeds). The Franklin concludes the set with a situation readers can finally accept, but I’ll leave that until later.

While the methods of obtaining contentment in marriage differ, the much larger theme of the tale reflecting the thoughts and desires of the teller binds them together into a set.

The Envoy of the Clerk's Tale: A Farewell to Arms

2009-02-25T20:48:00.000-08:00

I can't get over that envoy to the Clerk's Tale, which vaulted an already sophisticated and fascinating story into some transcendent level of narrative art. The tale of Griselda is a masterpiece: gripping in its own right and replete with the rich political significance and allegorical symbolism that we discussed on Monday (and that themselves, in their Boccaccian and Petrarchan manifestations, point in different directions, both of which Chaucer nonetheless manages to render simultaneously plausible in his telling). To conclude such an absorbing, shocking, infuriating story with such a boisterous and satiric coda, one that almost seems to undermine everything that precedes it, is a stroke of genius - and like all real strokes of genius, it more or less defies interpretation.

The opening lines of the envoy would be astonishing enough by themselves: "Griselde is deed and eek hire pacience, / And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille" (1177-1178). In the way in which it unceremoniously shoves our sentimental, sympathetic heroine under the ground, this beginning is almost ruthless. Beyond its brusque disposal of the story's protagonist, the envoy also disposes of the exemplary/allegorical significance and didactic force that the Clerk, following Petrarch, has only recently broached. Granted, the Clerk specifically disclaims only a reading of his tale that would make it a model for matrimonial behavior, but the envoy is so insistently playful, with its show-off rhyme scheme and increasingly comic or extravagant images, that not just this specific didactic meaning but all exemplary or allegorical readings (the very idea of exemplum?) come to seem ridiculous. "[L]at us stynte of ernestful matere," indeed (1175).

Which is not to say that the envoy doesn't make a serious point, just that this point isn't something simplistic and edifying (on the order of "wives should endure their husbands' authority as patiently as Griselda, or even "all human beings should endure the inscrutable acts of God as patiently as Griselda"). The envoy begins with a relatively straightforward warning against confusing life and literature, or directly translating literature to life (an important warning for some on the pilgrimage: witness the Reeve). It warns also, and at the same time, against the unbridled exercise of masculine authority in marriage, another relatively straightforward and unambiguous injunction. But from here, as the same rhymes repeat again and again, giving the little poem an increasingly comic and artificial air, things get steadily less serious. The legitimate admonition to married men (and political leaders?) to not act like Walter becomes a call for women to rhetorically defend themselves against misogynist "auctoritee," to talk back and wield "governaille" (1190), and finally to wage metaphorical warfare against their husbands and reduce them to misery. Round about the entry of the cow Chichevache (1188), this has all become visibly tongue-in-cheek, and by the time we get to the overblown depiction of marriage as a Hundred Years' War battle, with wives piercing husbands with "[t]he arwes of thy crabbed eloquence" like longbowmen mowing down knights at Crecy or Poitiers (1203), its burlesque qualities are patent.

That the Clerk doesn't seriously make a case for women running marriages and hectoring the life out of their husbands is not a surprise. But I don't think the comic absurdity of these stanzas has the effect of putting women back in their place, either. These absurd images of warfare between wives and husbands instead point to the absurdity of seeing matrimony as warfare - maybe even the absurdity of strife between two people who should, in the eyes of God and men, be one flesh (something that various speakers in the Merchant's Tale will reiterate). As Jason points out in his recent post, Chaucer has gradually been developing a picture of the reciprocity necessary to marriage. In The Wife of Bath's and Clerk's tales, both parties must negotiate their positions, modify their behavior, or at least prove their worthiness. The best marriages (the Wife of Bath's with Jankyn after its crisis, for example) are founded on some sense of cooperation and equality. Through and beneath its satirical scenes of matrimonial warfare and male misery, I think the Clerk's envoy makes a similar point. Differences in power, age, temperament, or other factors that might lead to such opposition and conflict have no place in marriage and must be reciprocally worked out should they arise.

And by making this point by wildly exaggerating it, the Clerk also follows the model of the Wife of Bath, who, as I see it, cloaked a similar plea - for reciprocity, parity, and harmony in marriage - in a similarly boisterous, comic, deliberately overstated manner (at times, anyway). So in claiming that he speaks "for the Wyves love of Bathe" (1170) when he satirizes her demand for female governance in marriage (a demand that I don't think was entirely serious even in her articulation of it), the Clerk speaks the plain truth. I think he does in fact honor Alison of Bath by making a similar point in a similar style.

