A New Companion to Critical Thinking on Chaucer 9781641892537

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A NEW COMPANION TO CRITICAL THINKING ON CHAUCER

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Companions Further Information and Publications www.arc-humanities.org/our-series/ref/

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A NEW COMPANION TO CRITICAL THINKING ON CHAUCER Edited by

STEPHANIE L. BATKIE MATTHEW W. IRVIN LYNN SHUTTERS

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. © 2021, Arc Humanities Press, Leeds

The author asserts their moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

Permission to use brief excerpts from this work in scholarly and educational works is hereby granted provided that the source is acknowledged. Any use of material in this work that is an exception or limitation covered by Article 5 of the European Union’s Copyright Directive (2001/​29/​EC) or would be determined to be “fair use” under Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act September 2010 Page  2 or that satisfies the conditions specified in Section 108 of the U.S. Copyright Act (17 USC §108, as revised by P.L. 94–​553) does not require the Publisher’s permission. ISBN (print): 9781641892520 eISBN (PDF): 9781641892537

www.arc-​humanities.org

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

References and Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Foreword: Chaucer’s Singular Vocabulary CHRISTOPHER CANNON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii

Introduction STEPHANIE L. BATKIE, MATTHEW W. IRVIN, AND LYNN SHUTTERS. . . . . . . . . . . 1

PART ONE

Consent/​Assent FIONA SOMERSET. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Entente CANDACE BARRINGTON. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Pite GLENN D. BURGER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Slider DAVID RAYBIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75 Response: Consent, Entente, Pite, Slider ARDIS BUTTERFIELD. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89

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Contents

PART TWO

Merveille TARA WILLIAMS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101

Virginite SARAH SALIH ������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������ 113 Swiven HELEN BARR. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Craft BRUCE HOLSINGER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Response: Merveille, Virginite, Swiven, Craft SIMON HOROBIN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159

PART THREE

Vertu HOLLY A. CROCKER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Wal MARION TURNER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Thing STEELE NOWLIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Blak CORD J. WHITAKER. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

Response: Vertu, Wal, Thing, Blak CAROLYN DINSHAW. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

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PART FOUR

Contents

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Auctorite/​Auctour R. D. PERRY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Seculere CATHERINE SANOK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255 Flesh RICHARD H. GODDEN. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269

Memorie RUTH EVANS. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 Response: Auctorite, Seculere, Flesh, Memorie ANDREW COLE. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Appendix 1: Summaries of the Works of Chaucer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Appendix 2: Additional Terms. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Appendix 3: Coverage by Term. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 329 Appendix 4: Coverage by Work. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This companion began life in a coffee shop in Kent, Ohio, where its editors were participating in a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar on Chaucer, held at Kent State University (2016). We have no doubt that the four weeks spent delving into Chaucer’s words influenced this project. We thank our fellow seminarians for our many convivial conversations about the Canterbury Tales, and we especially thank the seminar organizers, Susanna Fein and David Raybin, for making these conversations possible. While working on this companion, Lynn Shutters held the position of Thomas Mark Scholar in the English Department at Colorado State University. She would like to thank the family of Thomas Mark for their generous financial support, which facilitated this work. Matthew Irvin would like to thank the University of the South for providing a semester of sabbatical, and the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium for its network of scholars, and its suggestion to us of the respondent format. Finally, the editors would like to thank all of our outstanding contributors. In devising a new format for a Chaucer companion, we were often figuring things out as we went. We appreciate our contributors’ willingness to work with us throughout this process, and we thank them for the excellent essays that are its result.

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REFERENCES AND ABBREVIATIONS

References All quotations of Geoffrey Chaucer’s works are taken from the Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., edited by Larry D. Benson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

Abbreviations AND

DIMEV DMF DMLBS

LS MED

OED OLD

Anglo-​Norman Dictionary. Edited by Louise W. Stone, T. B. W. Reid, and William Rothwell. Publications of the Modern Humanities Research Association, 1977. www.anglo-​norman.net/​gate/​. An Open-​Access, Digital Edition of the Index of Middle English Verse. Edited by Linne R. Mooney, Daniel W. Mosser, and Elizabeth Solopova. www.dimev.net.

Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, version 2015 ATILF-​CNRS & Université de Lorraine. www.atilf.fr/​dmf/​.

Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources. Edited by Richard Ashdowne, David Robert Howlett, and Ronald Edward Latham. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2018. https://​logeion.uchicago.edu/​.

A Latin Dictionary. Charlton Lewis and Charles Short. Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1879.

Middle English Dictionary. Edited by Robert E.  Lewis, et  al. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1952–​2001. https://​quod.lib.umich. edu/​m/​middle-​english-​dictionary/​dictionary.

Oxford English Dictionary. Edited by Simpson, J.  A., et  al. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2000. www.oed.com. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Edited by P.  G. W.  Glare. 2  vols. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2012.

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FOREWORD: CHAUCER’S SINGULAR VOCABULARY CHRISTOPHER CANNON A “complex word” for William Empson was often key to the meaning of a whole poem, and it acquired that centrality as its complexity was “gradually built up” by the other words, an “enriching” of its meanings that occurred as the poem unfolded.1 A poet would have understood this richness from the start, but a poem was also a process for drawing out a word’s possible meanings through the variety of contexts in which that word was placed, as the sequence of those contexts layered those meanings atop one another. A key word of this kind for Chaucer was “free” as he used it in the Franklin’s Tale. It is first introduced there in a legalistic sense, as Arveragus vows that he will never try to dominate Dorigen, and, in order to insist that his oath is valid, says he makes this vow “of hys fre wyl” (5.645). In this case the adjective modifies a term for a human faculty (the will) and means “an absence of constraint.” The word occurs for a second time in the tale as part of a definition of “love”: Love wol nat been constreyned by maistrye. Whan maistrie comth the God of Love anon Beteth his wynges, and farewell, he is gon! Love is a thing as any spirit free. (5.764–​67)

“Free” also means “unconstrained” here but it now refers to a more absolute sense of freedom: the Franklin’s point is not so much that “love” is an unconstrained emotion but, rather, that it is the diametric opposite of compulsion; it is not the condition of a feeling or act but a fundamental property (love is not love if it is compelled). “Free” occurs only one more time in the poem when readers are asked to judge which of its main characters was the “mooste fre” (5.1622): was it Arveragus, when he allowed Dorigen to keep her promise to Aurelius, or Aurelius, when he released Dorigen from that promise, or the philosopher, who released Aurelius from his obligation to pay the debt of a thousand pounds Aurelius had incurred when trying to ensnare Dorigen? The word has acquired one wholly new meaning here—​and it is one that we have actually lost—​since in Middle English, “free” could mean “generous” and the simplest way to read this question is “who was the most generous of these three?” “Free” also retains the legalistic sense with which the poem began (who of the three is the least constrained), but now a fourth meaning also shadows all the others, because the meaning of “free” also begins to swing around to something very like the first meaning’s opposite. As we are asked to consider which of these related actions is the more uncompelled we are also made to see how each one of them is compelled by the generosity of the action that preceded it. Precisely because they are so generous to each other, neither Arveragus, Aurelius, nor the philosopher are 1 Empson, Structure of Complex Words, 74.

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constrained by prior actions, but those constraints—​in their very generosity—still compel, even if what they compel is more freedom. A word may also be “key,” as Raymond Williams defined it, because its range of meanings opens a window onto a whole culture particularly as that range is contested or in flux.2 “Compagnie” was such a key word for Chaucer. Although derived from French, it had been used in English since the twelfth century to describe a “multitude” or “group of people.” Alongside that meaning it had also developed a more intimate sense of a large group bound together by a shared interest or purpose, a “fellowship,” and it is in this sense that Chaucer described the Canterbury pilgrims as a “compagnie.”3 But in the early fourteenth century a culturally important third meaning was also making its way into general use as the idea of a bounded multitude became increasingly useful for describing “a professional group.”4 At first such groups were religious and the term referred to clergy, but, at precisely the moment Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales—​and calling its pilgrims a “fellowship”—​the term had begun to be used to describe a craft guild such as the “company of grocerys” in London. Chaucer uses the term in just this way in the Man of Law’s Tale to describe a “compaignye of chapman” (2.135) or a guild of merchants. “Compaignie” in this last sense was fast on its way to becoming complex in an Empsonian sense insofar as guild membership was as much about exclusion as it was about fellowship. But it is this growing complexity that also gave this word a growing political and ethical force: it was a keyword because “its meanings [had become] inextricably bound up with the problem it was being used to discuss.”5 When Chaucer begins the Canterbury Tales by describing his pilgrims as “wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye” (1.24) he means that they are “in felaweshipe,” almost an ecclesiastical body because “pilgrims were they alle” (1.26), but he also quickly begins to sort them into professional groups and, in the process of that sorting, quietly insists that “work as a social experience” has thoroughly shaped their perspectives and even their definition of the good.6 When Chaucer projects these differences into a variety of genres and narrative forms as the Tales unfold he is making the subtle but crucial claim that a world grouping itself into “compaignyes” was a world that increasingly defined lives by work. The third kind of “keyword” Chaucer used—​and the one I will focus on here—​was unique to him and it fundamentally defined his style. Such words were “key” because they were singular: used in only one poem in all of Chaucer’s writing. They were sometimes what are called “nonce” words (used only once), but Chaucer often repeated them in a given poem, not least because they were (or became) central to its plot or meanings. Such words are particularly characteristic of, and common in, the Canterbury Tales for 2 Williams, Keywords, 9. 3 MED, s.v. “compagnie, n.,” 2(b), 1, and 3 respectively. 4 MED, s.v. “compaignie, n.,” 1(e). 5 Williams, Keywords, 13.

6 Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 202.

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the reasons I have just described: narrowing a poem’s vocabulary, wedding it to the tale told by a particular speaker, tended to produce a “special kind of poetry” for that speaker and his or her subject.7 A simple example here would be the Miller’s use of the word “ferting” only in this tale where it is at once an indication of his churlishness but also central to the poem’s action: it is Absolon’s squeamishness about this particular bodily function, that so enrages him when Alisoun farts in his face, that makes his retaliation the linchpin of the poem’s entire plot.8 “Cliket” (the latch of a door or gate) and “pirie” (pear tree), words unique to the Merchant’s Tale, also have a defining role to play in that poem’s vulgar plot: each names a crucial aspect of the setting for the conclusion of that tale’s action (the pear tree in the locked garden) and the site of the betrayal with which the plot concludes. Some of these key words are placed under such scrutiny by their repeated use that they become complex in the Empsonian sense. “Creauncen” (“to borrow money or obtain credit”) is a word Chaucer only uses in the Shipman’s Tale where it describes the work of the merchant, but, since the tale is finally about the very nature of economic activity (and the wife’s bold strategy for insisting that sex within marriage has monetary value) it is a word that finally contains within it the poem’s bracing analysis of value. “Buxomli” and “sad” in the Clerk’s Tale might be said to be “key” in the sense Raymond Williams defined such words, since these terms are not only used in this text to describe the most important attributes of Griselda’s character but also, as the Clerk suggests in conclusion, to persuade all the tale’s readers to “be constant in adversitee /​As was Grisilde” (4.1146–​47). In many cases the singular words Chaucer used in the Tales were already common in the language, but on many other occasions Chaucer invented them for the purpose: Loo Adam, in the feeld of Damyssene With Goddes owene fyner wroght was he, And nat bigeten of mannes sperme unclene And welte al paradys savynge o tree. Hadde nevere worldly man so heigh degree, And Adam, til he for mysgovernaunce Was dryven out of hys hye prosperitee To labour, and to helle, and to meschaunce. (7.2007–​14)

Here, for example, in the first stanzas of the Monk’s Tale—​a poem that the Monk has said will be about the “tragedie” that comes when someone in “greet prosperitee” is “yfallen out of heigh degree” (7.1975–​77)—​Chaucer derived the word “mysgovernaunce” from “governaunce” for the first time in recorded English in order to announce a central theme of his poem: that these great and tragic falls were very often self-​inflicted, that “tragedie” 7 See Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style, especially 20.

8 Here and throughout I am drawing on statistics and an argument in ­chapter 3 of my Making of Chaucer’s English, 91–​135. That chapter contains further statistics surveying the patterns I  will outline here, and part 2 of that book provides a profile of each one of the words I mention including its derivation and patterns of use in Middle English.

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is often particularly wretched because it can be avoided. A similar lexical process can be observed in the Knight’s Tale: Ful ofte a day han thise Thebanes two Togydre ymet, and wroght his felawe wo; Unhorsed hath each oother of hem tweye. Ther nas no tygre in the vale of Galgopheye Whan that hir whelp is stole whan it is lite So crueel on the hunte as is Arcite For jelous herte upon this Palamoun. (1.2623–​29)

Here Chaucer coined the word “unhorsed” from “horsed” (“to seat oneself on horseback”) for a narrative filled with combat on horseback in order to specify a key event in the final confrontation between the tale’s competing heroes, Palamon and Arcite (it is just after the lines I have quoted that Palamon is taken to the stake which signals his loss and Arcite’s victory in this tournament). “Chuckken,” which Chaucer coined to describe the sound of the chickens in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, is an imitative word that not only neatly describes the sounds made by the tale’s central characters (the rooster, Chaunticleer, and his wife, Pertelote) but, as it contrasts with their rhetorically elaborate speech, keeps squarely before its readers the tale’s defining interrogation of “nature”: are the chickens’ anthropomorphic behaviours as “natural” as their sound? “Caunterbury-​ ward” in the General Prologue to the Tales is a word Chaucer coined from “Canterbury” and used only there to take in the whole of the Tales’ purpose: to take the twenty-​nine pilgrims, by means of the unfolding stories in the collection, “to Canterbury.” It makes sense that Chaucer should use singular words of this kind in the Canterbury Tales, but this technique was a resource in all of Chaucer’s writing, even in his prose.9 In his more technical writings the phenomenon may seem to be a direct consequence of the specialized nature of the subject he was writing about. It was almost inevitable, for example, that Chaucer should use words such as “altitude,” “elevacioun,” “meridian,” “plum-​rule,” and “zodiak” only in the Treatise on the Astrolabe, a work that describes the intricacies of using an astronomical instrument. It seems inevitable too that he should use words such as “destinal” and “eternite” only in his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy whose central subject is the relationship of human life to the larger cosmos. It makes sense that he only had reason to use the names of some birds (“stork,” “tercel,” “hei-​sugge”) as well as their characteristic sounds (“queken”) in the Parliament of Fowles. And if he used the word “bitraisinge” (betraying) only in the Legend of Good Women it was doubtless because Chaucer defines “good women” there as women whom “false men” have betrayed (Pro.F.484–​46). But the creation of a singular vocabulary of the shape Chaucer produced involved a second technique—​really a kind of discipline—​allied to the acts of invention that produced or discovered new words for each text. To ensure that a particular set of words were confined to a single text Chaucer had to keep that vocabulary unique by forbearing 9 See Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style, especially 20.

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to use these key words ever again. So, when Chaucer writes of the Phoebus (or the sun) climbing in the sky to an angle of forty-​five degrees in the introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, he could have so easily described what he does call the sun’s “highte” (2.12) as its “altitude”—​using the word from the Treatise on the Astrolabe—​but he does not. In Troilus and Criseyde when Troilus considers, at length, his “destinee” (4.959) and the extent to which his events “shul comen by predestyne” (predestination) (4.966), he has every opportunity to take the word “destinal” from the Boece but he never does. The temptation to use words from the Parliament of Fowles must have been particularly great in the extraordinary scene of barnyard chaos that follows the seizing of a farm’s prize rooster by a fox in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale: Ran cow and calf, and eek the verray hogges, So fered for the berkyng of the dogges And shoutyng of the men and wommen eeke They roone so hem thoughte hir herte breeke They yolleden as feendes doon in helle The dokes cryden as men wolde hem quelle The gees for feere flowen over the trees; Out of the hyve cam the swarm of bees. (7.3385–​92)

It is particularly effective poetically to have the ducks “cry” here since the whole point of this passage is to make the farmyard animals resemble a rioting mob, and yet the dogs “bark,” and so, when these ducks do not “quack,” as they did in the Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer is not so much distinguishing the sounds these birds make in the different poems as distinguishing these two poems (each has a singular word for this sound). The rigour of the discipline involved in creating a vocabulary of this kind is revealed best in the very first line of what was probably Chaucer’s first attempt to write a poem of any length, his translation of the Roman de la Rose: “Many men sayn that in sweveninges /​Ther nys but fables and lesynges” (A.1–​2). This couplet stays very close to the sense of the French of Guillaume de Lorris (“Maintes genz dient que en songes /​N’a se fables non et mençonges”) although, for the rhyme words, Chaucer replaces two French terms with very familiar English terms, “sweveninges” (dreams) and “lesynges” (lies). It is remarkable, however, that Chaucer never uses the word “swevenings” again, even though many of the poems he wrote after this one recount the contents of dreams (the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowles, and the Legend of Good Women). It may not be that Chaucer was fully aware of this discipline of course: it may have been a consequence of a general fecundity of language (a boundless capacity for lexical invention) and a capacity to use that abundance for careful specifications in each poem. But the discipline resides in its effects, in the way that confining certain key words to a single work of prose or poem makes the whole of Chaucer’s vocabulary singular, work by work. One of the more extraordinary consequences of this discipline, and the best way to take the measure of its rigour, are the words Chaucer sequestered to particular poems that had no possible thematic purpose. A revealing instance here can be found near the end of the Franklin’s Tale when Aurelius assures the philosopher who helped him that he will indeed pay him what he owes, whatever it may cost him:

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Christopher Cannon […] Maister, I dar wel make avaunt, I failled nevere of my trouthe as yit. For sikerly my dette shal be quyt, Towardes yow, howevere that I fare To goon a-​begged in my kirtle bare. (5.1576–​80)

“Kirtle” is an unusual word to modern ears here though it was quite common in Chaucer’s English. “Abegged” (which simply means “begging”) is also unusual to us and probably was to Chaucer’s audience too, since it is one of those singular words that Chaucer only uses in this poem. But it is also the case that the simple and common adverb “however,” in the penultimate line of the passage, is also unique to this poem and this passage. And so too is the simple and common adjective “nomore” or “namo” as it is spelled here in the first sentence of Chaucer’s description of the Yeoman in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales: A Yeman hadde he and servantz namo At that tyme, for hym liste ride so, And he was clad in cote and hood of grene. (1.101–​3)

This adjectival form of “nomore” is more unusual than the common adverb, which Chaucer has just used to describe the Squire: “He sleep namoore than dooth a nightingale” (1.98). But the adjective was common in Chaucer’s day—​he has not invented it here—​and yet, Chaucer never uses this simple word again. In other words, the sequestration of words in particular poems—​the ensuring that particular words were key because they were singular—​was not always a means to a signifying end for Chaucer but an end in itself. There is also a further element to the building of such a vocabulary even more subtle than the discipline that confined certain words to a single poem once Chaucer had used them. That discipline might be envisioned as the drawing of a line in time after a word has been used beyond which it will not be used again. But Chaucer also drew such lines in front of or before his poems restricting his vocabulary sufficiently in each poem to leave many words in the language unused until later or even late in his career. This phenomenon cannot be detected unless Chaucer’s poems are put into some order, although, given the nature of the phenomenon it does not matter so much what that order is. I have elsewhere called this category of words a “reserved vocabulary” because another way to think about these words is as “reserved” by Chaucer for later use.10 How could we ever know that Chaucer was holding back words in this way, and why would it matter in the larger scheme of a language in which no poet could ever hope to use all the words? The answer to both questions is to be found in Chaucer’s aggregate vocabulary over the course of his career. Surveying all of Chaucer’s words and the poems they are and are not used in tells us nothing about intentions, but knowing all the words that Chaucer finally will use once he has written all his poems, it becomes both generally and specifically interesting to see just how carefully these words were apportioned—​as if, 10 Cannon, Making of Chaucer’s English, 114–​17.

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again, an important part of that distribution was to have a unique set of words for each poem. In his earliest poems such sampling is uninteresting because it converges with the whole of that poem’s vocabulary (there being no prior poem or poems to measure that vocabulary against). Later in Chaucer’s career, however, the unusual nature of these words becomes statistically clear. In a relatively late poem such as the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, for example, Chaucer still found 247 different words that he had never used in any other poem to use there. In the Clerk’s Tale, another relatively late work, he found sixty-​one such words. Even in a 49-​line lyric like The Envoy to Scogan (usually assumed to be written near the end of Chaucer’s life because he refers to himself as old and grey) Chaucer finds four words he had never used before in almost 40,000 lines of poetry. The singular vocabulary Chaucer fashions for each of his poems is both a subset of such words and a function of this technique. That is, Chaucer seems always to have been searching for new words for each poem, and another way to accomplish this (besides finding a set of new words) was to leave some words behind. The effects of Chaucer’s reserved vocabulary and the singular vocabulary they made possible were historically dramatic. Almost from the minute Chaucer died, his language was described not only as unique and original, but as foundational because of its originality. Hoccleve called him the “first fynder of our faire language” in 1412, and he was only the first in a chorus of imitators and acolytes which extended well into the twentieth century, when even scholars of Chaucer continued the tradition, often insisting as the very measure of his importance that he had “naturalized into English a new poetic mode and language.”11 The language of a poet who fashioned something like a new vocabulary for each of his poems is bound to look this inventive, and, of course, viewed out of the context of other poets’ work—​that is, irrespective of the relationship of the novelty of that language when measured against the English language in general—​ it is inventive. But the general impression of originality can also be seen as the way all of Chaucer’s readers tend to register the relative novelty of his language in each poem and of the unusual way in which Chaucer made certain words “key.” As I have shown here, such words are often complex in the ways Empson described, and they are often keywords in the sense Raymond Williams used the term, central to larger cultural concerns and debates beyond Chaucer’s poetry. But they may be both of these things, significant because of their rarity, and also key to the meaning of the poem they as a result tend to define. All of these attributes can be found in usefully condensed form in the simple word “twinning” in book 4 of Troilus and Criseyde: The soth is this: the twynnyng of us tweyne Wo us disese and cruelich anoye, But hym byhoveth somtyme han a peyne That serveth Love, if that he wol have joye. (4.1303–​6)

Criseyde is here trying to persuade Troilus that their parting is only a temporary nuisance by making the word “twinning” mean that their separation is nearly its opposite 11 Hoccleve, Regement of Princes, line 4978; Fisher, “Chaucer and the French Influence,” 178.

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(“complex” because it describes only a temporary annoyance before an inevitably rejoining). But haunting this local argument—​and drawn into it by this word—​are all of the historical and political actors who have, on the one hand, regarded the “twynning” of these two lovers as of little importance, in part by discounting Criseyde’s wishes, while, on the other hand, insisting that greater ends are (and must be) served by this sacrifice. Because the word is made so instantly rich in its meanings—​and also in all the ways the poem’s plot leads up to this particular moment—​this is a poem about “twynnyng” and it therefore makes sense that Chaucer would have reached this common noun off the shelf for the first time when writing this stanza and pressing hard on all of these points so late but also at such a crucial join in this poem. Having made it key to Troilus and Criseyde in this way, Chaucer maintains a kind of conceptual and lexical pressure on this word for the rest of his career by refusing ever to use it again. It is in this way that Chaucer crafted a vocabulary that was distinctive in its difference from the language of any other poet. But it was also distinctive with respect to itself, singular not only in general, but poem by poem throughout Chaucer’s entire career.

Bibliography Primary Sources Hoccleve, Thomas. The Regement of Princes. Edited by Charles R. Blyth. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1999.

Secondary Sources

Benson, C.  David. Chaucer’s Drama of Style. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986. Cannon, Christopher. The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. London: Chatto & Windus, 1964. Fisher, John H. “Chaucer and the French Influence.” In New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism, edited by Donald Rose, 177–​91. Norman: Pilgrim, 1981. Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Christopher Cannon has taught at UCLA, Oxford, Cambridge, and NYU and teaches currently in the departments of Classics and English at Johns Hopkins University where he is also Vice-​Dean for Humanities and the Social Sciences. He has written books on Chaucer’s English (and, in particular, the history of his words), early Middle English, and schoolroom learning in fourteenth-​century England. He is currently working on a book on dictation.

1

INTRODUCTION STEPHANIE L. BATKIE, MATTHEW W. IRVIN, and LYNN SHUTTERS This collection contains two kinds of essays: sixteen main essays (in four parts), which consider how a single word from Chaucer’s vast corpus functions in one or more of his works, and four response essays, which demonstrate how ideas from essays in each part might be combined. A focus on individual words from Chaucer’s corpus might initially seem like an old-​fashioned approach for a Companion, a remnant of New Critical reading practices. Most Companions tend to frame discussion of an author’s work through theoretical approaches, historical contexts, and broad, key concepts, and, in some sense, we fit into the last of these categories.1 However, we also see these words as carrying their histories with them, traversing time and space so as to engage with contemporary modes of thinking. For us, these words both remind us of the historical distance between Chaucer’s concepts and our own and allow us to build connections to the pressing issues of our own moment. We also wanted to model how to write about Chaucer. We thought about Chaucer’s words as a prompt for writing, a starting point from which his readers could dilate and create. Academic writing, after all, “is not the memorialization of ideas. Writing distills, crafts, and pressure-​tests ideas—​it creates ideas.”2 The main essays illustrate a wide range of potential ways of writing about Chaucer, embracing different styles, historical approaches, and theoretical concerns; the response essays explore different methods of engaging with academic writing, expanding the creative process which Chaucer’s words had prompted. We began with a very long list of Chaucerian words that we believed offered creative entry points into Chaucer’s canon. Some of these were chosen because Chaucer uses them often; others, because Chaucer’s usage of them is the first in Middle English; still others, because they are keywords (as Christopher Cannon calls them in his Foreword) for larger arenas of thought, medieval or modern. We then invited scholars to select a word (one from our list or of their own devising) as the basis for a main essay. Because our contributors could follow their ideas in whatever direction they developed, their essays model the discovery, energy, and pleasure all evident in the best academic writing. 1 Examples of recent Chaucer companions include the Cambridge Companion to Chaucer; Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches; Chaucer: An Oxford Guide; A New Companion to Chaucer; and The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. 2 Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style, 1, original emphasis.

1

INTRODUCTION STEPHANIE L. BATKIE, MATTHEW W. IRVIN, and LYNN SHUTTERS This collection contains two kinds of essays: sixteen main essays (in four parts), which consider how a single word from Chaucer’s vast corpus functions in one or more of his works, and four response essays, which demonstrate how ideas from essays in each part might be combined. A focus on individual words from Chaucer’s corpus might initially seem like an old-​fashioned approach for a Companion, a remnant of New Critical reading practices. Most Companions tend to frame discussion of an author’s work through theoretical approaches, historical contexts, and broad, key concepts, and, in some sense, we fit into the last of these categories.1 However, we also see these words as carrying their histories with them, traversing time and space so as to engage with contemporary modes of thinking. For us, these words both remind us of the historical distance between Chaucer’s concepts and our own and allow us to build connections to the pressing issues of our own moment. We also wanted to model how to write about Chaucer. We thought about Chaucer’s words as a prompt for writing, a starting point from which his readers could dilate and create. Academic writing, after all, “is not the memorialization of ideas. Writing distills, crafts, and pressure-​tests ideas—​it creates ideas.”2 The main essays illustrate a wide range of potential ways of writing about Chaucer, embracing different styles, historical approaches, and theoretical concerns; the response essays explore different methods of engaging with academic writing, expanding the creative process which Chaucer’s words had prompted. We began with a very long list of Chaucerian words that we believed offered creative entry points into Chaucer’s canon. Some of these were chosen because Chaucer uses them often; others, because Chaucer’s usage of them is the first in Middle English; still others, because they are keywords (as Christopher Cannon calls them in his Foreword) for larger arenas of thought, medieval or modern. We then invited scholars to select a word (one from our list or of their own devising) as the basis for a main essay. Because our contributors could follow their ideas in whatever direction they developed, their essays model the discovery, energy, and pleasure all evident in the best academic writing. 1 Examples of recent Chaucer companions include the Cambridge Companion to Chaucer; Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches; Chaucer: An Oxford Guide; A New Companion to Chaucer; and The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. 2 Hayot, The Elements of Academic Style, 1, original emphasis.

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2 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters Beginning with words not only provides innovative entry points into thinking about Chaucer; this approach is also quite practical, particularly for students. Students encountering Chaucer for the first (or second, or third) time are often daunted by his words and view Middle English as a foreign language, doubly foreign, perhaps, in the case of non-​native English speakers. Chaucer’s English can cause students to throw up their hands in despair or overly rely on Modern English translations and glosses. This companion both demonstrates the importance of working with the original Middle English and models how to do it. While our contributors often reference the Middle English Dictionary, our goal is not to define these terms (in Chaucer’s work, or more generally), but to explore how Chaucer himself distills and tests ideas, both concrete and abstract, in the crucible of language. While we wanted to offer our contributors freedom, we did not, however, want to receive sixteen main essays on, say, the Knight’s and Merchant’s Tales and none whatsoever on any other Chaucerian texts. Therefore, we built our contributor list slowly and collaboratively, consulting with each scholar about their selection of word and texts and constantly reevaluating our companion in terms of both individual chapters and the aggregate whole. While our companion does not offer “complete” coverage of Chaucer, that is, consideration of each and every work, it does consider the vast majority of them. And the main essays offer a different kind of coverage of Chaucer’s career. Perusing their words of focus—​slider, flesh, blak, wal, thing, craft, swiven, consent/​assent, entente, pite, seculere, auctorite, memorie, vertu, virginite, and merveille—​we might note that the first seven words are derived from Old English, while the latter nine are from French and ultimately Latin, thus indicating the diverse origins of and influences upon English language and culture.3 This English/​Romance division also corresponds, roughly, to a division between more physical, concrete terms (wal, blak, flesh) and more abstract, intangible ones (auctorite, entente, consent). An overlapping, but not quite identical, binary can be devised of words describing lofty ideals (pite, vertu, virginite) versus words describing crude acts (swiven) or mundane objects (wal). We might also note that many words remain in present-​day English (memorie, thing), but others have fallen out of use (the adjective slider, swiven). A word like seculere might seem a surprisingly modern term to associate with a medieval poet, while modern readers might view craft, and merveille as more characteristically “medieval” concepts. Our contributors test and trouble these distinctions, demonstrating the range of Chaucer’s own habits of thought, and the creative energy required to renegotiate these centuries-​old terms for the habits of our linguistic and cultural world(s). These essays also provide models for how to develop critical thinking about literary texts beyond close reading. This process, which typically involves the careful consideration of theoretical paradigms and historical contexts, can be daunting, especially for students learning theory and history at the same time they are encountering Chaucer’s literature. 3 It is worth noting that some Old English words also derive from Latin, as is the case with Old English weall, predecessor of Middle English wal, deriving from Latin vallum. See OED s.v. “wall, n.1.”

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Introduction

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The fact that each essay starts from a single word in the corpus shows the variety of ways that critical thinking can proceed: a tightly focused view of a term leads to broader claims about how Chaucer’s work interacts with notions of gender, history, textuality, race, disability, subjectivity, political engagement, devotion, and more. And these claims come with a range of theoretical and scholarly approaches that develop initial textual analysis into innovative arguments. While all of the essays include engagement with the work of other scholars, and several discuss historical documents and texts, student readers will also find these skills modelled more directly in the response essays at the end of each part. Here, the authors are working from the insights found in the main essays and show the beginnings of various ways these ideas might be combined to form new arguments. They model how to take an essay focused on one thing and synthesize it with an idea, approach, or context from another. The response essays also demonstrate that we read scholarship for reasons extending far beyond buttressing our own claims or refuting someone else’s. Connecting scholars’ ideas both to each other and to the reader’s own is also a form of creative thinking. Therefore, the response essays demonstrate how to think with the main essays and discover points of connection between them. These points of connection do not preexist the reading process but emerge with it, guided by the idiosyncratic interests of each response essay author. Two authors, Horobin and Butterfield, use their response essays to develop methodologies for working with Chaucer’s words. Horobin asks how Chaucer’s readers might have perceived particular words and offers research strategies for answering this question, while Butterfield draws on England’s trilingualism to contemplate how a single, Chaucerian word might possess “multiple linguistic lives.” Cole and Dinshaw, conversely, use ideas encountered in their respective parts as the starting points for their own interpretations of Chaucer, with Cole exploring the interrelation of time, experience, and narrative in select Canterbury Tales and Dinshaw contemplating the multiple registers of boundary crossing in the Miller’s Tale. Taken together, main and response essays offer a form of reading and interpretation that is immediately accessible and necessarily flexible, offering readers not only new ideas about Chaucer’s writing, but also a template for continuing this work for themselves.

Geoffrey Chaucer: A Cultural and Linguistic Biography

As Christopher Cannon has demonstrated, the manuscripts of Chaucer provide the first occurrences of about two thousand English words (one of which, swiven, is explored in the pages ahead).4 However, Chaucer did not make those words up out of thin air; many were already in usage in English, and were first written down in one of Chaucer’s works, or existed in other languages, such as French, Castilian, Italian, or Latin. In fact, Chaucer knew all of these languages, and lived in a London that was, while small (forty 4 For the completest account of Chaucer’s contributions to English, see Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English; Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition; and Burnley, A Guide to Chaucer’s Language, especially 133–​55.

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4 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters thousand residents), an international city,5 with populations of Dutch, German, Italian, and, of course, French speakers. French was language not only of England’s political rival, but also of England’s own aristocracy and courts, in which fluency was a sign of high estate; just ask Chaucer’s Prioress, who has taken pains to learn French, though she speaks the French not of Paris, but of “Stratford ate Bowe,” the location of her convent near London (1.125).6 This French specific to England is referred to as “Anglo-​Norman.” The expansiveness of Chaucer’s language is a sign of his times and his place in them; Chaucer was born in the early 1340s, a tumultuous period in the development of Northern Europe. Because the English kings were of Norman blood and still held territory in Normandy, Aquitaine, and other lands in vassalage to the French king, there was constant tension between the French and English kings. These disputes reached a head in 1337, when the French king Philip VI claimed Aquitaine and part of Normandy, and the English king Edward III claimed, through his mother Isabella, daughter of the French monarch Philip the Fair, to be King of France. Philip VI invoked Salic Law (which does not allow for succession through the female side) and the Hundred Years’ War began. It is probably easier to see the Hundred Years’ War as a series of conflicts over regional jurisdiction rather than as a war between national powers; the cultures, languages, and dominant political families of England and France overlapped and fed one another.7 Edward III spoke French, probably as his first language; his grandson and successor, Richard II, was born in Bordeaux. All the monarchs of England until Henry V generally preferred French to English, and until late in the fourteenth century, French was the official language of the English legal system and was the common language of educated men and women in England, including Chaucer. However, it was during the Hundred Years’ War that England became a major power in Europe. Edward III proved a powerful leader, able to organize and lead the great magnates that dominated the rather decentralized English ruling class. His son, Edward the Black Prince, was an able statesman and excellent general; the combination of their leadership and the extensive use of professional mercenaries led to the conquest of large parts of France and the signing, in 1360, of the Treaty of Brétigny, which left Edward in control of a third of France. England was also heavily involved in the intrigues around the rulers of Christian Spain and Portugal, as well as the Low Countries, the Holy Roman Empire, and even places as far from England as Poland and Lithuania (the future Henry IV went on crusade to the latter country). In England, and on the continent in general, the period in which Chaucer grew up was a difficult one. In 1347–​1351, the Black Death swept through Europe, coming up 5 For Chaucer’s likely childhood exposure to the international quality of London in the immigrant-​ rich Vintry Ward, see Turner, Chaucer: A European Life, especially 27–​28. For primary documents about Chaucer’s life, see Chaucer Life-​Records. 6 All references to Chaucer’s works are to the Fragment number (as used in the Riverside Chaucer and Norton Chaucer editions) and line number. 7 Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy, 5, 9.

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through the Eastern trade routes; England was struck most profoundly in 1349–​1350, and again in 1361. The first wave killed a quarter to a half of the population. This had a profound effect upon Europe, one that is almost impossible to calculate. In England, the effect on the economy was especially profound. Suddenly, there was a huge grain surplus and a shortage of workers. The relatively weak central government attempted to control prices, wages, and the movement of workers, but largely failed. It is helpful to know that there were, in the late fourteenth century, about 3.5 million people living in England. Less than 0.5 percent were the families of the 150 lords and about 2,000 knights; about 50,000 (or 1.5 percent) were in some sort of ecclesiastical orders; about 40,000 (just over 1 percent) were gentry and esquires, Chaucer’s status; roughly 100,000 to 125,000 total persons resided in cities (or 3.5 percent).8 Therefore, almost 95  percent of the population of England was made up of rural commoners, essentially invisible to the historical record. They were not, however, passive. In 1381, a major peasant rebellion, predicated on high taxes, artificially suppressed wages, abuses in the administration of justice, and attempts by landholders to enclose common land, succeeded in entering London, executing the Lord Chancellor and Archbishop of Canterbury Simon Sudbury, and threatening King Richard himself, at that time only fourteen years old. The rebellion was put down, but it was a major cultural moment in late medieval Europe, one that remained a touchstone for popular revolution through the seventeenth century, and even into the nineteenth-​century agrarian and twentieth-​century socialist movements. In sum, late fourteenth-​century English politics were a mess, and not just on account of the Black Death. By the mid-​1370s Edward III was senile, and his mistress, Alice Perrers, had a major influence on royal government. Edward the Black Prince died young at the age of forty-​six in 1376, one year before his father. The nine-​year-​old Richard II, the Black Prince’s son, took the throne in 1377. In the mid-​1380s, Richard II was coming under increased pressure from the so-​called Appellants, the major magnates (specifically, the Duke of Gloucester, Richard’s uncle, the Earl of Arundel, Admiral of the Navy, the Earl of Warwick, and Henry Bolingbroke, Earl of Derby [later Henry IV]). Then in 1388, the Appellants took over the government (the so-​called “Merciless Parliament”), purging it of Richard’s favourites, some of whom were executed (these included several of Chaucer’s associates, most notably Nicholas Bembre, mayor of London, and the writer Thomas Usk). Richard recovered power in 1389; in 1397–​1399 he attempted fully to undo the work of the Merciless Parliament and punish his enemies, including Henry of Lancaster (as Henry Bolingbroke was called after the death of John of Gaunt in 1397). Richard banished Henry in 1397, but Henry returned to England in 1399, defeated Richard, and claimed the throne as Henry IV, the first of the Lancastrian kings. If England was politically chaotic, then Europe as a whole was not faring much better. In 1378, the Papal Schism divided the Church, Urban VI, ruling from Italy, was recognized by England and the Holy Roman Empire, while Clement VII, ruling from Avignon, was recognized by a rejuvenated France under Charles V (1364–​1380). The schism would 8 See Strohm, “The Social and Literary Scene in England,” 1–​2.

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6 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters continue until the Council of Constance in 1414–​1418. Charles regained much of the land lost to England in the Treaty of Brétigny, especially as Edward III weakened and Edward the Black Prince became ill and autocratic in his rule over Gascony. Spanish and Portuguese Christians were pushing against Muslim rule in Iberia, and England was constantly playing one monarch off another; John of Gaunt, brother of the Black Prince and father of Henry IV, was at one time nearly king of Portugal. What, we might ask, was Chaucer’s position in this complex world? While Chaucer was not among the highest of the gentry, he was well connected, in fact much better connected than many of his gentil associates. His father was a successful vintner from a merchant family in Ipswich, and Geoffrey married Philippa de Roet, who was a lady-​ in-​waiting to Queen Philippa of Hainault (wife of Edward III) and sister to Katherine Swynford, mistress and eventual third wife of John of Gaunt. He was therefore brother-​ in-​law to the most powerful person in England besides (and perhaps even including) the king, who became the father of the Lancastrian line. Chaucer gained a series of administrative jobs and bureaucratic benefits during his career. As best we know, his career in government began in service to the Countess of Ulster, around 1357. By 1367, Chaucer had been granted a lifetime annuity by Edward III, and was actively involved in several diplomatic missions; he was listed as a valettus or esquier in the royal household; while not among the chamber-​knights that formed the inner circle of court life, he was certainly among the gentils. In 1374, Chaucer became Comptroller of Customs in London, and received patronage in the form of an annuity from John of Gaunt. In the mid-​1380s, when Richard II was coming under increasing pressure from the Appellants, Chaucer dropped out of London politics, and moved to Kent; he served as a Member of Parliament from Kent in 1386. After Richard’s recovery of power in 1389, Chaucer was appointed Clerk of the King’s Works, and Richard II renewed his annuity in 1394. Despite Chaucer’s seeming closeness to Richard’s court and favourites (including the notorious de la Pole family), the Lancastrian king Henry IV rewarded Chaucer with an additional annuity, perhaps because of Chaucer’s own close relationship with the Lancasters. Chaucer’s civil work was his primary source of money, as he was not landed gentry, and there is no evidence that his writing was ever a source of any significant income. Chaucer travelled widely and often. In the early 1360s, he was captured at Reims in France, travelling with the Countess of Ulster’s husband, Lionel of Antwerp, Duke of Clarence (Edward III’s younger brother). He may have visited Italy as early as 1368 to attend Lionel’s marriage to Violante Visconti at Milan, at which the poets Jean Froissart and Francesco Petrarch were also present. He was definitely in Genoa and Florence in 1372–​1373 and Lombardy in 1378. He worked on the negotiations for the marriage of Richard II to Princess Marie de France in 1377 (which did not succeed; Richard married Anne of Bohemia in 1382). He also conducted negotiations with Sir John Hawkwood, the condottiere and mercenary, whose early experience as an English soldier in the Hundred Years War prepared him for a prominent role in the feuding Italian city-​states. Chaucer’s success in establishing himself is indicated not only by his own remarkable career but by the achievements of his children and grandchildren. His son, Thomas Chaucer, was not only Chief Butler to the King for thirty years, but five times speaker of

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the House of Commons, and a major political player during the reigns of Henry IV and Henry V. Thomas’s daughter Alice became Duchess of Suffolk, marrying William de la Pole, and their grandson, John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was the designated successor to Richard III. John was killed in 1487, but his brothers continued the Yorkist claim until their own deaths in 1513 and 1525. The sixteenth-​century reception of Chaucer made much of his noble connections, and the early printed folios of Chaucer helped cement him as a major “English” author, one whose “words” were key to the development of English as a national language.9 Indeed, all of Chaucer’s surviving writing is in English. This may seem obvious, since Chaucer was English. However, Chaucer’s poetry depends heavily not only on a French tradition, but on a French mode of thinking about poetry, especially the poetry of love. Much of the literature produced in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in England was written in various forms of French (including Anglo-​Norman) or Latin. Chaucer’s poetry finds its past not in the Anglo-​Saxon poetry of England (which was not well known during the later Middle Ages), but in France. France was the literary centre of Europe, only recently challenged by the Italians Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio (all of whom either spent significant time in French-​controlled territory or read extensively in French texts). The troubadour and trouvère poets of 1100–​1300 began the ironic lyrical discourses of love; in the Latin West these were followed by the romances of Beroul, Chrétien de Troyes, and Benoît de Sainte-​Maure. In the thirteenth century, Guillaume de Lorris began his Roman de la Rose, which combined the ironic and self-​reflective love discourse of the troubadours with the narrative of the romance poets; his work was “completed” (or rather vastly expanded) by Jean de Meun in the later thirteenth century. The huge impact of the Rose was felt throughout Europe; it produced a poetic literature prodigious in scope that was intensely self-​reflective about its own art, concerned with the relationships of human emotions and reason, and critical of the power of religious and social ideologies and institutions. The great French poets of the fourteenth century, especially Jean Froissart and Guillaume de Machaut, were careful students of the Rose, as was Boccaccio; Dante and Petrarch both read the Rose. One of Chaucer’s great accomplishments was his translation of the Rose into English, of which we might have some small part. The earliest work of Chaucer we can definitively date is the Book of the Duchess, written to lament the death of Blanche, John of Gaunt’s first wife, around 1369–​1370. It draws heavily upon French sources; about a thousand of its 1,334 lines find direct echoes in French poets. Chaucer’s next burst of creative activity seems to be from 1378–​1382, in which he wrote the House of Fame, the incomplete Anelida and Arcite, and the Parliament of Fowls. Between 1382 and 1386 he translated Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (working as much from a French source as from the Latin), and wrote Troilus and Criseyde, which is largely reworked from Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato. From 1385 to 1387 he worked on the Legend of Good Women, apparently starting a revision after the death of Queen Anne in 1394. He began the Canterbury Tales in 1387; he continued 9 See Cook, The Poet and the Antiquaries, 17–​41.