The Worthy Wyf

2009-02-23T17:54:00.000-08:00

Based on class discussion concerning both “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale”, I have been forming some thoughts on the limited powers afforded to women in the context of The Canterbury Tales as a whole.
In “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” chivalry is used by female characters as a tool to manipulate men. Though in some respects the old woman who marries the knight is ultimately forced to conform to his standards and contemporary norms to form a happy marriage, she does manage to use the mode of the knightly quest to secure for herself a noble husband. While he gets what he wants in terms of a beautiful and faithful wife, she also gets what she (presumably) wants in the way of a noble, courageous, and courteous husband. In this manner, the chivalric ideal of duty not only brings the two together, it places the knight in a position where the task of maintaining her as a wife becomes not only dutiful, but desirable. Though the tale is told by a woman, it is certainly possible that Chaucer is simply using the Wife of Bath as a mouthpiece to express not necessarily what women want, but what they deserve within the context of a conventional medieval social structure. Women should not expect a husband like the knight unless they first meet “knightly” standards. Just because the old woman is able to use chivalry in a subversive way to entrap the knight in a marriage, does not mean she will not have to give ground in order for the marriage to be happy.
In “The Clerk’s Tale” we also see the same idea in practice. By entering into a marriage with a man above her social status, Griselda is achieving a sort of ideal, but not without consequences. She must also prove her worthiness by remaining constant and patient through the trials inflicted on her by Walter. Though Walter’s behavior may be decided less chivalrous than the knight’s, this tale still shows that a woman must meet certain criteria before her marriage can meet the needs of both her and her husband.
Based on the themes of these two tales, I think it can be safely stated that a woman’s primary mode of agency in The Canterbury Tales is the establishment of a proper role within established framework. If a woman can prove herself beautiful, loyal, and constant, she has far greater hope of establishing further authority than she would otherwise.

Genre and the Friar's Tale

2009-02-19T09:30:00.000-08:00

In her blog post "Fabliau," Jennifer Levin explains the history and definition of a fabliau and points out Chaucer's use of the genre in several of his Tales. Fabliaux generally are narratives focusing on ordinary people, involve trickery and games, and cast the third estate in a negative light.

With the Friar's Tale, however, we get an example of another genre Chaucer uses in the Canterbury Tales: an exemplary tale that is shrouded in the guise of a fabliau.

The friar borrows from the previous pilgrims by setting up his tale initially as a fabliau, a narrative about a summoner who is a "rennere up and doun / With mandementz for fornicacioun / and is ybet at every townes ende" (1283-5). Like the "quiting" among the miller's, reeve's and cook's tales, the friar is participating in an insulting contest with the summoner and the reader anticipates a tale of trickery in which the summoner will come out the worse. The tale is actually structured very much like a fabliau, and the summoner is tricked into being sent to hell by the devil.

Additionally, as Helen Cooper explains in her Oxford Guide to Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales, fabliaux often use commonplace, domestic or subhuman imagery, such as animals, rather than the romance genre's use of religious or exotic imagery (24). The Friar uses animal imagery to enhance the appearance of a fabliau, comparing the summoner to a dog: "For in this world nys dogge for the bowe / That kan a hurt deer from an hool yknowe / Bet than this sumnour knew a sly lecchour" (1369-1371).

Behind its guise of fabliau, however, the Friar's tale is actually an exemplary tale. While irreverent, like the preceding fabliaux, the exemplary tale unlike a fabliau does not ignore "the operations of God" in favor of the more base and earthly (Cooper 20), but bears within its structure a moral warning against greed. The summoner is so blinded by his greed and desire to bribe a poor widow that he makes a deal with the devil and does not understand at first the trap he has walked into until it is too late. The friar warns his audience to beware the devil, to "disposeth ay youre hertes to withstonde / The feend, that you wolde make thral and bonde" (1659-1660). He even bluntly warns the summoner to repent "of hir mysdedes, er that the feend hem hente!" (1664).

It perhaps should come as little surprise that our first religious figure in the Canterbury Tales gives us not a fabliau, but an exemplary tale involving the devil and warning against a moral transgression. The most interesting part of this tale, to me, is Chaucer's blending of fabliau and exemplary tale into a hybrid of sorts that seems to move the friar from his lofty first-estate standing closer to the level of the commoners who have already told their tales. The friar stoops to mixing characteristics of the earthier fabliau into his exemplary tale, but is this unconscious or an intentional act in an effort to better convey his point about summoners to the other pilgrims? Is this hybridization a wise choice, considering his audience? Is it more effective than a simple exemplary tale?

The Same Coin?