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8 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters to work on them until his death in 1400. There are several works of Chaucer that have been lost and which predate the Legend because they are named in that work; these include not only the translation of the Roman de la Rose, but also several ballads and a life of St. Cecilia (which most likely becomes the Second Nun’s Tale). Among his other works, the Treatise on the Astrolabe is probably dated to 1391, and his shorter poems have been assigned various dates throughout his career.

Chaucer Studies: Theoretical Questions and Points of Focus

In conceptualizing this companion, we devised a format that does not restrict contributors to a particular theory or point of focus. Essays are consequently eclectic in approach, and, depending on each contributor’s interests, some approaches are covered more than others. Here we want to provide a brief guide to the approaches that have been most influential in shaping current Chaucer scholarship. We should note that this list is by no means complete and that the strands listed below overlap significantly: for example, we list Chaucer’s engagement with the Italian poet Boccaccio in the “Sources for Chaucer” strand, although it could just as easily fit in “English versus European Chaucer.” We hope that this list will help readers identify some of the approaches in Chaucer from which scholars, including our contributors, participate. Aesthetics and Form in Chaucer

In looking at Chaucer’s language, scholars have also begun to turn to larger questions of literary form and aesthetic effects.10 This approach can be quite flexible, encompassing interests in linguistic forms (including particular poetic forms, like the dit or the ballade),11 aesthetic or affective qualities of forms (such as contemplative forms, complaints, or exemplum),12 or the intersection between discourse and form (as in how political discourse is transformed into or by literary performance).13 We might also consider the intersection between form and matter when it comes to ideas like compilation, which stand between material culture and formal structures.14 In this volume, formal concerns feature prominently in Holsinger’s arguments about how literary craft evokes material production and mastery, as well as social and cultural 10 We can see this in recent collections like Answerable Style (ed. Grady and Galloway), The Medieval Literary (ed. Meyer-​Lee and Sanok), and Chaucer and the Subversion of Form (ed. Prendergast and Rosenfeld). For examination of Chaucer in light of a particular form, prosimetrum (the mixing of prose and verse), see Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages, 55–​167. 11 See, for example, Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 33–​97; Bertolet, “Chaucer’s Envoys and the Poet Diplomat.” 12 Schrock, Consolation in Medieval Narrative, 107–​27; Lavinsky, “Turned to Fables.”

13 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. For an example of how historical and affective contexts can be used to interrogate literary forms, see Chaganti, Strange Footing; and for a more general investigation of affective genre, see Scase, Literature and Complaint. 14 Bahr, Fragments and Assemblages, 155–​208.

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identities associated with making, whereas Raybin’s discussion of slider brings to light larger, structural forms in Chaucer’s works—​in this case, forms that query the nature of narrative unity in the Canterbury Tales. Still another approach can be found in Perry’s reading of the ballade, with particular attention to how Chaucer’s language deliberately blurs the lines between English and French traditions, even as his use of an experimental envoy marks Chaucer’s work as distinctly insular. All of these possibilities take the “close reading” approach and bring it into conversation with larger historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts. Affect, Emotions, and the Mind in Chaucer

Chaucer’s representations of mental, affective, and cognitive processes have long interested scholars, who both locate these processes within specifically medieval contexts and compare them to their latter-​day counterparts. Points of interest include perception, decision making, consent, feelings, and memory.15 Recently, such work has developed in tandem with the “affective turn,” a term designating increased academic interest across multiple disciplines in how people experience, develop, and narrate bodily sensations and emotions. Examples of such work in Chaucer studies include consideration of specific feelings represented in Chaucer’s corpus, encompassing love, anger, and pity; location of Chaucerian emotion in historical trajectories emphasizing both similarities and differences between medieval and modern-​day structures of feeling; the gendering of emotion; and the tension between the unintelligibility of intensities of sensation and the drive to represent those sensations in narrative.16 In this volume, Glenn D. Burger examines pity as an ennobling emotion that both sustains and exceeds structures of community; Fiona Somerset considers processes of decision making and the degree to which Chaucer’s characters fully consent to their actions; and Ruth Evans theorizes erotic love in Chaucer’s writings in light of richly developed medieval accounts of memory. English versus European Chaucer

Chaucer has been dubbed the “father of English poetry,” a status at which he allegedly arrived after progressing through two prior phases, a French and an Italian one, each characterized by extensive reliance on continental literary practices. This account is now viewed as overly rigid and anachronistically dependent on postmedieval investments in Englishness and authorship. Recent scholarship has considered Chaucer’s literary and cultural affinities in light of his European-​ness and the trilingual status of Chaucer’s 15 Scholarship on consent has largely focused on Chaucer’s female characters, such as Criseyde, and the question of whether they are willing participants in their sexual experiences. See, for example, Robertson, “Public Bodies.” Carruthers’s Book of Memory, a now classic study of medieval memory practices, includes references to Chaucer. 16 See, for example, Burger, Conduct Becoming, 173–​90; Crocker, The Matter of Virtue; McTaggart, Shame and Guilt in Chaucer; and Nowlin, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention.

10

10 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters England (French, Latin, and English).17 For example, Ryan Perry’s essay on “Auctorite” looks carefully at how Chaucer responds to a literary tradition rooted in the French ballade, considering specifically the relationship between Machaut’s love lyrics and Chaucer’s adaptation of them. Similarly, we see attention to etymological and continental histories of entente in Candace Barrington’s essay through her discussions of the legal system of medieval England. These connections place Chaucer in a more expansive context and argue for the deep connections English literary production in the medieval period shared with its continental counterpoints. Gender and Sexuality Studies and Chaucer

Feminism arrived relatively late to Chaucer studies, in the late 1980s to early 1990s, with the publication of three major feminist monographs.18 Scholars are now asking how to revisit and revitalize feminist approaches to Chaucer. Key interests include intersections of feminist and queer studies in approaches to Chaucer; Chaucer’s biography, particularly Cecily Chaumpaigne’s charge of rape against the poet; and connections between Chaucer and present-​day developments in feminist culture, most notably the #MeToo movement.19 Queer approaches to Chaucer coincided with the rise of queer studies in the 1990s. Scholars have taken particular interest in the Pardoner, whose body appears to not conform to social constructions of masculinity.20 In keeping with the aim of queer studies to destabilize systems of meaning more broadly, queer studies of Chaucer have also involved focus on topics that might not obviously seem queer, like marriage and genre.21 Chaucer scholars are also now drawing from the field of transgender studies.22 In this volume, Helen Barr argues that Chaucer employs “swiven,” a vulgar term meaning “to fuck,” to interrogate the social commonplace that men are the initiators and agents of sex, and women its objects; Glenn D. Burger considers pity as a feminized emotion that is nonetheless appropriable by male rulers; Holly A. Crocker traces associations of masculinized agency back to the Middle Ages and demonstrates how Chaucer’s writings open up space for an alternative model of feminized virtue; and Sarah Salih presents virginity as a complex cultural phenomenon that both encompassed and exceeded sexual experience; virginity, she argues, follows 17 See Turner, Chaucer: A European Life; and Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy.

18 See Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics; Mann, Feminizing Chaucer; and Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. 19 For an overview of recent feminist scholarship on Chaucer, see Seal and Sidhu, “Introduction”; and for examples of such work, see the essays included in New Feminist Approaches to Chaucer, a recent special issue of The Chaucer Review.

20 See, for example, Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; 113–​36; Kruger, “Claiming the Pardoner”; and Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory. For a queer reading of the Wife of Bath, see Lochrie, Heterosyncrasies, 89–​102. 21 See Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation; and Pugh, Queering Medieval Genres, 45–​106. 22 See, Bychowski, “Trans Textuality.”

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multiple narrative trajectories in Chaucer’s poetry dependent upon a character’s gender and religious status. Nature and Nonhuman Entities in Chaucer

Chaucer studies are traditionally “humanist” insofar as they focus on how Chaucer represents human life in various metaphysical, experiential, and historical contexts. In the wake of recent developments in philosophy and literary theory, including ecocriticism, animal studies, and new materialism, scholars are now examining nonhuman entities in ways that do not simply reduce them to inertness or instrumentality vis-​à-​vis human actors. Along these lines, scholars have examined the prominence of birds in Chaucer’s corpus and his portrayal of natural land-​and seascapes.23 Scholars have also examined Chaucerian “nature” in light of late medieval philosophy, much of which is indebted to Aristotelian theories of physics and matter.24 In this volume, Tara Williams explores marvels that lie on the borders between the natural, the supernatural, and the cultural, while Marion Turner argues that Chaucer’s walls often constitute those very borders; Steele Nowlin employs theory from New Materialism to investigate the nature of things from nonhuman perspectives, while Catherine Sanok examines how the animal (here, the rooster) orders human notions of time. Philosophical Chaucer

Chaucer engages with numerous “philosophical” issues, including agency and autonomy, metaphysics, epistemology, teleology, ethics, and dialectical reasoning. These issues are also key concerns of the Christian religion, and, since the earliest days of Christianity, influential writers such as Augustine and Boethius sought to establish compatibility between Greco-​ Roman philosophy and the Christianity. While late antique efforts to bridge classical philosophy and Christianity focused largely on Plato, later efforts, beginning in the twelfth century, increasingly focused on Aristotle, an approach characteristic of medieval scholasticism and the work of its most famous practitioner, Thomas Aquinas. All of these influences found their way into Chaucer’s philosophical thinking, and, while there are significant overlaps between “Philosophical Chaucer,” “Religion and Chaucer,” and “Political and Ethical Chaucer,” we can nonetheless identify a thread of Chaucer studies prioritizing Chaucer as a philosophical poet.25 Chaucer’s engagement with Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy has garnered extensive scholarly

23 For ecocritical approaches to Chaucer, see, for example, Crane, “ ‘The Lytel Erthe That Here Is’ ”; Rudd, “Being Green in Late Medieval English Literature”; and Stanbury, “EcoChaucer.” On animal studies and Chaucer, see, for example, Crane, Animal Encounters, 120–​36, 147–​52; Kordecki, Ecofeminist Subjectivities; and the essays in Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts, ed. Van Dyke. 24 See Robertson, Nature Speaks, 225–​81.

25 See, for example, Miller, Philosophical Chaucer.

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12 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters attention, as has the poet’s engagement with Aristotelian and scholastic thinking.26 In this volume, R.  D. Perry examines the antinomy that arises when Chaucer positions himself between freedom and authority; David Raybin traces human response to arbitrariness in the Canterbury Tales partially by way of Boethius; and Catherine Sanok demonstrates how the overlapping temporalities of Chaucer’s poetry structure human perception and experience. Political and Ethical Chaucer

As noted in our biography of Chaucer, the poet lived during a period of political upheaval, both within England and across Europe more broadly. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Chaucer rarely comments overtly on politics; on many scholarly accounts, doing so would be ill-​advised if not downright dangerous for a man of Chaucer’s “in between” social status working for an often volatile court. Indirect or allegorical commentary on England’s political landscape was nonetheless possible, and many scholars have read Chaucer’s work in this light, interpreting his poems as loosely veiled commentary on the monarchs King Richard II and Queen Anne of Bohemia and on what constitutes just rule in a broader, more philosophical sense.27 Chaucer’s own political stances, including whether he was supportive or critical of those in power, is a matter of debate. Scholars have also examined Chaucer’s poetry in light of the Uprising of 1381, which is briefly but overtly referenced in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale.28 Related to political questions regarding the best way to organize and govern a society are ethical questions regarding the most virtuous way to live one’s life. The most important guide for virtuous living in Chaucer’s world was undoubtedly the Christian religion (see “Religious Chaucer” below). Also important were traditions of ethics derived from Greco-​Roman philosophy, which could be viewed as both affirming and contesting Christian doctrine. Scholars have identified Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (early sixth century CE) and medieval reception of Aristotle as particularly important to ethical examinations in Chaucer’s poetry, examinations which often centre on questions regarding fortune and erotic attachments.29 In these essays, Fiona Somerset and Candace Barrington explore the related terms of “consent/​assent” and “entente,” Somerset examining how agreements are formed within medieval legal and philosophical contexts, and Barrington exploring 26 On Chaucer and Boethius, see Minnis, Chaucer’s Boece; and Grady, “The Boethian Reader.” On Chaucer and scholastic tradition, see Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions. On Chaucer and late medieval reception of Aristotle more broadly, see Karnes, “Wonder, Marvels, and Metaphor”; and Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, 96–​106, 149–​70.

27 See Astell, Political Allegory, 94–​116; Barr, Socioliterary Practice, 80–​105; Bowers, Chaucer and Langland, 157–​82; Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature, 129–​78; Green, Poets and Princepleasers; Staley, Languages of Power, 1–​74, 265–​338; Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, Wallace, Chaucerian Polity.

28 See Barr, Socioliterary Practice, 106–​27; Blamires, “Chaucer the Reactionary”; and Justice, Writing and Rebellion, 193–​254. 29 See Miller, Philosophical Chaucer; Mitchell, Ethics and Eventfulness, 27–​46; Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative, 79–​140; and Rosenfeld, Ethics and Enjoyment, 135–​70.

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how intentionality functioned differently in secular and ecclesiastical legal systems. Holly A. Crocker engages ethical thought through a rigorous reappraisal of the meaning of “virtue,” and R. D. Perry reads problems of political and literary authority through the philosophical work of Hannah Arendt. Post-​historicism and Chaucer

A prominent methodology in Chaucer scholarship from the late 1980s onward was to locate his literary output within historical contexts.30 This approach sometimes emphasizes the alterity or other-​ness of medieval cultures as opposed to modern ones and the consequent need to understand Chaucer’s poetry in medieval, rather than modern-​day terms. In providing a more nuanced account of medieval cultures, these studies also disrupt progressive models of history that cast the Middle Ages as a simplistic or backward precursor to modernity. While interest in historical contexts has not waned, scholars are also turning to alternative or additional methodologies, including aesthetic, formalist and psychoanalytic approaches.31 Some scholars are also experimenting with approaching Chaucer and his era in terms of historical continuity and anachronism as opposed to alterity and difference; here theorizations of nonlinear temporality in queer studies have drawn particular interest.32 The discussion of craft, for example, in Bruce Holsinger’s essay moves between conceptions of literary production from Chaucer’s period to those discussed by contemporary authors today. Rick Godden and Cord Whitaker, in their discussions of disability and race respectively, both look to modern formulations of these terms and examine how they intersect with medieval discourses of the same. In doing so, these essays open their terms and texts to new analysis that also comments on how we see the historical and theoretical apparatus of literary study. Racial and Religious Difference and Chaucer

Chaucer’s England formed part of late medieval Latin Christendom, which defined itself in contrast to a range of other religious cultures, including Greco-​Roman pagan antiquity, Jews, and Muslims, as well as practitioners of Christianity who did not conform to the Latin Church, including the Greek Church centred in Constantinople and heretics, a term used to designate those adopting what were perceived to be incorrect Christian practices. The most notable heresy in Chaucer’s England was Lollardy. Scholars have examined how Chaucer represents these religious cultures, focusing in particular on Judaism in the Prioress’s Tale; Islamic cultures in the Man of Law’s Tale; Lollardy in 30 In addition to the sources cited in notes 14 and 15, see Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History; and Strohm, Social Chaucer.

31 For psychoanalytic approaches to Chaucer, see Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love; and Scala, Desire in the Canterbury Tales; for a formalist approach, see Johnson, Practicing Literary Theory, 55–​164. 32 See Dinshaw, “Pale Faces.”

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14 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters the endlink to the Man of Law’s Tale; and classical antiquity in Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, and the Knight’s Tale.33 Work on the Man of Law’s Tale in particular has drawn from postcolonial theory. An important question regarding late medieval religious identities is the degree to which they were believed to encompass somatic features, that is, features of the physical body. For example, in Chaucer’s world, were Jews or Muslims in the Middle Ages perceived to be physically different from their Christian counterparts? Chaucer scholars who answer this question affirmatively argue that we can usefully approach medieval religious difference as racial difference and draw from the Critical Race Theory field of critical race studies to address religious difference in Chaucer. Scholars interested in race and Chaucer also focus on representations of the body, constructions of whiteness, and references to colour more broadly in Chaucer’s works.34 Tara Williams understands the marvellous as a response to difference, including religious difference, while Sarah Salih explores how the religious and racial difference represented by Judaism shapes Chaucer’s concept of virginity, especially in the Prioress’s Tale. Cord J.  Whitaker reads blackness in the Miller’s Tale through a variety of medieval discourses, offering a new approach to race and colour in Chaucer’s work. Reception Studies and Chaucer

Scholars are increasingly interested in the circulation, interpretation, and adaptation of Chaucer’s texts beyond fourteenth-​century England. Such studies range from interest in the construction of Chaucer’s corpus via print collections and editions to focus on present-​day adaptations of Chaucer’s works or life in print, television, film, and online media.35 This latter interest falls into the category of medievalism studies, the term “medievalism” designating artistic and cultural re-​imaginings of the Middle Ages in postmedieval eras. One branch of Chaucer reception studies, Global Chaucers, focuses on adaptations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in post-​1945, non-​Anglophone contexts. Global Chaucers seeks to disrupt the national, linguistic, and racial hierarchies that are 33 On Jews and Judaism in Chaucer, see Heng, “The Invention of Race,” 84–90; Kruger, “The Bodies of Jews”; and Lampert, Gender and Jewish Difference, 58–​100. On Islam in Chaucer, see Heng, Empire of Magic, 181–​238; Ingham, “Contrapuntal Histories”; and Schibanoff, “Worlds Apart.” On Lollardy in Chaucer, see Cole, Literacy and Heresy, 75–​100; and Minnis, Fallible Authors. On Chaucer and classical antiquity, see Federico, New Troy, 65–​98; Grady, Representing Righteous Heathens, 103–​9; and Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity. 34 See Dinshaw, “Pale Faces,” and Whitaker, Black Metaphors.

35 On the circulation and printing of Chaucer’s works, see Cook, The Poets and the Antiquaries; Dane, Out of Sorts, 105–​17; Horobin, The Language of the Chaucer Tradition, 77–​95; and Kuskin, Symbolic Caxton, 117–​90. On the reception of Chaucer among scholars, see Trigg, Congenial Souls; and Prendergast, Chaucer’s Dead Body. On Chaucer’s reception in the United States, see Barrington, American Chaucers. On recent popular adaptations of Chaucer, see the essays in Chaucer on Screen; and Forni, Chaucer’s Afterlife.

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a legacy of Chaucer studies.36 In this volume, Candace Barrington, Cord Whitaker, and Helen Barr use the reception of Chaucer to investigate how our understanding of his work has shifted from earlier readings. Whitaker opens his discussion of blak as a term with brief consideration of reception of Chaucer by Black communities around the globe; Barrington begins with how Chaucer’s life was depicted by his first biographer and early printers of his work; Barr demonstrates how modern editorial attempts to cleanse Chaucerian texts of vulgar language divest those texts of their poetic force. These represent multiple modes of reception, from medieval to modern, but all demonstrate the value of seeing Chaucer’s works within networks of reception and audience. Religion and Chaucer

Although many of Chaucer’s works strike modern-​day readers as secular, Chaucer lived and wrote in a Christian culture. One of the most influential Chaucer scholars of the twentieth century, D. W. Robertson Jr., championed an “exegetical” approach to Chaucer, in which all of Chaucer’s works were alleged to espouse Christian values if understood correctly, that is, within a medieval Christian cultural context.37 Beginning in the 1970s, exegetical interpretation of Chaucer went out of fashion, with scholars arguing that Chaucer’s works could raise ideas that were not strictly in line with Christian doctrine and that medieval Christianity itself was a conceptually complex belief system that could be practised and interpreted in multiple ways. Scholars focusing on Christianity in Chaucer’s works consequently adopt various approaches, including identification of a group of religious tales within the Canterbury Tales;38 examination of Chaucer’s engagement with a particular genre of religious narrative, such as hagiography or saints’ lives;39 Chaucer’s use (or avoidance) of theological concepts or ideologies;40 and examination of his engagement with notions of religious orthodoxy and heterodoxy (see the discussion of heresy and Lollardy under “Racial and Religious Difference and Chaucer”). In this volume, Glenn D.  Burger examines Chaucerian pity as both a specifically Christian and a more broadly universalized emotion; Sarah Salih explores Chaucerian virginity as a state of spiritual perfection that inevitably invites violence; and Catherine Sanok demonstrates how secular theories of time in Chaucer intersect with their Christian counterparts, liturgical time and the atemporality of the divine. Sources for Chaucer

As noted in our biography of the poet, Chaucer drew inspiration from an extensive literary archive, including classical works drawn from Roman antiquity (Ovid, Vergil, 36 See the Global Chaucers website: https://​globalchaucers.wordpress.com. 37 D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer.

38 See Chaucer’s Religious Tales.

39 See Sanok, “Reading Hagiographically” and Her Life Historical, 42–​48.

40 See Aers, Chaucer; Besserman, Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics.

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16 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters Statius, etc.), and continental French and Italian sources, especially Guillaume de Lorris’s and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose and works by Italian poets Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) and Giovanni Boccaccio.41 Which sources Chaucer drew upon and how he engaged with them is an ongoing interest among Chaucer scholars. Source studies today are less concerned with tracking a Chaucerian reference to a particular source than with locating Chaucer’s compositional practices within the rich intertextuality of late medieval literature, focusing, for example, on his adoption of first-​person narrative practices from French dits (narrative poems addressing love) or his eclectic portrayal of the classical deity Apollo as a means to contemplate late medieval vernacular poetics.42 In this volume, Fiona Somerset, Marion Turner, and Ruth Evans explore Chaucer’s complex inheritances, from how Petrarch’s notions of consent inform the Canticus Troili, to how Giotto’s painting provides a model of vision in the House of Fame, to how the philosophical and medieval discourses on memory shaped Chaucer’s depictions of memory through his works.

How to Use This Book

There are several approaches readers might take to this volume. The parts may, of course, be read in sequence, along with their response essays. This would give the reader a broad range of terms, theoretical approaches, and Chaucerian texts to work within. Alternatively, readers might select a single term of interest, or choose essays by the works of Chaucer’s they address. Readers might be interested in reading across Chaucer’s corpus, or focusing on a smaller section of it. Alternatively, attention might gather around a single part, using the concluding, synthesizing essay as a model for generating different and unique pairings of terms and approaches. As this is a collection intended for students as well as scholars, engagement with the contents will necessarily take different forms. For Students

Student readers of these essays, coming to Chaucer for perhaps the first time, will first and foremost be interested in the arguments each term raises for various parts of Chaucer’s works. The main essays (those which focus on an individual term) offer historical information about how a given word was used in Chaucer’s period, and how he 41 On Chaucer and Roman poets, see Battles, The Medieval Tradition, 85–​144; Fyler, Chaucer and Ovid; Calabrese, Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love; and Desmond, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath; Schwebel, “The Legend of Thebes”; Wetherbee, Chaucer and the Poets. On Chaucer and the French Tradition, including the Romance of the Rose, the classic study is Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition. See also Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy and Miller, Philosophical Chaucer. On Chaucer and the Italian Tradition, see Edmondson, The Neighboring Text; Ginsberg, Chaucer’s Italian Tradition; Rossiter, Chaucer and Petrarch; Schwebel, “The Legend of Thebes”; and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. 42 Spearing, Medieval Autographies, 33–​97; and Fumo, The Legacy of Apollo.

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in particular approaches the word within his writing. This can be valuable information for understanding how an idea or term might differ from its modern usage, and how terms might carry multiple valences for Chaucer and his readers. In addition, students should also look to these essays as models for how to engage critically with the language of a text; each scholar has begun not with a large question about the text or texts under consideration, but rather with a word that would lead to different kinds of theoretical, historical, or textual discourses. Beginning with close reading as a method for discovering ideas is a critical part of developing arguments about texts, and the essays in this volume demonstrate this process for their readers. While all of the essays include engagement with the work of other scholars, and several discuss historical documents and texts, student readers will also find these skills modelled more directly in the essays at the end of each part. Here, the authors are working from the insights found in the main essays and show various ways these ideas might be combined to form new arguments. They model how to take an essay focused on one thing and synthesize it with an idea, approach, or context from another. Finally, the essays in this volume demonstrate that academic writing need not be “dry” or adopt a set format or tone. By offering an array of lively academic writing styles, ranging from the relatively formal to the relatively informal, this collection encourages readers to reflect on what style of writing appeals to them and to experiment with style in their own writing. For Instructors

There are a number of ways instructors might include these essays in a syllabus. The volume has been structured to make the essays as easy as possible to insert into student reading, be the class dedicated exclusively to Chaucer’s works or one with a larger purview. As above, essays can be discussed for their content, as models for close reading (in the case of the main essays), or for the possibilities that come from working with the intersection of ideas and approaches (in the case of the synthesizing essays). To help with classroom use, we have included for each essay a list of the main readings contained therein, so instructors can easily pair essays with the primary reading schedule for the course. In the appendix can also be found a list of which essays attend to which of Chaucer’s works, for the same purpose. This is not to say that essays need be tied to the texts they focus on, but many instructors and students might find it beneficial to read, say, essays that deal with the Knight’s Tale along with the reading of the tale itself. The collection is also intended to inspire student writing, building from the ideas and methodologies modelled by the essays. Terms might be applied to works not discussed in a given essay, essays might be combined across parts, or connected in ways not addressed directly in each part. We have also included as an appendix a beginning list of additional terms students might want to try out, building readings of their own in the style of the essays in the collection.

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18 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters For Scholars Quite apart from the work that these essays do individually and the readings they offer, scholars might look to this volume as an argument for how essential attention to Chaucer’s language is as a readerly methodology. Rather than merely an element in a larger schema, a linguistic approach to Chaucer’s texts offers a different sense of scope. As Christopher Cannon argues in the forward, the way Chaucer manages his word choices across texts and throughout his writing career is both intricate and deliberate. It is also what sets him apart from his contemporaries in poetry and prose. As the essays in the volume demonstrate, we can see his attention to distinctive language-​use in words and terms that appear often throughout his work, but also in terms that are more limited in use. Consideration of both is valuable for uncovering linguistic structures and opportunities for his larger corpus, and can produce large claims from seemingly small details. As mentioned above, at the end of the volume are a series of tools intended to assist with navigating the essays in the collection. Included are brief descriptions of Chaucer’s primary works, along with a list of which works appear in which essays. There is also included a list of additional terms not addressed by the essays presented here, but which would no doubt yield fruitful readings.

Bibliography Primary Sources Chaucer Life-​Records. Edited by Martin M.  Crow and Clair C.  Olson. Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1966.

Secondary Sources

Aers, David. Chaucer. Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986. Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England. Edited by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Astell, Ann W.  Political Allegory in Late-​ Medieval England. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Bahr, Arthur. Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Barr, Helen. Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2002. Barrington, Candace. American Chaucers. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Battles, Dominique. The Medieval Tradition of Thebes: History and Narrative in the OF Roman de Thèbes, Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Lydgate. New York: Routledge, 2004. Bertolet, Craig. “Chaucer’s Envoys and the Poet Diplomat.” Chaucer Review 33 (1998): 66–​89. Besserman, Laurence. Chaucer’s Biblical Poetics. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998. Blamires, Alcuin. “Chaucer the Reactionary:  Ideology and the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales.” Review of English Studies 51 (2000): 523–​39.

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Bowers, John M. Chaucer and Langland: The Antagonistic Tradition. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007. Burger, Glenn. Chaucer’s Queer Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. ———. Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Burnley, David. A Guide to Chaucer’s Language. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Butterfield, Ardis. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Bychowski, M. W. “Trans Textuality: Dysphoria in the Depths of Medieval Skin.” postmedieval 9 (2018): 318–​33. Calabrese, Michael A.  Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994. The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer. 2nd ed. Edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Cannon, Christopher. The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Chaganti, Seeta. Strange Footing: Poetic Form and Dance in the Late Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Chaucer: An Oxford Guide. Edited by Steve Ellis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches. Edited by Susanna Fein and David Raybin. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Chaucer and the Subversion of Form. Edited by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Chaucer on Screen: Absence, Presence, and Adapting the Canterbury Tales. Edited by Kathleen Koyne Kelly and Tison Pugh. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Chaucer’s Religious Tales. Edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson. Cambridge: Brewer, 1990. Cole, Andrew. Literacy and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Cook, Megan L. The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rose of Literary History, 1532–​1635. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. ———. “ ‘The Lytel Erthe That Here Is’: Environmental Thought in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 1–​30. Crocker, Holly A. The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Dane, Joseph A.  Out of Sorts: On Typography and Print Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Desmond, Marilynn. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. ———. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-​and Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999.

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20 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters ———. “Pale Faces: Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer’s Texts and Their Readers.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 19–​41. Edmondson, George. The Neighboring Text: Chaucer, Boccaccio, Henryson. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Federico, Sylvia. New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Forni, Kathleen. Chaucer’s Afterlife: Adaptations in Recent Popular Culture. Jefferson: McFarland, 2013. Fradenburg, L. O. Aranye. Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Fumo, Jamie. The Legacy of Apollo: Antiquity, Authority, and Chaucerian Poetics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. Fyler, John M. Chaucer and Ovid. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Giancarlo, Matthew. Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Ginsberg, Warren. Chaucer’s Italian Tradition. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002. Global Chaucers. https://​globalchaucers.wordpress.com. Grady, Frank. “The Boethian Reader of Troilus and Criseyde.” Chaucer Review 33 (1999): 230–​51. ———. Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Green, Richard Firth. Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Hayot, Eric. The Elements of Academic Style: Writing for the Humanities. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. ———. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Horobin, Simon. The Language of the Chaucer Tradition. Cambridge: Brewer, 2003. Ingham, Patricia Clare. “Contrapuntal Histories.” In Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern, edited by Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren, 47–​70. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Johnson, Eleanor. Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Justice, Steven. Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Karnes, Michelle. “Wonders, Marvels, and Metaphor in the Squire’s Tale.” ELH 82 (2015): 461–​90. Kordecki, Lesley. Ecofeminist Subjectivities: Chaucer’s Talking Birds. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Kruger, Steven. “The Bodies of Jews in the Middle Ages.” In The Idea of Medieval Literature: New Essays on Chaucer and Medieval Culture in Honor of Donald R. Howard, edited by James M. Dean and Christian Zacher, 307–​23. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1992.

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———. “Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 115–​39. Kuskin, William. Symbolic Caxton: Literary Culture and Print Capitalism. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008. Lampert, Lisa. Gender and Jewish Difference from Paul to Shakespeare. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Lavinsky, David. “Turned to Fables: Efficacy, Form, and Literary Making in ‘The Pardoner’s Tale.’ ” Chaucer Review 50 (2015): 442–​64. Lochrie, Karma. Heterosyncrasies: Female Sexuality When Normal Wasn’t. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Lynch, Kathryn. Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions. Cambridge: Brewer, 2000. Mann, Jill. Feminizing Chaucer. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002. McTaggart, Anne. Shame and Guilt in Chaucer. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form. Edited by Robert J.  Meyer-​Lee and Catherine Sanok. Cambridge: Brewer, 2018. Miller, Mark. Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Minnis, Alastair. Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity. Cambridge: Brewer, 1982. ———. Chaucer’s Boece and the Medieval Tradition of Boethius. Cambridge: Brewer, 1993. ———. Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Mitchell, J.  Allan. Ethics and Eventfulness in Middle English Literature. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. ———. Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004. Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. A New Companion to Chaucer. Edited by Peter Brown. Hoboken: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2019. New Feminist Approaches to Chaucer. Edited by Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu. Special Issue, Chaucer Review 54.3 (2019). Nowlin, Steele. Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales. Edited by Candace Barrington, Brantley L.  Bryant, Richard H.  Godden, Daniel T.  Kline, and Myra Seaman. https://​ opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Prendergast, Thomas A. Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pugh, Tison. Queering Medieval Genres. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Robertson, D. W., Jr. A Preface to Chaucer. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1962. Robertson, Elizabeth. “Public Bodies and Psychic Domains:  Rape, Consent, and Female Subjectivity in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.” In Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M.  Rose, 281–​310. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Robertson, Kellie. Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

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22 Stephanie L. Batkie, Matthew W. Irvin, and Lynn Shutters Rosenfeld, Jessica. Ethics and Enjoyment in Late Medieval Poetry: Love after Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Rossiter, William T. Chaucer and Petrarch. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010. Rudd, Gillian. “Being Green in Late Medieval English Literature.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 27–​39. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Sanok, Catherine. Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. ———. “Reading Hagiographically: The Legend of Good Women and Its Feminine Audience.” Exemplaria 13 (2001): 323–​54. Scala, Elizabeth. Desire in the Canterbury Tales. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2015. Scase, Wendy. Literature and Complaint in England, 1272–​1553. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2007. Schibanoff, Susan. “Worlds Apart: Orientalism, Antifeminism, and Heresy in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.” Exemplaria 8 (1996): 59–​96. Schrock, Chad D.  Consolation in Medieval Narrative: Augustinian Authority and Open Form. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Schwebel, Leah. “The Legend of Thebes and Literary Patricide in Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Statius.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 139–​68. Seal, Samantha Katz, and Nicole Sidhu. “Introduction.” In New Feminist Approaches to Chaucer, edited by Samantha Katz Seal and Nicole Sidhu. Special Issue, Chaucer Review 54 (2019): 224–​29. Spearing, A.  C. Medieval Autographies: The “I” of the Text. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012. Staley, Lynn. Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Stanbury, Sarah. “EcoChaucer:  Green Ethics and Medieval Nature.” Chaucer Review 39 (2004): 1–​16. Strohm, Paul. “The Social and Literary Scene in England.” In The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd ed., edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 1–​19. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. Social Chaucer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Sturges, Robert S.  Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Trigg, Stephanie. Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Turner, Marion. Chaucer: A European Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. ———. Chaucerian Conflict:  Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-​Century London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Van Dyke, Carolyn, ed. Rethinking Chaucerian Beasts. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wetherbee, Winthrop. Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on Troilus and Criseyde. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984. Whitaker, Cord J. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-​Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019.

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Stephanie L. Batkie is an Associate Teaching Professor at the University of the South. Her work focuses on the late medieval period, and she has published on literature written in Middle English, Medieval Latin, and Anglo-​Norman. Her current projects include a translation and edition of John Gower’s Vox Clamantis, undertaken with Matthew Irvin, as well as a monograph on sound, attention, and political discourse in the Anglo-​Latin poetry of medieval England. At the University of the South, she is also the Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, and director of the Sewanee Writing Center.

Matthew W. Irvin is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Sewanee Medieval Colloquium at the University of the South. He is the author of The Poetic Voices of John Gower: Politics and Personae in the Confessio Amantis (2014), as well as articles and book chapters on Gower, Chaucer, and The Prologue and Tale of Beryn. He and Stephanie Batkie are collaborating on a new edition and translation of Gower’s Vox Clamantis for TEAMS. Currently, he is working on a book on pity in late-​fourteenth-​century English and Anglo-​Latin literature.

Lynn Shutters is Assistant Professor of English at Colorado State University. Her research interests include feminist approaches to medieval literature, late medieval narratives of marital affection, and the medieval reception of classical antiquity. Her work on Chaucer includes multiple articles published in The Chaucer Review. She has edited (with Betsy McCormick and Leah Schwebel) a special issue of The Chaucer Review titled Looking Forward, Looking Back: The Legend of Good Women (2017), as well as Teaching Medieval and Early Modern Cross-​Cultural Encounters (with Karina F.  Attar; Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). In addition to medieval literature and cultures, she is also interested in medievalism, particularly in popular romance, and is writing an article on erotic desire, female agency, and consent in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and Fifty Shades of Grey.

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CONSENT/​ASSENT FIONA SOMERSET General Prologue Knight’s Tale Man of Law’s Tale Clerk’s Tale Parson’s Tale Physician’s Tale Troilus and Criseyde

Consent is an extraordinarily flexible and powerful concept, in Chaucer’s day and

in our own. In Chaucer’s usage, as in ours, consent is the linchpin at the centre of legal, moral, and philosophical theories about how agreements are made and enforced. Assent, consent’s more overtly affirmative cousin, often overlaps in meaning; but where there is a distinction, “assent” is used to describe how agreements are enacted or otherwise invoked.1 For the purposes of this essay I will treat them as near-​synonyms, since that is how Chaucer uses them. One reason consent is so pervasive in medieval writings is that it is used to explain how decisions are made (or assumed to have been made) on so many levels, and frequently jumps scales. Consent may be used to describe how the faculties of the soul work together to produce a decision within the self, as for example when the will consents to the reason. Between persons, consent ratifies and enforces contracts such as marriage and apprenticeship. Across the body politic of the realm as a whole, with the ruler as its head, consent to the ruler is often assumed, but sometimes in jeopardy. But of course, consent between a person’s faculties can also be an allegory for persons negotiating a contract, and vice versa, and either can be a metaphor for any larger interaction between persons within a social body.2 Consent pervasively jumps scales in this way in part because despite its centrality in moral psychology, law, and  political theory, it functions very poorly as a means for negotiating agreements

1 As the Oxford English Dictionary explains, “assent” designates concurrence or compliance (whether mental, verbal, or enacted through some document or symbolic object), while “consent” might describe many of the same phenomena, but also includes instances where conformity of will is assumed on the grounds of silence or acquiescence. See OED s.v. “assent, n. and v.” and “consent, n. and v.”

2 The study of consent thrives on disciplinary interchange: research on philosophy of mind and moral psychology, law and in particular marriage and other contracts, and political theory, can be helpful in determining what is at stake in literary examples. For further reading see articles by Hoffmann, “Intellectualism” and Porter, “Action,” Tierney, Religion, and Clarke, Interdict.

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and disagreements. When we attempt to describe how persons arrive at decisions and apportion culpability for them in terms of consent, our metaphors collapse. Consider, for example, this conventional explanation for sin from Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, in which an individual’s faculties are represented by Adam and Eve: There may ye seen that deedly synne hath, first, suggestion of the feend, as sheweth heere by the naddre; and afterward, the delit of the flessh, as sheweth heere by Eve; and after that, the consentynge of resoun, as sheweth heere by Adam. /​For trust wel, though so were that the feend tempted Eve—​that is to seyn, the flessh—​and the flessh hadde delit in the beautee of the fruyt defended, yet certes, til that resoun—​that is to seyn, Adam—​consented to the etynge of the fruyt, yet stood he in th’estaat of innocence. (10.331–​32)

Adam was innocent until he consented to the eating of the fruit. Yet how was this an informed decision, if it was made without knowledge of good and evil? And if Adam stands for the reason, then how can he also stand for the whole person, such that the person is guilty if he eats and not if he does not? Is Eve, who has already eaten the fruit, not part of the person too? If Adam does not stand for the whole person, then how can some parts of the person be progressively guilty while others are not? Is there any room for women’s consent in this story? Or do some people get to make choices, while others do not? Worries about representation and culpability apply to persons within a larger social body, to relationships between persons, as well as to faculties within a person, and they cannot be explained away by describing one in terms of the other. Is any of us to blame if we consent on the basis of false information, or under duress, or to someone who has power over us? Are we held to the consequences of any such consent?3 Chaucer is preoccupied with these and similar questions throughout his oeuvre, but they ramify in especially productive ways in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. As Jill Mann has shown with reference to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer puts pressure on a range of keywords across the stories that he revised or composed to form parts of this larger work.4 He deploys them within and outside stock expressions, in a variety of contrasting settings, and in different voices and genres. That consent/​assent will be one of his keywords becomes obvious when he puts an obviously problematic example of consent at the centre of the tale-​telling agreement that launches the collection. Here the would-​be Host is preparing his audience for his proposal of the tale-​telling competition: “And if yow liketh alle by oon assent For to stonden at my juggement, And for to werken as I shal yow seye, Tomorwe, whan ye riden by the weye, Now, by my fader soule that is deed,

3 On various ways in which consent can be compromised in practice, see also Ahmed, Willful Subjects, especially 53–​56.

4 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, xxv–​xlix. A new glossarial concordance to the works of Chaucer and Gower makes it much easier to study how either poet puts pressure on particular words: see Glossarial Concordance to Middle English.

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But ye be myrie, I wol yeve yow myn heed! Hoold up youre hondes, withouten moore speche.” Oure conseil was nat longe for to seche. Us thoughte it was noght worth to make it wys, And graunted hym withouten moore avys, And bad him seye his voirdit as hym leste. (1.777–​87)

The Host consults the pilgrims about their preferences and in the process of being consulted as a group they become a corporate body. What is more, they are bound to the unforeseen consequences of their collective decision. The language of pleasure and preference (“if yow liketh,” “as hym leste”) is undercut by legal discourse (“assent,” “stonden at […] juggement,” “avys,” “voirdit”) and by the Host’s weighty (if seemingly joking) oaths by his father’s soul and his own head. The narrative structure of this moment mimics that by which tyrants operate: the Host asks the pilgrims to agree unanimously, to do as he says without any further discussion. He promises them happiness in return, but without placing any limits on his own power. It is a sinister moment, despite the pleasure-​seeking holiday atmosphere that surrounds it.5 It is odd that the pilgrims agree so readily and “withouten moore avys,” without any further consideration, to such a stringent proposal, and without knowing more about what it may entail. What may the Host ask of the pilgrims? The explanation given, “us thoughte it was noght worth to make it wys,” seems imprudent in the extreme. We will see counterexamples in the tales themselves where “avys,” and being “wys,” are high-​ stakes goals. Here, however, the pilgrims’ instincts may be correct. There are moments, as the Tales continue, where this initial promise is recalled: the Knight, Man of Law, and Clerk, all law-​abiding and in positions of relative power, are ostentatiously observant of its terms in the prologues or introductions that precede their tales. The Man of Law is especially explicit in response to the Host’s belaboured reminder, and he frames his compliance in legal terms: [“]Acquiteth yow now of youre biheeste; Thanne have ye do youre devoir atte leeste.” “Hooste,” quod he, “depardieux, ich assente; To breke forward is nat myn entente. Biheste is dette, and I wole holde fayn Al my biheste, I kan no bettre sayn. For swich lawe as a man yeveth another wight, He sholde hymselven usen it, by right[.”] (2.37–​44)

Notice how Chaucer rhymes “assent” with “entente” here; he frequently deploys this rhyming pair, and as when he clusters “avys” and “wys” near “assent” or “consent,” he 5 David Wallace notices the Host’s “despotic proclivities” (65) in a closely attentive analysis of this scene; Chaucerian Polity, 65–​72. Nancy Bradbury compares it with other joyful, voluntary scenes of oathtaking in Middle English in “Erosion of Oath-​Based Relationships.” See also Scala, “General Prologue.”

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does so to put pressure on what we think these terms mean when they appear together. Overtly affirming “assent” does not reveal “entente” in nearly as simple a way as we might imagine, any more than “avys,” taking time to consider, leads us to make “wys” decisions. We do not always follow through on what we have agreed to do, nor should we if there are unintended consequences; and we do not always reason our way to the best decision, if there is a good decision to be had. Like the Knight, the Man of Law obeys on principle, rather than out of fear of punishment. The pilgrims’ incaution in assenting so readily to the Host might profitably be compared with the abandon with which we in the digital age sign user agreements without reading them, or for that matter provide our signed consent in advance to medical treatment before an appointment with a new doctor, or before a surgery where we will be unconscious. However, we might agree that the stakes of the tale-​telling game are relatively low, in that the Host has no real power to force compliance with his will. Even if the Host may want to make inordinate demands, he cannot punish the pilgrims for disobeying him. Even where he later threatens violence against the Pardoner, he is stopped from acting as the Knight prevents their angry confrontation from escalating (6.960–​68). The stakes are not always this low within the tales themselves. The Clerk’s Tale, for example, deploys “avys,” “wys,” and “entente” near “consent” and “assent” to rather more dreadful ends.6 In contrast with his sources Chaucer mentions “assent” eight times, once in the Prologue as the Clerk recalls his consent to the Host’s tale-​telling game, five times in the opening scene where Walter’s subjects attempt to give their capricious young ruler wise advice, once in the scene where he proposes marriage to Griselda, and once as he later enforces the stringent agreement he has imposed on her.7 The Clerk refers to “consent” twice, once in describing Griselda’s acquiescence to Walter’s cruel tests and once as Walter announces the pope’s consent to his divorce, recorded in a forged papal bull.8 Walter’s subjects think that they have achieved their goal by the end of the opening scene. But their consent is not properly informed: they do not know that Walter already had his own plan for his marriage.9 And the agreement he exacts from them in return for promising to marry the woman of his choice forbids them from advising him further throughout the course of the tale, even as he pretends to Griselda that they are pressuring him in order to justify his cruel decisions. Griselda, for her part, promises an extraordinary level of compliance, even more than Walter asks, but it should be noted that she has little choice: her father has already agreed, and with the wedding party standing by, Walter offers her only the choice to assent to his proposal, 6 I am writing at length on consent in the Clerk’s Tale in a book in progress, so I will give only an introductory summary here. See also Grudin, “Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’ as Political Paradox,” Wallace, “Whan She Translated Was,” Georgianna, “Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent.” See also Nakley, “Authority (Familial, Political, Written) in the Clerk’s Tale.” 7 See 4.11, 88, 129, 150, 174, 176, 350. 8 See 4.537, 803.

9 For Walter’s earlier plans to marry Griselda, see 4.232–​45.

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or else to consider it further first (“yow avyse,” 4.350).10 Like the Canterbury pilgrims of the General Prologue in their ready agreement to the Host’s proposal, Griselda agrees to obey even beyond the limits the Clerk set for consent in his prologue, “as fer as resoun axeth” (4.25). Griselda’s extraordinary compliance is the subject of close scrutiny as the Clerk’s Tale unfolds, but Walter’s people too stick to their agreement, even if the shape of the plot encourages us to think that Griselda is the only one being tested. Walter’s tests could not succeed unless the whole realm functioned as an extension of his unbridled will. Since Walter’s will compels everyone else as well, his inability to swerve from his purpose once he has embarked upon it demonstrates for us another problem with consent, and one that cannot be solved by jumping scales to restage the problem within the self, as in the Clerk’s concluding moves where he proposes but then retreats from the interpretation that the tale is an allegory of the relationship of the individual will to God (4.1143–​62, 1163–​76). It is a bad idea to keep promises with unintended consequences, even to oneself. Where consent to a course of action leads to sin or suffering, anyone has an obligation to prevent or resist that action as far as is in their power, even if they had previously agreed to it. No ruler should compel obedience to commands that are wrong or unreasonable. These are medieval convictions, as well as ones that have been articulated in more recent moral and political theory.11 The Clerk’s Tale prompts us to articulate these convictions, even as it presents a purportedly “blisful ende” to the story it tells (4.1121). Chaucer’s contemporary John Wyclif summed them up in a verse that he and his followers frequently cited and discussed: Consentit cooperans, defendens, consilium dans Ac auctorisans, non iuuans, non reprehendens.

To paraphrase, not only participating directly in a sin, but also defending it, advising it, authorizing it, not helping to prevent it, and failing to speak up against it are all forms of consent to the sin of another.12 The idea that even a ruler’s subjects who have no power to resist his commands are somehow implicated in his sin creates many difficulties, but Wyclif did not invent it: similar verses are cited in canon law commentary, and the final category listed here, consent through silence, is one that medieval law received from Roman law. Nor have these difficulties evaporated: they remain central to our most basic

10 For Griselda’s agreement, see 4.359–​64; for her father’s previous consent, see 4.319–​22.

11 As well as Tierney, Religion, and Clarke, Interdict, see Buc, L’ambiguite du Livre, and Baldwin, Masters, Princes, and Merchants. Fowler, “Civil Death and the Maiden,” looks forward toward later developments. For more recent articulations see n13.

12 On versions of this verse and their importance for Wyclif and his followers, see Somerset, “Before and After Wyclif.”

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understanding of the ways in which we are responsible for one another’s actions, as well as our own.13 In both the Canterbury pilgrimage frame tale and the Clerk’s Tale, consent is overt and explicitly stated and agreed. However, public consent to the wrongdoing of a ruler is not always this overt. It is often assumed, even where it has not been affirmed, except where a violent uprising indicates that it has been withdrawn. For example, Chaucer’s rapid, summary resolution to the Physician’s Tale emphasizes the consent of Apius’s followers to their master’s sin as it explains what seems an uneven distribution of justice. And whan the juge [Apius] it saugh, as seith the storie, He bad to take hym [Virginius] and anhange hym faste; But right anon a thousand peple in thraste, To save the knyght, for routhe and for pitee, For knowen was the false iniquitee. The peple anon had suspect in this thyng, By manere of the cherles chalangyng, That it was by the assent of Apius; They wisten wel that he was lecherus. For which unto this Apius they gon And caste hym in a prisoun right anon, Ther as he slow hymself; and Claudius, That servant was unto this Apius, Was demed for to hange upon a tree, But that Virginius, of his pitee, So preyde for hym that he was exiled; And elles, certes, he had been bigyled. The remenant were anhanged, moore and lesse, That were consentant of this cursednesse. (6.258–​76)

A thousand people suddenly thrust in to save Virginius: notice the violent, penetrative metaphor. They are motivated, it seems, by compassion and immediately suspect that the plot took place “by the assent of Apius,” so they throw Apius in prison. They condemn Claudius to death, but Virginius pleads for clemency, again out of “pitee,” and the people seem certain that Claudius had been beguiled, so he is merely banished. However, the “remenant […] moore and lesse,” the rest of those who “were consentant” regardless of their social status, are hanged. Jean de Meun, in one of Chaucer’s sources, specifies that those hanged are the witnesses (“qui tesmoing de sa cause furent”)14 but Chaucer is vaguer about how these accomplices are discovered and their guilt determined. The rapid judgment here is partly the consequence of Chaucer’s compression of the narrative, which resembles Jean de Meun’s quick précis but contrasts sharply with Livy’s patient detailing across 13 This basic problem of political theory has created a vast archive of writings on the obligation to resist power. See for example Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, and Foucault, Government of Self and Others. 14 Bleeth, “The Physician’s Tale,” 551, line 5658.

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several chapters of how Virginius gains sympathy and builds alliances to bring about long-​standing legal reform. But regardless of whether Chaucer knows Livy’s version as well as Jean’s, I think he is also trying to show us something about swift and summary justice, and about its disproportion. We were told earlier that Claudius overtly consented to Apius’s plot, rather than being beguiled as suggested here (cf. 6.139–​48). The “remenant” who are so harshly punished seem to have been far less directly involved, even if they might be seen as culpable for their failure to resist Apius as forcefully as the thousand people who thrust in. But it is hard to be sure, for this is the first in the tale we have heard of them. It is hard to feel convinced that the thousand people thrusting in can be so certain of the intentions and information available to each of the persons who was party to the deed—​especially when the confidently moralizing conclusion that follows the tale makes provision for cases where only God and the sinner know of a sin (6.277–​86). As in the Clerk’s Tale, what seems a confident resolution brings incongruities to light that encourage resistant reading.15 The people know well that Apius is “lecherus” (6.266); this is one basis for their judgment. His inability to govern himself contrasts with Virginia’s equally renowned continence, and demonstrates his unfitness for ruling others. The lengthy digression on governance that Chaucer inserts near the beginning of the tale is not as irrelevant as it might appear, even if it does pose itself as advice to the governess Virginia does not need (6.72–​104). Here Chaucer presents the peril of guilt through consent to another’s sin, as much as one’s own, from the perspective of a ruler rather than a subject: Now kepeth wel, for if ye wole, ye kan. Looke wel that ye unto no vice assente, Lest ye be dampned for youre wikke entente; For whoso dooth, a traitour is, certeyn. (6.86–​89)

“If ye wole, ye kan”:  the sovereign will has the capacity to prevent sin. Rulers are responsible for curbing the vice of their subjects, as well as their own vice. Any assent to vice is a betrayal, whether of oneself or of another, and may merit damnation. Yet notably, there is no mention of consent in the long exchange between Virginius and Virginia that Chaucer adds in the middle of the story. Virginius never asks permission for his daughter’s murder, even while Chaucer’s version is unique in giving her an opportunity to respond to what is presented to her as a necessity. In other versions, she is dead before she knows it. As in this added scene between Virginius and Virginia, Chaucer frequently highlights how women’s choices are occluded or overridden. Only rarely do his characters or tale tellers ask for a woman’s consent—​and never for their consent to sexual activity, despite the many instances in which Chaucer makes sexual consent into a problem. The only tale in the Canterbury Tales that overtly discusses sexual consent is the Parson’s Tale, as 15 On resistant reading of Chaucer’s women, in the “Physician’s Tale” and more generally, see Middleton, “ ‘Physician’s Tale’ and Love’s Martyrs.”

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part of a hypothetical examination of a sexual encounter in which either party, or both, should be questioned to determine the degree of their culpability: The sixte circumstaunce is why that a man synneth, as by which temptacioun, and if hymself procure thilke temptacioun, or by the excitynge of oother folk; or if he synne with a womman by force, or by hire owene assent; /​ or if the womman, maugree hir hed, hath been afforced, or noon. This shal she telle: for coveitise, or for poverte, and if it was hire procurynge, or noon; and swiche manere harneys. (10.973–​74)

This discussion seems to have a fairly fine-​grained sense of the ways in which women’s willingness to engage in sexual activity can be complicated by coercion of various kinds: a man might have sex with a woman at his own instigation, or at the behest of others; and by force, with her consent, or against her will despite whatever she might have been able to do to prevent it, whether or not force was required to overcome her resistance. The woman, for her part, might have created the opportunity for the sexual encounter—​or not—​and might be motivated, or indeed compelled, by whatever compensation she might receive. None of this language appears in tales where sexual activity under constraint is central to the plot, but arguably it haunts them nonetheless. The exception that proves the rule is the opening of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, where “maugree hir heed” describes what is explicitly labelled as a rape scene (3.887), but the plot leaves the raped maiden behind and follows her attacker instead.16 Rape in Chaucer has been the focus of a great deal of good recent research.17 In grappling with Chaucer’s representations of coercive sexual contact of whatever kind (whether threatened, avoided, or accomplished) we might advance differing interpretations of how Chaucer’s stories resonate with his portrayals of their tellers, and of the generic expectations that their story types might bring. But all readers will observe that Chaucer frequently builds plots in which consent to sexual contact, or to the marriage that would license it, is temporally disjunctive, duplicitous, or even explicitly refused. What is more, Chaucer consistently omits any reference to consent from these episodes, or else displaces the vocabulary of consent onto other human relations elsewhere in the tale. As an example where consent is conspicuous by its omission we might consider the Reeve’s Tale, where John and Aleyn discuss their sexual intentions with each other, but not with their partners, and where their partners’ failure to resist their unexpected advances is part of the ostensible joke. However, we will focus on examples where our keywords consent/​assent are displaced rather than omitted, rather than dwelling at length on arguments from absence. 16 Harris, “Rape and Justice” points to the tale’s “overt emphasis on the legal language of sexual violence.” 17 Anna Fore Waymack’s digital project “De raptu meo” presents a full account of the documents showing that Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer from a charge “de raptu meo”/​concerning my rape [or abduction], and a bibliography on Chaucer and rape. See “De raptu meo.” See also, among many others, Edwards, “Rhetoric of Rape,” and Harris, Obscene Pedagogies.

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In the Merchant’s Tale, for example, the only agreement to the marriage between January and May that we witness—​a marriage she clearly does not want—​happens before January has even chosen a wife, in the parody of arriving at consent through wise counsel that occupies the first third of the tale. January begins by asserting his virility and urging his counsel to assent rather than asking their advice: “And syn that ye han herd al myn entente, /​ I prey yow to my wyl ye wole assente” (4.1467–​68). He asks his male audience to assent to his will, positioning his listeners as a kind of social extension of his own person, rather than as selves with minds of their own. Placebo readily complies with January’s request:  “I consente and conferme everydeel /​ Youre wordes alle and youre opinioun” (4.1508–​9). Obviously, confirmation of one’s opinion is not counsel, and Placebo’s consent is further vitiated by his explanation that in all his years as a courtier he has never contradicted any lord, since he is convinced that their wit surpasses any advice he might give (4.1478–​518). Justinus might seem less compliant, but despite his insistence on “avyse” (4.1524, 1526, 1528, 1531) and emphasis on “myn assent” (4.1532), he urges caution only in the choice of a wife, not the decision to marry (4.1528–​36). Still, January rejects Justinus’s advice and turns back to Placebo for a direct echo of his own will: [… “]Wyser men than thow, As thou hast herd, assenteden right now To my purpos. Placebo, what sey ye?” “I seye it is a cursed man,” quod he, “That letteth matrimoigne, sikerly.” And with that word they rysen sodeynly, And been assented fully that he sholde Be wedded whanne hym liste and where he wolde. (4.1569–​76)

Placebo’s “wyser” reply rejecting any “avysement” results in the group’s immediate, full assent to marriage terms that closely resemble those Walter negotiated in the previous tale: January should marry whoever he likes, whenever and wherever he wants. We have seen that unanimity in consent to a course of action is not always the happy result that we might suppose. Frequently when persons speak as if with one will, their united voices are not the product of careful, even-​handed deliberation between social equals: consent can be poorly informed, and can exert coercive force. In the Knight’s Tale it seems at first that Creon’s tyranny is most egregious when it causes him to ignore the mourning voices of women. Creon has thrown all their lords’ bodies in a heap, and will not allow them to be buried or burned, “by noon assent” (1.941–​47 at 945). He ignores their united protests. Theseus is instead attentive to their petition, and fights a war to redress the wrongs done to them. Several years later, Theseus distinguishes himself from Creon again by attending to the “oon general assent” of his people, rather than overriding it, when they cease mourning and hold a “parlement” at which they agree to pursue an alliance with Thebes (1.2967–​74 at 2969, 2970). However, in attending to these assembled voices Theseus ignores the voices of those whose fate the “parlement” decides. Theseus does not consult Emelye about his plan to marry her to Palamon, any more than he had consulted her about Arcite. Even if the assent on which he acts is more genuinely consultative than

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January’s, it is no more attentive to what the women around him want. He cites his consent to his parliament’s “avys” only to issue a direct order to Emelye: “Suster,” quod he, “this is my fulle assent, With al th’avys heere of my parlement, That gentil Palamon, youre owene knyght, That serveth yow with wille, herte, and myght, And ever hath doon syn ye first hym knewe, That ye shul of youre grace upon hym rewe, And taken hym for housbonde and for lord. Lene me youre hond, for this is oure accord.” (1.3075–​82)

As he cements their agreement to marry by addressing Palamon in turn, Theseus at least admits that Palamon should have some opportunity to consent to a course of action on which he is being advised. But he does so only on the way to assuming Palamon’s ready consent rather than asking it: “I trowe ther nedeth litel sermonyng To make yow assente to this thyng. Com neer, and taak youre lady by the hond.” (1.3091–​93)

We never learn whether Theseus is correct in his belief that it would take little persuasion to make Palamon assent, because Palamon is never given a chance to reply. The phrases “oon assent” and “full assent” used to designate some form of unanimity will be echoed and redeployed with variations across several of the Canterbury Tales. But it is in Troilus and Criseyde that once again the occlusion of a woman’s choice by parliamentary assent turns the plot, in a way that brings this poem’s treatment of Criseyde’s consent elsewhere into full view. Troilus and Criseyde is Chaucer’s masterpiece on consent, all the more so because of how consent is displaced from the poem’s central action. Chaucer stages his pivotal moment of parliamentary assent in book 4 of Troilus and Criseyde. Both Troilus and Pandarus are present when the Greek parliament receives the proposal to exchange Criseyde for Antenor (4.141–​217, 344–​47). Criseyde, of course, is not: she has no place in a male public assembly. Troilus does not speak, but he resolves to ensure that Criseyde’s wishes are respected, whatever the lords may decide and even though he would rather die than let her go: he will not act “withouten assent of hire” (4.165). Meanwhile, in the external public parliament, only Hector speaks on behalf of Criseyde, but the people’s response to Hector’s assertion that the Trojans do not sell women is an outraged blaze of sound (4.183–​84). Despite Hector’s resistance, the parliament determines “by oon assent” to send Criseyde (4.211–​17, 346). Attentive readers will have noted that Chaucer builds the plot of Troilus and Criseyde upon keywords reiterated through extended dialogue between the three main characters (and, of course, in narratorial commentary). “Assent” is the keyword of the ensuing deliberations between Pandarus, Troilus, and Criseyde about how to proceed. Troilus remains steadfast throughout book 4 in his refusal to act without Criseyde’s assent (4.554, 632); Pandarus, however, refers to Criseyde’s assent only to assume

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he knows what it is (4.535, 933). When Troilus and Criseyde meet to decide what to do, each asks the other’s assent to his or her preferred plan (4.1372, 1526); but in the end they proceed as Criseyde prefers: she will comply with the will of parliament, but promises Troilus to find a way to return. Like any of Chaucer’s women, she is subject to men’s decisions, on which she is rarely consulted; here she tries to please both Troy and Troilus, with disastrous results. In contrast, consent is never even mentioned in the elaborate plot that leads to Troilus and Criseyde’s first sexual encounter at the beginning of book 3. Rather, I should say that Criseyde is never offered an opportunity to refuse consent, for Pandarus consistently disregards her wishes, even as he, Troilus, and the narrator consistently use the vocabulary of consent to describe their own and other men’s choices. Troilus consents to love three times, twice as he debates internally and a third time at Pandarus’s prompting (1.191, 413–​14, 936). Pandarus has multiple opportunities to give or refuse consent as he develops his plot (1.1009, 2.356, 2.1300, 2.1630). Troilus consents to Pandarus’s plans three times (2.1058, 2.1539, 5.433). Deiphebus, according to Pandarus, is the kind of man who would consent to anything honourable and good (2.1444). But Pandarus gives Criseyde no choice about whether to accept Troilus’s advances. This is not only because he bullies and manipulates her into doing so, but because the only opportunity for consent he grants is to fortune: Allas, he which that is my lord so deere, That trewe man, that noble, gentil knyght, That naught desireth but ȝoure frendly cheere, I se hym deyen ther he goth vp-​ryght, And hasteth hym with al his fulle myght fforto ben slayn, if his fortune assente; Allas, that god ȝow swich a beaute sente! (2.330–​36)

Ordinarily in this kind of love language it is the female love object who is coercively given an opportunity to decide whether her lover will live or die; here Pandarus displaces even this choice into a quasi-​allegorical register. Fortune is almost personified, as a proxy for Criseyde; yet not quite. Similarly, Criseyde never makes the choice to love Troilus. Instead, she yields to what she cannot safely avoid. She begins to lean, “gan enclyne” (2.674), when Pandarus arranges for her to see him returning from battle. She grows “able to converte” 2.903) after hearing Antigone’s song about love. She dreams of an eagle who rips out her heart in exchange for another’s (2.925–​31). And as Pandarus anticipates in encouraging Troilus, she falls as inevitably as an oak tree after many blows (2.1380–​93). The irony of course is that she is more like the reed in Pandarus’s comparison, which rises once the wind has passed (2.1387–​90). When Troilus asks her to yield to his sexual advances in book 3, at the end of the long duplicitous exchange in which Pandarus has brought him into her bed in secret through many false pretenses, she comments that she would not be there unless she had long since been yielded to him: “Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte deere, /​ Ben yolde, ywis, I  were now nought heere!” (3.1210–​11). Even at this celebrated moment of sexual bliss, Criseyde is entirely clear that it is not by her own

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choosing that she finds herself in Troilus’s arms: she has not yielded, but she has been yielded. Troilus never had a choice either, but his internal conflict reveals that he is rather less self-​aware. He imagines himself as making moral choices even while the story represents him as succumbing to the arrows of the God of Love. Troilus meditates on his own capacity to consent to his feelings in his Canticus Troili, in which Chaucer translates and adapts Petrarch’s S’amor non è: “And if that at myn owen lust I brenne, ffrom whennes cometh may waillynge and my pleynte? If harme agree me, wherto pleyne I thenne? I noot, ne whi vnwery that I feynte. O quike deth, O swete harm so queynte, How may of the in me swich quantite, But if that I consente that it be? “And if that I consente, I wrongfully Compleyne, i-​wis; thus possed to and fro, Al sterelees with-​inne a boot am I Amydde the see, bitwixen wyndes two, That inne contrarie stonden euere mo. Allas, what is this wondre maladie? ffor hete of cold, for cold of hete, I dye.”

(1.407–​20)

We may compare Chaucer’s version with Petrarch’s: in the preceding quotation I have underlined the lines where Chaucer alters or adds text, and italicized his expansion. In what follows I put in bold the words from Petrarch that Chaucer omits or changes: S’ a mia vóglia ardo; ónd’ è ’l pianto e ’l lamènto! S’ a mal mio grado’; il lamentar che vale? O viva mórte, o dilettòso male, Còme puói tanto in mè, s’io nòl cónsénto?

E s’io ’l cònsénto; a gran tórto mi dóglio. Fra sè contrári vénti in fragil barca Mi tróve in alto mar senza govérno. Sí liéve di savèr, d’erròr di carca, Ch’ i’ medèsmo nòn só quèl ch’ io mi vòglio; E trémo a mézza state, ardéndo il vérno.18

(If I burn by my own will, then from where the plaints and laments! If despite myself, then what use is my complaint? O living death, o delightful harm, How can you accomplish so much in me, if I do not consent to it? And if I consent, my suffering is very much my own fault Among contrary winds, in a fragile boat,

18 Petrarca, Canzoniere 132, p.  641, lines 5–​14. My translation. On Chaucer’s adaptation of the sonnet see also Ginsberg, “Chaucer and Petrarch.”

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I find myself, on the high sea without direction.

So light in knowledge, so heavy with error That I myself do not know which I want for myself And I tremble in mid summer, burn in winter.)

Chaucer may have chosen Petrarch’s sonnet for the conflicted representation of consent at its centre; certainly this is where he makes the least change. He pares down Petrarch’s oppositional metaphors, eliminating light and heavy, summer and winter, and elaborating on the contrary winds to focus on the opposing impulses that complicate Troilus’s ability to choose. Caught between alternatives, as if between magnets of equal strength, Troilus is not fixed in place but tossed like a boat on a stormy sea. Troilus wonders how he can possibly be so desperately in love if he has not consented to his feelings. If he has, then surely he is wrong to complain? The moral psychology implied by the language of consent used here, and familiar from our opening example from the Parson’s Tale, would suggest that a stirring of passion in the soul is sinful only if the reason or will consents to it. Notice that Chaucer substitutes “lust” for “voglio/​ will” to bring the poem’s language into closer conformity with this theory. However, this understanding of the self sits oddly with the narrative representation of love earlier in book 1, in which Troilus is wounded painfully by the arrows of the God of Love (see 1.204–​10). Being violently penetrated by an arrow is part of a different kind of story about love than the one in which a person’s higher faculties consent to his “lust”; the narrative of violent penetration is one in which no consent takes place. Troilus’s quandary over whether he has in fact consented points to the limitations of his understanding of himself: he does not want, and has never wanted, to be in love. So does the turmoil of his feelings that he elaborates through the metaphor of sailing on a stormy sea without a rudder. How he feels is not the result of informed choice, or indeed any kind of choice at all. Troilus is struggling toward an awareness that he is anything but the bounded self that moral psychology demands, as in the advice to governesses near the beginning of the Physician’s Tale. He is not in control of his own impulses, some of which arise from outside himself and affect bodies other than his own. He is subject to the decisions of others, and not in control of the scattered parts of his own self, some of which are distributed into other bodies. His consent is irrelevant to the ways in which power is exercised, even if it is often invoked or imagined. We might revel in how his pain and confusion at the death of the bounded, sovereign subject resembles our own.19 But in putting pressure on the keywords consent/​assent, Chaucer does more than ask us to notice that even noble men cannot shape the world as they will. He also shows us that many (many of them women) never have even the illusion that their consent will make any difference to events. Where a previous generation of medievalists insisted, sometimes indignantly, that early modernists were wrong to deny medieval people an understanding of themselves as individual bounded selves, we might now want to 19 Pain and confusion persist at the loss of another (as of the self) even if we have never believed ourselves to be bounded selves; see Butler, Undoing Gender, chap. 1, 17–​39, and especially 20.

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present Chaucer’s deployment of consent/​assent as evidence that they were far ahead of us in losing any such illusion.

Bibliography Primary Sources Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann. New York: Penguin, 2005. “De raptu meo.” http://​chaumpaigne.org/​. Petrarca, Francesco. Canzoniere: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, edited by Rosanna Bettarini. Turin: Einaudi, 2005.

Secondary Sources

Ahmed, Sara. Willful Subjects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2014. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New  York and London: Penguin, 2006. “assent, n. and v.” OED Online. June 2019. Oxford University Press. Baldwin, John W. Masters, Princes, and Merchants: The Social Views of Peter the Chanter and his Circle, 2 vols. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970. Bleeth, Kenneth. “The Physician’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2, edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 535–​64. Woodbridge: Brewer, 2005. Bradbury, Nancy. “The Erosion of Oath-​Based Relationships: A Cultural Context for Athelston.” Medium Aevum 73 (2004): 189–​204. Buc, Philippe. L’ambiguite du Livre: Prince, pouvoir, et peuple dans les commentaires de la Bible au Moyen Age. Paris: Beauchesne, 1994. Butler, Judith Undoing Gender. London: Routledge, 2004. Clarke, Peter D. The Interdict in the Thirteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. “consent, n. and v.” OED Online. June 2019. Oxford University Press. Edwards, Suzanne. “The Rhetoric of Rape and the Politics of Gender in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the 1382 Statute of Rapes.” Exemplaria 23 (2011): 3–​26. Foucault, Michel. The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France 1982–​1983, translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave, 2010. Fowler, Elizabeth. “Civil Death and the Maiden: Agency and the Conditions of Contract in Piers Plowman.” Speculum 70 (1995): 760–​92. Georgianna, Linda. “The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent.” Speculum 70. 4 (October 1995): 793–​821. Ginsberg, Warren. “Chaucer and Petrarch: ‘S’amor non e’ and the Canticus Troili.” Humanist Studies & the Digital Age 1.1 (2011): 121–​27. Glossarial Concordance to Middle English. https://​middleenglish.library.jhu.edu. Grudin, Michaela Paasche. “Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’ as Political Paradox.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 63–​92. Harris, Carissa M.  Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018.

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———. “Rape and Justice in the Wife of Bath’s Tale.” In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, edited by Candace Barrington, Brantley L. Bryant, Richard H. Godden, Daniel T. Kline, and Myra Seaman. https://​opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/​wobt1/​. Hoffmann, Tobias. “Intellectualism and Voluntarism.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Robert Pasnau, 414–​27. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2009. Middleton, Anne. “The ‘Physician’s Tale’ and Love’s Martyrs:  Ensamples Mo than Ten as a Method in the Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer Review 8 (1973): 9–​32. Nakley, Susan. “Authority (Familial, Political, Written) in the Clerk’s Tale.” In Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, edited by Candace Barrington, Brantley L.  Bryant, Richard H. Godden, Daniel T. Kline, and Myra Seaman. https://​opencanterburytales.dsl. lsu.edu/​wobt1/​. Porter, Jean. “Action and Intention.” In The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Robert Pasnau, 506–​16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Scala, Elizabeth. “The General Prologue:  Cultural Crossings, Collaborations, and Conflicts.” In The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales, edited by Candace Barrington, Brantley L.  Bryant, Richard H.  Godden, Daniel T.  Kline, and Myra Seaman. https://​ opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu/​wobt1/. Somerset, Fiona. “Before and After Wyclif: Consent to another’s sin in medieval Europe.” In Europe After Wyclif, edited by Michael Van Dussen and J.  Patrick Hornbeck II, 135–​72. New York: Fordham University Press, 2016. Tierney, Brian. Religion, Law and the Growth of Constitutional Thought: 1150–​ 1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. “wall, n.1”. OED Online. December 2020. Oxford University Press. Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. ———. “Whan She Translated Was: A Chaucerian Critique of the Petrarchan Academy.” In  Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–​1530, edited by Lee Patterson, 156–​215. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990.

Fiona Somerset is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of Connecticut. She has written and/​or edited Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late-​Medieval England (Cambridge, 1998), Four Wycliffite Dialogues (Early English Text Society 333:  Oxford, 2009), and Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Cornell, 2014). Her collaborative projects include Wycliffite Spirituality (Paulist, 2013), three edited volumes on vernacularity, the influence of Lollardy, and medieval media, and the Brill Companion to Lollardy (2016). She is a past editor of the Yearbook of Langland Studies and Director of the International Piers Plowman Society. Her interest in the interface between intellectual thought and popular culture has led her to work on medieval emotions, popular devotional writings, political poetry, and, most recently, law and literature. She is currently finishing a book on the medieval history of consent through silence, and is preparing to write another book on personhood in the Middle Ages.

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ENTENTE CANDACE BARRINGTON Legend of Good Women Troilus and Criseyde Friar’s Tale Retraction

Despite biographers’ valiant efforts, our understanding of Geoffrey Chaucer’s life is riddled with gaps. We have a series of life-​records that point to the poet’s activities throughout England and into Europe during the second half of the fourteenth century, and we have the literary works he authored.1 Over the centuries, biographers have taken his recorded activities and literary efforts, arranged them according to the latest understanding of the literary, cultural, and political backdrop of Chaucer’s day, and then stitched all these elements together, sometimes with suppositions about Chaucer’s intentions, sometimes with a silence that leaves the reader to infer those motives for themselves. We see Chaucer’s first biographer, Thomas Speght, harness the power of silence when he briefly remarks in his 1598 edition of Chaucer’s Works that “Master Buckley did see a Record [from the Inner Temple], where Geoffrey Chaucer was fined two shillings for beating a Franciscane fryer [friar] in Fleetstreete.”2 In twenty words, this report gives us most of the basics—​the Who, What, Where, How, and one of the Whys (Why was Chaucer fined two shillings?)—​but remains silent on the other Why’s we might ask. Why was that Franciscan friar on Fleet Street, where his destination could have ranged from law courts to brothels? Why did Chaucer beat that friar? Did the friar know why Chaucer was beating him? Did Chaucer know why the friar was on Fleet Street? Why was this offence worth a two-​shilling fine? Why did Buckley mention this altercation and the consequent fine to Speght? We have no answer to these questions, nor do we have other contemporaneous accounts to help fill in the gaps. Despite this documentary silence, we glimpse Speght’s reasons for including this report in his biography by considering what the reported incident suggests about Chaucer. Not only did an affiliation with the Inner Temple confirm the poet’s formal education, but the altercation with a friar corroborated what Speght and other post-​ Reformation readers saw as Chaucer’s deep-​seated antifraternalism, a disposition already evidenced by such characters as the pilgrim Friar Huberd (1.208–​69) and the friar in the Summoner’s Tale (3.1709–​2294). In this way, Speght continued the work of William Thynne’s 1542 edition, which had added the Plowman’s Tale, a “spurious and 1 Crow and Olson, Chaucer Life-​Records. 2 Pearsall, “Thomas Speght.”

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anti-​papal” work furthering Chaucer’s reputation as an anticlerical, proto-​Protestant.3 This justification for including the anecdote was not universally accepted. Francis Thynne (William’s son) immediately doubted the anecdote’s authenticity. Although the biographical detail would seem to further his father’s sense of Chaucer’s anticlericalism, the younger Thynne dismissed the characterization as antithetical to another quality associated with the poet, his exemplarity of English gravity and civility.4 Francis Thynne could not imagine Chaucer having any intentions that would explain such behaviour; therefore, the encounter must not have happened. Our understanding of the anecdote’s legitimacy has not advanced beyond this to-​and-​fro between acceptance and denial. Instead, this anecdote has repeatedly been trotted out to explain Chaucer’s proto-​ Protestant motives or rejected to confirm his adherence to conservative causes. Because Chaucer’s intentions on both accounts remain unknown to us, this anecdote ends up revealing more about the intentions of editors and readers publishing and enjoying his Middle English works than about Chaucer’s intentions. The anecdote’s bare narrative foregrounds the role of intentions in moments that constitute our lives, both high-​stakes (a violent altercation between a friar and one of the king’s agents) and quotidian (reading a collection of medieval tales). We expend much effort toward understanding the intentions of ourselves and others. Most times we get close enough to a correct understanding that we avoid disaster. Seldom, though, do we fully comprehend anyone’s intentions, including our own. Nevertheless, we might spend hours in psychotherapy seeking out the lost intentions behind our actions. We might subject ourselves to systems of religious introspection in order to identify buried intentions, or we might face juridical interrogations to uncover concealed intentions. Underlying these practices is an assumption that intentions can be sufficiently known to make insightful interpretations when reading literature or to make useful decisions when encountering a friar—​or friar-​hater—​in medieval London’s Fleet Street. Chaucer’s verse, however, seems skeptical about any certainty regarding intentions. Rather than focus where intentions seem discernible, Chaucer seems fascinated by intention’s murky areas. In their concern with intention—​the Middle English term is entente—​Chaucer’s works reflect a larger legal concern in late-medieval England that might surprise twenty-​first-​century readers accustomed to intention (or the lack of intention) having exculpatory force, both in the courts and in our daily interactions. Our legal system’s distinction between homicide and murder depends on the perpetrator’s intentions. Our interactions with others include apologies casually tagged with “I didn’t mean to …,” as though that admission diminishes our culpability. During Chaucer’s lifetime, England’s two dominant legal systems (the canon-​law courts and the common-​law courts) had split opinions on entente’s knowability and its role in measuring guilt.5 For the Church’s courts (as well as its penitential sacrament), 3 Machan, “Speght’s ‘Works,’ ” 148–​50. 4 Thynne, Animadversions, 21–​22.

5 Barrington, “Common-​Law and Penitential Intentionality.”

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entente was all.6 The Church’s mechanisms for discovering entente assumed not only that entente could (partially) exonerate an individual, but also that identifying the perpetrator’s intentions might prevent further misdeeds. If a woman cohabitates with a man she thinks is her husband but later learns he remains married to another woman, her penance would be milder than the penance of a woman who knowingly lived with a man outside the sacrament of marriage. The entente behind the transgression had to be considered as much as the transgression itself. For the secular common-​law courts, on the other hand, intention counted for little. These courts were not convinced entente could be known. Consequently, late-medieval England’s secular courts did not generally consider entente in their judgments.7 If a man’s livestock escaped enclosure and trampled a farmer’s crops, it did not matter that the livestock owner did not intend for his animals to damage his neighbor’s fields. Similarly, if a defendant intended to repay a debt but was thwarted by drought or illness, his overdue debt remained overdue and could go into foreclosure. Whether the accused intended no harm or intended to do right, the final results—​not entente—​were what mattered in the secular courts. By granting Chaucer knowledge of the courts’ different attitudes towards entente, we need not suppose his connection to formal legal studies. Through his personal and occupational engagements with both church and secular courts, Chaucer would have been intimately aware of these opposing attitudes towards entente’s knowability and its efficacy.8 This spectrum of entente’s uses would have been enough to intrigue Chaucer. Coming to Middle English from Latin “intentus” through Old French “entente,” the term settled in legal and religious registers, in each case with a rather stable meaning pointing to the purpose behind actions and decisions.9 What differs between these two registers—​and here Chaucer shows his interest—​is the knowability and effectiveness of anyone’s (someone else’s or one’s own) entente. An entirely mental process, entente makes itself known to others by such actions as spoken declarations or oaths. Complications arise, however. Sometimes the behaviour does not point unequivocally to the entente (such as when the entente is hidden or dissembled), leading to epistemological uncertainty, that state of not knowing how to interpret someone’s behaviour and causing us to ask, Why are they acting that way? Sometimes the entente does not achieve its goals (such as when the entente is impeded by uncontrollable or unanticipated circumstances), leading to teleological uncertainty, that state of not knowing what will be the consequence of someone’s behaviour and causing us to ask, What will be the result of their actions? These and other uncertainties prevent a guaranteed relationship between entente and associated behaviours. 6 Kelly, “Penitential Theology and Law”; Little, Confession and Resistance.

7 Harding, Social History, 63; Baker, Introduction, 403–​5; Arnold, Select Cases, xvii, xx, xxxi. 8 Evans, “Chaucer’s Life,” 9; Helmholz, “Conflicts.” 9 MED, s.v. “entente.”

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In addition to entente’s multiple uncertainties is a connotation of “concentrated planning” conjoining the mental activity and manifesting behaviours. This connotation is a remnant of entente’s Latin origins: the verb “intendere,” meaning “to stretch out,” and its noun form “intentus,” initially denoting “something stretched out or the process of stretching.” The Latin noun form narrowed to mental stretching: a thought that reaches out to comprehend something. This meaning carried over to Old French “entente.” As French became the language of England’s common-​law courts, “entente” entered the legal parlance called “Law French” where it continues the idea of a mental stretching out. As before, it could mean “attention,” a thought that reaches out to understand. This Law French phase also adds the familiar denotation, “intention,” a thought which reaches out to do something.10 When Middle English (ME) lexically enfolds “entente,” both meanings (“a mental reaching out to understand” and “a mental activity reaching out to do”) are attached to it. In this way “entente” is stronger, more wilful than “desire.” Entente connotes more than passive longing or aggressive acquisition; it requires attentive concentration and planning. Whenever we read “entente,” we should always couple its dual uncertainty with ideas of planning and straining towards. No wonder Chaucer’s fascination with the word.

The Friar’s Tale

Chaucer’s most sardonic engagement with “entente” is the Friar’s Tale, a story whose analogues provided Chaucer with assorted motifs for questioning legal entente and its efficacy.11 Saturated with the legal language of contracts and obligations, the tale features the local archdeacon’s agent and his encounter with a fellow traveller. According to the tale’s teller, Friar Huberd, this agent’s job was to summon individuals to appear before the archdeacon’s court, which was charged with the discovery and punishment Of wicchecraft, and eek of bawderye, Of diffamacioun, and avowtrye, Of chirche reves, and of testamentz, Of contractes and lakke of sacramentz, Of usure, and of symonye also. But certes, lecchours did he grettest wo […]. (3.1305–​10)

Though limited in scope, these criminal charges delved into the most intimate aspects of individual lives, allowing the shady summoner to manipulate the archbishop’s corrupt network for personal gain. So fearsome was the summoner’s reputation that he could extort payments by promising to tear up the paperwork. Because these extortionate payments were profitable for him and his archdeacon, we’re told, this particular 10 Baker, Manual, 103. 11 Nicholson, “Friar’s Tale,” 87–​92. See Kline, “ ‘Myne by Right’ ” for another perspective on the tension between secular and ecclesiastical understandings of “intent.”

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summoner “sette all his entente” on them (3.1374).12 That is, he habitually bent his mind towards turning each encounter into a money-​making opportunity. Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale captures nicely the workings of entente. When the summoner sets “al his entente” on extorting money, we can imagine a mental process seizing every opportunity to grab more money. The tale frequently literalizes the necessary movement. When the summoner tells his chance companion (himself an agent from “helle”) that “Heere faste by […] is meyn entente /​ To ryden, for to reysen up a rente /​ That longeth to my lordes duetee” (3.1389–​91), he associates his entente with going to a particular place to execute his will. His companion articulates his duties in similar terms: “heere I ryde aboute my purchasyng, /​To wite wher men wol yeve me any thyng /​ My purchas is th’effect of al my rente” (3.1449–​51). The fiend confirms that he and the summoner have the “same entente,” a similarity he shores up by echoing the summoner’s terms: he plans to “ryde” “heere” to gather up the “rente” (3.1447–​1455). The fiend adds one telling difference unnoticed by the summoner: he will remain faithful and not cheat his master of souls collected for hell.13 When the fiend reminds the summoner that their overriding ententes can easily be thwarted, he foregrounds the residual “attention” embodied in entente: the need for constant alertness and perseverance. Nevertheless, as the fiend admits, one’s entente is never guaranteed. For all his efforts to steal men’s souls, sometimes the fiend’s hellish temptations do the opposite and save the victim’s soul (3.1497–​500). The fiend knows his entente is “dependent upon the will of the humans he pursues,” but the summoner remains blithely unaware of these limitations.14 Declaring the fiend his sworn brother, the summoner strikes a bargain with his companion to share their loot (3.1533–​34), an informal contract that the summoner could rightly assume binding if the fiend had not agreed to it “by [his] fey” (3.1535), a devilish oath that might be the equivalent of invalidating a promise with hidden crossed fingers. Willing to ignore the fiend’s feigned “fey,” the summoner is equally willing to trust the efficacy of his own entente. One way to understand the summoner’s blind faith in entente is through his institutional affiliation with the ecclesiastical courts. According to a maxim of the Church’s canon law, Intentio iudicat hominem (The intent judges the man); consequently, intention was a primary consideration in these courts (as in the confessional booth where sins of both deed and intent were sought out through practices institutionalized after the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215). The Church authorized penitential manuals (the models for the Parson’s Tale) designed to burrow into an individual’s inner recesses where intention lurked. The Church’s modes of discovery and punishment relied on its confident ability to identify entente. Intentions might be hidden, but they are not unknowable. In fact, they must be known. To mete out the correct punishment, the Church courts must determine if errors were intentional, for the sinner might earn a milder 12 Bryant, “ ‘By Extorcions I Lyve,’ ” 183–​85. 13 Kline, “ ‘Myne by Right.’ ”

14 Kline, “ ‘Myne by Right.’ ”

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punishment if the misdeed were committed impulsively or mistakenly.15 Moreover, to ignore intention was to ignore a morass of sin that corrupted the individual’s soul. When Church agents like the summoner in the Friar’s Tale (as well as the Canterbury Tales’ Pardoner, Friar, and Summoner) accepted bribes or sold indulgences, they preempted the introspection necessary to reveal sin and entente, and in that way, they thwarted absolution. Coming from an institution committed to its ability to discover entente, the summoner in the Friar’s Tale unreflexively believes in entente’s knowability and efficacy. We see evidence of his credulity in two moments. First, he believes that people’s words inevitably reveal their intentions. When the carter, angered by his horse-​drawn wagon stuck in the mire, damns his horses to hell, the summoner urges the fiend to possess the horses immediately. The fiend demurs, replying that the angry curse does not reflect the carter’s entente. And sure enough, as soon as the horses free the wagon from the mud, the man praises them. The fiend explains to the summoner, “The carl spak oo thing, but he thoghte another” (3.1568). These unknown thoughts, not his unpremeditated words (which were not backed up by any form of material proof), constitute his entente.16 Second, at the same time that the summoner expects to identify correctly someone else’s entente, he also expects to realize his own entente without impediment. His fiendish companion has already alerted him to the ways entente can be frustrated. Despite these warnings, the summoner assumes his plan has no impediments, telling the fiend, “taak heer ensample of me” (3.1580): Watch me and learn. Intending to extort “twelf pens” from an “old rebekke” (3.1575 and 1573), the summoner knocks on the Widow Mabely’s gate and begins his usual threats. Three times, she patiently responds, eventually taking a supplicant’s posture and asking for mercy. The summoner instead threatens to take her “newe panne” (3.1614). Her patience finally broken, she curses him: “Unto the devel blak and rough of hewe /​ Yeve I  thy body and my panne also” (3.1622–​23). The devil takes note of her being “upon hir knees” (3.1625), a position that connotes a level of mindfulness (in contrast to the carter’s mindless anger), and asks, “Is this youre wyl in ernest that ye seye?” (3.1627). She reaffirms her seriousness and demands the summoner repent. He insists repenting is not part of his plans: “that is nat myn entente” (3.1630). With the summoner’s denial, the devil claims, “Thy body and this panne be myne by right” and carts him “body and soule” off to hell (3.1635 and 1640). Though he follows the script, the summoner fails to get the twelve pence, and in the process loses his body and soul. The foolish summoner tries to operate by assuming that he can know another’s entente, and that he can control the consequences of his own entente. We learn—​but he never does—​the limits of knowing and controlling anyone’s entente. By placing the curse in the mouth of an old widow (someone whom the Church would not grant the authority to condemn another to hell), this brief episode raises rather than 15 Kelly, “Penitential Theology and Law,” 249. 16 Kline, “ ‘Myne by Right.’ ”

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settles issues concerning the nature and efficacy of entente. The tale might seem to show how the summoner’s entente backfires when he sends himself to hell by declaring his entente not to repent.17 Or, if the tale articulates the Wycliffite position questioning the Church’s exclusive jurisdiction over excommunication, it might be the widow’s curse that sends him to hell.18 Either way, the tale illustrates the error of forgetting that no matter how powerless and impoverished a widow might seem, she packs a degree of legal punch that should not be forgotten.19 As a feme sole who had legal authority to make her own decisions (and not a feme covert who had to surrender her legal authority to a male guardian, such as her father, brother, husband, or son), the widow had the right to accuse the summoner and (according to the Wycliffites) the ability to condemn him to hell. By discounting her curse because she is an old woman of low degree—​so low that he calls her “olde stot” (3.1630), a misogynist slur originally denoting a “work horse,” a creature with no more entente than the carter’s horses—​the summoner ignores the legal reach of her accusation and her curse. In blithely refusing to recant, he thereby allows the widow’s entente to be realized.20 The summoner in the Friar’s Tale is the most gullible of Chaucer’s many greedy characters. Whereas other fabliau characters may lose face (like John the Carpenter), get a scorched arse (Nicholas), forfeit money (the canon’s assistant), receive a fart in the face (Absolon and the Summoner’s friar), or become cuckolded (every husband in the fabliaux), only the Friar’s summoner is dragged to hell. Whereas the other fools think they can control the behaviour of women or substances, the summoner thinks he can discern and control entente. In this way, the tale spreads doubt regarding anyone’s (including the Church’s) ability to discern or to implement entente.