2009-02-18T09:14:00.000-08:00

Why do the Friar and the Summoner tell each other's tales?
Obviously to expose the other's faults. The Friar tells a tale about a deceitful Summoner who extorts money from the innocent and the Summoner tells a tale about a deceitful Friar who takes money for prayers, which, it is implied is virtually the same thing just self-righteously executed. The Summoner preaches in his text and says of friars, "That specially oure sweete Lord Jhesus/Spak this by freres, whan he seyde thus/`Blessed be they that povere in spirit been.' He goes on to describe a Friar who is sent to assuage a sick man of his ire for the church and the Friar. Quickly we see the sick man thinks the Friar is a manipulative liar who uses people for his well being. And unfortunately for the Friar, the other lord he visits to seek some kind of revenge on the sick man also thinks he is duplicitous or else he wouldn't mock him so openly in his house.

The Friar makes a point to tell the group that he would have told them tales of the saints which would have made their hearts wrench with compassion and awe of their committment (something like that) but - we assume - he thought it best to put the fear of god into them rather than the love of god. Does this prove the Summoner's point that the Friar is "povere in spirit been"? The interplay of the two characters and their tales show shared traits which manifest differently, perhaps more violently in one (Summoner) and more insidiously in the other (Friar).

Knights, Hags and Gender Role Reversal

2009-02-18T08:08:00.000-08:00

After Monday's class, it was interesting to see that there was a lengthy discussion regarding who benefited and who sacrificed at the end of the Wife of Bath's Tale. Though the overall consensus of the discussion was that the only true "loser" throughout the tale was the woman raped by the knight at the beginning, I believe that the true defeat came in a complete distruction of stereotypical gender roles in medieval society. Chaucer successfuly flipped the power roles between genders, and showed a world opposite to the one he was living in.

Obviously, it is clear that throughout the tale the women are in control. The knight (A knight of King Arthur, nonetheless), shatters the masculine, honorable mold that he is assigned and rapes a woman. As a result, he is placed on trial and it seems he is guaranteed execution for disgracing the role of the knight in King Arthur's kingdom. However, in what is an uncommon move, Arthur succumbs to his wife and allows her to decide the punishment for one of Arthur's knights. Thus, the Queen sends the knight on his mission. What motivation does Arthur have to transfer control to his wife? I'm still unsure the answer to that question.

The tale progresses, and after no success on finding the answer to what women want the knight meets the "olde wyf". After doing some research, I've learned that this knight meets hag situation has appeared numerous times in medieval literature*. According to Susan Carter, a knights have had to hook up with hideous women a couple of times in order to be victorious. It's kind of like slaying a dragon, except the dragon is a seriously busted lady.

The knight is generally rewared in a way that returns him to the prestigious level of a knight, but Chaucer's tale varies in that at the end of the tale, the knight has surrendered his will and his body to a woman. Whether she's ugly or hot, and whether he's happy or not, the knight has relenquished all control to his lady. So to recap: in the universe created by the Wife of Bath, King Arthur lets his queen do the decision making, and a knight's primary duty is to his wife. Not only that, but Arthur and the knight seem pretty cool with this. Sure, the knight is a little apprehensive when his wife is gross, but when all is said and done, he couldn't be happier.

All the talk of who made the sacrifices in the Wife of Bath's Tale seems pretty futile. People changed and gave up certain aspects of their lives, but in the end everyone was better for it. Although I think that the Wife of Bath is saying a world ran by women is a better one, I don't think Chaucer thinks so as well. I believe he was just posing an alternate control of power between genders. To me, it doesn't seem like the Wife of Bath's world is any better or worse than the accepted norm; it's just different.

* Carter, Suan. "Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunted Hunter". The Chaucer Review 37.4 (2003): 329-345.

"My Nacioun": The Man of Law and the Wife of Bath Write British History

2009-02-15T18:06:00.001-08:00

I proposed in my last posting that the narrative trajectory of Fragment I of the Canterbury Tales might be seen as one of increasing nationalization, moving from the globalized, perennially expatriated Knight and his temporally and geographically remote tale to the rooted, here-and-now Englishness of that inimitable trio, the Miller, Reeve, and Cook. The nature and value of this newfound "Englishness" then became the question. Especially given the terms of their opposition with the Knight, it's easy to think of these tellers and their tales as embodying an authentic and unadulterated English identity, the mass popular identity of the third estate as against the internationalized francophone nobility and Latinate clergy. The abrupt termination of the Cook's Tale, however, suggests that such authentic and unadulterated Englishness, if it does exist, is a narrative dead end. The identity presupposed by the Cook's account of "oure citee" (I.4365) can't be sustained - at least not without a better sense of its historical underpinnings. This - an understanding of where the English nation came from and how it gained its current form, as a way of confirming its authenticity in the present - is one of the tasks undertaken in Fragments II and III.