Troilus and Criseyde

In contrast to the Friar’s Tale and its gullible summoner, Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde weaves the tragic entanglement of incompatible, ever-​shifting ententes. Besides featuring Troilus’s naïve understanding of entente, Pandarus’s wily manipulation of entente, and Criseyde’s skeptical engagements with entente (a skepticism briefly interrupted by the workings of literary deceit), the long narrative poem displays the slippery nature of entente. By depicting the inherent deceptions and consequent calamities when accepting someone else’s “good entente” (1.935, 2.878, 2.923, 2.1060, 3.1188, 4.853, and 4.1416), Troilus and Criseyde reflects the position of medieval England’s secular courts, which were troubled by the role a defendant’s entente should play in determining guilt or innocence. Because (according to the king’s secular courts) entente is unknowable, observers (and often the perpetrator) cannot truly 17 Passon, “Entente in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale,” 169–​70. 18 Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender, 182–​96.

19 Bennett and Froide, “A Singular Past”; Hallissy, Clean Maids, 135–​36. 20 Steel, “Friar’s Tale.”

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know the actor’s entente. Because entente is unreliable, it can direct an agent’s actions but not guarantee results. Factors outside the agent’s control can break the “chain of causation” and affect entente’s efficacy.21 As Pandarus, Troilus, and Criseyde show, entente is an ever-​shifting source of purpose and an ever-​moving target of desire, making it difficult for any adjudicator to pin down. While Chaucer seems aware that entente inadequately accounts for human action and cannot be the basis of judgment, the machinations of entente in Troilus and Criseyde seem to identify the dangers of ignoring entente altogether.22 Tracing the declarations and failures of entente in Troilus and Criseyde reveals a web of culpability that cannot exonerate Criseyde, for entente cannot do that, yet it helps to implicate Troilus and Pandarus as co-conspirators, a judgment the common-​law courts might be reluctant to make. Acting as an attentive linchpin, Pandarus plots to lure Criseyde into Troilus’s bed, his energies focused on the scheming that links entente’s uncertain purposes and uncertain results. Repeatedly misrepresenting Troilus’s and his own ententes, he first requests that Criseyde consent to Troilus’s service, then begs that she “make [Troilus] bettre chiere” (2.360) than she had previously given. This new request, he claims, is “pleynly oure entente” (2.363). Repeatedly, after Criseyde consents to one demand, Pandarus badgers her to relent further, to “lat be youre nyce shame and youre folie” (2.1286). Able  to beguile with false words, Pandarus finally lands on the “fyn of his entente” ((3.553) and 553): “to bryngen to his hows som nyght /​His faire nece and Troilus yfere” (3.514–​15) so they may sexually consummate their relationship. Once “Pandarus hath fully his entente” (3.1582), however, all mention of Pandarus’s entente disappears from the poem. By the time Criseyde forsakes Troy and Troilus, Pandarus’s original misrepresentations and manipulations of entente have been replaced by the indisputability of the couple’s relationship. Not surprisingly, Troilus’s stated ententes mirror Pandarus’s, and he thereby evades acknowledging his role in his own betrayal. Furthermore, as the “exemplar of the adverbial form of intention”—​he acts “ententiflich” (1.332)—​Troilus focuses on the concentrated planning essential to entente but does so without being fully aware of his purpose.23 For example, the anguished lover begins steadfast in his entente not to reveal the source of his love-​longing (1.738), yet the reader learns this singular entente to be weak. Within 150 lines, Troilus has forfeited his silence and identified Criseyde as his “swete fo” (1.874). Before long, Troilus’ single desire to serve Criseyde without reward has blossomed into demands not part of the original game. Partially lured by Pandarus, partially failing to recognize the nature of his desires, Troilus allows his stated entente to shift from desiring Criseyde’s recognition of his service to her friendship from afar, to her conversing with him, to her intimacy, to her body. Of course, neither he nor the reader truly knows his entente at any point. Nevertheless, by labelling his entente as “trewe” or 21 Baker, Introduction, 404. 22 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 142. 23 Katz, “Intention and the Idea of the Literary,” 39.

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“good,” he allows himself to ignore that its stated object has shifted, an objective that would implicate him in his own betrayal. Criseyde’s entente also shifts under Pandarus’s influence, but (unlike Troilus’ entente) the movement of her entente is not in tandem with Pandarus’s. Her initial entente was to keep herself safe and free from the dangers of a public relationship, an entente outwardly expressed by her widow’s garb. When Pandarus finds her, she is ensconced in her “palays” (2.76), living her version of the “widewes lif” (2.114): secluded, reading, observing religious rituals, yet not fully a feme sole (2.117–​19). In asking Criseyde to “make hym bettre chiere,” Pandarus exerts rights of guardianship by chiding her to remove her veil, show her face, abandon her entente. Although Pandarus pressures Criseyde to bend her entente towards the men’s entente, her barriers are not sufficiently eroded until she listens attentively to Antigone’s song (2.827–​75), a paean to good entente in love. The song praises “trewe” entente (2.828) as the source of bliss and (most importantly for Criseyde) “seurte” (security) (2.833). The lover’s entente gently morphs into “ententif” (2.838), a word suggesting a comforting combination of “with strong entente” and “attentive.” His love will encourage her to banish vices from her life, and cause her “t’entende” (to incline) towards virtues (2.853). With no reservations, the song declares “ther is no peril,” only benefits, in returning the lover’s love (2.875). Criseyde responds to the song with an appropriately ambiguous question: “Who made this songe now with so good entente?” (2.878), asking both “who, with good intentions, composed this song?” and “who composed this song about love’s good intentions?” We’re told the song’s lesson (a lesson Criseyde eventually learns has limited application) sinks into her heart and “That she wex somewhat able to converte” (2.903). That evening, listening to the nightingale’s song in good “entente,” she falls asleep, primed by Antigone’s and the nightingale’s songs to extend an offer of friendship the next day (see 2.962), and in this way to align her entente with those professed by Pandarus and Troilus. In this manner, her entente slides into the realm of the unknown and the uncertain. Criseyde’s good entente listening to the nightingale is the poem’s final pretense to an entente that is honest and unquestioned. And even that moment is sullied by the story of Philomela, which any literary mention of a nightingale should bring to mind. Innocent, deceived, and raped by her sister’s husband, Philomela eventually metamorphizes into a nightingale. Her story warns against trusting anyone’s professed entente. From here on, all is foul in Troilus and Criseyde. Though Troilus knows that Pandarus won from Criseyde only the promise of friendship (2.962), he quickly joins Pandarus’s plot to arrange for more. Consequently, his “good entente” (2.1060) points away from any pure motives he might claim, landing instead on the dubious yet effective efforts to achieve his desires. Often modifiers like “goode” and “trewe” allow the audience (within the text, as well as the reader) to ignore the deleterious effect the entente will have on the object of its aim, Criseyde. The treachery underlying the nightingale’s song should inform our reading of the consummation, where the ententes of all three characters seem to align, but with an important difference. While Pandarus and Troilus have gained their long-​standing

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entente, Criseyde seems to discover, nearly simultaneously, both “hire entente” (3.1208–​11, 1239) and Troilus’s “clene entente” (3.1229). Perhaps Criseyde is relating a decision that can be discovered only after it is made.24 Or, in keeping with her failing efforts to control her situation, she declares proleptically that being his lover was her plan all along. Either way, when Criseyde discovers the natures of both Troilus’s entente and her own, she is compared to the “newe abaysed nyghtyngale” (suddenly startled nightingale) (3.1233), bringing to our attention the perfidy inherent in the ententes that have brought her to this point. Until this point, Troilus and Pandarus have paid little attention to Criseyde’s entente. That wilful negligence ends when news circulates that Criseyde might be exchanged for Antenor. After ignoring and manipulating Criseyde’s entente, the men are finally forced to pay it attention. Because the impending trade forces Troilus into a paralyzing dilemma, he decides to ask Criseyde to tell “hym hire entente” (4.173). Before reaching her home, he is waylaid by the Trojan Parliament, which decides “For Antenor to yelden out Criseyde” (4.212). Recognizing the powerlessness of his entente, he resorts to bewailing false Fortune and then races through a series of options that end where he began: to hear straight from Criseyde “al hire entente” (4.657). By this time, however, her entente is equally powerless, and her plan—​though “seyd of good entente” (4.1416)—​is partial and impractical. Once Criseyde reaches the Greek encampment, a new male entente begins to grasp for her, and Criseyde’s entente diminishes to near invisibility. She wanly attempts to establish her widowhood (and thus her right to her own entente) when Diomedes asks if she left a lover in Troy. Before denying another love with a triple negative (“Ther in myn herte nys, ne nevere was”), she supplies information readers had previously inferred:  “I hadde a lord, to whom I  wedded was, /​ The whos myn herte al was, til that he deyde” (5.978 and 975–​76). Wearing no widow’s weeds (5.806–​26) and living under her father’s jurisdiction, Criseyde seems unable to avail herself of the agency that widowhood should provide. Diomedes’ entente, which we suspect is propelled by falsehoods (he is an enemy Greek, after all), initially misses its mark. Despite his best efforts, he neither achieves his entente nor makes it known to Criseyde (5.776 and 867–​68). All the while, Troilus has tried to learn her plans, to second-​guess the meaning of her delay. He will not find it in her words; her letter is evasive and ambiguous, with repeated references to circumstances keeping her with the Greeks, to the spies reading her letters, and to the gossips spreading stories about her (5.1590–​631). Her decision to remain in the Greek camp is not relayed in terms of entente but of “cause[s]‌” (5.1028), a paratactic string of circumstances that interfere with her entente and prevent her return to Troy and Troilus. She ends by questioning Troilus’s entente, saying she worries that he “ne do but holden [her] in honde” (only leads her on) (5.1600–​15 at 1615). Uncertain of Troilus’s entente and facing multiple threats to her safety, she determines the risks too 24 Mann, Life in Words, 17.

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great, a reasonable concern considering the slippery ententes of Troilus and Pandarus. Sounding like an ecclesiastical canon lawyer, she concludes with “Th’entente is al, and nat the lettres space. / And fareth now wel—​God have yow in his grace” (5.1630–​1). At first glance she seems to affirm the value of trusting another’s entente and ignoring the words spoken or written (especially when spies might be reading her letters). Considering how her entente has been repeatedly ignored and how the men have misled her with claims to good and true ententes, we can wonder if she is turning their words back on them: “I trusted your protestations of good entente; now it’s your turn to trust mine.” Unable to make sense of her letter—​“This Troilus this lettre thoughte al straunge” (5.1632)—​Troilus elsewhere discovers a sign of her entente that he understands: Diomedes’s wearing the brooch Troilus gave Criseyde (5.1688–​94). Because Criseyde’s entente has been erased from the narration, Troilus’s interpretation of this sign is only speculation, no better than any other indication of entente. In Troilus and Criseyde, the general pattern of usage disqualifies entente as a useful barometer of either malice or innocence. The narrative repeatedly invokes entente, yet we are provided no mechanism for judging a character’s actions against entente. This absence creates values similar to those of the common-​law courts and their recognition that intentions could be hidden or ineffective, suggesting we can judge from outward manifestations better than from inward purpose. Despite these echoes of the secular courts, Troilus and Criseyde avoids judging Criseyde, and the narrator repeatedly states his reluctance to judge her failure to return to Troy and Troilus. At the same time, the poem does not encourage us to judge Pandarus and Troilus, whose dissembled and shifting ententes are the basis of Criseyde’s eventual betrayal of Troilus. The poem avoids judging the men’s actions, though we suspect the malevolence of their ententes, and it forestalls judging Criseyde entirely on her actions when her final entente is hidden by the fog of war and by the dangers of being a woman encamped amidst an invading army. We know from Chaucer’s the Legend of Good Women that questions of justice and entente did lurk in readers’ perceptions. These questions did not, however, concern the guilt or innocence of Criseyde. Instead, the Legend’s prologue records how the God of Love placed Chaucer on trial for slandering the god’s greatest devotees of the past and for encouraging the god’s current servants to desert his service (F.321–​34; G.248–​53). In the impromptu trial, the God of Love serves as prosecutor and judge, and His Queen Alceste serves as the poet’s public defender. In both F and G versions of the prologue, legal terminology assures that we are witnessing a legal proceeding. As the poet’s advocate, Alceste provides a defence based on plausible deniability. Maybe, she posits, he “taketh no hed of what matere he take” when translating (G.343). Or perhaps, she offers, the poet was compelled to write by “som persone, and durste it not withseye” (G.347). Whether he wrote Troilus and Criseyde (and the Romauns of the Rose) out of ignorance or compulsion, she argues that Chaucer should be treated with compassion in order to demonstrate Cupid’s “pleyn benygnete” (G.361).25 Her proposed atonement, 25 Justice, Adam Usk’s Secret, 35–​36.

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which requires the poet to amass evidence of women’s loving fidelity and men’s brutal betrayals, however, risks additional insult to the God of Love by exposing the “excessive cost” of women’s faithfulness.26 Whatever Chaucer’s entente had been when he wrote Troilus and Criseyde, Alceste’s proposal requires him to duplicate (in reverse) his (un) intended insult to the God of Love. Faced with an untenable plea bargain, the accused poet tries claiming entente as an allowable defence: […] it was myn entente To forthere trouthe in love and it cheryce, And to be war fro falsnesse and fro vice By swich ensaumple; this was my menyge. (G.461–​64)

His defence of himself embeds, as well, a possible defence of Criseyde. Read one way, his defence claims his entente was no more and no less than to reproduce the meaning of his source text. Read another way, his defence ignores the source text’s meaning (and thus dismisses one of the possible excuses provided by Alceste [F.369–​72]) and claims the poet’s entente was to further the cause of love through the example of Criseyde, whom lovers should avoid duplicating. Whether the warning points to her falsehood or to her trust of men’s ententes—​that is left unsaid. Whatever the poet’s “menynge” in his defence of himself, in his defence of Criseyde, or in his defence of Troilus and Criseyde as a whole, the poet is about to step into treasonous territory. His attorney Alceste immediately silences him, for “Love ne wol nat counterpletyd be /​ In ryght ne wrong” (G.466–​67). In the God of Love’s court, secular principles dominate, and entente provides no justification or consideration for the accused. Adjudicating Criseyde’s guilt (without regard for her entente) makes a full appearance in Robert Henryson’s fifteenth-​century continuation, the Testament of Cresseid. Reduced to prostitution and despairing her situation, she curses the gods for her fallen state. In a scene provocatively similar to the fiend’s telling the summoner that the carter’s oath did not match the man’s entente (but with much different results), Criseyde’s entente is ignored by a tribunal of Greek deities who bring her to trial on trumped-​up charges of blasphemy and punish her with leprosy, thereby forcing her exile, her loss of personhood, and her inability to express entente.27 Chaucer’s initial exploration of entente in Troilus and Criseyde, with all its uncertainties, is completely wiped away by Henryson and replaced with a certainty that relies exclusively on observable behaviour.

Chaucer’s Entente

Perhaps the most important story about entente that Chaucer tells is his own wariness of both audience entente and authorial entente. We have already seen what happened 26 Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend, 120. 27 Mathews, “Land, Lepers, and the Law in The Testament of Cresseid,” 50–​66.

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when the poet’s persona faced the God of Love’s accusations in the Legend of Good Women. At the same time that the poet attempts to defend himself by declaring his entente, his commissioning patron, Alceste, undermines that defence. In the Canterbury Tales, that defence is again offered, this time without interference from antagonistic readers or a controlling advocate. He closes the General Prologue with a preemptive defence seeking to protect himself from incrimination (1.725–​42). Similar to the translator (the authorial stance Chaucer adopts in both Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women) who claims merely to reproduce the words and ideas of a written authority, Chaucer claims he is reproducing the spoken words of a motley group of pilgrims he witnessed. As a result of this choice, he may be forced to record how his fellow travellers speak “rudeliche and large” (1.734). Later, in the prologue to the Miller’s Tale, he further deflects any charges of “yvel entente” (1.3173) by denying responsibility for the entente of either the tale tellers or the readers of his book, who are quite free to “turne over the leef and chese another tale” (1.3177). “Blameth nat me,” he adds, “if that ye chese amys” (1.3181). He further muddies his entente by granting control of the Tales’ organizing structure to the Host, Herry Bailly, who repeatedly changes the terms of the tale-​telling contest. Consider the incomplete tales and the late-​ arriving and early-​departing Canon and his Yeoman, and any sense of Chaucer’s entente for the Tales’ structure evaporates.28 At the same time as he works to void the Canterbury Tales of his own entente, Chaucer repeatedly uses the pilgrims’ nasty quarrels and barbed remarks in the linking passages to saddle the tale-​telling exchanges with entente. The tales are not random efforts to entertain but motivated attacks that “quite” (or repay) another pilgrim for perceived insults. No matter that the Miller claims he has no intention to mock the Reeve for being a cuckold, the Reeve (as well as the Miller’s and Chaucer’s audiences) perceives the insult, giving the Miller’s Tale another interpretive layer and motivating the Reeve in the creation of his requiting tale. This process of spinning tales in response to the perceived intentions of other tale tellers repeatedly appears: the Summoner and the Friar tell tales reflecting the insults they have launched at one another; the Nun’s Priest inserts jabs at his fellow clerics, the Prioress and the Monk; and, the Canon’s Yeoman’s animosity towards the Canon’s trickery fuels the narrative the beleaguered servant generates. Whatever Chaucer’s own protestations might be, his tale tellers and their audience assume entente governs the creation and interpretation of their tales. For himself, though, Chaucer seems to have denied the efficacy of authorial entente, a denial both strategic (don’t blame me) and confessional (I cannot control my words once they escape my pen). Entente’s inherent tension between uncertain plans and uncertain outcomes appears once more in his purportedly final work, his Retraction:29 28 See Meyer-​Lee, “Abandon the Fragments,” for another perspective on the Tales’ flexible structure. 29 For the Retraction’s early reception history, see Katz, “Intention and the Idea of the Literary,” 1–​17.

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Candace Barrington And if ther be any thyng that displese hem, I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge and nat to my wyl, that wolde ful fayn have seyd better if I  hadde had konnynge. /​ For oure book seith, “Al that is writen is written for oure doctrine,” and that is myn entente. /​ Wherfore I  biseke yow mekely, for the mercy of God, that ye preye for me that Crist have mercy on me and foryeve me my giltes; /​ and namely of my translacions and enditynges or worldly vanitees, the which I revoke in my retracciouns […]. (10.1082–​85)

Rather than clarifying Chaucer’s entente, this statement further ambiguates what we have previously learned from him. Not only does it show the uncertainty of entente’s effort (he would have done better if he’d been able), but it also shows the uncertainty of entente’s consequences (the readers’ reactions were not what he had planned). He seems to claim that the entente behind his writing mirrors Saint Paul’s exhortation that “what things soever were written, were written for our learning” (Romans 15.4). That is, he writes in order to enlighten his readers. Yet in placing his works within the body of “al that is written,” a phrase that in Saint Paul’s letter clearly points to the Hebrew scriptures rather than everything ever written, Chaucer draws an audacious equivalence between his oeuvre and the Bible. For his readers to accept such an entente would implicate them in a misreading that Chaucer had already anticipated and denied as possible.

Chaucer and the Fleet Street Friar

In closing, I return to the Fleet Street friar to consider briefly one purported entente Chaucer could not have foreseen:  his elevation as a prefiguration of the Protestant Reformation, a reputation earned by his sharp critiques of the Roman Church’s corrupt agents stealing from Englishmen’s pockets and endangering their souls. Prior to the Henrician reforms, Chaucer’s respectability made his Works a safe receptacle for polemical voices such as the Plowman’s Tale and Jack Upland. Later, when Henry VIII’s government was culling books deemed too Romanish, these additions further confirmed Chaucer’s anticlerical reputation and possibly shielded his works from censorship or destruction. The story of the Fleet Street friar sealed Chaucer’s reputation, making it a “central aspect of [his] identity for over two centuries,” an identity that must have been far from an entente imagined or exerted by Chaucer.30 Whether fictional or real, the Fleet Street friar illustrates the malleability and vulnerability of entente. Events and motives occurring long after our demise can intervene, hijacking our entente and turning our efforts toward new and equally vulnerable purposes.

30 Jones, Radical Pastoral, 1381–​1594, 91.

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Bibliography Primary Sources Arnold, Morris S. Select Cases of Trespass from the King’s Court: 1307–​1399. London: Selden Society, 1985. Chaucer Life-​Records. Edited by Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1966. Nicholson, Peter. “The Friar’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 87–​99. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002. Thynne, Francis. Animadversions Uppon the Annotacions and Corrections of Some Imperfections of Impressions of Chaucers Workes. Edited by George Henry Kingsley. London: Early English Text Society, 1865.

Secondary Sources

Baker, J. H. An Introduction to English Legal History. 4th ed. Bath: Butterworths, 2002. ———. Manual of Law French. 2nd ed. Aldershot: Scolar, 1990. Barrington, Candace. “Common-​Law and Penitential Intentionality in Gower’s ‘Tale of Paris and Helen.’ ” South Atlantic Review 79 (2015): 132–​43. Bennett, Judith M., and Amy M.  Froide. “A Singular Past.” In Singlewomen in the European Past: 1250–​1800, edited by Judith M.  Bennett and Amy M.  Froide, 1–​37. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990. Blamires, Alcuin. Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Bryant, Brantley L.  “ ‘By Extorcions I  Lyve’:  Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale and Corrupt Officials.” Chaucer Review 42 (2007): 180–​95. Collette, Carolyn P. Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2014. Evans, Ruth. “Chaucer’s Life.” In Chaucer: An Oxford Guide, edited by Steve Ellis, 9–​25. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1927. Reprint, 1985. Hallissy, Margaret. Clean Maids, True Wives, Steadfast Widows: Chaucer’s Women and Medieval Codes of Conduct. Westport: Greenwood, 1993. Harding, Alan. A Social History of English Law. Gloucester: Peter Smith, 1966. Helmholz, R.  H. “Conflicts between Religious and Secular Law:  Common Themes in the English Experience, 1250–​1640.” Cardoza Law Review 12 (1991): 707–​28. Jones, Mike Rodman. Radical Pastoral, 1381–​1594: Appropriation and the Writing of Religious Controversy. Surrey: Ashgate, 2011. Justice, Steven. Adam Usk’s Secret. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Katz, Stephen Andrew. “Intention and the Idea of the Literary in Chaucer.” Berkeley: University of California, 2009. https://​escholarship.org/​uc/​item/​2x1560m9. Kelly, Henry Ansgar. “Penitential Theology and Law at the Turn of the Fifteenth Century.” In A New History of Penance, edited by Abigail Firey, 239–​317. Leiden: Brill, 2008. Kline, Daniel T.  “ ‘Myne by Right’:  Oath Making and Intent in The Friar’s Tale.” Philological Quarterly 77 (1998): 271–​98.

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Little, Katherine C. Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. Machan, Tim William. “Speght’s ‘Works’ and the Invention of Chaucer.” Text 8 (1995): 145–​70. Mann, Jill. Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-​Poet, and Malory. Edited by Mark David Rasmussen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Mathews, Jana. “Land, Lepers, and the Law in The Testament of Cresseid.” In The Letter of the Law: Legal Practice and Literary Production in Medieval England, edited by Candace Barrington and Emily Steiner, 40–​66. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Meyer-​Lee, Robert J. “Abandon the Fragments.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 47–​83. Passon, Richard H. “Entente in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 2 (1968): 166–​71. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Pearsall, Derek. “Thomas Speght (ca. 1550-​?).” In Editing Chaucer: The Great Tradition, edited by Paul G. Ruggiers, 71–​92. Norman: Pilgrim, 1984. Steel, Karl. “The Friar’s Tale: Animals and the Question of Human Agency.” In The Open Access Companion to The Canterbury Tales, 2017. https://​opencanterburytales.dsl.lsu.edu.

Candace Barrington is Professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, where she pursues two research interests. She studies legal and literary discourse in medieval England, resulting in several articles and coedited volumes, including the Cambridge Companion to Medieval English Law and Literature (2019) with Sebastian Sobecki. She also studies global medievalism, beginning with Chaucer’s popular reception in American Chaucers (2007) plus numerous articles. With Jonathan Hsy, she directs Global Chaucers; they maintain an active blog and co-edited an issue of the Global Circulation Project for Literature Compass, “Chaucer’s Global Compaignye” (2018). With Louise D’Arcens, she coedited Digital Philology’s “Global Middle Ages, Global Medievalism” (2019). She’s currently writing two monographs: Faithless Love:  Re-​ reading Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales through Global Languages and Chaucer and Translation: The Global Roots and Branches of English Literature. She belongs to the editorial collective that published the Open Access Companion to The Canterbury Tales (2018), and is a founding co-editor of New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession.

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PITE GLENN D. BURGER Man of Law’s Tale Knight’s Tale Merchant’s Tale Squire’s Tale

Variations of the word pite appear in the General Prologue and fifteen of the Canterbury Tales. But they cluster meaningfully in just seven, each associated with poetic high style and/​or high social estate: the Knight’s (14 times), Man of Law’s (10), Clerk’s (8), Merchant’s (3), Squire’s (4), and Franklin’s (6) Tales, and the Tale of Melibee (5). In contrast, references to pite are strikingly absent from the fabliau or estate satire tales—​the Miller’s, Reeve’s, Cook’s, Friar’s, Summoner’s, and Shipman’s Tales—​and from the two tales associated with embodied, oral female wisdom—​the Wife of Bath’s and Manciple’s. We might expect, based on the centrality of ennobling love as a crucial question in so much of Chaucer’s earlier poetry, that when pite clusters in the Tales it would be in the context of fin’amor service—​where the pitous situation of the courtly lover crucially elicits (or not) a corresponding pite on the part of his lady. But the fin’amor contexts for pity in the Tales, more often than not, distort typical modes of signification and undercut any ennobling function it might have. Nor do the Canterbury Tales echo the widespread use of empathetic pity in late medieval affective devotion, where devotees are incited to identify in embodied compassionate terms with events in Christ’s life and thereby connect directly with the godhead through Christ’s humanity and sacrifice. Such affective devotion is largely absent from “straight” religious tales such as the Second Nun’s and Parson’s.1 And as we will see, when such structures of feeling are evoked in a quasi-​saint’s legend such as the Man of Law’s Tale, pite emerges as a much more hybrid form of feeling, as much secular as religious. Instead, Chaucer associates pite in the Canterbury Tales both with specifically gentil or ennobling modes of feeling and with how a particular kind of womanly attunement to empathy can profoundly affect masculine self-​rule. As a case study for considering Chaucer’s analysis of such exchanges of feeling, I  will focus on those tales—​Knight’s, Man of Law’s, Merchant’s, and Squire’s—​where the refrain “pitee runneth soone in gentil 1 The one exception here might be the Prioress’s Tale, where the schoolboy’s expression of Marian devotion explicitly takes place without his understanding the Latin words of the song he sings. Nonetheless, there is no attempt to organize such feeling within the structures of private devotion that we find in late medieval affective spirituality.

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60 Glenn D. Burger herte” appears.2 In my discussion of the Man of Law’s Tale I focus on Christianity and gentility; in the Knight’s Tale, on justice, right rule, and gentility; in the Merchant’s Tale, on embodiment and satire; and in the Squire’s Tale, on the failure of pite to coalesce into an emotional community. To understand how pite circulates in these tales, and to what ends, requires both that we historicize the specifically medieval structures of feeling from which it emerges, and that we attend to a particularly Chaucerian take on such structures. I argue that these tales draw on gendered cultural practices that enable pite to be recognized in socially effective ways. In the opening moments of the Knight’s Tale, for example, the emotion expressed by the grieving Theban widows incites an outburst of righteous anger by Theseus that then justifies his subsequent warfare as just revenge.3 Such controlled displays of pity thus connect feeling subjects to the social sphere in politically agential ways by representing an emotional community of “gentils” whose mode of feeling justifies them as “naturally” fit to rule.4 A statement such as “pitee runneth soone in gentil herte” also encapsulates and draws attention to just how such displays function as emotional utterances that, in William Reddy’s words, “do things to the world.” In the Knight’s Tale, for example, the phrase marks the point when Theseus, in response to the weeping Emelye and Hippolyta, shifts from one first-​person, present tense emotion claim—​I am angry—​to another—​I am merciful—​in response to the traitorous behaviour of Palamon and Arcite. The phrase’s ability to structure feeling here does more than simply describe one internal feeling being replaced by another. At the same time, it does not record the constitutive power of a true performative speech act. It remains somewhere in between. As Reddy notes, “[w]‌hen someone says “I am angry” the word angry is not the anger, not in the way that, in “I accept,” accept is the acceptance.” This expression of how pite moves through Theseus’s gentil heart, then, operates through the use of what Reddy has termed emotives:  “An emotive utterance, unlike a performative, is not self-​referential […] emotives are similar to performatives (and differ from constatives [that is, simple descriptive utterances]) in that emotives do things to the world. Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful.”5 Pite, I will be arguing, functions as a power-​filled emotive in late medieval culture: expressing what is best in human behaviour and providing a crucial tool in the repertory of gentil self-​identification. In the Canterbury Tales, however, the circulation of pite also explores the fragility of its status as an emotive, emerging at moments of social unease about the security of the established gender (and state) relations that such 2 See the Knight’s Tale (1.919–​20; 1.1760–​62), Merchant’s Tale (4.1986–​96), and Squire’s Tale (5.478–​87). I also include the equivalent formulation, “gentil herte […] fulfild of pitee,” from the Man of Law’s Tale (2.659–​60). 3 For a survey of recent work on medieval affect and emotion, see Crocker, “Medieval Affects Now.”

4 See Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, who coins the term “emotional community” to describe “groups in which people adhere to the same norms of emotional expression and value” (2). 5 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 104–​5.

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displays of pite should establish. Chaucerian pity does not simply reproduce gentility as an ethically stable structure, and thus it cannot establish the merciful gentil ruler as naturally fit to rule. On the contrary, Chaucer considers profound strains that the performance of pite demands of its gendered subjects, and with that the instability of gentil as a foundational category for hegemonic social relations.

The Man of Law’s Tale: The Limitations of Pity’s Imagined Communities

The Man of Law’s Tale begins and ends with striking displays of pite as empathetic feeling for the suffering of another. The first occurs when Custance is forced by her father, the emperor of Rome, to leave family and friends and marry the Muslim sultan of Syria. As the narrator puts it, not at Troy when the Greeks sacked it, nor at the siege of Thebes, nor at Rome when Hannibal attacked it, “Nas herd swich tendre wepyng for pitee /​As in the chambre was for hire departynge” (2.292–​93). The second circulation of such empathetic feeling occurs at the end of the tale when Custance and Alla are unexpectedly reunited: Long was the sobbyng and the bitter peyne, Er that hir woful hertes myghte cesse; Greet was the pitee for to heere hem pleyne, Thurgh which pleintes gan hir wo encresse. (2.1065–​68)

The tale records a third moment when the circulation of pite produces direct and embodied feelings of empathetic connection. This takes place when Custance, expelled from Syria and adrift in a boat for “thre yeer and moore” (2.499), finally washes up on the Northumbrian coast. As she tells the constable of the castle that she was “so mazed in the see /​That she forgat hir mynde” (2.526–​27), he “hath of hire so greet pitee, /​And eek his wyf, that they wepen for routhe” (2.528–​29). In all three cases, pity appears to be a kind of universal emotion, capable of connecting medieval and modern reader, Roman and Saxon protagonist, in a shared humanity. But another moment of empathetic connection, this time between the narrator and Custance when she is first cast adrift in a boat by the sultaness, reminds us, as Sarah McNamer has argued, that Western compassion has a specific history and that we need to approach with caution any assumption that such expressions are somehow universal and transhistorical. As Custance enters the boat, she blesses herself and “with ful pitous voys” addresses Christ’s cross: “O cleere, o welful auter, hooly croys, Reed of the Lambes blood ful of pitee, That wessh the world fro the olde iniquitee, Me fro the feend and fro his clawes kepe, That day that I shal drenchen in the depe.” (2.449, 451–​55)

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62 Glenn D. Burger Custance’s affecting prayer is itself framed by the narrator’s empathetic emotional outburst: “O my Custance, ful of benignytee, /​O Emperoures yonge doghter deere, /​He that is lord of Fortune be thy steere!” (2.446–​48). If human compassion, the feeling and transmission of pite, is understood as universal here it is because it originates in the once and forever exercise of compassion bound up in the union of divine and human in Christ’s Incarnation and fully expressed in his sacrifice on the cross. Pity describes not simply a straightforward flow of empathetic feeling but also the transformative effects this movement of the heart has on the individual producing such compassion. The Man of Law’s Tale and Custance’s exemplarity as a Christian subject put clear limits on the universality such pite has as an emotion and on its ability to describe fully what it means to be human. While it links the soon-​to-​be-​Christian pagan constable and wife with the quintessentially Christian Roman aristocrat in a common structure of specifically Christian feeling, pite, or rather its lack, in the stubbornly Muslim sultaness and pagan Donegild also defines their essential inhumanity. The pite that Custance arouses, then, is first and foremost a defining Christian emotion, or put another way, the “universality” of pity embodies the triumphal universality of the idea of Christendom itself, even in the face of temporal and spatial locations that would seem to stand outside it.6 We can see how embodied feeling is marshalled, channelled, and displayed as socialized emotion and as a specifically Christian form of pite in a key moment in the tale that portrays Custance as quasi-​saint and elicits quasi-​Christian compassion from a pagan authority. When a knight kills Hermengyld and lays the knife beside Custance as she sleeps in Hermengyld’s bed, Custance is falsely accused of her murder and brought before king Alla. When the king hears her sorrowful history, and sees in front of him “so benigne a creature /​ Falle in disese and mysaventure,” his heart “of pitee gan agryse” (2.614–​16). Custance, kneeling in front of him, breaks into prayer, begging the God that saved Susanna from false testimony to save her: This Alla kyng hath swich compassioun, As gentil herte is fulfild of pitee, That from his eyen ran the water doun. (2.659–​61)

The production of feeling on Custance’s part here elicits a corresponding movement in Alla’s heart, and his turn to compassion tempers any immediate imposition of “justice” that might lead to Custance’s execution. Instead he calls for a book to be brought for the knight to swear again to his evidence against Custance. Equally notable, however, are the two stanzas of intensely emotional utterance by the narrator that precede the description of Alla’s pite. First, the narrator asks his audience if they have not sometimes seen “a pale face, /​Among a prees” (2.645–​46) of one being led to the gallows in order that they might feel the piteousness of Custance’s situation, that she appears just like 6 For discussions of the tale’s patterns of othering based on religion and race, see Heng, Empire of Magic,” 181–​238; for intersections of medieval race and religion more generally, see Heng, The Invention of Race, especially 110–​80.

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that person in this moment of accusation. Then the narrator directly attempts to invoke a feeling response from his imagined female readers: O queenes, lyvynge in prosperitee Duchesses, and ye ladyes everichone, Haveth som routhe on hire adversitee! An Emperoures doghter stant allone. (2.652–​55)

In doing so, the Man of Law adopts the affective strategies structuring much late medieval private devotion. Nicholas Love, for example, in The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, frequently urges his readers to focus on events in the life and passion of Christ “worthi to be hade in mynde” (worthy to have in mind) and thus to “haue inwardly compassion” (have heartfelt compassion) for the suffering undertaken by Christ and felt by the Virgin Mary and those around him.7 By such a fully embodied encounter, readers are guided to perform a compassionate and performative “reading” of Scripture that will allow them to experience with Jesus the sorrowful events of his passionate linking of the divine and the human. We can see the Man of Law similarly guiding us to reproduce Alla’s compassionate identification with Custance. It becomes, then, the kind of affective meditation that provides what Sarah McNamer has usefully called “intimate scripts,” that is, “literally scripts for the performance of feeling that often explicitly aspire to performative efficacy” for their actors, allowing them to perform compassion in the private drama of the heart.8 But if a model of affective private Christian devotion lies behind the exercise of pity here, the Man of Law’s structuring of compassion differs from it in important ways. Mainstream medieval affective private devotion emphasizes the embodied habits of behaviour and thought that organize the ways in which individuals perceive the social world around them and react to it, and that kind of program of devotion provides an important model for understanding how Custance’s prayers and their emphasis on compassion provide an emotional regime that “proves” her saintliness. But while such embodied habits of behaviour may describe the programmatic harnessing of the affective flows we see in her prayer (and while that may provide a model for how the narrator directs his audience to respond emotively to Custance’s suffering), they do not exactly match up with the Man of Law’s handling of pity overall, especially the emotional frame that his extensive narrative interjections provide. His tale may want to look like affective devotion but it also differs substantively from that model by overlaying the supposedly timeless legend of Custance with a strangely hybrid blend of late fourteenth-​century, high-​status religious feeling and secular self-​identification.9 While the “pale face” of 7 Love, The Mirror of the Blessed Life, 38, 42. 8 McNamer, Affective Meditation, 12.

9 This self-​identification also has a distinctly English flavor since the narrator is actually directly addressing the Canterbury pilgrimage audience, and since Alla, who compassionately identifies with Custance at this point, is Northumbrian.

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64 Glenn D. Burger “hym that be lad /​ Toward his deeth” (2.645–​47, emphasis added) is both male and a criminal face exposed to a general audience, the queens, duchesses, and ladies exhorted to have “som routhe” on Custance’s adversity are a distinctly female and noble imagined community connected by a shared compassion for Custance. In other words, as in the earlier moments, pity’s circulation as emotion—​that is, as a codified, reproducible set of socialized feelings with discernible modes of display—​creates an imagined emotional community, making emotion a building block in constructing the social. But this seems more complex than simply an exclusionary “universal” Christianitas. The imagined community here is also a distinctly gentil one, codified as much in gendered as in classed terms. Performing pite—​whether within the action of the tale or through the performative reading practices the Man of Law employs and encourages—​establishes the audience as both Christian and gentil: a supplicating femininity eliciting compassion and, with that, a productive softening of masculine justice.

The Knight’s Tale: Womanly Pity, Masculine Mercy, and a Gentil Right to Rule

While the Knight starts with a brief synopsis of Theseus’s conquest of the Amazons and his marriage to their queen, Hippolyta (1.865–​83),10 what he actually lingers over at the beginning of the tale is the pitous appeal of the Theban widows to Theseus. This episode is structured as a dramatic tableau—​a series of stylized gestures and affecting demonstrations of pity—​as the widowed and dispossessed ladies describe in touching terms Creon’s conquest of Thebes and his refusal to let them bury their husbands, hoping to elicit from Theseus “[s]‌om drope of pitee, thurgh thy gentillesse” (1.920). Theseus dismounts, seeing these noble women “so pitous and so maat [dejected],” and “with herte pitous […] in his armes he hem alle up hente, /​ And hem conforteth in ful good entente” (1.955–​58). There and then, swearing as a “trewe knyght” (1.959), Theseus sets off to besiege Thebes, vowing to avenge the injustice done to these pitiable widows and to provide a proper burial for their husbands’ bodies. In effect, the narrative arc of the Knight’s tale—​what he finds personally significant and wants to foreground from his source, Boccaccio’s Teseida—​focuses not on Theseus’s masculinist conquest of the land of “Femenye” and the forced marriage of Hippolyta, but on how this moving tableau of grieving widows provokes strong feelings in Theseus (and us) and on how such strong feelings establish Theseus as the natural embodiment of justice. Pite is thus inextricably connected with the expression of proper forms of womanliness that can temper the innate masculine will to raw power (embodied by Creon’s tyranny, but also, potentially, in Theseus’s conquest). Such an opening to the first of the Canterbury Tales, coming after Chaucer’s previous effort in dystopian fin’amor, the Legend of Good Women, also silently substitutes a truly gentil version of Theseus for the ambitious false lover and high-​born cad represented in the “Legend of Ariadne.” The 10 In Chaucer’s source for the Knight’s Tale, Boccaccio’s Teseida, these events are narrated at length, occupying much of the first two of the poem’s twelve books. See Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 18–​72.

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Knight’s Tale shows an older and wiser Theseus acting out the very definition of what it means to be fully human, thereby restoring a “natural” order that has been upended by Creon’s misrule. Notably, such humanity is elicited by the compassion felt by the noble Theseus (and by readers) in response to the piteousness of gentil women dispossessed and gentil knights denied their rightful obsequies. All of this in turn subsumes the later image of a battleground strewn with dead bodies, themselves left unburied and open to despoliation by robbers, after Theseus recaptures Thebes. Rather than seeing a simple cycle of violence, the embodied response that is provoked by the circulation of pite in this opening tableau encourages us to believe that we have witnessed the exercise of true justice and not just raw power, the restoration of proper human relations and not simply the assertion of Theseus’s noble privilege through tyrannical state power. We understand this production of ennobling social and political relations through the embodied, affective relations between ruler and ruled more clearly later in the tale when Theseus discovers Palamon and Arcite fighting with each other in the forest. Once Palamon announces who he and Arcite really are, and with that their status as rebel and false subject respectively, Theseus has no choice, it would seem, but to respond by sentencing them to death. Justice demands it, Theseus announces. But after he condemns Palamon and Arcite to death, the queen “for verray wommanhede, /​Gan for to wepe, and so dide Emelya, /​And alle the ladyes in the compaignye, /​Greet pitee was it, as it thoughte hem alle, […] For gentil men they were of greet estaat” (1.1748–​51, 1753). And their piteousness in turn evokes a shift in Theseus’s emotions: “at the laste aslaked was his mood, /​For pitee renneth soone in gentil herte” (1.1760–​61).11 As in the opening tableau, but here enunciated more explicitly, the affective link between piteous subject and pitying viewer is made possible by their shared gentility and “greet estaat.” What results from such circulation of pite is, however, presented not as an exclusionary statement of class privilege and self-​interest but as a universalizing expression of true “humanity” and exemplary statecraft. In this case, however, unlike the opening encounter with the Theban widows, the Knight’s tableau of “verry wommanhede” (1.1748) and pitying masculine “gentil herte” (1.1772) is placed within a narrative context that works to unpack and analyze just how such performances provide emotional scripts for noble subjects that enable the repetition and socialization of certain behaviours as “universal” signs of an inherent right to rule. Theseus’s transformation is described as follows: And though he first for ire quook and sterte, […] Yet in his resoun he hem bothe excused, […] And eek his herte had compassioun Of wommen, for they wepen evere in oon, And in his gentil herte he thought anoon, And softe unto hymself he seyde, “Fy Upon a lord that wol have no mercy.” (1.1762, 1766, 1770–​77)

11 For a discussion of the intercessory role of Queen Anne in Richard II’s court, see Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 95–​119.

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66 Glenn D. Burger The narrator immediately follows this analysis of Theseus’s emotional script with direct citation of his long, dismissive speech about service to the God of Love. In it, Theseus expresses his amazement at how a lover’s service to a woman who does not even know him could make a knight like Palamon or Arcite act against his own best interest. Theseus points out that he himself as a young man also served the God of Love. And he ends by noting that at the request of his queen and Emelye, his “suster deere” (1.1820), he will forgive the trespass of Palamon and Arcite if they agree not to harm his country and to pledge allegiance to him. Theseus thus overlays the “noble” practice of love service (where service to a lady necessarily also demands service to the God of Love as ultimate ruler) with a “higher” service to lord, and substitutes his own administration of pite for that of the lady to her noble lover. As a result, an understanding of a reformed gentil pite enlarges the kinds of emotional community made possible by traditional fin’amor love service or by the piteous interchange between petitioning women and noble ruler at the opening of the tale. The circulation of pity among men that is made possible by feminine intervention restores a balance of self-​rule (within Palamon and Arcite as knights or within a ruler such as Theseus) that in turn ensures orderly rule within the hierarchized body of the state. If, indeed, pity comes to be associated with gentility in a way that inscribes a nobility otherwise defined by blood with a virtuousness derived from action, fusing morality and nature in ways that makes nobility at once universal and the marker of the privileged status of those with the right to rule, then that might lead to a more complex understanding of the reactions of the court and Theseus to the later death of Arcite. Describing the infinite sorrows and tears of old and young—​“Allas the pitee that was ther /​Cracchynge of chekes, rentynge eek of heer” (1.2833–​34)—​the narrator appears simply to record a “natural” human response. But when Theseus at Arcite’s funeral bier responds in similarly emotive fashion, “Therwith he weep that pitee was to heere” (1.2878), perhaps we are also witnessing how pity creates an emotional community, and with that, a community that repeats and perpetuates the right to rule of a certain class.

The Perils of Embodiment: Undercutting Pite as Emotive in the Merchant’s Tale

Pite occurs twice in the Merchant’s Tale, once expressed by January as he imagines demanding payment of the marriage debt of sex from his future wife, May, and then exhibited by May as she considers the suffering endured by Damian, the young squire in love with her. In both instances the larger cultural expectation that showing pite will instantiate ennobling refinement in the pitying subject is juxtaposed incongruously with a thoroughgoing physicality in how January, May, and Damian actually perform their versions of empathetic concern. January’s demonstration of pity cannot suture the pretense of ennobling love to his overwhelming desire for sexual gratification. Instead, his rhetorical deployment of pite underscores how the appearance of gentility can mask simple exploitation. He claims to be ravished in a trance every time he looks on May’s

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face, yet, anticipating his wedding night, in his heart he begins to threaten that he will press her in his arms harder than ever Paris did Helen: But nathelees yet hadde he greet pitee That thilke nyght offenden hire moste he, And thoughte, “Allas! O tendre creature, Now wolde God ye myghte wel endure Al my corage, it is so sharp and keene!” (4.1755–​59)

His “sharp and keene” sexual desire emerges in comically literal fashion on their wedding night: He lulleth hire; he kisseth hire ful ofte; With thikke brustles of his berrd unsofte, Lyk to the skyn of houndfyssh, sharp as brere […] And seyde thus, “Allas! I moot trespace To yow, my spouse, and yow greetly offende Er tyme come that I wil doun descende.” (4.1823–​25, 1828–​30)

In similar fashion, May goes through the motions of performing the role of fin’amor lady by arguing to herself that she must show pite for the pain Damian has suffered because of his love for her. this fresshe May Hath take swich impression that day Of pitee of this sike Damyan That from hire herte she ne dryve kan The remembrance for to doon hym ese. “Certeyn,” thoghte she, “whom that this thyng displese I rekke noght, for heere I hym assure To love hym best of any creature, Though he namoore hadde than his sherte.” Lo, pitee renneth soone in gentil herte! (4.1977–​86)

The satiric power of “pitee renneth soone in gentil herte” here depends upon our recognizing how it at once signals pity’s participation in fin’amor’s socially recognizable and empowering emotional regime and at the same time underscores the lack of substance in this particular enunciation of pity as an emotive. The assertion, “I would love him, even if he had nothing more than his shirt,” should function as the kind of affective utterance that identifies and intensifies a particular feeling as a recognizable emotion, in this case, an ennobling refined love that can now circulate between Damian and May because of her pite. Such a display of feeling, harnessed to an established emotional language and logic, would also “do things to the world” by ennobling these feelings and protagonists such that their refined love can set them apart and overwhelm anything that might come in their way, even the social and theological claims of primacy for the marriage vow. Such an assertion of selfless love on May’s part would then assert that an inner, personal gentility trumps external markers of high status. Of course, in

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68 Glenn D. Burger this context, the exclamatory refrain, “pitee renneth soone in gentil herte” also functions satirically to undercut any possibility that pite here is the real deal. It is not the picture of ennobling suffering of fin’amor love service that May would seem unable to drive from her heart but instead the image of a handsome young body in contrast to the decaying flesh of her randy old husband. And as we see later in the garden, the compulsion to pity that May feels here, “to doon hym ese,” is not the recognizable ennobling emotional connection that fin’amor authorizes but instead simply an expression of physical lust for a more satisfying sexual partner. Thus, the movement to pity represented in May seems less an emotion that produces embodied understanding (as we see laid out so clearly with Theseus’s move from ire to mercy) and more a kind of involuntary passion that takes over the body. Referencing an emotion that should produce and manifest embodied thinking—​a way to make “gentils” actually gentil—​here instead draws attention to the perils of embodiment and the complete absence of self-​rule in the characters. This makes the satiric effect of what the narrator says after exclaiming “pitee renneth soone in gentil herte” especially complex: Lo, pitee renneth soone in gentil herte Heere may ye se how excellent franchise In women is, whan they hem narwe avyse. Som tyrant is, as ther be many oon That hath an herte as hard as any stoon, Which wolde han lat hym sterven in the place Wel rather than han graunted hym hire grace, And hem rejoysen in hire crueel pryde, And rekke nat to been an homicide. This gentil May, fulfilled of pitee, Right of hire hand a letter made she […] (4.1986–​95)

On the surface the movement of feeling through May’s womanly heart out to the suffering Damian follows an emotional logic similar to that structuring Hippolyta’s pity of gentil suffering in the Knight’s Tale. And the reference to some tyrant who in his pride would rather let a suffering man starve than grant him mercy gestures to pity’s antithesis and the negative social effects that would result, a kind of mirror image to the socially beneficial effects that female pity has on Theseus, improving his own actions as ruler. But the introduction of these larger social ramifications for “feeling like a woman” in this context intensifies the satiric undercutting of pity by foregrounding the personal self-​ gratification and lack of self-​rule expressed here as “pitee.” Pity moving through May’s heart does not shape the will in socially productive ways. Quite the contrary, as we will see in the adultery that follows, and more generally in the way the gentil window dressing of the romance rhetoric and plot merely accentuates the baseness of the tale’s fabliau-​ like chicanery. What we witness is a willfulness that threatens social disintegration and instability. The feelings expressed by the narrator disrupt not only the gendered politics of fin’amor but also the politics of gentle rule that it undergirds. The reductive power of the satire here keeps us at the level of embodiment, taking off the blinders of socialized emotion in a way that is similar to how the tale shows us January from May’s point of

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view, as a scratchy-​bearded old lecher on top of an unwilling young woman. As a result, we get a different take on gentility. It may be the result of the class rivalry between merchant and noble such that the normal, naturalized compact between the two groups to preserve nobility as a marker of the right to rule is disrupted, and we can “see” the more material self-​interest that masquerades as “self-​rule as right to rule.”

Womanly Feeling in the Squire’s Tale: Pite’s Hold and Female Homosociality

The Squire’s Tale begins, like many romances, by representing an ideal ruler and his court. The emperor Cambyuskan embodies all the traits a noble ruler should possess: he is “hardy, wys, and riche, /​ And pitous and just, alwey yliche” (5.20–​21). The string of adjectives here is clearly meant to suggest that such physical and emotional balance comes naturally to the truly gentil individual. But the simple listing of attributes might also imply something inherently formulaic about Cambyuskan’s virtuous rule—​that it operates as mechanically as the horse and other “wonders” that are later presented to the emperor. As we saw in the Knight’s Tale, with its orchestrated circulation of pity between the suffering noble knights and the ladies, and then between the ladies and Theseus, and with the thoughtful modulation of anger by embodied cognition on Theseus’s part, doing what comes naturally takes effort and complex social interaction. Here such internal balance is either a romance “wonder” or a mechanical marvel, or both, and we are encouraged simply to accept at face value such emotional balance as a natural right of noble birth, much like the extravagant living we see Cambyuskan and his court engaging in. In contrast, our encounter with pity in part two of the tale is complex and singular, challenging any simple understanding of the naturalness of gentility. Here the tale emphasizes Canacee’s inherent humoral balance in contrast to the rest of the court. She is “ful mesurable, as wommen be” (5.362), and has gone to bed early the night before. She wakes up her governess early in the morning and persuades her and her ladies to go walking in the park. We quickly find ourselves in exactly the kind of “natural” landscape in which courtly literature has trained us to expect to find refined manners and fin’amor in their purest forms, and to look to womanly feeling as the best conduit for their expression. In this familiar space, Canacee hears the lament of a wounded falcon: That with a pitous voys so gan to crye That all the wode resouned of hire cry. Ybeten hadde she hirself so pitously With bothe hir wynges til the rede blood Ran endelong the tree ther-​as she stood. And evere in oon she cride alwey and shrighte, And with hir beek hirselven so she prighte That ther nis tigre ne so cruel beest That dwelleth outher in wode or in forest That nolde han wept, if that he wepe koude, For sorwe of hire, she shrighte alwey so loude. (5.412–​22)

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70 Glenn D. Burger Because Canacee is wearing a magic ring, she can understand what the falcon has said and join the rest of the natural world in a compassionate response to the falcon’s suffering. As a result, wel neigh for the routhe almoost she [Canacee] deide. And to the tree she goth ful hastily, And on this faukon looketh pitously, And heeld hir lappe abrood, for wel she wiste The faukon moste fallen fro the twiste [branch] Whan that it swowned next, for lakke of blood. (5.438–​43)

Both protagonists here are recognizably “womanly” in terms of their piteousness: Canacee in being moved without thinking, “naturally,” by her feelings to respond to another’s suffering; the falcon, in her lack of restraint and equally profound giving in to feeling, even at the expense of her bodily wellbeing. And as we will soon learn, this suffering is even more womanly in arising out of an excess of pity for the suffering of a male lover. But the piteous condition of the falcon becomes accessible to us not simply through Canacee’s instinctively gentil exercise of womanly pity but also because she possesses a magical ring that lets her converse with birds. That the natural order might reproduce the human, and a noble bird act (and here speak) just as a courtly heroine, is not unfamiliar as a feature of fin’amor. Think, for example, of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls. And it seems, at first, as if the suffering falcon will provide that kind of mirror back to Canacee, “proving” her inherent gentility, and by that, the universality of courtliness as the defining model for how to be truly human: Tho shrighte this faucon yet moore pitously Than ever she dide, and fil to grounde anon, And lith aswowne, deed and lyk a stoon, Til Canace hath in hire lappe hire take Unto the tyme she gan of swough awake. And after that she of hir swough gan breyde, Right in hir haukes ledene thus she seyde: “That pitee renneth soone in gentil herte, Feelynge his similitude in peynes smerte, Is preved alday, as men may it see, As wel by werk as by auctoritee; For gentil herte kitheth gentillesse. I se wel that ye han of my distresse Compassion, my faire Canace, Of verray wommanly benignytee That Nature in your principles hath set.” (5.472–​87)

But the connection between nonhuman and human established through the circulation of pity among falcon, Canacee, and reader here does not coalesce into an emotional community that can re-​present traditional forms of gentility in convincing ways. Instead, pity keeps us in a presocial, “natural” order that is startling in the violent disarray it

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displays. For the falcon goes on to elaborate the systematic way that her false lover deceived her and debased not only fin’amor as a social order but his very noble status itself, one that supposedly was his “natural” estate. The more rhetorically elaborated the male tercelet’s language, the more the gulf between its high style and the baseness of his motives comes through. Paradoxically, then, the magical ring does much more than allow for literal translation; the very literalness of the translation stands in the way of more substantive forms of cultural translation. The falcon’s narrative, like her bloodied, self-​wounded body, would seem to reveal something fundamental about womanliness not acknowledged in the codified structures of fin’amor, that is, its vulnerability to masculine abuse and the toll that such “love” takes on real women’s bodies and spirits. As a result, what circulates between falcon and Canacee, however much it appears to employ the language and emotional logic of pite, remains much more a kind of presocial feeling or what modern theoreticians would term “affect.”12 To the extent that that affective bond between the two becomes ever more profound and singular, it cannot as a result settle into the emotional community of pity that we have observed in the Knight’s Tale. Instead, masculine and feminine emerge as two fundamentally different desiring systems, and pite’s inability to connect them (as told by the falcon) underscores the failure of gentility as a signifying system. If gentility is the universal norm for what makes the human human, then it should translate seamlessly, look and sound the same everywhere, whether in the far off court of Cambyuskan or among the nobler animals such as the falcon and tercelet. But rather than figuratively “holding” a male lover in productive service to his beloved, Canacee literally cradles the falcon in her lap, thereby creating from the wounded remnants of love’s failure her own version of a fin’amor, female–​female relationship. Both like and unlike a romance heroine taking the wounded male knight home to heal his wounds, Canacee brings the falcon home to tend to her physical and psychic wounds. There by her bed’s head she has a pen constructed, covered in blue velvets (as blue is a witness of women’s fidelity) and painted green with images of false male birds. The end result is to join the two females together in a queer kind of physical intimacy and interspecies domesticity.13 The female sociality we encounter here in the face of male deception and violence to women differs in crucial ways from what occurs in the Legend of Good Women, where, for example, the sisters Procne and Philomela were kept separate and unable to communicate with each other. Here the magic ring brings alternative circulations of pity into being, brings two “women” together, or rather puts the voice of the fin’amor heroine into that of a bird, and 12 For an introduction to the variety of contemporary theorization of affect, feeling, and emotion, see The Affect Theory Reader.

13 I am indebted to Haylie Swenson for helping me think about female interspecies homosociality in the tale; see Swenson, “Resisting Sex.” For broader discussions of the animal/​human divide in the Middle Ages, see Crane, Animal Encounters; and Steel, How to Make a Human.

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72 Glenn D. Burger makes “woman” here the care-​full auditor. Such structures of feeling cannot function as any kind of traditional emotive arising out of the expression of pite. Disruptive translation impedes pite’s ability to construct a crossgender emotional community of gentils adhering to the same norms of fin’amor emotional expression. But by postponing the normal circuit of gentil activity around and through pite, a space is also opened up to experience other, perhaps more individuated kinds of embodied understanding.

Conclusion

In my analysis of these four Canterbury tales, then, I  have explored how their representation of pite often either vacates the kind of feeling needed to secure emotional integrity or overloads the affective exchanges taking place in complicating ways. In doing so, Chaucer foregrounds the complex flows of affect necessary to make pite work as an emotive with real effects in the world. As a result, looked-​for connections between masculine and feminine, feeling and gentility, interpersonal relations of power and state formation, are established but also disturbed, obscured, or challenged. Chaucer’s recognition of the centrality of emotions to cultural formations, as well as their potential to exceed the formations to which they are harnessed, opens up new interpretative possibilities across his works. As a final thought for this essay, I  wish to identify one such possibility: the intersection of emotion with Chaucerian poetics and form. Poetic accomplishment is central to the reception of Chaucer, whose foundational position as the “Father of English Poetry” is built, in part, on his supposed success in mastering a truly English poetic high style. One feature of Chaucerian high style is the rhyme royal stanza, a form Chaucer introduced in Troilus and Criseyde and employs in four Canterbury Tales—​the Man of Law’s, Clerk’s, Prioress’s, and Second Nun’s. As is regularly noted, rhyme royal appears in Chaucerian works featuring idealized, “gentle” characters, elevated content, and heightened emotions, emotions which are felt by characters and narrators within the works but also extend outward to readers, who are invited to feel along with the characters and thus to share in their social and ethical prestige. If, as I’ve argued in this essay, structures of feeling are intimately connected with the formation of conduct, making certain flows of affect among individuals meaningful and manipulable, then how are we to read this affective circuit connecting poet, reader, and poetic form? Does this circuit work not only to naturalize and elevate a particular mode of reader empathy, but also a particular poetic form, a form that would come to be associated with both English high style and with Chaucer himself? A more suspicious understanding of the relationships between pite and gentility, as I  have been outlining in this essay, might challenge the character of “Father Chaucer” built on such supposed success in introducing and mastering a truly English poetic high style. Undoing the productive relationships between Chaucerian high style and hegemonic identity in the Canterbury Tales might take us back in new ways to a recurring critical concern about the “lack”

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(of humanity, style, social and moral worth) that is supposedly evident in those fabliau or estate satire tales without pity—​the Miller’s, Reeve’s, Cook’s, Friar’s, Summoner’s, and Shipman’s Tales. Operating outside the “normal” syntax of emotive utterance, these tales might, in ways that parallel Canacee’s cross-​species relationship, be understood not as throwbacks to outmoded forms such as fabliaux or as low comic interludes on the way to somewhere else more meaningful but instead as opening up spaces for new structures of feeling and forms of social experimentation.

Bibliography Primary Sources Boccaccio, Giovanni. The Book of Theseus: Teseida delle nozze d’Emilia. Translated by Bernadette Marie McCoy. New York: Medieval Text Association, 1974. Love, Nicholas. The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ: A Reading Text. Edited by Michael G. Sargent. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2004.

Secondary Sources

The Affect Theory Reader. Edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J.  Seigworth. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Crocker, Holly A. “Medieval Affects Now.” Exemplaria 29 (2017): 82–​98. Heng, Geraldine. Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. ———. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Reddy, William M.  The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007. Steel, Karl. How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Strohm, Paul. Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-​ Century Texts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Swenson, Haylie. “Resisting Sex and Species in The Squire’s Tale.” Paper presented at the Forty-​Third Annual Sewanee Medieval Colloquium. Sewanee, March 2017.

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74 Glenn D. Burger Glenn D. Burger is Professor of English at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY. He has edited the fourteenth-​century crusade history, Hetoum’s A Lytell Cronycle (Toronto University Press, 1988). He has coedited (with Steven Kruger) Queering the Middle Ages (Minnesota University Press, 2000), (with Lesley Cormack, Jonathan Hart, and Natalia Pylipuik) Making Contact: Maps, Identity, and Travel (Alberta University Press, 2003), (with Holly A. Crocker) Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2019), and (with Rory Critten) Household Knowledges in Late Medieval England and France (Manchester University Press, 2019). He is author of Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minnesota University Press, 2003), Conduct Becoming: Representing Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), and numerous articles on queer, gender, and postcolonial issues in Chaucerian texts.

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SLIDER DAVID RAYBIN Knight’s Tale Clerk’s Tale Franklin’s Tale Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale Boece God only knows God makes his plan The information’s unavailable To the mortal man We work our jobs Collect our pay Believe we’re gliding down the highway When in fact we’re slip slidin’ away. (Paul Simon, “Slip Slidin’ Away”)

A bit over 350 lines into the Knight’s Tale, Arcite has been released from captivity “in angwissh and in wo” (1.1030) and sent home to Thebes. Disconsolate that he can no longer see his beloved Emelye, Arcite bemoans his confinement in what he calls a “prisoun worse than biforn,” envies the “victorie” enjoyed by Palamon, who may continue to live “[f]ul blisfully” in a cell Arcite likens to “paradys,” and turns philosophical (1.1224, 1235–​37). It is, he says, a sad aspect of human nature that in the search for happiness people habitually go astray: “We faren as he that dronke is as a mous. A dronke man woot wel he hath an hous, But he noot which the righte wey is thider, And to a dronke man the wey is slider. And certes, in the world so faren we; We seken faste after felicitee, But we goon wrong ful often, trewely.” (1.1261–​67)

For a drunken man, the path to his house is slider. The word slider is unusual in Chaucer, its only other instance coming in the Legend of Good Women, where it describes the slipperiness of a ship’s deck when an enemy has strewn it with peas to render it hazardous in the confusion of battle.1 Variants (slyde, slit, slydyng/​e) appear more frequently—​in the 1 On the phrase “He poureth pesen upon the haches slidere” (Legend, 648), see Sayers, “Chaucer’s Description of the Battle of Actium,” 85.

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76 David Raybin Clerk’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, and Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales, and also in Boece, the Book of the Duchess, the Parliament of Fowls, and Troilus and Criseyde—​and often, as with Arcite’s complaint, in meaningful and potentially hazardous situations.2 In this chapter, I explore Chaucer’s use of the word slider as it is reflected in the haphazard movement of events and reflective philosophical attitude that undergird the Knight’s Tale, and then, more briefly, in how the variants point to similar perspectives in the Clerk’s, Franklin’s, and Canon’s Yeoman’s Tales. I close by considering how the concept of a slider path to felicity informs the structure of the Canterbury Tales as a unified book. As I hope to show, the notion that human pathways are in their essence slider is central to Chaucer’s thinking about life and art. People, Chaucer contends, typically seek the “righte wey” to home and happiness, but it is inherent in our nature that “we goon wrong ful often, trewely.” The MED offers as definitions of slider:  “slippery, slick,” “prone to slip, uncertain,” “gliding, sliding,” and “smooth,” sometimes with the figurative import of “treacherous, deceitful.”3 The word is attested as early as 1225, and most of the early instances appear in conjunction with wei, giving the sense of a (figuratively) slippery or slick path, as in The Owl and the Nightingale:  “Ƿu schalt falle, Þe wei is slider” (You will fall, the path is treacherous; 956). The MED places the Knight’s Tale usage in this category, but the phrasing adds some nuance to the meaning. Chaucer here defines slider in opposition to righte, which in context has the primary sense of “direct” and a secondary sense of “correct” or “proper,” “right” as opposed to “wrong.” A  drunken man cannot follow a proper path to the house he seeks, but finds himself on a course that is slippery, sliding, uncertain, dangerous, wrong. In the Boece, Chaucer translates Boethius’s “lubrica […] Fortuna” as “slydynge Fortune” (Boece, 1.m5.34) and “spes lubrica” as “slidynge and desceyvynge hope” (Boece, 4.m2.14).4 What a person imagines to be the direct path to a desired end is no more reliable, the translation suggests, than ephemeral Fortune or illusory hope, hence hardly reliable at all. Chaucer’s usage in the Knight’s Tale places drunken men before a reader’s eyes—​ we can all picture how sots stumble, weave, and sometimes lose their way or fall down—​but the point of the analogy is not to mock the drunkard but to define the human condition:  “And certes, in the world so faren we.” Arcite’s consideration is egocentric; he laments his own circumstances and wistfully imagines that his misery is universal. As a statement about Chaucer’s practice, however, the recognition is widely applicable, and it governs the ebb and flow of the Knight’s Tale, where the workings 2 While the other instances are rarely mentioned, the characterization of Criseyde as “slydynge of corage” (Troilus, 5.825) has been much cited. See, for example, Fries, “ ‘Slydinge of Corage,’ ” and Knapp, “The Nature of Nature.’ ” 3 MED, s.v. “slider, adj.,” 1(a), 1(b), 1(c), 1(d).

4 Boethius, Consolatio, 1.m5.28–​29; and 4.2.8.

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of fate, chance, and divinity determine outcomes, and almost no human endeavour progresses directly as planned.5 As the tale opens, Theseus, having defeated the Amazons and married Hippolyta, is riding home to Athens and “come almoost unto the toun” (1.894) when he is distracted by a mass of women kneeling and crying in the “heighe weye” (1.897), the main road into the city. He is nearly there, nearly home triumphant from his wars, but after discussion with the assembled ladies he raises his banner and rides forth to Thebes: “No neer Atthenes wolde he go ne ride, /​ Ne take his ese fully half a day” (1.968–​69). Theseus’s direct path has been replaced by a wayward one, and it is only after he has killed Creon and dismantled Thebes’s walls that “hoom he rit” (1.1026) to be crowned as a conqueror. In the twisting journey toward love and glory, the distinction between conqueror of the Amazons and conqueror of Thebes hardly matters, even as it informs the progress of the tale. Palamon and Arcite have been wounded grievously in the fighting. Discovered in uncertain state in a pile of dead bodies—​“Nat fully quyke, ne fully dede” (1.1015)—​the cousins are transferred to Theseus’s tent and the path of their lives is ordained: they will remain together “[p]‌erpetuelly” and “[f]or everemoore” (1.1024, 1032; cf. 1175–​76, 1229, 1341–​43, and 1457–​58) in Theseus’s prison. Until they don’t. After a period of undefined years and days, Arcite is released from prison, “Frely to goon wher that hym liste over al” with the sole proviso that he never appear in Athens, while Palamon abides in “derknesse and horrible and strong prisoun,” bathing the fetters on his shins in “bittre, salte teeres wete” (1.1207, 1451, 1280). Each cousin envies his rival’s state and imagines his own path as hopeless: “I nam but deed,” cries the one, “ther nys no remedye”; “Allas,” wails the other, “Of al oure strif, God woot, the fruyt is thyn” (1.1274, 1281–​82). The men are much alike in their corporeal response to ill fortune, as each man’s appearance is transformed by envy and sorrow. Jealousy clutches so “woodly” at Palamon’s breast and heart “that he lyk was to biholde /​The boxtree or the asshen dede and colde” (1.1301–​2). Envious Arcite’s shrunken face renders him similarly pallid and unrecognizable, “His eyen holwe and grisly to biholde. /​ His hewe falow and pale as asshen colde” (1.1363–​64). At this point in the serpentine storyline, a reader does not know that Arcite’s corpse later will be “brent to asshen colde” (1.2957), but such is the direction toward which the imagery will wind. Thus altered in body, each man embarks on the path that he imagines has given advantage to his opposite. Arcite returns to 5 H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. observes in a similar vein that the shift to “we” has the effect of making it “difficult, on first reading, to decide who is speaking here,” such that it is “tempting to construe [lines 1251–​67] as the narrator’s comment on Arcite’s speech rather than as a continuation of it,” noting further that “The effect was not lost on the scribes of Ellesmere and Hengwrt, both of whom interject before line 1251 the paragraph sigil that does duty in their manuscripts for quotation marks indicating a change of speaker” (Disenchanted Self, 239 n 18).

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78 David Raybin Athens in hope of looking upon and serving Emelye, and Palamon contrives to break out of prison with the intention of returning to Thebes and gathering an army with which to win her. It has been seven years since Arcite’s release from prison,6 but the world has so turned, “Were it by aventure or destynee” (1.1465), that each man’s “entente pleyn” (1.1487) determines only his first steps and not his path through life. As a telling couplet suggests, a person had best be able to deal calmly with the unexpected: “It is ful fair a man to bere hym evene, /​For al day meeteth men at unset stevene” (1.1523–​24). A few lines later, Chaucer expands upon this evocation of the world’s mysterious workings: The destinee, ministre general, That executeth in the world over al The purveiaunce that God hath seyn biforn, So strong it is that, though the world had sworn The contrarie of a thyng be ye or nay, Yet somtyme it shal fallen on a day That falleth nat eft withinne a thousand yeer. (1.1663–​69)

A distant God, observing all from a vantage point outside of the passage of time, watches as his prime minister—​be it called destiny, fate, or Fortune—​directs the mutable workings of the world. And so the young men devise their plans and—​poof, just like that—​all hell breaks loose. Having met in the grove that will turn out to be the principal locus of the tale’s activity, a space that evolves as the action requires, they quickly agree to battle for the right to love Emelye:  “Thou shalt nat loven my lady Emelye,” proclaims Palamon; “I wol love hire maugree al thy myght!” replies Arcite (1.1588, 1607). Their common assumption is that the victor is on the path to possessing her—​“if […] thou […] sle me […] /​Thou mayst wel have thy lady” (1.1617–​19)—​but what can a person actually know about the future? Their confident paths turn out to be slider, as their duel does not decide the issue. Theseus, whose route to the grove follows “the streighte wey” (1.1690), halts the fighting, pronounces the unruly Thebans’ execution, and, as is his wont, reverses himself in a manner that reinforces his authority. He forgives his erstwhile enemies and awards Emelye as wife to the victor in a tournament conducted under proper ducal authority: “And forthy I yow putte in this degree, That ech of yow shal have his destynee As hym is shape, and herkneth in what wyse; Lo, heere youre ende of that I shal devyse.” (1.1841–​44)

No longer will knights succumb to wild abandonment. Here they have a plan by which to determine—​or, perhaps more precisely, to disclose—​their destinies. 6 Or perhaps seven years since Arcite was first imprisoned; the reference in 1.1451–​53 is ambiguous.

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Until, again, they don’t. Palamon appeals to Venus that he be granted Emelye, Emelye implores Diana that she may remain chaste, Arcite asks Mars for victory, and Saturn intervenes with a stratagem that requires human agents to adapt their desires to new circumstances. Curiously, the clearest articulation of Saturn’s plan anticipates his intervention, in the intricate sign Diana grants to Emelye even before Arcite has prayed to Mars: […] sodeynly she saugh a sighte quentye, For right anon oon of the fyres queynte And quyked agayn, and after that anon That oother fyr was queynt and al agon; And as it queynte it made a whistelynge, As doon thise wete brondes in hir brennynge, And at the brondes ende out ran anon As it were blody dropes many oon […]. (1.2332–​40)

Palamon—​represented by the first flame—​will be defeated in the tournament, but after a “lengthe of certeyn yeres” (1.2967) he eventually will marry his beloved Emelye; Arcite—​represented by the second flame—​will attain victory in the tournament but die suddenly at the height of his glory; and Emelye will be granted many of the years of virginity for which she had prayed and then will marry the man who most desires her—​though she must accept her fate, there is never any question of her desiring either of her suitors.7 None of these paths is straight or predictable. A principal byproduct of the divine resolution is that Theseus will have the opportunity to ensure Theban submission to Athens at a crucial political moment, the endpoint of the political machinations that inform his Theban policy throughout the tale.8 All seems set in order, but the human tragedy of Arcite’s death remains to be dealt with. Egeus, who “knew this worldes transmutacioun, /​ As he hadde seyn it chaunge bothe up and doun” (1.2839–​40), cites the transience of earthly existence and how human beings fit into the flow of things: 7 What with the whistling of soggy twigs, the Vergilian reference to bloody drops issuing from the ends of branches, and the fourfold “queynt(e),” the vision is obscure, but Diana’s ensuing explanation helps unpack the imagery: “Thou shalt ben wedded unto oon of tho /​That han for thee so muchel care and wo” (1.2351–​52). The denouement is anticipated earlier in Venus’s response to Palamon’s petition: “But atte laste the statue of Venus shook, /​ And made a signe, wherby that he took /​That his preyere accepted was that day. /​For thogh the signe shewed a delay, /​Yet wiste he wel that graunted was his boone” (1.2265–​69). How the response might project Saturn’s plan without Venus being aware of it is one of the Knight’s Tale’s circuitous devices. For the bloody drops, see Vergil, Aeneid, 3.27–​33 augmented in Dante, Inferno 13.28–​45. On the punning use of “queynte,” see Crane, “Medieval Romance and Feminine Difference,” 55–​56.

8 Lee Patterson calls the “Thebanness” against which Theseus struggles “a fatal doubling of the self that issues in a replicating history that preempts a linear or developmental progress,” such that “it stands as “a dark echo of the idealistic recursus of Boethianism” (Chaucer and the Subject of History, 77). Chaucer’s conception of the drunken man’s path reflects the more optimistic Boethian perspective insofar as it allows redemption for those who have misgone from the “righte wey.”

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80 David Raybin “This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo, And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro. Deeth is an ende of every worldly soore.” (1.2847–​49)

The lines are celebrated as a succinct reflection on how the just-​begun pilgrimage to Canterbury models the characteristic human journey from birth to death, by which light one may note the waywardness implicit in “passynge to and fro.” The consolation is followed quickly by an extraordinary evocation of how the nature of things can suddenly alter: the grove in which Palamon and Arcite fought—​a woodland with at least twenty-​one varieties of trees, an ancient shelter to both gods (“Nymphes, fawnes and amadrides”) and creatures of earth and air (“the beestes and the briddes alle”) (1.2928–​ 29), and for a short time the site of an arena a mile around—​is now transfigured into Arcite’s towering funeral pyre, its arms stretching twenty fathoms wide.9 Tragic death and ecological devastation become the occasion for a display of majestic human ritual. Theseus’s “Firste Moevere” speech (1.2987–​3074) articulates a governing philosophy for how best to think and act in a world where all things are “corrumpable” (1.3010) and in which, however lengthy or winding its course, each “engendred” thing, be it “tree,” “stoon,” ryver,” “tounes,” “man and womman,” or “kyng” and “page” (1.2997, 3020, 3021, 3024, 3025, 3027, 3030), eventually will return to “his propre welle /​ From which it is dirryved,” that is, the house from which it sprung and to which it yearns to return (1.3037–​38).10 What optimism there is in “this wrecched world adoun” (1.2995) comes from patiently accepting the inexorableness of our “passynge to and fro.”11 Even if in the broader scheme “thilke glorie that ye travailen aboute to schewe and to multeplye” is “streyte” and “compressid” (Boece, 2.pr7.67–​69), people can enable the manifestation of that glory. When we acknowledge that our pilgrimage is inherently slider, we may choose to profit from the inevitable twists, obstacles, and challenges: “Thanne is it wysdom, as it thynketh me, To maken vertu of necessitee, And take it weel that we may nat eschue […]” (1.3041–​43)12

This counsel may seem to some a platitude, a thinly disguised cover for political expediency. But by the terms Chaucer sets out in the Knight’s Tale, there is no wiser 9 The grove’s mutations are indicative of the contingent usage that marks the plot of the Knight’s Tale. In a similar vein, Theseus in his assault on Thebes “rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter” (1.990), yet Palamon and Arcite ride homeward to “Thebes with his olde walles wyde” (1.1880) to prepare for the tournament. On the grove’s various manifestations, see Eyler and Sexton, “Once More to the Grove,” and Grimes, “Arboreal Politics in the Knight’s Tale.”

10 On the Knight’s Tale’s Boethianism, see Mann, “Chance and Destiny,” Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 136–​56, and Stretter, “Cupid’s Wheel,” 72–​76.

11 On the tale’s incessant movement, see Woods, “Up and Down, To and Fro.”

12 Chaucer’s direct source for this Boethian idea is Boccaccio’s Teseida, 12.11.1–​2: “E però fare della neciessitate /​virtù […] è sapienza” (Coleman, “The Knight’s Tale,” 212).

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response to the vicissitudes that accompany life in a slydynge world. Fate and the gods may decide the broad course of a life, but a person can adapt to the decisions and turn them to good effect.13 The Knight’s Tale introduces a model of circuitous narration that will be replicated in smaller scale in many tales. The storylines of the Clerk’s and Franklin’s Tales also meander, as in each instance a tendency (Clerk’s Tale) or reluctance (Franklin’s Tale) to leet slyde a defining thought or behaviour causes the path of the tale and its characters’ lives to depart from a straight, clear, and ethically consistent track. The verbal phrase leten slyde (“disregard [sth.], put aside, let pass; neglect [to do sth.]”14) has a somewhat different valence from the adjectival slider, but it shares the sense of departing from a direct or proper course. In the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer inserts “leet he slyde” in the tale’s opening stanzas to clarify the narratorial critique of Walter that “in somme thynges […] he was to blame” (4.76). The marquis’s lack of thought for the future constitutes dereliction of his regnal duty in that it disregards the consequences of inaction: I blame hym thus: that he considered noght In tyme comynge what myghte hym bityde, But on his lust present was al his thoght, As for to hauke and hunte on every syde. Wel ny alle othere cures leet he slyde, And eek he nolde—​and that was worst of alle—​ Wedde no wyf, for noght that may bifalle. (4.78–​84)

High-​born Walter has not just been interested in hawking and hunting “on every syde”; he has allowed this disposition to distract him from what his subjects recognize as a vital responsibility: the propagation of a successor in rightful marriage. The people seem to accept that most “othere cures leet he slyde”—​they won’t complain when, after his marriage, Walter continues to be “absent” (4.435) and his low-​born wife must arrange “Peple to save and every wrong t’amende” (4.441)—​but they are tormented by the fear that “a straunge successour” (4.138) might take his place. Accordingly, they propose a logical path forward: they will find Walter a suitable wife, one “Born of the gentilleste and of the meeste /​Of al this land” and thus an appropriate consort in “Honour to God” and to Walter (4.131–​33). The marquis, of course, refuses to follow this well-​worn track, and were he to do so there would not ensue a story extolling extreme patience. As Griselda explains, a “tendre mayden […] koude nat adversitee endure /​ As koude a povre fostred creature” (4.1039, 1042–​43). The ever more deviant plot requires that 13 Thus Jill Mann observes, “Theseus’s heroism consists not in his attempts to impose an ordered stasis on the flux of existence, but rather in his readiness to move with the course of events, to match their change with his own,” as when his “patient acceptance” of Arcite’s death “leads him to see the possibility of making ‘vertu of necessitee’ (3042)—​that is, of shaping the scattered fragments created by the blow of chance into a new and positive form” (Geoffrey Chaucer, 176, 179). 14 MED, s.v. “slider, v.,” 2(c).

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82 David Raybin a domineering lord marry a peasant accustomed to submission and able to stomach hardship. Walter’s proclivity for immoderate and wrongful behaviour joins with Griselda’s resolve to obey him, irrespective of his brutality, to drive a slithery storyline that moves from one appalling trial to another before the marriage ends up pretty much as it began, with Walter telling Griselda what to do and Griselda conforming to his wishes. For the lord who plots the journey, its horrific details hardly matter:  “This is ynogh, Grisilde myn,” he commands at the reconstitution of their marriage as he had ordered at its beginning, as if the road from point A  to point B has been steady and nothing of import has occurred in the interval (4.365, 1051). But Walter’s persistence doesn’t make Griselda’s path to what he blithely calls “myn hous” (4.956) any less winding. After yielding her still-​nursing daughter and barely weaned son to a terrifying servant, the peasant wife must obey her husband’s command—​“Retourneth to youre fadres hous” (4.809)—​and then accept being summoned back to Walter’s “paleys honurable” (4.197) to prepare the rooms for his new, noble bride. She must in the face of his cruelties display “word” and “contenance” so composed that “nevere koude he fynde variance” (4.708, 710). As an exemplar of righteousness, she must be at once limitlessly adjustable in her responses to her life’s vicissitudes—​therein embodying “with hertely obeisaunce” (4.502) Boethian indifference to the gifts of Fortune—​and flawlessly straight in her ethical constancy:  “This wyl is in myn herte, and ay shal be,” Griselda says, “No lengthe of tyme or deeth may this deface, /​ Ne chaunge my corage to another place” (4.509–​11).15 In will, thought, and behaviour, she patterns the patient endurance required when in the course of the slider pilgrimage through this world of sorrow we are assailed by the “sharpe scourges of adversitee” (4.1157) with which God proves people’s virtue. On the model of Griselda, such trials allow us to hone our strengths, thereby to attain our houses (earthly or celestial) by whatever errant paths are required to get there. In the Franklin’s Tale, leten slyde appears twice in close succession, once in relation to Dorigen and then as advice to Aurelius. In the first instance, Dorigen has been worrying about whether her husband will return safely from two years of fighting abroad, so friends have taken her to a garden so delightful that, except in cases of too great sickness or sorrow, its beauty and sweetness would lighten the heart of anyone ever born. Instead of enjoying the Edenic setting, Dorigen bemoans Arveragus’s absence, upon which she is urged to be patient and adopt a more positive outlook: “she moste a tyme abyde /​And with good hope lete hir sorwe slyde” (5.923–​24). A change in attitude might seem to offer a straight path to happiness, but the text now introduces the snake in the garden, Aurelius, who has spent those two years languishing in love of Dorigen and now steps forward to solicit her “mercy” (5.978). Dorigen is perhaps careless when she promises to love Aurelius if he clears the Breton coast of the rocks that endanger ships and boats, but lest there be any confusion as to the absoluteness of the rejection designated her 15 On Griselda’s “Boethian self-​sufficiency,” see Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 154.

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“fynal answere” (5.987), she instructs the unwelcome suitor to “Lat swiche folies out of youre herte slyde” (5.1002). His pitiful response—​“ ‘Madame,’ quod he, ‘this were an inpossible!’ ” (5.1009)—​may refer to the removal of the rocks, the emptying of his heart, or, as is most likely, both. For Aurelius, neither path would seem likely to lead him safely home. The two uses of leten slyde point to how similar are the stages of Dorigen’s and Aurelius’s suffering. The parallel arcs of their lovesickness govern the narrative’s structure: each despairs about a lover’s unavailability, complains bitterly to the gods, spontaneously blurts out an imprudent promise, ponders suicide, seeks relief from a beloved, and is by the tale’s end released from a terrifying debt by the lien-​holder. It is of course easy to blame each of them for naïve imaginings about love and marriage—​Dorigen might appreciate that her husband’s military career requires travel; Aurelius might concede that a woman he adores prefers her husband—​but a more generous response is to sympathize with people who suffer because they don’t accept that the course of desire—​like the slider path of most every Canterbury Tales life save Saint Cecilia’s—​runs neither smooth nor straight. A poignant correspondence links the emptiness in Aurelius’s and Dorigen’s erotic lives. Veiled carnal entreaties—​“with a word ye may me sleen or save,” “Have mercy, sweete,” “Is there noon oother grace in yow,” “love me best,” “In yow lith al to do me lyve or deye” (5.975, 978, 999, 1329, 1337; see also 1325)—​hardly mask Aurelius’s hunger for Dorigen’s body. Yet even as her counsel against adulterous desire exposes his ignoble hopes—​“What deyntee sholde a man han in his lyf /​For to go love another mannes wyf, /​ That hath hir body whan so that hym liketh?” (5.1003–​5)—​it simultaneously discloses Dorigen’s own unfulfilled longing: her husband is unavailable for lovemaking. Arveragus has travelled to England “To seke in armes worshipe and honour—​/​For al his lust he sette in swich labour” (5.811–​12), and an absence predicated as lasting “a yeer or tweyne” has extended to the outer limit: “And dwelled there two yeer” (5.809, 813).16 Dorigen’s lonely misery—​“Desir of his presence hire so destreyneth” that she “moorneth, waketh, wayleth, fasteth, pleyneth” (5.820, 819)—​is replicated in Aurelius’s agony after Dorigen’s rejection: “In langour and in torment furyus /​Two yeer and moore lay wrecche Aurelyus” (5.1101–​2). Dorigen’s and Aurelius’s paths cross three times: in garden, temple, and town centre. In each instance, Aurelius has been tracking Dorigen, approaching “whan he saugh his tyme” (5.966, 1308) or stalking her: “wel he spyed whan she wolde go /​Out of hir hous to any maner place” (5.1506–​7). The final meeting takes place as each heads to the garden in which he initially solicited her love, a winding back to the inception of their interaction similar to those enacted when Walter at the climax of the Clerk’s Tale credits Griselda’s virtue and when Theseus at the end of the Knight’s Tale ordains Emelye’s marriage as he had compelled Hippolyta’s at the tale’s start. One notes that Dorigen travels “the wey forth right /​Toward the gardyn” (5.1503–​4). In Chaucer’s Boethian 16 Chaucer repeats the puns on armes and lust when describing Dorigen’s sensual delight at Arveragus’s return: “O blisful artow now, thou Dorigen, /​ That hast thy lusty housbonde in thyne armes, /​The fresshe knyght, the worthy man of armes” (5.1090–​92).