Among (many other) things, both the Man of Law's and the Wife of Bath's tales are explorations of the national and pre-national past. In a way, they synthesize the two kinds of scene-setting in Fragment I, combining English places (for at least a significant part of their action) with distant times. In both stories, though, returning to these distant times troubles and undermines the Englishness of those English places. The hopeful, eternalizing "Whilom" that begins the Miller's and Cook's tales, the comfortable assumption that Oxford or "oure citee," London (itself a Celtic name), were always familiar and folksy English places, even back in once-upon-a-time, becomes considerably less viable after the lawyer and Allison have had their say.

In the Man of Law's Tale, the ancestral English, when first encountered, "[w]ere payens, and that contree everywhere" (534). That is, the origins of England lie in the "strange nacioun," "the Barbre nacioun" (268, 281), to which Custance fears to be sent and against whom (but also for whom) Chaucer's Knight spends his life fighting. "Northhumberlond" (508), at this point in time, is the equivalent of Syria. Not only are these English pagans, they are pagan conquerors, aggressive subjugators of a country not their own - and a Christian one at that. In one sense, this reminder of the pagan Anglo-Saxon conquest of Christian Britons helps recuperate the past evoked by the Man of Law from a completely alienating alterity: the ancestors of the English may have been pagans, but at least they came to a country that was already, and in a sense primordially and inherently, Christian. But even if pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain was already Christian, it was still British, not English. The glib claims of the Miller or the Cook to timeless possession of their narrative spaces come up cold against this fact. The Man of Law, whose familiarity with legal precedent as far back as William the Conqueror (I.323-324) suggests some investment in national continuity across history (but whose inability or unwillingness to go back further than the Norman Conquest also says something about his national identification), certainly wants to minimize this undermining of the national history as much as possible - hence his description of the divine providence and miraculous nature of Northumberland's conversion to Christianity. But the effect of his story is still to expose the inauthenticity of the contemporary national identity in a deep historical perspective.

The Wife of Bath's Tale demonstrates this inauthenticity even more dramatically. In her telling, "this land" was originally so different as to belong to another order of existence: "fulfild of fayerye" (859). The lusty but prosaic world of the third estate tales in Fragment I, wherein John the Carpenter's belief that Nicholas has been charmed by "elves and...wightes" (3479) is a measure of his stupidity, is of recent and artificial creation, product of a religious conquest/exorcism: "the grete charitee and prayeres / Of lymtours and othere hooly freres.... - This maketh that ther ben no fayeryes" (865-866, 872). The contrast between the mechanisms of conversion in Allison's story and those in the Man of Law's are striking: divinely ordained enlightenment channeled through the passive body of Custance vs. the active assertion of male and clerkly authority, linked structurally and thematically with rape (after the friars have completed their exorcism, no incubi remain to prey on women - except the friars themselves [880]; and the description of the fraternal exorcism leads directly into the description of the bachelor knight's rape). The idea that it took such a sustained and implicitly violent effort to make Britain Christian (the necessary precondition to making it the way it is at Chaucer's time) further undermines the authenticity and purity of that ultimate identity. If the effort of Christianizing was even necessary at all: during her wedding-bed sermon to her husband, the fairy woman refers to "[t]he hye God, on whom that we bileeve" (1178). "Fayerye" Britain, by this account, was Christian (or monotheist, or something) already, an idea that would make its male clerkly transformation into the world in which "ther ben no fayeryes" seem all the more coercive and illegitimate.

The havoc that the Wife of Bath's Tale wreaks with authorized ideas about insular history and national identity is underscored by the knight's horrified reaction to the prospect of marrying the "olde wyf": "Allas, that any of my nacioun / Sholde evere so foule disparaged be!" (1068-1069) "Nacioun," here, has a narrow sense of "family" (closer, etymologically, to the root meaning of "birthplace"), but, as the uses of the word in the Man of Law's Tale testify, it also had a Middle English sense very close to the modern meaning of "nation." Thus, while the knight is specifically revolted to have his high lineage associated with this ugly and low-born woman, he also (as the mouthpiece of late 14th century Englishmen) might be thought of as voicing dismay that his nation is "disparaged" by this revelation of alterity and inauthenticity in its past. The Wife of Bath, of course, is hardly advancing a sober theory of history in her tale, but her irreverent and destabilizing retelling of "th' olde dayes" (that comfortable "whilom" of the Miller and the Cook) speaks to her desire to re-imagine and reconstitute the English national community in the present. She inserts herself into the vision of "oure" country and identity promulgated by the Miller, Reeve, and Cook in part by re-imagining the past on which that vision was predicated.

Thus, building off of the steady nationalization of narrative that took place over the course of Fragment I, Fragments II and III explore the historical foundations and justifications of the nation that emerges, and find those foundations to be shallow and unsteady. The Man of Law tells a story of Northumberland's predestined and providential conversion in order to redeem this alterity of the national past and bring it in line with the present, but the Wife of Bath, with a very different view of authority and society, delights in rendering the insular past as different and unfamiliar as possible in order to undercut that authority and that society.

The Surrender Of Maistrye in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

2009-02-14T10:03:00.000-08:00

I love it… “Miss Independent”. I too want to talk about the inscrutable Wife. I’ve been researching women in medieval culture over the last few weeks and have come across the Wife often. A particularly interesting analysis of the Prologue and Tale can be found in chapter three of Jill Mann’s book Geoffrey Chaucer. This book was published as part of a series, Feminist Readings.
In this chapter, Mann discusses the scene at the end of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, “the surrender of maistrye”. This is the chapter in the book I found the most interesting. Mann approaches the surrender of the rapist and his transformation into a meek and obedient husband as a kind of feminine fairy tale, and yet also a representation of male subjugation to female power (87-88). These two points: that a rapist mystically allows his old and undesirable wife to dictate the future, and that the surrender of man is worthy of female daydreams can be said to characterize the Wife herself. Indeed, Mann notes that the tale “repeats on a larger scale the pattern of surrender and reconciliation which is traced in miniature at the end of her Prologue” (87).
Side note: perhaps this partially explains why Pasolini may have found the Prologue itself extremely adequate representation of the Wife and therefore omitted her Tale.
We mentioned many aspects of her character in class. She’s spunky and quick to explain away her faults, and yet finds no sin in any of (and even her most tricksy) actions. And as see upon reading her tale, I believe she can be heralded as an early feminist. She believes that the most important thing for a woman is the right to choose what she’ll do and where she’ll go. The surrender of maistyre represents the fantastical dreaming of a woman who wants nothing more than to take this maistyre and turn and wield it herself.

Mann, Jill. Geoffrey Chaucer. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, Inc.,
1991.

Miss Independent

2009-02-12T12:33:00.000-08:00

We said a lot today in class about the Wife of Bath's prologue and her character but I think a little more interpretation would not be excessive.

It was established in class that Allison of Bath is sort of quite-ing herself in her prologue as means of protecting herself or lending a certain kind of validity to her story, but this doesn't seem to be true. She quites herself so as to hide herself and give an impression of honesty and humility (a "grounding" self-knowledge)but her gloss of herself is a false sheen covering a more ingrained and influential ambition from which she cannot divorce.

I've read in some of my research for the annotated bibliography that women - more often than men - in the 14th century were more apt to petition to save their marriage - even a bad one - because it was their only claim to security (even if her husband was poor) or social standing of any merit (even if her husband was lowly born). The courts in this era sided with the wives overwhelmingly perhaps because they didn't want a bunch of single women to further burden the state, I'm not sure on that point. The point I am trying to make is that Allison's virtue - if she had any - was in the nakedness of her ambition. She lived in a man's world but had a man's appetites and therefore had to resort to exaggeration, manipulation or outright duplicity to quench her worldly desires. Her biggest sin lay therefore in her deception. Further, she has - by living this way (or having been "forced" to live in this way) enabled her paradox which is that which she most desires, which she most pursues - when satisfied - is what increases her unquenchable desire. This is obvious in her admission of love for the "bad" husbands and the uselessness of the "good" though they were useful in other impersonal, material ways. She loves the "bad" men because she cannot conquer them; she cannot quench her womanhood through them - only in periodic trysts - but as it is in the lovemaking to these men that her womanhood is quenched it is increased (and taken back) by the postcoital treatment the men show her. They do not value her so she sets out to make them value her.

As to the pilgrimage and her fellow pilgrims she could be seen as virtuous (or at least important) if her virtue as an accomplished deceiver (tale teller) is noted as fulfilling the necessary expectation of an evening of narrative play.

Her tragedy otherwise lay in her misconception of what is desirable.

Merry Olde England

2009-02-05T21:07:00.000-08:00

In class today we touched on the gradual narrowing in geographic and temporal extent that we see over the course of the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales. The tales become steadily closer to their tellers in space and in time: from "once upon a time in Greece," to "once upon a time in Oxford," to Trumpington near Cambridge now ("Ther gooth a brook, and over that a brigge, / Upon the whiche brook ther stant a melle" [3922-3923]: the present-tense verbs say it all), to "our city," London, again "once upon a time" but a time that is, by all indications, really the present. Building on this observation, I wonder if this steady narrative constriction or withdrawal within the borders of Chaucer's England also represents a way in which the three third-estate narrators in this fragment successively "quite" the Knight and his tale.