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84 David Raybin lexicon, a “right” way or the closing of a circle often signals that a slider path’s twists and turns have brought a traveller home.17 The two occurrences of variants of slider in the opening sections of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale also reflect issues raised in the Knight’s Tale. The variants appear as verb (“slit awey”) and adjective (“slidynge”), in each case pointing to the elusive character of the science of alchemy: “But that science is so fer us biforn, We mowen nat, although we hadden it sworn, It overtake, it slit awey so faste.” (8.680–​82)

Lo, which avantage is to multiplie! That slidynge science hath me maad so bare That I have no good, wher that ever I fare […] (8.731–​33)

The first instance closes a passage that insists on how difficult it is for alchemists to achieve their goals. However much we labour, the Canon’s Yeoman says, we inevitably “blondren,” “faille of oure desir,” “lakken oure conclusioun” (8.670–​72). Ever filled with hope, vowing that they will succeed, alchemists repetitively “grope” (8.679) in pursuit of an end that inevitably slip slides away. The second instance treats the effects of the slippery science on its practitioners, particularly on the Yeoman himself. Where once he was “right fressh and gay /​Of clothyng” (8.724–​25), now he is so impoverished that he tops his head not with a hood but with a mere stocking. Living always in the “futur temps” (8.875; both “future tense” and “imagined future time”), alchemists cannot but “faille of that which that we wolden have” (8.958). As often as not, their experimentation ends in a broken pot and violent explosion. The scenario comes across rather like a schizophrenic mix of dreary repetitiveness and dizzying hyperactivity, a coincidence of boredom and fiery conclusion not far removed from what Chaucer portrays in the Knight’s Tale. The Yeoman is wearied by his ineffective labour but nonetheless driven to describe his chemicals and procedures on and on and on, incapable of stopping his talking once he has begun. Simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by his own pallid face and leaden hue, he is no more able to withdraw from his fruitless tasks than are Arcite and Palamon from their struggle for Emelye, Walter from his testing of Griselda, or Aurelius from his pursuit of Dorigen. The slidynge science that drives the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale can thus be seen as intriguingly analogous to the slider course of the Knight’s Tale, in which the confusion of the drunken man reflects the wayward routes of people’s lives more generally. But the lesson of the Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale adds an important complementary direction. The Yeoman voices a remarkable description of an alchemist’s powers:

17 By way of contrast, the Pardoner’s Tale’s three revelers “turne up this croked wey” (6.761).

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“I seye, my lord kan swich subtilitee […] That al this ground on which we been ridyng, Til that we come to Caunterbury toun, He koude al clene turnen up-​so-​doun, And pave it al of silver and of gold.” (8.620, 623–​26)

I read the passage as a statement about Chaucer’s own art, a metaphoric description of his signal accomplishment as author of the Canterbury Tales. Heeding the words he assigns to the Host—​“confort ne myrthe is noon /​To ride by the weye doumb as a stoon” (1.773–​74)—​Chaucer has turned “up-​so-​doun” the ground traversed in the pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury, painting a penitent journey in the silver and gold of a poetry that is in its essence “slidynge,” slippery, uncertain, ambiguous. The wayward paths of the alchemist’s search for a transformative elixir mirror those of the poet who fashions a cluster of stories into a dynamic portrait of a multifaceted world. The analogy of a drunken man unable to find his way home comes from the second section of book 3 of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, translated in Chaucer’s Boece as a man’s “corage alwey reherceth and seketh the sovereyne good, al be it so that it be with a dyrkyd memorie; but he not by whiche pathe, ryght as a dronke man not nat by whiche path he may retourne hom to his hous” (Boece, 3.pr2.83–​88).18 The specific adjective that typifies the universally sought-​after path to the “sovereyne good” of true felicity as slider appears neither in Boethius’s Latin nor in the Boece, and may therefore be understood as Chaucer’s addition for the Knight’s Tale. Insofar as a drunken man knows not the direct path to his house, his way inevitably will be indirect and wandering, but it is nonetheless possible for one strong of heart to make it home: a slider path may be slippery, but it is far better than no path at all. As translator, Chaucer knew intimately the entire second section of book 3 of the Consolation. Book 3, prosa 2 opens the section by introducing the idea that there are many paths to people’s common goal, as Lady Philosophy tells Boethius that “Alle the cures […] of mortel folk, whiche that travailen hem in many manere studies, gon certes by diverse weyes; but natheless thei enforcen hem alle to comyn oonly to oon ende of blisfulnesse” (Boece, 3.pr2.4–​8).19 Chaucer adapts this idea at the beginning of the Parson’s Tale, where he glosses a passage from Jerome with the comment that “Manye been the weyes espirituels that leden folk to oure Lord Jhesu Crist and to the regne of glorie,” pointing not to a single, direct path to salvation, but to the myriad divergent paths that allow those who “thurgh synne hath mysgoon” to nonetheless reach the heavenly kingdom 18 “animus etsi caligante memoria tamen bonum suum repetit, sed uelut ebrius domum quo tramite reuertatur ignorat” (In spite of a clouded memory, the mind seeks its own good, though like a drunkard it cannot find the path home). Boethius, Consolatio 3.pr2.13; with translation from Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, 49. 19 Boethius, Consolatio 3.pr2.2.

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86 David Raybin (10.79–​80).20 As the variously troubled journeys of the Knight’s, Clerk’s, Franklin’s, and Canon’s Yeoman’s Tales suggest, and as illustrated in larger scale by the passage of the Canterbury Tales itself, even as people seek to follow a narrowly “righte wey,” all paths home are tricky. Boethius’s book 3, metrum 2 closes with an evocation of the circularity that marks the close of a good life. The final word in Boethius’s metrum is orbem, signifying a circle, sphere, or, by extension, the world, hence a symbol of completed symmetrical movement. The emphases in Chaucer’s translation are on the need all things feel to return to their proper nature and on their delight when their ends match their beginnings: Alle thynges seken ayen to hir propre cours, and all thynges rejoysen hem of hir retornynge ayen to hir nature. Ne noon ordenaunce is bytaken to thynges, but that hath joyned the endynge to the bygynnynge, and hath maked the cours of itself stable (that it chaunge nat from his propre kynde). (Boece, 3.m2.39–​46)21

The passage might almost serve as a précis of the Canterbury Tales as a collection of stories in which characters travel by diverse paths in the hope of achieving the happy ending of a return to their “propre kynde.” What Chaucer adds to the Boethian idea of circularity without “ordenaunce” is the specification that when one has the strength to endure a slider journey and the wisdom to adapt to the inevitable challenges imposed by wayward Fortune, a felicitous return home is possible.22

Bibliography Primary Sources Boethius [Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius]. Boethius: Consolatio philosophiae. Edited by James J. O’Donnell. 3 vols. Bryn Mawr: Thomas Library, Bryn Mawr College, 1990. http://​ faculty.georgetown.edu/​jod/​boethius/​jkok/​list_​t.htm. ———. The Consolation of Philosophy. Translated by Victor Watts. Rev. ed. London: Penguin, 1999. Cartlidge, Neil. The Owl and the Nightingale: Text and Translation. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2001. Coleman, William E.  “The Knight’s Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2, edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 87–​247. Cambridge: Brewer, 2005. Dante Alighieri. Dante’s Inferno. Edited and translated by Allen Mandelbaum. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. Vergil [Publius Vergilius Maro]. The Aeneid of Virgil. Edited by R. D. Williams. London: Macmillan, 1972. 20 For a fuller reading of these lines, see Raybin, “ ‘Manye been the weyes,’ ” 11–​23.

21 Boethius, Consolatio 3.m2.34–​38.

22 Perhaps an appreciation of Chaucer’s use of slider and its variants as a marker of the human condition may be read backwards into a more sympathetic understanding of his characterization of Criseyde as “slydynge of corage.”

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Secondary Sources Crane, Susan. “Medieval Romance and Feminine Difference in The Knight’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 47–​63. Eyler, Joshua R., and John P. Sexton. “Once More to the Grove: A Note on Symbolic Space in the Knight’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 40 (2006): 433–​39. Fries, Maureen. “ ‘Slydinge of Corage’:  Chaucer’s Criseyde as Feminist and Victim.” In The Authority of Experience: Essays in Feminist Criticism, edited by Arlyn Diamond and Lee R. Edwards, 45–​59. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977. Knapp, Peggy A.  “The Nature of Nature:  Criseyde’s ‘Slydyng Corage.’ ” Chaucer Review 13 (1978): 133–​40. Grimes, Jodi. “Arboreal Politics in the Knight’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 46 (2012): 340–​64. Kolve, V.  A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984. Leicester, H.  Marshall, Jr. The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Mann, Jill. “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale.” In The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd ed., edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 93–​111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. Geoffrey Chaucer. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1991. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Raybin, David. “ ‘Manye been the weyes’:  The Flower, Its Roots, and the Ending of The Canterbury Tales.” In Closure in The Canterbury Tales: The Role of The Parson’s Tale, edited by David Raybin and Linda Tarte Holley, 11–​43. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2000. Sayers, William. “Chaucer’s Description of the Battle of Actium in the Legend of Cleopatra and the Medieval Tradition of Vegetius’s De Re Militari.” Chaucer Review 42 (2007): 76–​90. Stretter, Robert. “Cupid’s Wheel:  Love and Fortune in The Knight’s Tale.” Medievalia et Humanistica, n.s. 31 (2005): 59–​82. Woods, William F. “Up and Down, To and Fro: Spatial Relationships in The Knight’s Tale.” In Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales, edited by Susanna Greer Fein, David Raybin, and Peter C. Braeger, 37–​57. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1991.

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88 David Raybin David Raybin is Distinguished Professor of English emeritus at Eastern Illinois University. He has served as editor of The Chaucer Review since 2001 and has written extensively on Chaucer and on medieval French literature. His publications include the collections Chaucer: Visual Approaches (2016), Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (2010), and Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales (1991, all edited with Susanna Fein); and Closure in The Canterbury Tales: The Role of the Parson’s Tale (2002, edited with Linda Tarte Holley). He has collaborated as editor and translator for two METS editions: the three-​volume The Complete Harley 2253 Manuscript, edited by Susanna Fein, with David Raybin and Jan Ziolkowski (2014–​15); and The Roland and Otuel Romances and the Anglo-​Norman Otinel, edited by Elizabeth Melick, Susanna Fein, and David Raybin (2019).

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RESPONSE: CONSENT, ENTENTE, PITE, SLIDER ARDIS BUTTERFIELD Everyone reading this volume, or so I  imagine, knows that addictive pleasure of looking up a word in a dictionary and emerging, perhaps hours later, with any number of paths taken, redoubled, veered from, and lost along. Online tools have made that all the easier, and more swiftly immersive. The activity is both current and dredged in history: search engines have long existed, just in different forms and media. The implications for reading, for hermeneutics, for epistemology have again long been recognized to be at the core of pedagogy, and hence of what it is to study, and of what one studies and why.1 Isidore of Seville’s Etymologiae sive origines (Etymologies or Origins) compiled in the early seventh century and the OED’s online riches belong to a history of word study in which a kind of obsessive curiosity about lexical connections passes down centuries.2 If modern historical linguists think about etymology in different ways from Isidore, with their careful scientific tracking of phoneme shifts back some 5,500 years to proto-​Indo-​European, then modern literary scholars and theorists of language perhaps share more of the playful enjoyment of puns, linguistic oddities and solecisms, strange histories of meaning and extrapolation that characterize Isidore’s voluminous musings.3 They also develop architecturally complex theories and terminologies to describe lexical connectivity, of which intertextuality and deconstruction are perhaps the most intensely self-​questioning yet mundanely collapsible.4 The four words explored in this section, consent, entente, pite, and slider, inhabit many forms of connectivity. Each essay explores patterns of meaning traced through Chaucer’s writings in slightly different ways though with a similar methodology: the use of dictionaries and concordances. Somerset’s tracking of consent finds it to be part of an assonantal pairing with assent: at key moments in the Canterbury Tales and in Troilus and Criseyde, characters are shown to be put under various kinds of pressure to agree or assert, yet without seeming to show due caution for where such assent might lead them. It turns out that Chaucer repeatedly plays with the sound not only of assent and consent but also with the further rhyme entente; a neat trio of chiming, colliding proximities that

1 This is not the place for an extensive bibliography: some sense of the long durée of books and their influence on intellectual history can be gained from the panoramic riches of Suarez and Woudhuysen, Oxford Companion to the Book, and in the medieval period, from Minnis and Johnson, Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, Reynolds, Medieval Reading, and Empson, Structure of Complex Words. 2 Isidore, Etymologies.

3 Katz, “Etymology,” and Katz, “Etymological ‘Alterity.’ ”

4 Orr, Intertextuality provides a helpful, concise account.

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90 Ardis Butterfield draws the audience’s attention to a web of fluctuating situations playing off coercion and acceptance, resistance and compliance. Barrington is less interested in entente as intention than in entente in action as a type of concerted or planned defence against others’ manipulations. The issue is not so much one of a puzzled audience trying to discern the subtle vagaries of what someone might have meant or thought but of that process of deduction being itself aggressive, and carried out with an ecclesiastical lawyer’s persistent desire to expose wrongdoing or concealed purpose to sin. The Friar’s Tale, for example, proves to be full of unexpected toughness in its treatment of entente as a weapon of the poor and disenfranchised exemplified by the old widow, seemingly a victim of the Summoner’s greedy malpractice, but with the power to damn him to hell. Slider and pite at first seem to be different kinds of words, one an adjective rarely transmitted in Middle English written sources that pinpoints a certain, ethically dubious flux; and the other at the opposite extreme, so fully and richly cited that its meanings overflow out of most attempts to circumscribe them. Burger fastens on certain Tales where Chaucer turns a spotlight on the nature of gentility and its varied forms of practice in the world. Pite, he argues, is constructed by Chaucer to show a “power-​filled emotive” at work in specific, and gendered, social situations. Raybin, with his different range of textual evidence, builds on the single occurrence of slider in the Knight’s Tale to argue that it contains a meaning that—​finally—​encapsulates the perspective of the Canterbury Tales as a structured, unified exploration of paths and path-​making. Where Burger is required to home in on specific moments in pite’s broad and diverse reach, Raybin draws out of a single citation a sense of overarching coherence.5 To focus on methodology, it may be helpful to reflect briefly on how techniques and approaches towards word study have been conceived and practised over time in modern scholarly work on Chaucer. The towering figure here is undoubtedly Jill Mann, an important explicit point of reference for Barrington, Raybin, and Somerset, and an implicit one for Burger, whose critical method in many of her essays involves selecting a keyword or sometimes paired keywords and teasing out their literary significance in specific texts with reference to larger social and philosophical questions.6 In Andrew Galloway’s pertinent observation, “her commitment to explicate the force of language and literary form, especially as the focuses of ethical and intellectual problems with which the writers she chooses consciously grappled” endures in more recent criticism.7 Galloway points out, correctly in my view, that Mann’s subtle attention in Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire to social, economic, and philosophical factors in the ethical

5 It is hard to resist mentioning its modern meaning, still largely unknown in British English: “Chiefly U.S. Originally (slang): a hamburger. Now chiefly: a small hamburger; (more generally) any small sandwich made with a roll” (OED, s.v. “slider, n.”; first citation Chicago Tribune, 1974). 6 Mann’s most influential articles are collected in Mann, Life in Words. 7 Galloway, “Review of Life in Words,” 1127.

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dimensions conjured by word study influenced the sophisticated 1980s and 1990s historicism of Paul Strohm, Lee Patterson, and—​in that runaway notion for Renaissance scholars of “self-​fashioning”—​Stephen Greenblatt.8 What makes her work distinctive from theirs, and characteristic also of her peers such as Tony Spearing and John Burrow, her own much acknowledged mentor Morton Bloomfield, and the inimitable William Empson, is her interest in form as well as verbal ligatures.9 I am thinking, for example, of her essay “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale,” where Mann goes deep into the heart of Criseyde’s decision making and shows that Chaucer expounds it with brilliant delicacy through his manipulations of narrative form, structure, and timing.10 She concentrates here on chance and destiny, but words like “ ‘cas’, ‘aventure’, or ‘destinee’ (and […] others, such as ‘entencioun’, ‘purveiaunce’, ‘ordinaunce’, ‘governaunce’)”11 are also in the frame of her enquiry. All four essayists clearly work in this mould, and the accident of incidence with one word (slider) occurring only twice in Chaucer’s works in contrast to another (pite) that is ubiquitous turns out to be more a matter of poetic weighting than of topical or ethical variety. Burger’s approach to pite can also be seen to be in line with Mann’s emphasis on form in his consideration of the refrain “Pitee renneth soone in gentil herte,” and with her conclusion, that Chaucer’s “deepest interest in investigating human psychology is to uncover the subtlest manifestations of time and change at work in human emotions, shaping the course of human lives.”12 (One might recall that Empson’s opening chapter in The Structure of Complex Words is called “Feelings in Words.”) I single out Mann, as against a more “historicist” or theoretical critic, to make the case that this volume, and these essays in particular, are asking us to reflect on how reviving a particular kind of word study might prompt new interpretive perspectives. To what extent do online tools forge a real change in critical emphases, or do they simply speed up and facilitate types of reading that have remained constant, and indeed foundational to our practice? Is the relationship between crafted words and affinities, verbal networks and social consociation, practices of verbal assertion and sodality or its opposite, estrangement, a relationship so authoritatively probed by such distinguished scholars as Mann and Burrow and then Strohm, Patterson, and David Wallace, a relationship that is now open to other, different investigations?13 These are large questions, and this is a brief response. I will sketch out one kind of answer by studying another word, one that Mann often names but does not pause to 8 Galloway, “Review of Life in Words,” 1126. See Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire.

9 Spearing, Criticism and Medieval Poetry; Burrow, Ricardian Poetry; and Empson, Structure of Complex Words. 10 Mann, “Chance and Destiny.”

11 Mann, “Chance and Destiny,” 109. 12 Mann, “Chance and Destiny,” 109.

13 Burrow, Ricardian Poetry; Strohm, Paul, Social Chaucer; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity.

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92 Ardis Butterfield analyse per se: proces. Its relationship to consent/​assent, pite, entente, and (proleptically) slider is multiply networked by Chaucer throughout book 2 of Troilus in ways that most readers absorb implicitly if not explicitly. In the kind of close reading that Mann’s generation taught so brilliantly and with the trusty aid of a concordance, one could point out that proces occurs more often in Troilus than in any other of Chaucer’s works (12 out of 22) and with an especial concentration in book 2 (6). It shares this concentration of occurrences with assent(ed) (6), and both fall well below the frequent use of entente/​de (14), placed as a rhyme word thirteen times in this one book. Bald statistics aside, it is clear why proces underpins the drama of Pandarus’s flirting, pressurizing, vicarious “wooing” of Criseyde. Chaucer presents this scene as intensely performed and performative: its two main characters do not only speak in lines carefully crafted to probe and dissimulate; they watch each other avidly yet furtively, seeking knowledge of their inner motivations and desires. The story is told entirely (at this stage) from Pandarus’s point of view, so we don’t know, as Pandarus doesn’t, how Criseyde will react to the news that Troilus loves her. Chaucer immediately sets up—​with Jamesian-​like subtlety—​a sense that there are two kinds of conversation at large: one conducted on the basis of public social chit-​chat in front of the audience of Criseyde’s female companions, and the other, made up of few words, but frequent glances, gestures, silences, and blushes that forms an inner dialogue of thoughts and counterthoughts. Both kinds of conversation start simultaneously, and in the same stanza. First public exchange: Quod Pandarus, “Madame, God yow see, With al youre fayre book and compaignie!” “Ey, uncle myn, welcome iwys,” quod she. (2.85–​87)

Second private exchange, accompanied by a quick, secret gesture:

And up she roos, and by the hond in hye She took hym faste, and seyde, “This nyght thrie, To goode mot it turne, of yow I mette.” And with that word she doun on bench hym sette. (2.88–​91)

This prompts an immediate reply from Pandarus, with scarcely time to draw breath between stanzas: “Ye nece, yee shal faren wel the bet, If God wol, al this yeer,” quod Pandarus. (2.92–​93)

He then swiftly moves on, and shifts register to talk of the book they’re reading, making a self-​deprecatory joke that Criseyde just as swiftly caps with a crunching one-​liner, prompting suitable laughter from the room: “Uncle,” quod she, “your maistresse is nat here.” With that thei gonnen laughe […] (2.98–​99)

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In opening the scene with this sharp, theatrical banter Chaucer does more than establish character traits such as their easy familiarity and fondness for repartee; he sets the pace for narrative timing, which in the rest of the superbly constructed 600-​line tableau vivant, slips between fast exchange and sudden faltering silences, long intimate conversation and loaded questions and their cautious replies, punctuated by gestures, sighs, downward looks. Pandarus even gets up abruptly to leave only again to be waved back into his seat by a firm-​handed Criseyde who is desperate to hear the news he has frustratingly checkmated her into refusing to ask about. The frequent occurrence of the term proces in the narrative thus comes as no surprise. The MED distinguishes four main meanings: (1) A  sequence, succession, right order; progression; (2)  A  passage, lapse, or period of time; (3)  A  narrative discourse, an orderly narrative; (4)  Law (a) A course of legal proceedings, legal action, a lawsuit.14

All these senses apply to narrative:  as a matter of due order, appropriate timing, and due process. The insights of Somerset and Barrington show us Chaucer’s interest in the ethical, political, and legal niceties of consent: how its fragility and opacity in social practice is caused by the complexities of intent as well as assent. But it is proces that ties that ethical flux to action. The initially comic yet strained drama of Pandarus’s assault on Criseyde in her own home proves to be tightly articulated through the precise timings of narrative sequence. Gaps between stanzas, the quickening rush of rhyme (consent/​intent/​sent [2.1446]),15 the increasingly brutal hypocrisy of Pandarus facing off a poignant uncertainty on the part of Criseyde in the repeated adjectives “pleyn,”16 “cleen,”17 and “good”18 entente, all combine to mark a precise tracking of the imprecise, indeterminate motions of emotional affluence. Pite and slider further enrich this figure of proces through the way Chaucer allows a notion of slipperiness to infect the emotional community. The uncertainties of book 2 prepare us for the witty and clear-​sighted shock of 5.824–​25, where the two words find their classic combination in the portrait of Criseyde: Ne nevere mo ne lakked hire pite; Tendre-​herted, slydynge of corage

Just before this stanza, the tight skein of poetic lexis surfaces once more in an outburst that juxtaposes “entencioun,” “knotteles,” and “slide”: “For which, withouten any words mo, To Troie I wole, as for conclusioun.”

14 MED, s.v. “process, n.”

15 See went/​mente/​entent (4.169–​75) and assent/​torment/​entent (4.631–​37). For detailed commentary on the word entente in Troilus, see Archibald, “Declarations of ‘Entente.’ ” 16 2.363, 1293, 1560. 17 2.580.

18 2.878, 923, 1060.

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94 Ardis Butterfield But God it wot, er fully monthes two, She was ful fer fro that entencioun! For bothe Troilus and Troie town Shal knotteles throughout hire herte slide; For she wol take a purpose t’abyde. (5.764–​70)

Attending to proces alongside consent, assent, entente, pite, and slider thus alerts the reader to the narrative, not merely lexical articulation in Troilus of deep tensions between desire and constraint, feeling and form, will and judgment. Chaucer shows these tensions to operate in not one but many social arenas. He trains his readers through self-​ reflexive pointers to his narrative methodology to focus on the very process (timing, duration, order, legality) of decision making: its volatility, the ethical conundrums and contortions, the vulnerability, manipulation, the pain and strain in coming to a judgment, the disappointment and even self-​laceration at judgments wrongly made or wrongly applied. Such a reading of Troilus has not strayed far from classic close reading as exemplified by Mann.19 What might a new direction look like? I want to finish by proposing that we don’t have to look very far—​just to more dictionaries—​to find one, and perhaps it is the kind of new direction that has always been there but has simply not always been adopted. So, what results when we look up proces in Anglo-​French, Middle French, Anglo-​Latin and Classical Latin dictionaries?20 It turns out that the range of meanings overlaps very fully with the MED, though with further nuances: processus in British Latin (DMLBS) is listed as meaning: 1. progress onward or through successive stages, course of events. b (mil.). c course (of a written work; 2. ceremonial procession; 3. spatial extension, development (w. ref. to geom. figure); 4. (theol.) process of issuing, emanation, procession; 5. course of time over which any process extends, duration; 6. progress, advance, development (of idea or concept); 7. legal process or proceedings, action, suit; b. grounds for legal proceedings, case; c. written record of legal proceedings; d. sentence, penalty; 8. written discourse on particular theme, tract; 9. process of thought or speech, line of reasoning. b. (~um dare) to make a request.21

It would be otiose (though not to the happy obsessive) to list all meanings given by all these dictionaries: so it seems more profitable to move directly to the reflections the exercise prompts. One is that this layering of dictionary citations immediately invites a comparison of method: what order are the meanings listed, and why? (It turns out, 19 For another essay in this mode and of this date, see Barney, “Suddenness and Process.” 20 AND, DMF, DMLBS, and Lewis and Short, Latin Dictionary.

21 DMLBS, s.v. “processus, n.” In the AND (s.v. “procés, n.”):  “1. course (of events), progression through stages; legal process, method of procedure in an action, a series of steps in carrying on an action; 2.  legal proceedings, legal action, suit; 3.  process, (written) account, memorandum of proceedings;” in the DMF (s.v. “procès, n.”): “Acte dressé par une autorité compétente constatant un fait entraînant des conséquences juridiques.”

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for example, that the MED (unlike the OED) lists meanings in “logical” rather than chronological progression).22 Legal meanings do come strongly to the fore in Anglo-​ French: and in modern French procès means directly “trial” or “lawsuit.” The very selection of meanings indicates this and perhaps one could even say how much a legal perspective must implicitly be expressing itself in French in the poem. To take up an argument from an earlier essay, perhaps, though, the dictionaries tell us something more radical. The exercise of tracking a single word, in this case proces, through the fine sieve of multiple modern dictionaries, goes to the heart of what words are, and how we distinguish and identify them. The sanction of a modern dictionary listing marks words as finite structures, it delimits and slices up meanings into bounded parcels. But when it is the “same” word, cited in multiple languages, linguistic difference takes on a strange aspect. For Rousseau, it is writing itself that both fixes and alters language: L’écriture, qui semble devoir fixer la langue, est précisément ce qui l’altère; elle n’en change pas les mots, mais le génie; elle substitue l’exactitude à l’expression. (Writing, which seems to fix language, is precisely what alters it; it doesn’t change the words but the genius; it substitutes precision for expression.)23

The long history of medieval commentary on language that forms the substratum of Rousseau’s thinking here dwells on sound production and the ear’s ability to distinguish the articulate from the inarticulate, itself a function of slicing up sound into syllables. I cite Rousseau because he comments particularly on the difference that “les sons, les accens, les inflexions de toute espèce, qui font la plus grande énergie du langage” make to its “vivacité.”24 Hearing a word in several linguistic spheres reminds us of the plurality of accents it can have, a property belied by its fixed written form. In short, Rousseau reminds us that the singular state of a word is an illusion of writing: words come to life in sound, and sound marks linguistic difference in ways that dictionary systems, predicated on defining languages as monolingual, render obscure. Proces in English, proces in French, and processus in Latin may or may not be the same word: but their differences or sameness amount to more (and less) than their placement in three or four separate modern dictionaries. An example of medieval insular interest in linguistic difference through sound is Walter Bibbesworth’s Tretiz. This mid-​thirteenth-​century vocabulary list takes the form of rhyming couplets, playfully and punningly listing homonyms and synonyms for a wide number of rural estates terms suitable for the landed Anglo-​French family to which it is addressed.25 At the foot of the page in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.49, in a

22 See “About the Middle English Compendium,” https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​english-​ dictionary/​about. 23 Rousseau, Essai sur l’origine des langues, my translation.

24 I cite him also because of the fundamental role this essay plays in Derrida, De la grammatologie.

25 “Coe est le tretyz ke moun syre Gautier de Biblesworth fist a ma dame Deonyse de Mountchensy ke vous aprendra le fraunceys de plusour choses de ce mound pur fyz de gentyls home enfourmer de langage” (This is the treatise that my lord Walter de Bibbesworth made for my lady Dyonise de

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96 Ardis Butterfield revised version of the Tretiz known as the Femina recast in quatrains interwoven with English translations and glosses, are cues to pronunciation. They are pragmatic yet also revealing of the thin border between English and French pronunciation habits, and a rare indication of what sounds sounded differently (or similarly) to bilingual readers and speakers.26 The identity of Chaucer’s proces is both more and less than “English,” “French,” and “Latin” because it is doubtful that he would have cared to categorize it in such a way. Of more importance is that sense of how a word captures a fluctuating and permeable set of literary histories. What I have elsewhere called a “new etymology” might be invoked to describe the way a complexly plurilingual society does not simply pile up parallel meanings and usages across the various languages in use, it creates new lineages and crosslingual ties.27 A single word with multiple linguistic identities becomes something like a sleeping pun, ready to be provoked into consciousness by the watchful poet. Chaucer seems to enjoy activating the different lives and genealogies of his poetic lexis, drawn as it is from writings in Latin, Greek, Italian, and French. The result is to make linguistic diversity itself a tool in his portrayal of emotional volatility. The proces of dynamic change in each character’s hold over unfolding events is articulated by a corresponding mobility produced by the range of linguistic histories of the words he assigns to narrate their tragedy. Such witnesses to the “permeability, translatability and instability of English and French in this period”28 warn us that tracking words through dictionaries is not as innocent as it seems. Words that have multiple linguistic lives spring up hydra-​ headed in our searches. It is no longer enough to assume that a word that occurs first in English is “new:” it may have been in written use much earlier in French or Latin, and without such post-​hoc singular labels hanging round its neck. Are dictionaries an example of an institution that is no longer to be trusted?29 Perhaps so; but as Criseyde and Troilus discovered, trusting in proces is at once full of risk and yet worth the hazard.

Munchensi which will teach you the French for many things in this world in order to instruct the sons of noblemen in language; BL Add, MS 46919, fol. 2r; my translation). 26 Butterfield, Familiar Enemy, 332; Hinton, “Anglo-​French”; Knox, “The English Glosses.”

27 See Butterfield, “Chaucerian Vernaculars,” 37, on bilingualism and lexical and literary history; see also my “The Dream of Language,” “Medieval Lyric,” “Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language,” and “Construction of Textual Form.” 28 Hinton, “Anglo-​French,” n51.

29 Latour, Inquiry into Modes of Existence, 2–​7.

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Bibliography Primary Sources British Library, Add. MS 46919. Cambridge, Trinity College, MS B.14.49. Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Secondary Sources

Archibald, Elizabeth. “Declarations of ‘Entente.’ ” In Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer Review 25.3 (Winter, 1991): 190–​213. Barney, Stephen A. “Suddenness and Process in Chaucer.” Chaucer Review 16 (1981): 18–​37. Burrow, J.  A. Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the “Gawain” Poet. London: Routledge and Paul, 1971. Butterfield, Ardis. “Chaucerian Vernaculars.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 25–​51. ———. “The Construction of Textual Form: Cross-​lingual Citation in Some Medieval Lyrics.” In Citation, Intertextuality and Memory in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Yolanda Plumley, Giuliano Di Bacco, and Stefano Jossa, 41–​57. Exeter: The University of Exeter Press, 2011. ———. “The Dream of Language: Chaucer ‘en son Latin.’ ” The Presidential Address. Studies in the Age of Chaucer 41 (2019): 3–​29. ———. The Familiar Enemy:  Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. “Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language in the Middle Ages: Part 3: Translating Fuzziness: Countertexts.” In Fuzzy Studies. A Symposium on the Consequence of Blur Part 6, edited by Jeffrey M. Perl. Special Issue of Common Knowledge 19.2 (2013): 446–​73. ———. “Medieval Lyric: A Translatable or Untranslatable Zone?” In World Poetics, Comparative Poetics: Special Issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, guest edited by Jonathan Hart and Ming Xie 88.2 (2019): 142–​59. Derrida, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967. Empson, William. The Structure of Complex Words. London: Chatto & Windus, 1951. Galloway, Andrew. “Review of Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-​Poet, and Malory, by Jill Mann.” Renaissance Quarterly 68.3 (2015): 1126–​28. Hinton, Thomas. “Anglo-​French in the Thirteenth Century:  A Reappraisal of Walter de Bibbesworth’s Tretiz.” Modern Language Review 112.4 (2017): 855–​81. Katz, Joshua T.  “Etymological ‘Alterity’:  Depths and Heights.” In Deep Classics: Rethinking Classical Reception, edited by Shane Butler, 107–​26. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. ———. “Etymology.” In The Classical Tradition, edited by Anthony Grafton, Glenn W.  Most, and Salvatore Settis, 342–​45. Cambridge, MA:  Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010. Knox, Philip. “The English Glosses in Walter of Bibbesworth’s Tretiz.” Notes and Queries 60.3 (2013):  349–​59.

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98 Ardis Butterfield Latour, Bruno. An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013. Lewis, Charleton, and Charles Short. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879. Mann, Jill. “Chance and Destiny in Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight’s Tale.” In The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, 2nd ed., edited by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, 93–​111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. ———. Life in Words: Essays on Chaucer, the Gawain-​Poet, and Malory. Edited by Mark David Rasmussen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014. Middle English Compendium. General Editor Frances McSparran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–​18. http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​english-​dictionary/​. Minnis, A.  J., and Ian Johnson, eds. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 2, The Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Orr, Mary. Intertextuality: Debates and Contexts. Malden: Polity, 2003. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Reynolds, Suzanne. Medieval Reading: Grammar, Rhetoric, and the Classical Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques. Essai sur l’origine des langues. Introduction and notes by Angèle Kremer-​Marietti. Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1974. Spearing, A. C. Criticism and Medieval Poetry. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964. Strohm, Paul. Social Chaucer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Suarez, Michael F., and H. R. Woudhuysen, eds. The Oxford Companion to the Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

Ardis Butterfield, Marie Borroff Professor of English, Professor of French and Music, joined the English faculty at Yale in July 2012. Previously she was Professor of English at UCL, a Leverhulme Senior Research Fellow (2008–​2011), and a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford (2010–​2011). She has most recently in 2018–​2019 been Visiting Fellow Commoner, Trinity College Cambridge and Faculty of English Visiting Research Fellow at Cambridge. Her books include Poetry and Music in Medieval France (2002), and The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford University Press, 2009), which won the 2010 R. H. Gapper prize for French Studies. She is currently engaged in two book-​length projects: an edition of medieval English lyrics for Norton, and a book on medieval song, SongWriting: Theory of Medieval Song, along with research on untranslatability and medieval global multilingualism.

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MERVEILLE TARA WILLIAMS Squire’s Tale Franklin’s Tale Clerk’s Tale

Marvels represent moments

when we encounter something unexpected or unfamiliar—​invisible forces take visible forms, and the impossible intersects with the quotidian. Historical approaches classify medieval marvels as natural or demonic based on the agency behind them; in Richard Kieckhefer’s formulation, “demonic magic invokes evil spirits and rests upon a network of religious beliefs and practices, while natural magic exploits ‘occult’ powers within nature and is essentially a branch of medieval science.”1 Literary texts focus on the effect rather than the agency: something is marvellous because it inspires marvel. Caroline Walker Bynum has demonstrated that “medieval theorists […] understood wonder as cognitive, non-​appropriative, perspectival, and particular.”2 We can find similar characteristics in the responses to literary marvels, and examining those reactions can open up insights about the texts, characters, and readers; a shared definition of what is marvellous may identify a community, for example, or map the boundaries of moral behaviour. In Chaucer’s works, merveille is connected with a range of elements—​secular and religious, human and supernatural, public and private. Three tales that usually appear near the middle of the Canterbury Tales, albeit in different orders in different manuscripts, explore key aspects of the marvellous. The Squire’s Tale offers marvels that are public and supernatural (typical characteristics of literary marvels during the later Middle Ages), and attends carefully to the reactions of the witnesses. In the Franklin’s Tale, the marvels fall on the border between supernatural and natural; they are still visual spectacles, but their impacts within the text are more personal. The marvels in the Clerk’s Tale are significantly not supernatural but instead focused on human behaviour and how extreme it can become. Across these three texts, marvels raise moral questions about how we understand ourselves, how we define our communities, and how we treat others.3

1 Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages, 1. Corinne Saunders explores a related distinction—​white versus black magic—​in a specifically literary context; see Saunders, Magic and the Supernatural, especially 117–​78.

2 Bynum, “Wonder,” 3.

3 For a fuller consideration of the connections between marvels and morality in fourteenth-​ century texts, see Williams, Middle English Marvels.

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102 Tara Williams Merveille often appears alongside related words like wonder or miracle. Chaucer chooses wonder most frequently, including as an adverb (making an action or characteristic more distinctive or intense, as when Palamon and Arcite fight “wonder longe” in the Knight’s Tale, 1.1654) and as a noun in the phrase “no wonder” (which appears about twenty times across his works). Instances of merveille seem reserved for more extraordinary events and objects, or reactions to those, which is why I have chosen it as the central term here. Wonder will nonetheless appear in some of the readings below, particularly when the Squire, Franklin, and Clerk use the term to reinforce the nature of or response to one of their primary marvels.

Marvels and Perspective in the Squire’s Tale

On the spectrum of the Canterbury Tales marvels examined here, the Squire’s Tale examples are the closest to being unambiguously supernatural. Griselda’s behaviour in the Clerk’s Tale inspires wonder precisely because we accept it as human virtue—​ extraordinary, but not achieved through external forces. The Franklin’s clerk creates an illusion in his study that is characterized as magic, but within that capacious category seems closest to sleight of hand—​courtly entertainment made possible by skill and knowledge rather than supernatural influences. The removal of the rocks may be a similar illusion or a careful leveraging of the clerk’s calculations of natural events. The Squire’s Tale, however, presents four items that seem to possess supernatural powers: the brass steed that can take its rider anywhere and become invisible, the gold ring that translates speech between birds and humans, the mirror that reveals false friends or lovers and future adversity, and the sword that causes wounds that only its blunt edge can heal. The agency behind all of these powers is unclear, but the lack of an identifiable agent augments rather than undermines their supernatural status. This tale thinks carefully about why something seems marvellous, how reactions to marvels unfold, and what those reactions reveal about one’s own situated perspective. The scene in which the knight appears solidifies the objects’ supernatural status. The first line of the tale establishes its setting as “At Sarray, in the land of Tartarye” (5.9) and after a description of Cambyuskan’s character that follows fourteenth-​century western values, the narrator reminds us where he is king: “This noble kyng, this Tartre Cambyuskan” (5.28). The Squire professes his “Englissh […] insufficient” (5.37) to describe the beauty of Canacee, the Mongol princess, and he also cannot manage to tell the full details of their courtly feast. But it is not the fact that the objects appear in Cambyuskan’s court that supports their supernatural status—​instead, that court provides the baseline setting for the narrative and it is the appearance of the knight, who is foreign in that context, and the reception of the objects he brings that underscore their unusual nature. When the knight enters Cambyuskan’s court, language again falls short: “In al the halle ne was ther spoken a word /​For merveille of this knyght; hym to biholde /​Ful bisily they wayten” (5.86–​88). “Merveille” is a response to difference—​we do not marvel at something familiar, but at something new or unusual, something that stands out from our everyday context. It is also most often a reaction to something we see, so that difference must be apparent

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at a glance—​as is the case here, when the court “biholde[s]‌” the knight. The Squire notes that elements of Cambyuskan’s feast would be “strange” to the tale’s audience and then, not quite twenty lines later, he characterizes the knight as “strange” to Cambyuskan’s court (5.67, 89). Recognizing the knight as unfamiliar to and a source of marvel for that court might make an English audience understand that figure to be more familiar or more like themselves. The Travels of Sir John Mandeville shows a similar dynamic when Mandeville marvels at a fruit enclosing “a beest of flessh, blod, and boon” (a beast of flesh, blood and bone) that seems ordinary to the residents of Caldee but then explains that “trees that bereth fruyt that bycometh bryddes fleynge” (trees that bear fruit that becomes flying birds), which are familiar to him, seem exotic to them.4 Rather than negating the knight’s unfamiliarity, however, the Squire’s Tale setting compounds it: this knight and, by extension, the objects he brings seem more strange because the Mongol people marvel at him as distant from themselves. The knight’s strangeness is thereby multiplied rather than cancelled out. The reaction of Cambyuskan’s court may offer a model for how to approach something or someone new—​in other words, for how to marvel. We are told twice that the knight appears “sodeynly” (5.80, 89) and that he is armed, but the courtiers react with openness rather than fear, with engagement rather than anxiety: “ful bisily they wayten” (5.88). While “bisily” could indicate anxiety or unease, the MED cites this usage by Chaucer as an example of a different denotation: “attentively, scrupulously; intently, zealously, eagerly; earnestly, devoutly.”5 When the unfamiliar, even strange, figure enters the court, the people respond with careful attention as they watch to see what will unfold. This waiting is active rather than passive, signalling a readiness to receive new information and interpret that as it comes. The interpretations commence as soon as the knight’s speech and actions conclude. Scholars have previously noted the text’s emphasis on the people’s difficulty understanding the objects:6 Of sondry doutes thus they jangle and trete, As lewed peple demeth comunly Of thynges that been maad moore subtilly Than they kan in hir lewednesse comprehende. (5.220–​23)

However, the narrator also reiterates that the people recognize the objects as marvels—​ and marvels, particularly supernatural marvels, are defined in part by the fact that they exceed human understanding. The people have the “mooste wonder” for the horse, which seems to them “a fairye [marvel]” (5.199, 201); they also “wondred on the 4 Mandeville, Book of John Mandeville, lines 2344–​48. 5 MED, s.v. “bisili, adv.”

6 Most scholars have read this description as a negative characterization of the people; however, Michelle Karnes has recently argued that the people’s reaction is in line with medieval philosophers’ understanding of wonder as beginning “with a spectacular sensory phenomenon that inspires a sort of paralysis […] and gives way to inquiry.” Karnes, “Wonder, Marvels, and Metaphor,” 469.

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104 Tara Williams mirour” (5.225), “wondred on the swerd” (5.236), and identified the ring as “a wonder thyng” (5.248) before they “cesseth hir janglyng and hir wonder” (5.257). Responses to marvels are cognitive as well as affective; as historians of science Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explain, wonder was a “cognitive passion” in the medieval and early modern periods.7 In that context, the people’s (unsuccessful) attempts to understand how these marvels work by searching for a precedent from their own knowledge is a common wonder reaction. We can read it as underscoring the marvellous nature of the objects rather than any shortcomings in the people’s understanding: the multiple and different attempts to understand the objects reinforces their mysterious and marvellous nature. The Squire emphasizes early on that there are a variety of reactions to the marvels:  “Diverse folk diversely they demed; /​ As many heddes, as manye wittes ther been” (5.202–​3). These lines recall a more well-​known passage describing the pilgrims’ reactions to the Miller’s Tale (“Diverse folk diversely they seyde,” 1.3857), an earlier instance of the acts of interpretation undertaken by individuals who are part of a group. In that case, the diversity of responses gives way to a more or less shared reaction: “But for the moore part they loughe and pleyde” (1.3858). As the interpretive attempts continue in the Squire’s Tale, however, the diversity is underscored as we hear different voices weighing in with their observations—​“oon” is followed by “another,” then “somme of hem” are answered by yet “another” (5.212, 216, 225, 228). Not all of the interpretations are well-​informed or carefully considered, but the text represents these various perspectives as part of an ongoing exchange among a group that is exploring different possibilities. The people do not arrive at a final resolution; instead, the overall response to the marvels remains open-​ended, characterized by the multiple interpretations raised and voices heard. The court’s identification of the knight as strange and the objects as marvellous points to a shared sense of what is familiar (and not)—​in other words, to a common frame of reference and experience. The interpretive exchange among the people, with different voices contributing to an ongoing conversation, reinforces that the individual courtiers are members of a community that is processing these wonders together but not uniformly. When Canacee goes on to use the ring, her encounter with the falcon is also marked by a willingness to listen and an openness to other perspectives. She spots the falcon and rushes over to catch the bird if she falls, then “a longe whil to wayten hire she [Canacee] stood /​ Til atte laste she spak” (5.444–​45). When Canacee finally speaks, she opens with questions—​inviting the falcon to share her story and offering “compassioun” as well as material assistance (5.463). In the Squire’s Tale, then, we can see that one way in which communities take shape is through their response to what seems marvellous—​and perhaps also by the form that their marvel takes. Medieval marvel is generally an affective and cognitive response to the new or unfamiliar; for the people and the princess at Cambyuskan’s court, it is more specifically marked by 7 Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 14.

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an openness and attentiveness to new things or ideas. It involves active wondering, asking questions and seeking ways to understand or interpret. After narrating the story of Canacee and the falcon, the Squire gestures toward the wonders that will come next: “But hennesforth I wol my proces holde /​To speken of aventures and of batailles /​ That nevere yet was herd so grete mervailles” (5.658–​60). Those “grete mervailles” continue to go unheard; in the Ellesmere manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, the Franklin interrupts and then tells a tale featuring marvels that are different in type from those the Squire portrays or promises. Even with the public marvel of the rocks, however, the Franklin’s Tale focuses on individual reactions; the Squire’s Tale remains unusual in depicting a communal and public response to the marvellous. It is also the tale that most explicitly connects the marvellous not only to the supernatural but also to the foreign and unfamiliar, highlighting how our perspective shapes our definition of the marvellous while also hinting how we can use marvels as prompts to reflect on our frame of reference as well as our response to others.

Marvels and Vision in the Franklin’s Tale

The Franklin’s Tale takes up marvels that are less obviously supernatural but still more impressively visual. After Dorigen makes the rash promise to love Aurelius if he can remove the rocks from the coastline, he seeks magical help from a clerk who creates a “sighte merveillous” in his study (5.1206). That episode suggests that the clerk is capable of magical feats, or at least illusions, setting up his later success in making the rocks seem to disappear. That spectacle precipitates the crux of the tale, raising the possibility that Dorigen will have to make good on her promise. Upon learning of that outcome, she is distraught, exclaiming, “wende I nevere by possibilitee /​ That swich a monstre or merveille myghte be!” (5.1343–​44). Although the marvels are impressive, it is not ultimately clear whether or to what degree the clerk exercises supernatural powers in the Franklin’s Tale: these marvels fall somewhere in between the overtly supernatural objects in the Squire’s Tale and the human characters in the Clerk’s Tale. The first marvellous element in the Franklin’s Tale is the scene in the clerk’s study. Aurelius’s brother recalls the courtly illusions that “subtile tregetoures” can create and resolves to seek one who can practice such “magyk natureel” (5.1141, 1155). They meet a clerk who reveals his knowledge of their situation, knowledge that the text characterizes as a “wonder thyng” (5.1175). They accompany him to his house, where he offers a more dramatic proof of his skills, showing a vision that encompasses scenes of hunting, jousting, and dancing. The vision itself is large in scale and dramatic—​it speeds us through a tour of “forestes,” “a fair ryver,” and “a playn” (5.1190, 1196, 1198), showing a hundred slain deer, then “fauconers” and “knyghtes” before shifting to the final and more intimate scene with “his lady” dancing (5.1196, 1198, 1200). The narrator slides into the vision, so that it is not clear precisely when it began: And with this magicien forth is he [Aurelius] gon Hoom to his hous, and maden hem wel at ese. Hem lakked no vitaille that myghte hem plese.

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106 Tara Williams So wel arrayed hous as ther was oon Aurelius in his lyf saugh nevere noon. He shewed hym, er he wente to sopeer, Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer. (5.1184–​90)

On first reading, we might assume that the forests are visible through the window or in an image somewhere in the room; as the vision develops, the very scale that it covers as well as the active nature of its scenes make it clear we are witnessing a magical spectacle. The passage also signals that this is a marvellous illusion by emphasizing the showing/​ seeing dynamic. In retrospect, the phrase “He shewed hym” marks the beginning of the illusion, and the dancing scene, which turns out to be the final element, begins with a similar signal:  “he hym shewed” (5.1189, 1199). In between, the description draws attention multiple times to what Aurelius “saugh” (5.1191, 1193, 1195, 1198). When the clerk claps his hands and dispels the vision, Aurelius and his brother recognize they have witnessed a “sighte merveillous” (5.1206). This episode heavily underscores the visual nature of marvels; it also persuades Aurelius of the clerk’s abilities, and prepares us for what will happen with the rocks. Both the vision in the study and the removal of the rocks are specifically identified as wrought by “magyk” (5.1202, 1295). However, the details of the clerk’s process with the rocks blur the lines between natural and supernatural phenomena—​he consults tables and makes detailed calculations related to the moon, yet the disappearance is depicted as an “illusioun, /​ By swich an apparence or jogelrye” that makes it seem “that alle the rokkes were aweye” (5.1264–​65, 1296). Critics remain divided on whether to interpret this outcome as a magical manipulation or carefully timed exploitation of a naturally occurring event. Not surprisingly, the responses of Dorigen and Aurelius also diverge. He calls it a “myracle” (5.1299), and rushes to tell her of the outcome. In response, […] she astoned stood; In al hir face nas a drope of blood. She wende nevere han come in swich a trappe. “Allas,” quod she, “that evere this sholde happe! For wende I nevere by possibilitee That swich a monstre or merveille myghte be! It is agayns the proces of nature.” (5.1339–​45)

The return to the term “merveille” connects this event to the illusion in the clerk’s study, while the pairing with “monstre” points to the looming consequences for Dorigen and contributes to the overriding sense in the passage that this occurrence is less supernatural than unnatural. Precisely because the disappearance of the rocks goes against nature—​the incursion of something apparently impossible into the everyday world—​she could not imagine or anticipate it. Although she could not project that outcome, she can and does project what might follow it, recalling in detail the precedents for women’s suicides.

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Both marvels emphasize visuality and invoke the natural world. In those respects, they are similar to Chaucer’s likely source, Boccaccio. His versions of the narrative in Il Filocolo and the fifth story on the tenth day of the Decameron depict the central marvel as a garden in winter—​more concrete and less magical than the disappearing rocks, but still spectacles involving nature. The Squire’s illusions involve expansive settings (forests and oceans), in contrast with the specific objects the knight brings to Cambyuskan’s court in the Squire’s Tale and the individual and human marvel of Griselda, whose face and demeanour Walter scrutinizes so minutely in the Clerk’s Tale. Within the Canterbury Tales, these marvels are different in form but similar in effect: they raise moral questions that do not have easy answers. Here, the tale leaves the audience uncertain as to whether Aurelius satisfied the terms of Dorigen’s promise and whether she is obligated to fulfill it. The long meditation on other women’s fates also raises questions about standards for female virtue in different times and cultures. Is Dorigen bound to those precedents? Is the marriage she and Arveragus have fashioned, with its promise of mutuality, truly different? The resolution of the plot returns to the language of wondering, but this time in the context of human interactions and choices. When Dorigen tells Aurelius that she is coming to meet him “as myn housbonde bad, /​ My trouthe for to holde” (5.1512–​13), her words prompt him to “wondren on this cas” (5.1514)—​and it is this wonder at Dorigen’s actions and Arveragus’s decisions that leads Aurelius to release Dorigen from her promise. After the clerk in turn releases Aurelius from his debt, the narrator closes the tale with a direct moral question:  “Which was the mooste fre, as thynketh yow?” (5.1622). However, this question, like the earlier ones, pertains only because of the marvel; without that, Aurelius would never have been able to claim to have satisfied the conditions Dorigen established and thereby set the rest of the plot in motion.

Marvels and Morality in the Clerk’s Tale

In the Franklin’s Tale, the marvels precipitate crises for the characters, their values, and their relationships. In the Clerk’s Tale, the dynamic is flipped: Walter’s trials set the stage for Griselda’s marvellous demonstration of virtue. Whereas the Franklin’s marvels were true spectacles, involving manipulations of nature and specialized knowledge, the Clerk’s marvels are about one person’s behaviour; they deal with the inscrutability of Griselda’s thoughts and the extreme nature of Walter’s actions and her responses. When urged by his people to marry, the marquis Walter selects the peasant Griselda as his wife but keeps her identity secret until their wedding day. He then tests her by pretending to have first their daughter and then their son killed, and finally by claiming he will set aside Griselda in favour of a more suitable match (with a noble maiden whom he later reveals is their daughter). Those marvels still have a visual dimension: the people wonder who will show up to become Walter’s wife, and Walter watches Griselda carefully to assess the impact of his trials. Chaucer complicates the sense of marvels as supernatural and strange in this tale, where Walter’s people puzzle over the “merveille” of his intended wife’s identity (4.248),

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108 Tara Williams Walter experiences a “merveillous” desire to test Griselda after they marry (4.454), and finally the envoy cautions wives, “Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence /​ To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille/​ As of Grisildis pacient and kynde” (4.1185–​87). Although not supernatural, these marvels invite the reader to engage with the moral stakes of the narrative by questioning Walter’s and Griselda’s actions. Wonder and merveille can serve as verbs as well as nouns, and the noun form alludes to the verb (tautologically, a marvel is something that makes one marvel). These and related terms can help to guide the audience’s response, signalling that whatever is being described is unusual and worth close attention or—​in the frequently used “no wonder” formulation—​that it is not. The number of wonder/​marvel usages overall (fourteen, over half of which are verbs) and the number of “no wonder” formulations specifically (four—​4.337, 727, 750, 925) in the Clerk’s Tale contribute to an atmosphere of wonder while also suggesting particular efforts to channel readers’ reactions. The reliance on this language may also be because the marvels it describes are less obviously marvellous, both in the sense that they are not supernatural and in the sense that they might inspire an emotion other than wonder (revulsion, distaste, or disapproval, to name a few possibilities); these characteristics are true of all three marvels, whether they are associated with Walter or Griselda. Merveille, however, only appears three times. Across the course of the Clerk’s Tale, that term builds in complexity and intensity. It moves from indicating something unknown to something difficult to explain/​understand to something that inspires wonder. At the outset of the tale, Walter promises his people that he will marry in order to provide them with an heir and names “a day, swich as hym leste, /​ On which he wolde be wedded sikerly” (4.183–​84). He insists that he will choose his own wife and when the appointed day dawns, her identity is still a mystery: The day of weddyng cam, but no wight kan Telle what womman that it sholde be; For which merveille wondred many a man, And seyden, whan they were in privetee, “Wol nat oure lord yet leve his vanytee? Wol he nat wedde? Allas! Allas, the while! Why wole he thus hymself and us bigile?” (4.246–​52)

This passage includes a constellation of terms often associated with marvels: “merveille,” “wondred,” and “bigile.” There are no supernatural resonances here, however; “merveille” indicates a mystery in the sense of something unknown and yet very much of the real world, with clear political and social stakes. The language of the passage emphasizes both how important Walter’s choice is for the people and how in the dark they are. The class and power differences are so stark that Walter’s thoughts and actions are entirely unknown to his people; they cannot even speculate about what might happen. Fear is often a dimension of marvel reactions, and we also see that in the people’s concern that Walter may be “bigil[ing]” or tricking them.

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The mystery has already been solved for the readers, who learned a few lines earlier that Walter has chosen Griselda. The Clerk did suggest that there was something unusual in Walter’s ability to recognize her virtue and, because that perceptiveness is contrasted with the people’s ignorance, there are heavy class implications here, too: “For thogh the peple have no greet insight /​In vertu, he considered ful right /​Hir bountee, and disposed that he wolde /​ Wedde hire oonly” (4.242–​45). Walter is not a supernatural figure, but the authority he holds and the opacity he cultivates mean that, from his people’s perspective, he might as well be. The use of marvel-​related terminology underscores that the people are simultaneously incapable of resolving the mystery on their own (because both Griselda’s and Walter’s natures are inscrutable to them) and deeply invested in what that outcome will be. Marvels are often visual by nature—​as we saw in the other two tales—​and the Clerk emphasizes the significance of sight in this marvel. After their marriage, the value that Walter “saugh” in Griselda (4.425) also becomes apparent to the people. She performs “al the feet of wyfly hoomlinesse” and “whan that the cas required it, /​The commune profit koude she redresse” (4.429, 430–​31). She also gives birth to a daughter, raising Walter’s and the people’s hopes for an heir. The language of marvelling reappears when the tale describes Walter’s initial desire to test Griselda: Ther fil, as it bifalleth tymes mo, Whan that this child had souked but a throwe, This markys in his herte longeth so To tempte his wyf, hir sadnesse for to knowe, That he ne myghte out of his herte throwe This merveillous desir his wyf t’assaye; Nedelees, God woot, he thoghte hire for t’affraye. (4.449–​55)

Here again, something about Walter’s desires and thoughts is beyond understanding—​ now, however, it is beyond the understanding of the narrator and the reader, as well. The emphasis on the visual also recurs: Walter wants to see what happens when he tests Griselda, and after the sergeant takes their daughter, Walter carefully examines “If by his wyves cheere he myghte se, /​Or by hire word aperceyve, that she /​Were chaunged” (4.599–​601). This is not the attentive waiting of Cambyuskan’s court in the Squire’s Tale, but instead something more self-​directed and searching, even suspicious. Whereas the secret identity of Walter’s chosen bride arouses doubt and fear among the people and the enigma of Griselda’s reaction to the trials attracts Walter’s scrutiny, the mystery of his motivation for trying her inspires the narrator’s condemnation of Walter’s actions and sympathy for Griselda. “Yvele it sit,” says the Clerk, “To assaye a wyf whan that it is no nede” (4.460–​61). Marvelling language returns in the envoy, which urges wives to eschew Griselda’s example: “Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence /​To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille /​As of Grisildis pacient and kynde” (4.1185–​87). The term garners additional emphasis because of its position in the rhyme scheme; to avoid ambiguity, change to: “mervaille” is the fifth of eighteen rhymes with an -aille ending in the envoy. The other

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110 Tara Williams rhyming words remind us of some of the key elements of the tale—​the setting in “Ytaille”; how Griselda was “assaille[d]‌”; and the importance of issues related to “governaille,” “apparaille,” and “travaille”—​and so may hint at how “mervaille” ties in to these other elements (4.1178, 1180, 1192, 1208, 1210). Here, “mervaille” describes the expected reaction to the story, projecting that readers will marvel not at Walter’s behaviour (which inspired the first two marvel reactions within the tale) but at Griselda’s. The marvel reaction has moved from doubt/​puzzlement to outrage/​condemnation and now to something more like awe/​disbelief—​and in the process, it has come to resemble more closely the reactions to the magical marvels in the other tales. No other husband should attempt to try his wife as Walter did, “for in certein he shal faille” (4.1182). The envoy threatens wives with another marvel—​“Chichevache,” the cow who eats good wives and so is always hungry—​and urges them to avoid Griselda’s model in order to evade the fate of ending up in that beast’s “entraille” (4.1188). The connection between the tale and the envoy is unsettled at best, and the latter’s attribution to the Clerk or Chaucer (as pilgrim or poet) is unclear. The envoy marks a radical shift in tone and, by most indicators, in message. Although Griselda advanced the “commune profit” with her early actions, as we saw in line 4.431, the envoy now suggests that repudiating her example would better serve that “commune profit” (4.1194). The tale ends by asserting that Griselda is not an example for wives but “for that every wight, in his degree, /​sholde be constant in adversitee /​As was Grisilde” (4.1145–​47). The envoy agrees with the tale’s conclusion that “it were inportable” to follow Griselda’s example (4.1144), but riffs on that idea to encourage wives to embrace behaviours that are as unlike Griselda’s as possible. The “archewyves” it depicts become near-​marvels in their own right, described as “strong as is a greet camaille” and “egre as is a tygre” (4.1195, 1196, 1199)—​animals that might rival Chichevache in their marvellous nature and overmatch the perpetually skinny cow in terms of prowess. These wives are dominant over not only their husbands but also men more generally. The envoy retrospectively casts Griselda as a marvel (perhaps a callback to the first usage in the tale, where she was the answer to the “merveille” of whom Walter had chosen). By mobilizing these exaggerated countermarvels, the envoy also underscores just how extraordinary her powers of patience were—​the opposite of Griselda, it suggests, is not an ordinary or even an impatient woman, but an arch-​wife of monstrous proportions. With this turn, the Clerk’s Tale invites readers to reflect on the marvels it has presented. Does Walter go too far? Is Griselda’s virtue too extreme? At the same time, it allows us to imagine how the answers to those questions might be contingent on a variety of factors—​historical, geographical, and individual. Italian, English, and Mongol audiences might marvel differently. A medieval courtier might marvel differently than a modern student. The Clerk might marvel differently from other pilgrims, and Chaucer-​as-​narrator might marvel differently than Chaucer-​as-​poet. Because marvel responses depend on what seems familiar versus foreign and what seems reasonable versus inexplicable, differences among them are one way to identify different communities—​but also to initiate conversations across such identifications about moral questions with broad relevance.

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Conclusion: Chaucer’s Marvels In the Hengwrt manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, the Merchant interrupts the Squire’s tale, and is then followed by the Franklin, the Second Nun, and the Clerk. In this order, the tale with the most obviously supernatural marvels among the set comes first and the tale with the most human marvels comes last (after, interestingly, an intervening tale of the miraculous). In the Ellesmere manuscript, the Clerk’s tale is followed by the Merchant’s and the Squire’s, which is then interrupted by the Franklin; in this order, the marvels increase in scale from the single figure of Griselda to the spectacle of the apparent removal of the rocks.8 Whatever their order, these tales represent related takes on the marvellous. The natures of the marvels differ, but they share an emphasis on the visual and on the surprising or unfamiliar; the tales also share an interest in the reactions by those who witness the marvels. Above all, however, the connection to the moral is the hallmark of the merveille in the Canterbury Tales. All of these marvels point to the variety of perspectives on any event, object, or development as well as the contingency of one’s own perspective, and all raise questions about how we should approach and interact with others. Do we want to align ourselves with those who manipulate wonder for their own purposes, or those who wonder with an attentive openness to what might come next?

Acknowledgments

The author thanks the editors and the audience for the Medieval Colloquium at the University of Notre Dame for their comments on earlier versions of these readings.

Bibliography Primary Sources Mandeville, John. The Book of John Mandeville. Edited by Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 2007.

Secondary Sources

Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Wonder.” American Historical Review 102 (1997): 1–​26. Daston, Lorraine, and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150–​1750. New York: Zone, 1998. Karnes, Michelle. “Wonder, Marvels, and Metaphor in the Squire’s Tale.” ELH 82 (2015): 461–​90. 8 I have argued elsewhere that the marginal dragons in the Ellesmere manuscript also influence our reading of marvels in that version of the Canterbury Tales, with particular attention to the Clerk’s Tale. See Williams, “The Ellesmere Dragons.”

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112 Tara Williams Kieckhefer, Richard. Magic in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Saunders, Corinne. Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010. Williams, Tara. “The Ellesmere Dragons.” Word & Image 30 (2014): 444–​54. ———. Middle English Marvels: Magic, Spectacle, and Morality in the Fourteenth Century. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.

Tara Williams is Dean of the Honors College and professor of English at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Inventing Womanhood: Gender and Language in Later Middle English Writing (Ohio State University Press, 2011)  and Middle English Marvels: Magic, Spectacle, and Morality (Penn State University Press, 2018). In addition to her work on gender and magic in the later Middle Ages, she has published on the scholarship of teaching and learning.

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VIRGINITE SARAH SALIH Second Nun’s Tale Prioress’s Tale Knight’s Tale Physician’s Tale An ABC

Virginity is the bush that burns and is not consumed; a virgin, says the Parson, is the Bride of Christ, living the life of angels; or, in the Wife of Bath’s charmingly homely figure, she is fine wheaten bread.1 Yet one would not care to be a Chaucerian virgin. Virginity, in Chaucer’s writing, invites trouble; it is dangerously attractive to violent desires. At best, as May and Griselda find, it merely attracts monstrous husbands. Violence against more unfortunate virgins is continuous background noise: Philomela, Antiochus’s daughter and other nameless virgins are raped, “[b]‌irafte […] of hir maydenhede” (2.83, 3.888); Dorigen easily recalls many more who evaded rape only by suicide.2 Stories centred on virginity are stories of cruelty, torture, and death. The early Christian Saint Cecilia conforms to the norms of virgin martyr legends, standing her ground on virginity to speak resistance to patriarchal and civic authority until she is martyred. Her pagan counterpart, Virginia, goes straight to her death without even the opportunity to voice resistance.3 The fate of the only male virgin in the Chaucerian canon, the “litel clergeon,” of the Prioress’s Tale, a “martir, sowded to virginitee,” shows that virginity is as dangerous for boys as it is for girls (7.503, 579). Emelye, Custance and a “formel” eagle forlornly resist, lament, or postpone the surrender of their virginity, but can only delay the inevitable.4 Narrative itself abhors a virgin. The bush may burn on, but wheaten bread will be eaten. Virginity may be rewarded a hundredfold in heaven, but it can expect to be continually assailed on earth. Many thanks to the editors of this volume for their enthusiastic, scrupulous and constructive work on this chapter. 1 See “An ABC,” 89–​91; Parson’s Tale, 10.947–​48; Wife of Bath’s Prologue 3.143.

2 For Chaucer’s version of the Philomela story, see the Legend of Good Women, 2228–​393; the phrase “[b]‌irafte […] of hir maydenhede” appears in the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale (2.83); the near identical phrase “rafte hire maydenhed” appears in the Wife of Bath’s Tale (3.888); Dorigen’s recollection of virgins threatened by rape appears in the Franklin’s Tale (5.1375–​78).

3 For Chaucer’s version of the legend of St. Cecilia, see the Second Nun’s Tale; for his version of the story of Virginia, see the Physician’s Tale. 4 Emelye is featured in the Knight’s Tale, Custance in the Man of Law’s Tale, and the female eagle in the Parliament of Fowls.

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114 Sarah Salih Virginity in the Chaucerian canon, as in late medieval society, was a complex phenomenon, encompassing much more than the state of sexual inexperience. It was both a lived identity and an impossible ideal. The holiest of men, such as Christ or the boy martyr of the Prioress’s Tale, might be imagined as exemplars of perfect virginity, but lived virginity was generally the concern of women. How this concern manifests in the Canterbury Tales, both within tales and in conjunction with women narrators, is the focus of this essay. Of the twenty-​nine Canterbury pilgrims, six—​the Prioress, her companion and her priest, the Monk, Friar, and Parson—​are career virgins, though the word is not used of any of them. Nuns took on the obligation continually to perform sacred virginity in their vulnerable human bodies. Hence the women, though not the men, tell tales that pay attention to virginity and so help them to perform their own: the Prioress of the “litel clergeon,” and the Second Nun of the Roman virgin martyr Saint Cecilia. In the tales of martyrs, Chaucer and his narrating nuns use virginity as an aesthetic effect that elicits affective response in order to consolidate Christian cultural identity. Chaucer’s nuns share a consistent aesthetic of virginity that juxtaposes the horrifying vulnerability of human bodies to violence with the perfect, immutable glory of jewels; the Prioress’s Tale deploys this contrast to highlight the purity of its child martyr and to intensify anti-​Semitic animus against his killers. Other tales, meanwhile, focus on young virginal women—​Emelye, May, Custance—​as objects of often threatening desire. Secular women have virginity only to lose it, and it belongs not to them but to their patriarchal families. Only Emelye, the dispossessed Amazon princess of the Knight’s Tale, imagines a non-​ Christian virginity that enables female autonomy—​and that is marked as an impossible fantasy in Theseus’s Athens. Lifelong virginity was a Christian invention: it was an imitation of the angels, of Jesus and Mary, a life of martyrdom that would be rewarded a hundredfold. Consequently it makes sense that Chaucer’s most sustained attention to virginity is “An ABC,” a highly wrought lyric in praise of the Virgin Mary, similar in tone and content to the Marian prologues of the Prioress and Second Nun.5 Mary’s virginity, like Mary herself, is a special case, bound up with her power and queenship. The sinless Virgin simply is pure, by her nature. “An ABC” uses Chaucer’s favourite figure for her virginity, the “bush with flawmes rede /​Brenninge, of which ther never a stikke brende” (90–​91). This image is applicable only to Mary’s virginity, not anyone else’s; only Mary’s virginity is so perfect that it defies the laws of nature and time. This is the model to which other virgins aspire, but which they can achieve only in heaven; it is essence rather than process. Ordinary humans, by contrast, need constant effort to maintain themselves pure in thought and deed; consequently, not every career virgin will succeed. Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale and Wife of Bath’s Tale are amongst many texts that mock or denounce clerical sexual misbehaviour. “It is no wonder that the priests had a reputation for lechery akin to that of the mid-​twentieth-​century milkman, since they were the only vital 5 For a comparison of the three addresses, see Reames, “Mary, Sanctity and Prayers to Saints,” 85–​93. I  am not persuaded by Reames’s argument that the Prioress’s prologue is distinctly “deficient” (86).

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males who occupied women’s space while men were in the fields,” comments Barbara Hanawalt.6 Ecclesiastical centres such as York harboured sex workers who specialized in clerical clients.7 Nuns, too, sometimes failed in chastity, and were particularly vulnerable to the priests and stewards who served nunneries.8 Yet once vowed, priests, monks, and nuns were all committed to virginity for life; individual failings led to penance and rehabilitation, not abandonment of the virginal life. Although virginity as a practice is theoretically gender-​neutral, virginity as material thing is more easily imagined as a female body: as Maud Burnett McInerney writes, “The various words for virgin in learned and vernacular languages, parthenos, virgo, vierge, pucelle, meiden, all have as their primary meaning the sexually intact body of the female of the human species. […] The female virgin body […] is not only eminently imaginable but profoundly appealing.”9 Hence although the majority of career virgins were men, religious virginity was primarily a female condition. Monks, friars, and secular clerics, perhaps 33,000 men, constituting 3 percent of the male population in the late fourteenth century, had spiritual responsibilities and privileges that demanded a lifelong commitment to virginity.10 Nuns were much fewer in number and had a narrower range of duties, but at their profession took on the responsibility of embodying virginity.11 John Alcock’s fifteenth-​century sermon for the profession of nuns provides praise for virginity “very much in the tradition of the numerous tracts on virginity produced for women.”12 “That oonly amonge wymmen a virgyn is to be consecrate” (amongst women, only a virgin is to be consecrated), Alcock explains, and “a virgyne replenysheth paradyse” (a virgin populates paradise).13 In a similar vein, Chaucer’s Parson instinctively casts his praise of virginity in the feminine: “Thanne is she spouse to Jhesu Crist, and she is the lyf of angeles. /​She is the preisynge of this world, and she is as thise martirs in egalitee” (10.947–​48). Although both men and women may be virgins, and virginity is often gender-​disruptive, the condition is more fundamental to identity for women. Lived virginity was dual, constituting a lifelong identity for vowed women, a finite stage of the life cycle for secular women. Chaucer’s diction shows both those distinctions and the common ground between the concepts. He primarily uses the Latinate terms virgin and virginite to refer to sacred virginity: “Virginitee baar oure Lord Jhesu Crist, and virgine was hymselve,” says the Parson (10.950); Saint Cecilia and the child martyr of the Prioress’s Tale are also said to exemplify ideal virginity (8.88, 7.579), while the 6 Hanawalt, “At the Margins of Women’s Space,” 9. 7 Karras, Common Women, 30.

8 Salih, Versions of Virginity, 125. 9 McInerney, Eloquent Virgins, 7.

10 Russell, “The Clerical Population of Medieval England,” 179.

11 The figures in Power, Medieval English Nunneries, 3 allow for perhaps at most two thousand nuns at any moment in late medieval England. 12 O’Mara, “Preaching to Nuns,” 104, 106.

13 Alcock, Desponsacio virginis xpristo, n.p.

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116 Sarah Salih Wife of Bath acknowledges that “Virginitee is greet perfeccion” (3.105). The English terms maydenhede, mayde, and mayden are much more common in the canon, and span religious and secular spheres. Virginite names an abstraction and a lifestyle; maydenhede shares that meaning, but is also a bodily organ, glimpsed only as it is lost: the Parson explains that “namoore may maydenhede be restoored than an arm that is smyten fro the body may retourne” (10.871). A  mayden may be the Virgin Mary, “that blisful Mayden” (7.664); the saintly bride Custance, “This hooly mayden” (2.692); or the nubile May (4.1693); the term covers the full spectrum of virginal women. For women religious, virginity spanned material and spiritual registers. Career virginity was a performative state, initiated with a vow in adolescence or adulthood and enacted daily, by wearing religious dress, maintaining chaste demeanour, and practising ascetic discipline. It was theorized as a disposition and a practice; as Kathleen Coyne Kelly writes: According to the logic of the Church Fathers, a woman could retain her chastity even if her body is violated, so long as she did not consent to the sexual act. Yet the same woman could lose her chastity through her lascivious dress or actions or thoughts—​or even if she were simply the focus of the male gaze.14

Thus virginity is a quality of the spirit rather than the flesh, and can even be imagined, in some circumstances, to be recoupable:  when the fifteenth-​century English mystic Margery Kempe lamented her lost virginity, Jesus assured her that “as thu art a mayden in thi sowle, I schal take the be the on hand in hevyn and my modyr be the other hand, and so schalt thu dawnsyn in hevyn wyth other holy maydens and virgynes” (As you are a maiden in your soul, I shall take you by the one hand in Heaven, and my Mother by the other hand, and so you shall dance in Heaven with the other holy maidens and virgins).15 Margery’s bodily history of marriage and child-​bearing and her actual pregnancy at the moment of this exchange were all overridden by her spiritual orientation toward Jesus and virginity. Yet virginity was also conceived as a material thing, inherent to the body: Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-​century book of instruction for women recluses, imagines virginity as “a precious liquor, a valuable liquid like balm, in a fragile vessel, an ointment in a brittle glass.”16 If the vessel were to break, the precious fluid would leak out and be lost. Thus, virginity is subject to slippage as to whether it is a performative condition that produces a virginal body as an effect of virginal behaviour, or whether virginity originates in the virginal body that must be protected thereafter. Either way, virginity is vulnerable and provisional in life, confirmed only at death. Chaucer must have known something about the lives of nuns, for his own (probable) daughter Elizabeth was a nun at Saint Helen’s, Bishopgate, close by his own lodgings at Aldgate.17 Nuns were vowed to rules that both protected their virginity and made it 14 Kelly, Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity, 5. 15 Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, bk. 1, chap. 22, lines 1682–​85; my translation. 16 Anchoritic Spirituality, 109.

17 See Chaucer Life-​Records, 545–​56; and Turner, “Unlocked Doors.”

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visible. They lived in at least nominal enclosure within walls that imaged the enclosed virgin body, wore habits that proclaimed their separation from the world, and were instructed to develop a demeanour that reinforced the perception of their virginity.18 The portrait of the Prioress in the General Prologue touches lightly on some details of nuns’ daily lives and these virginity-​producing practices. The narrator’s observation of her visible efforts “to ben holden digne of reverence” speaks to the delicate balance that women monastic superiors had to negotiate between authority and feminine modesty (1.141):  as Katherine J.  Lewis argues, the Prioress’s “potential for authority remains enclosed and inhibited by her femininity.”19 Her rosary’s legend, “Amor vincit omnia,” (love conquers all) points to affective, bridal spirituality, a component of virginity that generated desire for Christ; late medieval nuns are known to have read and owned affective texts.20 Her indulgence of her pet dogs and her pity for trapped mice are usually understood to show improper and misplaced affections, and it is true that nuns might be rebuked for excessive fondness of their pets: one visionary nun saw her dead colleague Margaret tormented in the afterlife by the dog and cat she had pampered.21 Yet if Margery Kempe “contemplated God in a workaday carthorse,” perhaps Madam Eglentyne saw him in the suffering of his small defenceless creatures at the hands of casually brutal humans, and used that orientation to compassion to sustain her virginal practice.22 The Chaucerian narrator has only an external knowledge of the Prioress, and the portrait does not allow her to speak for herself; Felicity Riddy suggests that in this portrait Chaucer accurately but superficially observes affective female piety.23 Thus we do not know in what spirit and with what emotion the Prioress sings the offices, only that her performance is “semely” (1.123). However, the description of her elegant table manners may outline a symbolic practice of virginity. A nun’s habit is both sign and locus of her virginity; nuns’ clothes, Laura Hodges argues, “symbolize the Christian idea of spiritual cleanliness represented by physical cleanliness.”24 Specific garments were allegorized as the material loci of qualities such as “abstinence,” “consideration of perpetual joy,” and “awareness of God.”25 In protecting these signifying clothes so that “no drope ne fille upon hire brest” the Prioress literally keeps herself spotless (1.131). She might consider, as Jill Mann says of the Gawain-​poet, that “[o]‌utward display and inward virtues are 18 Salih, Versions of Virginity, 115–​51.

19 Lewis, “The Prioress and the Second Nun,” 110. 20 Riddy, “ ‘Women Talking,’ ” 108.

21 Richard Rex makes the case against the Prioress’s possession of dogs; see Rex, The Sins of Madame Eglentyne, 100–​103. For the story of the tortured nun, see A Revelation of Purgatory, lines 628–​30. 22 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 261.

23 Riddy, “ ‘Women Talking,’ ” 127.

24 Hodges, Chaucer and Clothing, 45. See also Salih, Versions of Virginity, 128. 25 O’Mara, “Preaching to Nuns,” 109.

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118 Sarah Salih mirror images of each other” and that material cleanliness is inseparable from the virginal traits of moral purity, self-​identity, wholeness, and completion.26 The Canterbury Tales frame does not characterize the nuns further, nor does it allow them much interaction with the other pilgrims, or indeed with one another. Chaucer’s pilgrim-​nuns have devotional, rather than autobiographical, prologues to their tales and speak only indirectly of their lives, telling two tales that centre on different aspects of holy virginity. The Second Nun’s Tale is generally thought to be the “lyf […] of Seynt Cecile” Chaucer claims in the Legend of Good Women, and thus to be an early work imperfectly incorporated into the Tales (F Prologue, 426); the Prioress’s Tale too probably preceded the Canterbury Tales.27 Yet the two nuns share a rhetoric and register of virginity: both tell elaborated martyrdom narratives in rhyme royal, in an aesthetic that juxtaposes glittering beauty with bodily horror. The Second Nun tells the more straightforward tale, of the Roman virgin martyr Saint Cecilia. Cecilia is an entirely suitable subject for a nun: her life appears in Osbern Bokenham’s Legendys of Hooly Wummen, in a manuscript that belonged to a nunnery, with the promise that she could “purchase […] clennesse of lyuyng” (ensure purity of life) for her devotees, and in an East Anglian nunnery manuscript centred on virgins and monastic women saints.28 An elaborate prologue temporarily opens up the possibility that the Nun claims to have translated the story herself—​“I have heer doon my feithful bisynesse /​ After the legende, in translacioun”—​and thus that Chaucer might conceive an East London nunnery as a literary centre, but the “I” speaking here is probably the “unworthy sone of Eve” left over from the text’s pre-​Canterbury Tales iteration (8.24–​25, 62).29 In the usual virgin martyr fashion, Cecilia’s virginity enables a rejection of patriarchal authority, as she refuses to consummate her marriage, instructs and converts her husband and his brother, and speaks truth to power, denouncing the tyrannical prefect Almachius: “Youre myght,” quod she, “full litel is to dreede, For every mortal mannes power nys But lyk a bladdre ful of wynd, ywys.” (8.437–​39)

Her defiance is a quality of a specific kind of virginity, that of the Christian martyr who does not care how many earthly structures she tears down on the way to her true home in heaven. Cecilia’s secular and pagan counterpart is another late antique Roman, Virginia 26 Mann, “Courtly Aesthetics,” 236, 248.

27 For theories on when Chaucer wrote the Prioress’s Tale, see the Explanatory Notes to the tale in the Riverside Chaucer, 913. 28 Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, line 7443; on the inclusion of the Cecilia legend in the East Anglican manuscript, see Blanton, “The Devotional Reading of Nuns,” 205. 29 For the fragmentary evidence of late medieval English nuns scribing and composing devotional texts, see O’Mara, “The Late Medieval Nun”; and O’Mara, “Nuns and Writing.”

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in the Physician’s Tale. The Christian virgin martyr Cecilia begins her rejection of existing power structures with a domestic rebellion against her new husband’s authority; Virginia speaks only to submit to her father’s proposal to murder her in order to protect her from rape: “Dooth with youre child youre wyl” (6.250). Virginia’s virginity belongs to the patriarchal family, but Cecilia’s belongs to herself. Her virginity is beautiful and violent, embodied as an angelic guardian who may threaten with a sword or reward with floral garlands. Virginity in the legend is aestheticized: Cecilia is introduced as “ ‘hevenes lilie,’ /​For pure chaastnesse of virginitee” (8.87–​88). And though this virginity originally belongs to Cecilia, she is able to bestow it upon her husband. The angel crowns them both with garlands of rose and lily: “With body clene and with unwemmed thoght Kepeth ay wel thise corones,” quod he; “Fro paradys to yow have I hem broght, Ne nevere mo ne shal they roten bee, Ne lese hir soote savour. (8.225–​29)

Cecilia’s virginity is like these miraculous undying flowers: it is the Augustinian perpetual incorruption in corruptible flesh that enables a mere mortal human to approach the condition of the angels or anticipate the glorified body of the Resurrection.30 Tiburce and Valerian are executed without much fuss, but Cecilia’s long-​drawn-​out resistance to violence demonstrates the resilience of the virgin’s body. In a boiling bath “She sat al coold, and feelede no wo,” and then lived for three days “half deed, with hir nekke ycorven there” (8.521, 533). Her virginal behaviour produced an effect of virginal essence, manifest and visible first in the garland-​bearing angel, then in the horror show of the uncanny body. The Prioress’s Tale similarly combines purity and horror in a story of a virgin boy—​ This gemme of chastite, this emeraude, And eek of martirdom the ruby bright

—​whose throat is cut and body discarded in a sewage pit (7.609–10). The Prioress frames her tale as praise of the virginity of Mary in language very similar to that of the Second Nun’s Prologue and “An ABC”; she describes Mary as the “busshe unbrent, brennynge in Moyses sighte” (7.468). A Miracle of the Virgin might reasonably centre on the protection and rewards of virginity, but the other iterations of the boy-​singer miracle story that Chaucer might have known do not in fact characterize the child as a virgin.31 Yet at the centre of this tale is the Prioress’s apostrophe: O martir, sowded to virginitee, Now maystow syngen, folwynge evere in oon The white Lamb celestial—​quod she—​

30 Augustine, “Of Holy Virginity.” On the body and resurrection in medieval Christianity, see Bynum, Resurrection of the Body. 31 See Broughton, “Prioress’s Prologue and Tale.”

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120 Sarah Salih Of which the grete evaungelist, Seint John, In Pathmos wroot, which seith that they that goon Biforn this Lamb, and synge a song al newe, That nevere, flesshly, wommen they ne knewe. (7.579–85)

The virginity of a child martyr is the purity of the sacrifice, of the Christlike “perfect victim.”32 Childish virginity in Augustinian terms is unimportant; what matters is virginity that is chosen and vowed. A prepubertal child has clearly not chosen virginity, and thus in theory deserves no special credit for his abstinence. The boy’s virginity has no process, no narrative content; it exists only in this direct address, and in heaven. It is rather an aesthetic effect, of smallness, sweetness, innocence, the cleanliness that it shares with the Prioress’s own dainty habits.33 It is an essence and ideal image of virginity. “It is through images of virginity that Chaucer’s Prioress merges and redefines categories of male and female, adult and child,” as Anthony Bale argues.34 The Prioress’s self-​identification in her prologue as an inarticulate infant has long been seen as an identification with her protagonist.35 So his virginity is also a component of the Prioress’s virginity; thinking and speaking of this virginity is one of her techniques for maintaining it. And the Prioress’s virginity is also an imitation of Mary’s virginity; virginity is thus a shared quality that crosses gender, age, and history. Kathleen Coyne Kelly argues that “the saint and the saint’s virgin body […] came to represent the body of the Church metonymically, serving as the first line of defence, the lightening rod, the decoy, as it were, for the institution behind it.”36 Saintly bodies were literally built into churches; relics were placed in altars, churches constructed around shrines. When the Church imagines itself or the Christian community embodied in a virgin, it may choose to align the strength of the sealed, glorified virginal body with the strength of the golden shrine and stone walls that surround it.37 Or, as Robert Mills argues, virgin martyrs’ narratives can allow Christianity to identify instead with the virgin’s individual merely human body in order to imagine itself as embattled and vulnerable, thus obscuring its actual hegemonic power; hagiography was “bound up with discourses of anti-​Semitism, Islamophobia and the contemporary war against heresy,”38 Such a vulnerable virgin requires the construction of an enemy who is monstrously evil but also contemptible. The construction is fairly harmless when mobilized against imaginary pagans such as Cecilia’s Almachius. Virgin martyr legends’ celebration of 32 Prior, “Virginity and Sacrifice,” 168.

33 Kathleen M.  Hobbs connects the Prioress’s personal cleanliness with the child’s purity; see Hobbs, “Blood and Rosaries,” 192. 34 Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book, 129.