After all, we noted, in regard to the Knight's portrait, that his busy and illustrious chivalric career has little or nothing to do with England. His wars are all on the far margins of Europe, and in the past to boot. We hear nothing about the war England was waging right across the Channel in France, and less than nothing about whatever role the Knight might play within English society: the lands he owns, the political or juridical duties he executes, and the members of his own or other social orders that he deals with. England and its affairs are a void at the center of his portrait. The Knight's Tale reaffirms this sense of distance and diffusion, as the Knight not only narrates events that are remote in time and space but also locates himself in this remote sphere, in the strange sequence (1995-2039) wherein he claims to have seen firsthand the temple of Mars and all the horrors adorning it.

The contrast of all this to the Miller's, Reeve's, the Cook's tales, with their quintessentially English locations, characters, names, details, and language, could not be more striking. We can note, in this connection, the way in which the list of nice rustic natural things associated with Miller's Alison includes the staple of the medieval English economy: she is "softer than the wolle is of a wether" (3249). Where the Miller thus slips a reference to the foundation of the national wealth into his tale, the Reeve makes his tale into a microcosm of the nation itself, containing and combining representatives from different regions and dialects into a common English space. And the Cook caps this trajectory by taking us to the capital and metropolis of the kingdom. Coming from Chaucer, the poet who definitively established what the English vernacular was capable of, this steady nationalization, if we may venture to call it that, seems especially resonant.

On the other hand, it would be tough to argue that the Miller's, Reeve's, and Cook's tales bespeak a progressive sense of English patriotism. The narrative space of these tales may become more and more that of contemporary England, but an England in which the national pastimes are vengeance, trickery, and "swiving," in ever cruder and more debased forms, seems to be a creation of, to say the least, decidedly ambiguous value. Chaucer gives with one hand and takes away with the other, granting his audience their own language, their own time, and their own country at the price of a poor image of themselves. I wonder if the baseness of the literary England we have entered by the time the Cook's Tale breaks off is due to its being too insular, too constricted and narrow in its horizons. Is there some kind of median to be found between the wide-ranging life of the Knight and the solidly grounded identities of the three commoners who "quite" him? Will the rest of the tales prove more successful in integrating, or at least mapping routes between there and here, England and the distance and difference of the wider world?

The Fabliau

2009-02-02T14:15:00.000-08:00

Following our discussion today of "The Miller's Tale" as an example of the fabliau genre, I decided to give the class a brief history of this type of writing. Interestingly, The Canterbury Tales is the most oft-cited source of the fabliau (plural: fabliaux). "The Miller's Tale", "The Reeve's Tale" "The Shipman's Tale", "The Summoner's Tale", and the unfinished "Cook's Tale" are all fabliaux, and "The Merchant's Tale"(and possibly others) have aspects of the genre.
These tales were written by jongleurs (professional storytellers) in northeast France around the 13th century. Chaucer reworked this genre for several of the Canterbury tales. The fabliaux are bawdy, crude, and obscene. They are written (orated) in a simple and straightforward manner, but are usually jocular and boisterous as well. The tales take place in the present, with real, imaginable settings and ordinary men and women as characters. The French (and later British) storytellers populated their tales with peasants, clerks, priests, stereotypical women, drunkards, etc. The plots of the fabliaux involve tricks and games, most often with the least clever character ending up much worse off than when he or she started. As we saw with the Miller today and will see with the Reeve on Thursday, the main character often comes off looking like a buffoon who got completely outsmarted.
These stories, though used by Chaucer to characterize the third estate, are not actually very realistic. Unless, of course, men and women of the lower classes in 14-century Europe really were wily, sex-crazed tricksters.
I think that Chaucer's decision to use this type of writing in his tales, especially in such stark contrast with the other genres he incorporates, connects to my first post on Jill Mann's book. His usage of the fabliau style for the tale's of members of the third estate highlights his satire of the three estates. Chaucer uses the fabliau to further stress (along with the commentary and opinions of Chaucer the pilgrim and of the Host) the common though largely innacurate view of the members of the peasantry.

*Here is an interesting link to a comparison of "The Reeve's Tale" and it's French analogue: http://www.bu.edu/english/levine/fabliaux.htm.

Medieval Royal Sketch 1377-1400

2009-02-02T12:38:00.000-08:00

Above is a portrait of Richard II at his coronation.

To further describe the political context of Chaucer's world I thought I would describe a little research I've made on the royal lineage which ruled around the time Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales.

Edward III (1312-1377) was grandfather to Richard II (1367-1400; born in Bordeaux, France) who ascended the throne in 1377 when he was just ten years old. His father, Edward, the Black Prince, who was heir apparent to Edward III, died just the year before (Richard's older brother had already died). They were of the House of Plantagenet, a royal lineage founded by Henry II (1133–1189)son of Geoffrey V of Anjou, France known as the Angevin line. Since Richard was so young, his uncle, John of Gaunt, acted as Regent (who had been acting as Regent while Edward III was alive but too old to rule) until Parliamentary figures decided to rule via counsels until Richard was older.

The Peasant's Revolt (or known by its leader as Wat Tyler's Revolt or The Rising as made known in class today) which is described as one of the major disruptions of Richard's rule, occurred in 1381 when Parliament decided to enact a poll tax to continue the war effort (the Hundred Years' War with France). I have also read that wages were reduced but not the price of goods which contributed to the unrest as well as other societal restrictions all of which led to the revolt. Apparently, the 14 year old Richard was courageous as Wat Tyler became abusive at a field meeting between the king and members of the revolt but Tyler was killed on the spot by the Lord Mayor of London for his indiscretion.

The young king immediately thereafter called the rest of the revolt leaders off to the side and made promises to right any wrongs and things were calmed. This was overturned by Richard's counselors and all the leaders of the revolt were hanged instead.

Richard II's rule from 1389 to 1397 was apparently relatively peaceful until 1397 when Richard decided to take revenge on a group of Lords who, from 1387-1389 had temporarily usurped his crown's governmental authority. This is the period of Richard II's so-called tyranny and it is noted that his personality had become disordered by the end of his reign most likely contributing to his vengefulness.

In 1399, the former Regent, John of Gaunt, died and his son Henry Bolingbroke - who was in exile in France - came back with force to England with the intention of usurping the throne from Richard. He succeeded - partly since the country was not interested in keeping Richard around - and became Henry IV (and a future subject for Shakespeare; so too was Richard II).

Richard II was probably murdered in 1400 and this was the beginning of the War of the Roses, which was a war in the House of Plantagenet between cousins in the Lancaster (red rose) and York (white rose) lines. This war did not fully end until the marriage of Henry Tudor, who had become Henry VII in 1485 (he was a descendant of the Lancaster line) and Elizabeth York in 1486. Their heraldic emblem consisted of a larger red, Lancastrian rose behind a white Yorkist rose.

The Medieval Other in The Washington Post

2009-01-30T08:30:00.000-08:00

Although it's no longer hot off the presses, I thought I'd quickly bring up this article from Wednesday's Washington Post; it irritated me when I read it, but I only today thought of this blog as a good place to vent about it. The article provides a small but telling example of some of the prevalent assumptions and representations surrounding the era we're studying. (It also bears some remote resemblance to our discussion in yesterday's class about government, absolutist lineages and associational forms.)

The point at issue is an emergent influence-peddling scandal in the House of Lords. Apparently, the members allegedly involved cannot be suspended or expelled from the house, just publicly "named and shamed" (a job perk of which I'll bet Rod Blagojevich is now envious). The author of the article, in describing this, explains that "rules in the Lords, a chamber that dates to the 14th century, are still far out of step with modern Britain."

I may be over-reading (although isn't over-reading things a professional responsibility for a graduate student?), but note that, in this formulation, it is the Lords, and the Lords alone, that dates back to the 14th century. The things wrong with the house are presented as entirely explicable in terms of its medieval origin and legacy. Note, also, that the House of Commons, the fully representative and democratic chamber that runs most everything these days, is implicitly left off the hook. We hear nothing about the Commons dating to the 14th century, even though its origins are every bit as medieval (our author was a member). The Lords are medieval, hidebound, and anachronistic; the Commons are progressive and modern, free from the taint of medieval antecedents or a medieval history.

In other words, intentionally or no, this article misrepresents parliamentary history in such a way as to oppose the Middle Ages and modernity and pass off contemporary flaws in the system as medieval vestiges, without acknowledging that the system itself is, in some sense, a medieval vestige: a medieval institution providing the framework of modern government. It's easy to come up with alternate ways of stating the same basic point that avoid this problematic amputation of the medieval past: "rules in the Lords have changed little since both houses of Parliament were established in the 14th century." Instead, this article sweeps the medieval history informing all British government under the rug and essentializes as medieval only the undesirable or unlawful or disadvantageous aspects of modern society. I'm not saying that the rules in question here are not medieval holdovers in need of reform, just that, by identifying these rules alone as medieval in origin, this article demonstrates some of the deep-set ways in which modernity dissociates itself from and defines itself against its medieval past. This storm in a teacup (to use an appropraitely British expression) points us toward some of the fundamental theoretical and historiographical issues that will bear on our study of Chaucer and the period in which he wrote.

Jupiter and Theseus as "First Movers"

2009-01-29T17:08:00.000-08:00

Based on discussion at the end of class, I thought it might be worthwhile to examine the actions of the Greek nobility from the “Knight’s Tale” in the context of their “divine” connections.

One of the classic tenets of noble rulers has been their divine connection, either as gods themselves or as earthly rulers with a divine mandate. This was as true for the kings and queens of Chaucer’s England as it was for the ruling class of the Greek city-states such as Thebes and Athens.

Jupiter, being the highest and most powerful of the gods, is unable (or possibly unwilling) to enforce a peace between Mars, Saturn and Venus that will allow Arcite, Palamon and Emily to find a peaceful solution to their love triangle. On the human level, for reasons most likely political, Theseus does not enforce a decision concerning the competition between Arcite and Palamon, instead allowing these two lesser nobles to battle it out for Emily’s hand. Just as Jupiter does not utilize his full powers over the lesser gods, Theseus does not exercise his complete authority over Arcite and Palamon. In this way, their lesser instincts of jealousy, anger and lust win out over any divine benevolence that Jupiter could have imparted and the influences of the lesser gods rule the situation. If Theseus is the closest to the gods because of his higher noble rank, it can be assumed that lower nobles such as Arcite and Palamon would therefore be closer to lesser gods such as Mars, Saturn, Venus, etc. These lesser gods display emotions more in tune with the actions of Arcite and Palamon. Similarly, Jupiter remains just as aloof as Theseus, and though each may technically be in charge of their respective realms, they appear content to allow their subordinate gods and nobles to work things out among themselves, no matter how dangerous or costly this may be. Though Jupiter and Theseus may be “First Movers” in their spheres of influence, they do not make the last moves in the “Knight’s Tale”.

Also, as a side note, it is interesting that the Knight (and thereby Chaucer) used the Roman names for these gods despite the characters being Greeks.
(Thanks to James for pointing this out to me.)

What's the Reason for Their Pilgrimage?

2009-01-27T10:42:00.000-08:00

The General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales makes it clear that the diverse group who met at Southwark are off to Canterbury for, "The hooly blisful martir to seke". In essence they are off to pay homage or to show religious reverence (and receive some saintly favor) to Saint Thomas Becket. The only other motivation for the pilgrimage - apart from this desire - is that since it is springtime and nature is waking from the winter stasis, it follows that humans are apt to similarly wake and venture from their local habitats. The soundness of that logic is inconsequential since by "follows" I refer only to the fact that the line "Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages" literally follows in line from the description of nature's springtime bustle. (We discussed this briefly in class.) But what was Chaucer thinking? Why did he choose this context for his playful poem?

The online Catholic Encyclopedia (newadvent.org) defines a pilgrimage as, "journeys made to some place with the purpose of venerating it, or in order to ask there for supernatural aid, or to discharge some religious obligation". That much we know from inferences made of the text. But the origin of the idea is further described as locally evolved:

The idea of a pilgrimage has been traced back by some to the primitive notion of local deities, that is, that the divine beings who controlled the movements of men and nature could exercise that control only over certain definite forces or within set boundaries...Hence, when some man belonging to a mountain tribe found himself in the plain and was in need of divine help, he made a pilgrimage back again to the hills to petition it from his gods. It is therefore the broken tribesmen who originate pilgrimages. (Emphasis is mine.)

The pilgrims can be seen as broken tribesman, to some degree, who need to be renewed in some way through pilgrimage to their chosen or local religious site. And the adventure of the pilgrimage can be seen as a series of confessional monologues leading up to the purification or relief from moral guilt at the end of their journey.

Now, possibly by way of a too large leap, we can see the real pilgrimage - in a theatrical or dramatic context - as an obligation of the pilgrims to their creator Geoffrey Chaucer. Is Chaucer as the poet doing what the Catholic Encyclopedia claims that in making a pilgrimage humans are trying to recreate that which, "(in Christianity) God would Himself satisfy the craving He had first Himself created"? That is, an attempted act of perfect being? Are these characters perfect in their sketches by way of their perfectly rendered imperfect humanity which thereby transcribes the pilgrimage onto us in that we (or medieval Englishmen/women) reflect their condition(s)? It seems a pilgrimage facilitates their trilateral discourse in ways that any other context of medieval society would not.

Perhaps none of this illuminates the text any more than might be obvious but would the roadside forum i.e. pilgrimage be the only way for a medieval poet to gather these characters together in a way that would be believable enough to satisfy the suspension of disbelief which is contingent on the "could it happen" as opposed to the "would it happen". Yes, it seems, a pilgrimage of this variety could have happened making the question of whether or not it would have happened immaterial. And that would be enough for a dramatist.