35 See for example, Robertson, “Aspects of Female Piety,” 151. 36 Kelly, Performing Virginity, 41.

37 See Blanton, “Ely’s St Æthelthyth.”

38 Mills, “Can the Virgin Martyr Speak?,” 203.

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teenage girls’ resistance against fathers, suitors, and religious and secular authorities is at least superficially liberatory, though as Christina of Markyate’s vita shows, a medieval girl who actually imitated the virgin martyr’s attitudes to her elders was in for a hard time.39 The Prioress’s Tale, however, is an exemplar of the actively harmful version of Christian virginal vulnerability that cast the persecutors as Jews. Medieval England invented the blood libel, a paranoid anti-​Semitic fantasy that accused Jews of the ritual sacrifice of Christian boys. This narrative originated in Norwich in 1149/​50, when Thomas of Monmouth, a monk of the Cathedral Priory, promoted the theory that William, a twelve-​year-​old boy who in 1144 had been found dead in the woods outside the city, was not just an innocent victim, but a martyr and a saint. To be a martyr, William must have died for his faith, and thus anti-​Christian persecutors needed to be identified; Norwich’s Jewish community was the most convenient scapegoat. Thomas, Gavin Langmuir argues, “was more concerned to strengthen his own Christian cosmos than to destroy Jews”; Jews were collateral damage of Thomas’s campaign to establish a shrine and cult at Norwich Cathedral.40 The cult faltered and eventually failed, but Thomas’s anti-​Semitic invention spread throughout Christian Europe and was still alive centuries after William had been forgotten: In the centuries since its appearance—​beginning with Brother Thomas’s account—​the accusation of ritual murder led to instances of the torture, the death, and the expulsion of thousands of individual Jews throughout Europe and to the extermination of hundreds of communities. In the wake of the accusation, a large number of Jews were exiled, executed, burned at the stake, or died in prison. Accusations of ritual murder—​at times mere rumours of it—​provoked riots in every century well into the twentieth, some eight centuries after the death of William of Norwich.41

Male children were the typical victims in such stories, and were sometimes characterized as virgins. Anthony Bale shows that “Robert of Bury [found dead in 1181], William of Norwich and Chaucer’s ‘clergeon’ are insistently represented as male child virgins”; that is, childish virginity is an element shared not with the miracle tales to which the Prioress’s Tale ostensibly belongs, but with the historical accusations of ritual murder that had real material consequences in late medieval Britain and beyond.42 Although the ritual murder accusation is not inherently a virginity story, casting the child victim as a virgin strengthens its contrasts, demanding emotional assent to a set of polarities—​innocence versus cruelty, purity versus filth—​and then Christian versus Jew. Marian miracles and virginity discourse already deployed anti-​Semitism in the

39 On the likeness of Christina’s story to that of the virgin martyr, see Fanous, “Christina of Markyate and the Double Crown,” 53–​63. 40 Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth,” 845. 41 Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 7. 42 Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, 127.

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122 Sarah Salih project of claiming a pure Christian identity.43 William of Norwich’s rather threadbare collection of lived virtues consists of piety, fasting, and diligence; his virginity is not enacted, but, like the clergeon’s, a postmortem membership of the 144,000 virgins of Revelation.44 William needed to be a virgin after death, in order to strengthen his claim to sanctity, a status doubted by the contemporaries who remembered him merely as “a poor little ragged boy, working for his living as far as he could.”45 In the fifteenth century, John Lydgate celebrated Robert of Bury as “blyssid Robert, Innocent and Virgine,” but no earlier extant text speaks of his virginity; there are no known narratives of his virginal behaviour.46 Whether Chaucer knew the stories of William or Robert in any detail is unclear. Roger Dahood suggests, cautiously, their possible influence on the Prioress’s Tale: “probably from Harold of Gloucester, Robert of Bury, or both, came the abbey burial; and perhaps from William of Norwich came the secret alley.”47 William’s faltering cult enjoyed a temporary surge of support after he was adopted as a patron by Norwich’s peltiers in 1376, and so might have come to Chaucer’s notice during a period when he may have had connections or interests in Norwich.48 But whether Chaucer seized on childish virginity from William’s or Robert’s example or independently reinvented it, the introduction of this element of ritual murder accusation to a Miracle of the Virgin is a sinisterly brilliant enhancement of the legend. The virgin child—​like the Host, like the virgin martyr—​is an image of Christian perfection that is imagined as a bait to invite the hostile attentions of evildoers in order to expose them.49 The Prioress’s Tale was not an immediate or direct cause of persecutory violence: there were no Jewish communities in fourteenth-​century England. But it played a part in maintaining the credibility of the accusation, and was abstracted into devotional anthologies where any possible distancing imparted by the 43 See Boyarin, Miracles of the Virgin, 18; and Evans, “The Jew, the Host and the Virgin Martyr,” 171–​72.

44 See Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 12–​13, 42–​44; and Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, 127. 45 Thomas of Monmouth, Life and Passion of William of Norwich, 56. On the process of building a cult site and hagiographic narrative from such unpromising material, see Langmuir, “Thomas of Monmouth: Detective of Ritual Murder.” For an updated analysis of the genesis of the cult, see Rose, Murder of William of Norwich, 13–​91.

46 Lydgate, “Prayer to St. Robert of Bury,” line 1. The vita is lost; see Bale, Jew in the Medieval Book, 107–​12, for a summary of the fragmentary evidence of Robert’s cult.

47 Dahood, “English Historical Narratives,” 136.

48 See Nilson, Cathedral Shrines, 157. Mary Elizabeth Giffin argues that the Second Nun’s Tale was originally written to compliment the Norwich-​born Adam Easton on his 1383 appointment as Cardinal Priest of Saint Cecilia’s church in Rome; see her Studies on Chaucer, 29–​48. In 1385, Chaucer’s annuity was paid in part by the citizens of Norwich; see Chaucer Life-​Records, 328. Neither circumstance would require him to visit the city, but he might have been more alert to news from it at just the period when the cult revived. 49 Evans, “The Jew, the Host and the Virgin Martyr.”

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fictive frame of the Tales drops away.50 The tale is all the more pernicious because it is, in purely literary terms, so good: it was the Prioress’s Tale that Matthew Arnold chose to celebrate “Chaucer’s divine liquidness of diction, his divine fluidity of movement.”51 Along with Pearl, another anomalous poem of childish virginity, it is the most powerful expression in Middle English poetry of the glorious, inhuman mystique of sacred virginity. In the secular world, meanwhile, patriarchal order depended on the exchange of women between lineages as virgin brides. The bride is both the goods exchanged and herself a trader, surrendering her virginity in return for dower and wifely status. Secular virginity is first a stage in the female life cycle, maintained by proper maidenly behaviour. The Knight of the Tower’s conduct book of guidance on aristocratic morals and manners warns his adolescent daughters “ye ought to faste tylle that ye be maryed […] For the better to adaunte your flesshe /​ that it meue not ouermoche /​ for to keep yow more clene and holyly in the seruyce of god,” (you ought to fast until you are married … the better to discipline your flesh, so that it does not stir too much, so you may keep yourself chastely and devoutly in the service of God) and tells cautionary stories of young women whose indecorous behaviour rendered them unmarriageable.52 Repeated performance of maidenly modesty congeals virginity into a valuable commodity, to be surrendered in marriage as a woman enters adult life. In the Clerk’s Tale, Griselda’s sole challenge to Walter’s terms for divorce is to request repayment for the virginity that was her contribution to their marriage: Wherfore, in gerdon of my maydenhede, Which that I broghte, and noght agayn I bere, As voucheth sauf to yeve me, to my meede, But swich a smok as I was wont to were. (4.883–​86)

Pricing her virginity as worth a coarse smock is a display of humility, but pricing it at all is a challenge. Although Griselda speaks in contractual language here, the demand breaches her marital vow of total obedience—​but even Walter cannot contest the proposition that her virginity was worth something. Masculine secular virginity, meanwhile, barely existed. The closest thing in the Chaucerian canon to a male secular virgin, perhaps, is Sir Thopas, who “was chaast and no lechour” (7.745)—​and if David Raybin is right that Thopas should be read as a child at play, this is a joke.53 Troilus’s mounting terror, and eventual swoon, as he is led toward Criseyde’s bed strongly imply his sexual inexperience, but he is not called a virgin, nor would the term have any purchase. 50 On the circulation of the Tale outside of the Canterbury Tales, see Boyarin, Miracles of the Virgin, 159–​64. 51 Arnold, “The Study of Poetry,” 98. For a collection of such responses, see Wilsbacher, “Lumiansky’s Paradox,” 10–​11.

52 Book of the Knight of the Tower, 19, 28; my translation. 53 See Raybin, “Sir Thopas.”

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124 Sarah Salih If there is a distinctly Chaucerian quirk to the treatment of virginity, it is lavish sympathy for the plight of the marriageable virgin coexisting uneasily with voyeuristic anticipation of the moment she will have to surrender her virginity. On the far side of this loss, wives emerge as sexual subjects, as the loyal, passionate, tragic wives such as Dido, Alceste, and Dorigen, or the adulterous tricksters of the fabliaux. Yet Chaucerian brides tend to the apprehensive, and given the number of monstrous husbands in the canon, they have a point. A  formel eagle, asked to choose between suitors, objects “I wol nat serve Venus ne Cupide /​ Forsothe as yit,” and negotiates a year’s delay, resisting Nature herself and refusing a conclusion to her plot (Parliament of Fowls, 652–​53). Custance, on her way to a royal wedding, laments that “Wommen are born to thraldom and penance, /​ And to been under mannes governance” (Man of Law’s Tale, 2.286–​87); her protest is not obliterated by the narrator’s later assurance that “thogh that wyves be ful hooly thynges, /​ They moste take in pacience at nyght” (2.709–​10). The narrative tone is not very different from January’s boast-​gloat to his bride, “Allas! I moot trespace /​ To yow, my spouse, and yow greetly offende” (4.1828–​29). Women may pause to complain of the surrender of their virginity, but can only delay the inevitable. Emelye might hold up the tale with her protest, but the Knight knows, Chaucer knows, that the marriage plot will have its way with her. Of this group, Emelye’s is the most consequential objection. She wants not just delay or stasis, but out of the story altogether: to be a career virgin of a kind equally untenable in fourteenth-​century England and in Theseus’s Athens. At the centre of the Knight’s Tale its heroine articulates her profound rejection of all its assumptions. Chaste goddesse, wel wostow that I Desire to be a mayden al my lyf, Ne nevere wol I be no love ne wyf. I am, thow woost, yet of thy compaignye, A mayde, and love huntynge and venerye, And for to walken in the wodes wilde, And noght to ben a wyf and be with childe. (1.2304–​10)

Emelye, princess of the Amazons, withholds consent from all the knights’ tales. To Arcite and Palamon she is a pretty face and a tournament prize; possession of her represents the achievement of adult masculinity. To Theseus she is a tradable virgin kinswoman to be deployed in a political alliance. To herself, though, Emelye is something she is not permitted to be: a non-​Christian lifelong virgin, whose virginity is mobile, autonomous, female-​identified. She can and does speak from her virginity and her lament unsettles the tale. Palamon and Arcite saw a charming romance topos, a maiden gathering flowers in May; perhaps, with hindsight, we should see instead a hostage pacing repeatedly “up and doun” the walled garden that contains and figures the virgin’s body as patriarchal territory (1.1052).54 While the virginity of medieval women, both religious and secular, is insistently represented as enclosure, Emelye conceives hers as freedom and exteriority. 54 On the female body as patriarchal territory, see Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories”; and Magnani and McAvoy, “What Is a Woman?”; thanks to the authors for access to unpublished work.

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Yet she can speak this expansive vision only in an enclosure, in the temple that is her refuge in her exile. Emelye articulates the richest and most detailed account of lifelong virginity in the canon, but it is possible only in the lost Eden of Amazonia. The Knight’s Tale tells us that Amazonia is long gone, overrun by Theseus. Some contemporary sources, however, held out the possibility that it still existed in the late medieval present. Mandeville’s Travels locates it in the general vicinity of the Middle East, explaining that the Amazons “wole suffre no man among hem noþer to haue lordschipe of hem” (will allow no man to live amongst them nor to have authority over them).55 Though Mandeville’s Amazons are otherwise unlike Emelye’s, at least some readers of Chaucer may have wondered whether there were still, somewhere in the world, virgins walking free in the woods.

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55 Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels, 68; my translation.

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126 Sarah Salih Secondary Sources Bale, Anthony. The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms 1350–​1500. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Blanton, Virginia. “The Devotional Reading of Nuns: Three Legendaries of Native Saints in Late Medieval England.” In Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue, edited by Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, 185–​206. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. ———. “Ely’s St Æthelthyth:  The Shrine’s Enclosure of the Female Body as Symbol for the Inviolability of Monastic Space.” In Women’s Space: Patronage, Place and Gender in the Medieval Church, edited by Virginia Chieffo Raguin and Sarah Stanbury, 47–​74. New York: State University of New York Press, 2005. Boyarin, Adrienne Williams. Miracles of the Virgin in Medieval England: Law and Jewishness in Marian Legends. Cambridge: Brewer, 2010. Broughton, Laurel. “The Prioress’s Prologue and Tale.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2, edited by Robert M.  Correale and Mary Hamel, 583–​647. Woodbridge: Brewer, 2005. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone, 2011. ———. The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Dahood, Roger. “English Historical Narratives of Jewish Child-​Murder, Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale, and the Date of Chaucer’s Unknown Source.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 125–​40. Evans, Ruth. “The Jew, the Host and the Virgin Martyr:  Fantasies of the Sentient Body.” In Medieval Virginities, edited by Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih, 167–​86. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. Fanous, Samuel. “Christina of Markyate and the Double Crown.” In Christina of Markyate: A Twelfth-​Century Holy Woman, edited by Samuel Fanous and Henrietta Leyser, 53–​78. London: Routledge, 2005. Giffin, Mary Elizabeth. Studies on Chaucer and His Audience. Hull: Éditions L’Éclair, 1956. Hanawalt, Barbara A. “At the Margins of Women’s Space in Medieval Europe.” In Matrons and Marginal Women in Medieval Society, edited by Robert R.  Edwards and Vickie Ziegler, 1–​18. Woodbridge: Brewer, 1995. Hobbs, Kathleen M. “Blood and Rosaries: Virginity, Violence, and Desire in Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.” In Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, 181–​98. New York: St Martin’s, 1999. Hodges, Laura. Chaucer and Clothing: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Brewer, 2005. Karras, Ruth Mazo. Common Women: Prostitution and Sexuality in Medieval England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Kelly, Kathleen Coyne. Performing Virginity and Testing Chastity in the Middle Ages. London: Routledge, 2000. Langmuir, Gavin I.  “Thomas of Monmouth:  Detector of Ritual Murder.” Speculum 59 (1984): 820–​46. Lewis, Katherine J. “The Prioress and the Second Nun.” In Historians on Chaucer: The “General Prologue” to the Canterbury Tales, edited by Stephen J.  Rigby, 94–​113. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2014.

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Magnani, Roberta, and Liz Herbert McAvoy. “What Is a Woman? Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale.” Studies in the Ages of Chaucer 42 (2020): 311–24. Mann, Jill. “Courtly Aesthetics and Courtly Ethics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 231–​65. McInerney, Maud Burnett. Eloquent Virgins from Thecla to Joan of Arc. New  York:  Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Mills, Robert. “Can the Virgin Martyr Speak?” In Medieval Virginities, edited by Anke Bernau, Ruth Evans, and Sarah Salih, 187–​213. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. Nilson, Ben. Cathedral Shrines of Medieval England. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1998. O’Mara, Veronica. “The Late Medieval Nun and Her Scribal Activity:  A Complicated Quest.” In Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Hull Dialogue, edited by Virginia Blanton, Veronica O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, 69–​93. Turnhout: Brepols, 2013. ———. “Nuns and Writing in Late Medieval England: The Quest Continues.” In Nuns’ Literacies in Medieval Europe: The Kansas City Dialogue, edited by Virginia Blanton, Virginia O’Mara, and Patricia Stoop, 123–​47. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. ———. “Preaching to Nuns in Late Medieval England.” In Medieval Monastic Preaching, edited by Carolyn A. Muessig, 93–​119. Leiden: Brill, 1998. Power, Eileen. Medieval English Nunneries c. 1275 to 1535. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922. Prior, Sandra Pierson. “Virginity and Sacrifice.” In Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the Middle Ages, edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Weisl, 165–​80. New York: St Martin’s, 1999. Raybin, David. “Sir Thopas:  A Story for Young Children.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 225–​48. Reames, Sherry. “Mary, Sanctity and Prayers to Saints: Chaucer and Late-​Medieval Piety.” In Chaucer and Religion, edited by Helen Phillips, 81–​96. Woodbridge: Brewer, 2010. Rex, Richard. The Sins of Madame Eglentyne and Other Essays on Chaucer. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995. Riddy, Felicity. “ ‘Women Talking about the Things of God’: A Late Medieval Sub-​culture.” In Women and Literature in Britain 1150–​1500, 2nd ed., edited by Carole M. Meale, 104–​27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Robertson, Elizabeth. “Aspects of Female Piety in the Prioress’s Tale.” In Chaucer’s Religious Tales, edited by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, 145–​60. Cambridge: Brewer, 1990. Rose, E. M. The Murder of William of Norwich. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Russell, Josiah Cox. “The Clerical Population of Medieval England.” Traditio 2 (1944): 177–​212. Salih, Sarah. Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Brewer, 2001. Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W.  Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J.  Vickers, 123–​42. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1986. Turner, Marion. “Unlocked Doors: Geoffrey Chaucer’s Writing-​Rooms and Elizabeth Chaucer’s Nunnery.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 40 (2018): 423–​34. Wilsbacher, Gregory J.  “Lumiansky’s Paradox:  Ethics, Aesthetics, and Chaucer’s ‘Prioress’s Tale.’ ” College Literature 32.4 (2005): 1–​28.

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128 Sarah Salih Sarah Salih is a Reader in English at King’s College London. She has a long-​standing interest in medieval texts and practices of virginity; relevant publications include Versions of Virginity in Late Medieval England (Brewer, 2001); Medieval Virginities, edited with Anke Bernau and Ruth Evans (University of Wales Press, 2003); A Companion to Medieval English Hagiography, as editor (Brewer, 2006). She is currently researching drama and performance in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

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SWIVEN HELEN BARR Manciple’s Tale Merchant’s Tale Miller’s Tale Reeve’s Tale Cook’s Tale

In his Faerie Queene (1590), Edmund Spenser lauds Chaucer as the “well of English undefyled.”1 Nearly three hundred years later, Matthew Arnold revives the accolade in his praise for “the lovely charm” of Chaucer’s diction.2 For centuries, Chaucer’s language was graced with terms that celebrated its eloquence, its light, its honeyed sweetness. More preoccupied with their own poetic ideals than with dispassionate critical scrutiny of Chaucer’s, admirers and followers censored him. Literary myth-​making cleansed a well of English that was built on wishful thinking. More recent academic scholarship has made space for filth. Matter once considered out of place has been recognized as a crucial constituent of Chaucerian poetics. Still, however, Chaucer’s writing is censored. Rude diction is rendered polite by how it is glossed; sometimes it is simply glossed over. Scholarly taste persists in producing a version of Chaucer that attends only cursorily to his poetic skill with vocabulary that might be labelled “vulgar.” This study of “swiven” will attempt to redress the balance. I want to show that Chaucer’s use of this word is poetically nuanced. It is not simply a matter of “bawdy.”3 Rather, “swiving” in verse makes an important literary—​and social—​point. Chaucer’s use of “swiven” asks the questions: What is poetry? Who is it for? “Swiven” occurs seven times in Chaucer’s oeuvre: in the tales of the Miller, the Reeve, the Cook, the Merchant, and the Manciple.4 At first glance it might be thought to be a “fabliaux” word or simply a “cherles term.” Closer inspection of its appearance in the 1 Spenser, Faerie Queene, 4.2.32. 2 Arnold, “Study of Poetry,” 174.

3 Christopher Cannon examines the reception of Chaucer’s language in light of its alleged light, eloquence and sweetness; see Making of Chaucer’s English, 179–​215. He comments on “swyve” that it is one of the words that might have lived without the surveillance of text: “Most of them look exactly the kind of words that literature would have to work hard to capture” (161). Elliott devotes a chapter to “Cherles Termes,” but neither there nor elsewhere does he examine the meaning of “swyve”; see Chaucer’s English, 181–​239. David Burnley does not gloss it either; see Guide to Chaucer’s Language, 195. 4 The Miller’s Tale 1.3850; Reeve’s Tale 1.4178, 1.4266 and 1.4317; Cook’s Tale 1.4422; Merchant’s Tale 4.2378; and Manciple’s Tale 9.256.

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130 Helen Barr Manciple’s Tale begins to show us why. First, it is important to consider the teller. The Manciple is one of the “professional” pilgrims on the road to Canterbury. He’s a kind of business agent, purchasing provisions for an Inn of Court (school of law). According to the General Prologue, the Manciple is “a lewed” man (1.574), but he is not only able to keep pace with a “heep of lerned men” (1.575) who are expert in legal matters, he is cleverer than them all: “this Manciple sette hir aller cappe” (1.586). The Manciple shows an insouciant disregard for superiority based on learning. Shrewd business sense is better. How might this social profile bear on the Manciple’s diction in his tale? First, it is significant that Chaucer gives him a story that has already been told by Ovid, the Latin poet whose Metamorphoses was such a rich source for a number of Chaucer’s works.5 In the Metamorphoses a raven tells Apollo, the God of Poetry, that Coronis, his human lover, has committed adultery. In fury, Apollo takes his bow and shoots an arrow that kills her. When he sees her lifeless body, Apollo repents his impetuous rage and blames the bird who told him of Coronis’s transgression. While the raven hopes for a reward, Apollo punishes him by turning his white feathers black. In Ovid, the story is embedded in a quarrel about poetic emulation, a point that will prove significant for Chaucer’s retelling.6 In the Canterbury Tales, Apollo’s classical reputation is given a fourteenth-​century makeover: He was therwith fulfild of gentillesse, Of honour, and of parfit worthynesse. This Phebus, that was the flour of bachilrie, As wel in fredom as in chivalrie (9.123–​26)

The Manciple dresses the God of Poetry in the diction of Chaucer’s Knight from the General Prologue (1.43–​47). All the italicized terms are from a courtly register of noble knighthood. Apollo is turned into a fine member of the first estate. Although Coronis is not named in the tale, in contrast to Ovid’s telling, there is a special emphasis on Phoebus’s noble wife. Ovid is domesticated. Rank and status in this tale, however, are shown to be not innate, but performed because a person gets made up from the diction that is used to describe them. Or, as the Manciple says: I am a boystous man, right thus seye I: Ther nys no difference, trewely, 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—​ But that the gentile, in estaat above, She shal be cleped his lady, as in love;

5 Ovid is included as one of the five poets whom the narrator celebrates in the envoy to Troilus and Criseyde (5.1792). Ovid’s Heroides are cited as a major source for legendary poetry alongside Vergil in the House of Fame, 379. See also the Legend of Good Women, 1367 and 1465. 6 Ovid, Metamorphoses 2.536–​632.

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And for that oother is a povre womman, She shal be cleped his wenche or his lemman. And, God it woot, myn owene deere brother, Men leyn that oon as lowe as lith that oother. (9.211–​22)

Claiming to be a plain man, the Manciple argues that there is no difference between a noble wife who commits adultery and a woman from a poor estate. Difference is a matter not of person but language. And when it comes down to it, a man will tumble one as low as the other. The Manciple reprises the same argument with the terms tyrant, captain, outlaw, and thief. The only reason why a tyrant gets to be called a captain rather than an outlaw or a thief is because he has a bigger band of followers who are able to burn a house to the ground (9.223–​34). The naming of social distinction depends on power. The Manciple pretends to lack linguistic power as a cover for how he manipulates social register. Not only is he “boystous,” but he is “a man noght textueel,” and won’t speak of learned material (9.235–​56). That is not true. In Ovid, there is no direct speech given to the bird when he tells Apollo of his wife’s adultery. The Manciple gives the crow a speech that is a rhetorical tour de force of social humiliation: The white crowe, that heeng ay in the cage, Biheeld hire werk, and seyde never a word. And whan that hoom was come Phebus, the lord, This crowe sang “Cokkow! Cokkow! Cokkow!” “What, bryd?” quod Phebus. “What song syngestow? Ne were thow wont so myrily to synge That to myn herte it was a rejoysynge To heere thy voys? Allas, what song is this?” “By God,” quod he, “I synge nat amys. Phebus,” quod he, “for al thy worthynesse, For al thy beautee and thy gentilesse, For al thy song and al thy mynstralcye, For al thy waityng, blered is thyn ye With oon of litel reputacioun, Noght worth to thee, as in comparisoun, The montance of a gnat, so moote I thryve! For on thy bed thy wyf I saugh hym swyve.” (9.240–​56)

It is important here to remember the social dynamics of the exchange. The crow, a bird in a cage, has presumably been taught to speak by his master Apollo, the God of Poetry. The crow uses the gift of language to throw the terms back into his master’s face. There is the repetition of “cokkow”: a cuckoo, or rather a cuckold. The bird impersonates a birdcall that is not his own to crow over his master. He rehearses the diction that the Manciple uses to describe the God of Poetry as a knight in the opening of the tale: “worthynesse,” “beautee,” “gentilesse,” “mynstralcye.” The pomp of these fine abstract attributes along with that of the words “reputacioun” and “comparisoun” is deflated. Phoebus’s wife (unnamed by Chaucer) has cheated on her illustrious husband with a lowly nobody. His “montance” (value) is that of a gnat. The taunting is achieved through the comparison

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132 Helen Barr of two different registers: one refined, and the other blunt. Montance is a French word. “Gnat” is Old English. Gnats are food for birds. The crow’s speech is a malicious act of social levelling. Repeatedly he addresses the God of Poetry with the “thy” form of the second person pronoun used for intimates or social inferiors. It’s as if the bird has called his master “mate” in UK parlance, or “bro,” the US equivalent. Partly because of the piling up of the anaphoric clauses, and the assonance of line 9.245, the whole thrust of the speech comes down to that word “swyve.” The crow could have had Pandarus as his speechwriter: “th’ende is every tales strengthe” (Troilus and Criseyde, 2.260). What does “swyve” mean here? The notes of the Riverside Chaucer gloss the term as “copulate with.” So too does the Norton collection of the Canterbury Tales.7 The Riverside glossary also lists “fornicate” (p. 1296). The glosses miss the point. To render “swyve” in Latinate diction robs the word of its poetic force. “Swyve” is used to contest social status and high-​class diction. Chaucer never uses “swyve” to refer to intercourse between wife and husband. As we shall see, with one exception, the man who is swiving swives a woman who belongs to another man: either his wife or his daughter. The connotations of “swyve” include transgression, virility, rivalry, defiance, and social rebellion, and they give the lie to the Manciple’s claim that social register makes no difference to how things are perceived. Jill Mann, in her Penguin edition of The Canterbury Tales, glosses “swive” at this point in the Manciple’s Tale as “fuck.”8 Mann’s gloss is much closer to what “swyve” might mean. “Fuck” is a word of low register. In the most recent online edition of the OED, “fuck” (v) is labelled as “coarse slang” and then shrouded in Latinate definitions to give the decency of cover. The illustrative quotations, however, give a clear sense of the use of this word, not only to denote sexual activity, but also attitude. Connotations of “fuck” include “expressing healthy contempt”; “defiance”; “damage or ruin”; and “cheating.”9 The social resonances of “fuck” as well as its meaning come much closer to translating the meaning of “swyve” in the Manciple’s Tale than “copulate with.” The unknown man doesn’t just “couple” with Apollo’s nameless wife; the Manciple’s use of “swyve” inflects his telling of the episode with coarseness, defiance, cheating, and humiliation. If you don’t gloss this section of the Manciple’s Tale in the correct register, then you skirt round another important aspect of its usage. Chaucer, via the Manciple, tells a classical story which affords far more space for voice than Ovid’s does. And the space for the speaking voice uses diction that is not to be found in the Latin source. The Manciple shows that his “lewed” expression can keep place with that of “lerned men.” Via the Manciple, Chaucer makes Ovid demotic. Chaucer takes on an illustrious (albeit mischievous) forbear on his own “termes.” The crow’s “swyve” is a speech act embedded in literary competition. 7 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales, 290. 8 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann, 686. 9 OED, s.v. “fuck, v.,” 1, 2, 3, and phrases.

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There is a long passage after the plot has finished which, although it has no equivalent in Ovid, reprises the context of poetic emulation in which the story is embedded in the Metamorphoses. The speaker supplies a moral. With a litany of variations, the message is clear: keep your mouth shut. Why does Chaucer add this to the end of Ovid’s plot? In Ovid, Coronis is given direct speech. She deserves punishment but pleads for her as yet unborn child to be saved. The unnamed wife in the Manciple’s Tale has no direct speech, but another woman does. Just as the crow’s use of “swiven” challenges classical literary pedigree, so too does the speaker of the final lines of the story. The Manciple tells us that he learned the series of platitudes he delivers from his “dame”—​(his mother, 9.317). Lines 9.318–​62, that is, the last forty-five lines of the tale, are delivered in the voice of a woman. Even though this is an act of ventriloquism, Chaucer makes space for a voice that is so rarely heard in poetry. An unlearned food purchaser elbows out Ovid and the wife of the God of Poetry to let his audience hear what his mum has to say. Chaucer may have written this section to introduce a competitive reference to another literary work. The words “mi sone” are repeated through this passage. Why? Chaucer’s contemporary, John Gower (whose work Chaucer knew), also tells this tale of the crow in a work called Confessio Amantis (confession of a lover). The confessor figure in this work, called Genius, tells a series of exemplary tales to attempt to reform the Lover who is called Amans. Frequently, Genius addresses Amans as “mi sone.” Might a long homily on holding your tongue which repeats “mi sone” be a mischievous allusion to Chaucer’s contemporary poet? It would be a great joke. When Gower tells this story to warn against the consequences of wrath he adds a moral to take note of what happens when wicked speech is used. Genius tells Amans to remember how the white crow was turned into a black raven. He ends his tale, “Mi goode Sone, as I the rede.”10 There is no direct speech in Gower’s tale. It is delivered entirely in a male voice, and all the diction is in a decent register. How very different from the Manciple’s Tale, where a bird can say “fuck” to the God of Poetry, and a woman’s voice can supersede a man’s. What’s more, an English poet can stake a claim to a kind of poetry which is not afraid to open its mouth. Vernacular English does not have to skulk in the foothills of the mountain of Parnassus, reputed home of the Muses and sacred to Apollo. To write in a wide variety of registers in English, to be unapologetic about orality, domesticity, and bluntness, allows the vernacular to be expressed frankly. It holds its own against more courtly registers. Chaucer’s vernacular poetry, hospitable to social variety, could be seen to mount a challenge to the literary clout of French and Latin, a point to which I shall return at the end of this essay. That is why it is important to gloss “swiven” in this tale as Mann does. Chaucer uses diction which Gower excludes. A “lewed” speaker makes a Latin school-​ text into maternal education. “Swyve” here is not just a “cherles” term. It is a poet’s term, one that flouts social, sexual, and literary decorum. I have argued that fully to understand the nuance of the use of “swyve” in the Manciple’s Tale, we need to pay close attention to the literariness of the story and the 10 John Gower, Confessio Amantis, 3.782–​817 at 817.

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134 Helen Barr social dynamics between tale and teller. The same holds for the Merchant’s Tale. Once again, the teller is a member of the professional classes. In the General Prologue, we learn that he is constantly boasting about the increase of his profits (1.275) and applies his wit so adroitly that no-​one knows that he is in debt (1.280). Much though the narrator has heard from him, however, his pretentions to status are stingingly exposed since the narrator tells us that he does not know his name. Like the Manciple, the Merchant tells a story about a husband whose wife cheats on him with a man of lower social position, and in each tale knighthood and its claims to gentility, both social and textual, are sullied. The Merchant comes from the social group that posed a challenge to those born into the more “gentil” class. As Paul Strohm has discussed, the ability to accrue wealth through profession bred competitiveness between rank achieved by birth and power and status based on cash.11 It is therefore significant that January, the cuckold of the Merchant’s Tale, is a knight, and Damian, who does the cuckolding, is a squire who “carf biforn the knyght ful many a day” (4.1773), a reprise of the line in the General Prologue where we learn that the Squire carves before his father the Knight at the table (1.100). The Manciple and the Merchant both invest their cuckolded husbands with textual memory of the Knight of the General Prologue. While the Merchant regales us with literary allusion, elevated rhetoric is smirched by the antics of the tale and the diction in which they are couched. The description of January’s wedding to his young wife May rolls out a catalogue of literary comparisons (4.1709–​45) that matches the Merchant’s boasting in the General Prologue. Musicians and minstrelsy accompany every course. Not even Orpheus made such sweet melody—​nor Amphion—​before he turns up again in the Manciple’s Tale (9.116). Nuptial festivity is embedded in a literary competition: Hoold thou thy pees, thou poete Marcian, That writest us that ilke weddyng murie Of hire Philologie and hym Mercurie, And of the songes that the Muses songe! To smal is bothe thy penne, and eek thy tonge, For to descryven of this mariage. (4.1732–​37)

“Marcian,” or Martianus, a fifth-​century Latin writer, composed The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, which narrates the allegorical union of intellectual learning (Mercury) with the art of letters (Philology). Saturated with university learning, the treatise was widely studied and commented upon in the Middle Ages. The Merchant, however, dismisses the work with arrogant contempt: Martianus’s pen and tongue are too small (the sexual slur is never glossed by editors). The Merchant wears his learning very heavily, but the polish is soon rubbed off. The bed scene on the marriage night is framed within classical allusion. January thinks he will be Paris and May his Helen of Troy (4.1754). Only when it comes down to it, the consummation is narrated from May’s point of view. She feels 11 Strohm, Social Chaucer, 2–​23.

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the thick bristles of his coarse beard like the skin of a dogfish (4.1824–​26), and the loose skin shakes about his neck (4.1849). He croaks (4.1850). For all of the Merchant’s high literary foreplay, May “preyseth nat his pleyyng worth a bene” (4.1854). January, like Martianus, is humiliated in rude terms. Why is all this important for thinking about the use of the word “swyve” in this tale? As in the Manciple’s Tale, this usage is embedded in a story that has claims to literary pedigree, but in which a social inferior puts a “knight” in his place. The Merchant does so not only by appearing to have a stronger command of classical knowledge than January, who does not live up to the classical exemplars upon which he attempts to model himself, but by deriding upper class authority all together, as when he dismisses Martianus and employs a term like “swyve.” At the denouement to the story, May has tricked January to allow her into their walled garden. He is blind and does not see that Damian is waiting in a pear tree for a sexual assignation. The Merchant turns the biblical Garden of Eden into a playground of carnal knowledge: He [January] 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—​ And sodeynly anon this Damyan Gan pullen up the smok, and in he throng. (4.2348–​53)

No high-​flown learned preamble here. The diction is conspicuously monosyllabic and exclusively Anglo-​Saxon. While the Merchant politely apologizes to the ladies in advance, he, like Damian, gets straight to the point. Sex, and the diction that describes it, is blunt, forceful and abrupt. “[T]‌hrong” suggests a squire’s sexual potency that the knight clearly lacks. When, with his sight miraculously restored, January confronts May with what he has seen, May, quick with a ready answer, tells her husband that she was only doing something to help him. She had been told that she could heal her husband’s sight if she struggled with a man in a tree. This is January’s reply: “Strugle?” quod he, “Ye, algate in it wente! God yeve yow bothe on shames deth to dyen! He swyved thee; I saugh it with myne yen And elles be I hanged by the hals!” (4.2376–​79)

Coarse and base diction narrates a crude hasty conquest. Line 4.2376 describes what is set up as an act of lovemaking as basic animal impulse. While January reads up on Constantinus Africanus’s Latin De Coitu before his wedding night (4.1810–​11), Damian clearly needs no manual. The narration takes us uncomfortably—​and disturbingly—​close to a one-​sided act of penetration. Damian’s penis becomes just an impersonal pronoun “it.” No cherishing or tenderness: just lust bordering on violence. As a squire, Damian has a duty to serve January the knight, but not like this.

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136 Helen Barr In the very process of deflating the knight January by making him say “swyve,” Chaucer enhances his own poetic sophistication. “Swyved” has the same connotations of transgression, one-​upmanship, cuckoldry, and defiance that characterizes its use in the Manciple’s Tale. It would appear that Damian’s penis, unlike Martianus’s “penne,” is not too short. Here again, however, the gloss in the Riverside Chaucer has “copulated with.” The Norton edition editors gloss it as “had sex with.” Mann glosses it as “fucked.” “Had sex with” is anodyne; “copulated with” is an editorial act of blatant tact. The knight has been made to speak like a churl, or at least how a churl is supposed to speak. Although the Merchant claims to be a “rude” man, he makes a knight speak even more rudely by giving him the crudest word of the story. Chaucer is playing an elaborate literary and social game here. He creates a teller puffed up with classical mythology and biblical allusion who mocks the learned and sexual pretensions of a social superior. The Merchant can be coarse too, but not as coarse as a knight. In the tale as a whole, vulgar voice speaks alongside learned rhetorical art. Fictional tellers allowed to say “swyve” allow Chaucer to make a literary point. His radical poetics makes room for fucking alongside learned citations. The textuality of the Manciple’s and Merchant’s Tales helps us to understand why “swyve” appears in the tales of the Miller, the Reeve, and the Cook. The Miller tells a story in which an Oxford clerk cuckolds his landlord, John, an elderly carpenter. Alisoun is John’s much younger wife who plays a very active part in deceiving both her husband and her foppish admirer so that she spends a night in “bisynesse of myrthe and of solas” (1.3654) with the resourceful clerk Nicholas. This is how the Miller summarizes his story once the plot has been fully played out: “Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf, /​ For al his kepyng and his jalousye (1.3850–​51). It’s a cruel riposte. Gone are the merry antics of the tale, told without judgment. The absence of proper names alongside “swyved” turns the “moral” of the tale into a mockery of John the carpenter. “Swyve” here suggests masculine competition, bluntness, and contempt. As is well known, Oswald the Reeve (who is also a carpenter) feels personally affronted by the Miller’s lusty romp. So the Reeve tells a tale to “quite” (1.3864) the Miller. Illicit sex keeps pace with a tone of malice that is sustained throughout. Two Cambridge scholars, Aleyn and John, ride to Trumpington to see Symkyn the miller cheat them out of their rights to their college’s corn and meal. Offered lodging for the night, the scholars take vengeance by “swyving” the miller’s wife and daughter in a charade of mistaken identities and mobile beds played out under the cover of darkness. Disturbingly, neither woman appears to give consent to sex (1.4196) and (1.4229), and the Reeve appears to take salacious pleasure in recounting the vigour of the men at “pley” (1.4198). “Swyved” appears three times in this tale. Aleyn uses it first, telling John that in revenge for the miller stealing their flour he wil “swyve” his daughter (1.4178), and makes good on his claim. Thinking he has then crept back into John’s bed he boasts to his companion that he has “thries in this shorte nyght /​Swyved the milleres doghter bolt upright” (1.4265–​66). Unfortunately, Aleyn has climbed into the wrong bed, and blurts his sexual conquest, not to John, but to Symkyn. A bloody fight ensues. Despite all his pretensions to status, and his pride in the lineage of his daughter and wife,

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Symkyn ends up humiliated. He is deliberately beaten up by the two clerks, and his wife accidentally whacks him over the head with a large stick. The Reeve provides a narrative summary to quite Robin the Miller’s in the previous tale: “Thus is the proude millere wel ybete […]. His wyf is swyved, and his doghter als” (1.4313–​17). Defiant, vindictive, and coarse. Competitive also; Oswald trebles the previous tale’s “swyving” and turns his perceived slight forcefully back onto its teller. Needless to say, the Riverside’s “copulated with” fails to deliver any of this meaning. The Norton edition glosses “swyve” in these tales as “made love to” and in one instance (Aleyn’s first use), “lie with.”12 The romantic connotations here are wholly inappropriate to the word in context. Puzzlingly, Mann glosses the Miller’s and Aleyn’s use of “swyve” as “laid—​sexual sense.”13 It doesn’t capture the malice and sheer force of the act, though she does use “fucked” to capture Oswald the Reeve’s triumphant summary.14 A clear pattern thus emerges about the particular kind of sexual activity that “swyve” represents: it is crude, transgressive, masculinist, forceful, and competitively vengeful. And it is also part of a literary game. The first tale told on the journey is the Knight’s; a noble tale—​or at least it appears so on the surface. According to strict hierarchy the Monk ought to follow the Knight, but the drunken Miller steps in instead and insists he go next. Chaucer the narrator apologizes for the tales of the Miller and the Reeve that are about to be told and calls them “cherles tale[s]‌” (1.3169); because they are told by churls they are full of “harlotrie” (ribald filth, 1.3184). But as a narrator, he has to tell them accurately because otherwise he would be falsifying his material. But don’t worry, he tells his “gentil” audience: “whoso list it nat yheere, /​Turne over the leef and chese another tale” (1.3176–​77). How does the audience turn over the page of a book to which they are listening? Chaucer’s sly slide between orality and literacy contains another subversive joke. If the audience is told that what is coming next is salacious, but they can always skip it and go straight to the “holy” bits, what are they most likely to do? Read the dirty bits surely. After all, the churls’ tales are not really told by churls, and fabliaux are not composed for them. Chaucer knowingly, and teasingly, gives his non-​ churl audience a disclaiming trailer of what they might really like to hear and read, with diction to match. English poetry plays fast and loose with “harlotrie.” Conspicuously, “swyve” often appears at the end of a sequence of text, or at the end of a tale. “Swyved” is almost the last word of the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales. The Cook’s Tale is an unstructured snapshot of the life of a London apprentice called Perkyn. He loves women, drinking, and gambling and has spent time in Newgate prison. Thrown out of his accommodation by his master, Perkyn sends his belongings to a friend of his who shares his recreational habits. This friend has a wife who keeps a shop for the sake of appearances, but this is her trade: she “swyved for hir sustenance” (1.4422). The first story in the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales features a woman (Emelye) 12 See Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales, 88, 96, 98, 99.

13 See Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann, 141, 154, 157. 14 Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann, 158.

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138 Helen Barr who is fought over by two men. But there is no place in the Knight’s Tale for sex. Apart from some dysphemisms, sex is whitewashed into disembodied, distanced desire. The Cook, who’s there on the pilgrimage to provide food for socially aspirant guildsmen and their wives (despite an open wound on his leg), has the last word in this sequence of tales. He ends with a female sex worker. There is no judgment, no moral. She “swyves” for her livelihood, or as the Riverside glosses the term, “copulated for a living.” The Norton editors provide the gloss “had sex for her livelihood,” and Mann has “earned her living by prostitution,” a gloss that at least mentions the profession though with a word that now may be considered politically incorrect.15 Even so, it misses the radical poetic bravura with which “swyve” gets used. If you go to the MED to consult the meaning of “swiven,” this example from the Cook’s Tale is the first that is given, appearing just after the following definitions: “(a) To have sexual intercourse, copulate; smal-​swivinge men, men who copulate infrequently; (b) to have sexual intercourse with (a woman); (c) ~ to child, to make (a tree) fruitful.”16 The MED, like the OED with its entry for “fuck,” cannot bring itself to mention that a woman may be the active subject of a verb that means nonmarital sex.17 The Cook, though, allows a woman to be viewed as an initiator of sexual activity, and a shrewd sexual business woman. Chaucer is over 600 years ahead of his editors and lexicographers. Chaucer gives Roger of Ware poetic licence to include amongst the persons of the Canterbury Tales a woman who uses her sexuality to make a living. And then the tale just stops. It’s a shame she is not named. Perkyn’s friend’s wife ought to be a literary poster girl for radical sexual poetics. Of course, you could argue that because “swyve” is spoken by the vulgar Cook, then Po(e)sie, as I  wish to christen her, is narrated by a speaker with a dirty mouth. That doesn’t wash. As I have argued about all the other tales where “swyve” appears, by having narrators that are ventriloquists in a variety of poetic registers, Chaucer can write poetry that flaunts its socioliterary poetics. He can take on literary tradition and antique texts, but on his own “termes,” not theirs. To trace the meaning of “swyve” in Chaucer’s oeuvre we have to peel back the posteventual veneer of censorship that the Father of English Poetry has endured. This is not the end of Poesie’s story, however. Whether a woman is named, or not (as we saw in our discussion of the versions of the Manciple’s Tale), informs how we read the politics of gender. You might argue that Poesie’s “swyving” is framed dismissively. After all, she is narrated third hand: Perkyn’s unnamed male friend’s wife; anonymized twice over. One way to read this line is to argue that the idea of a woman being the subject of the verb “to fuck,” is so shocking that it’s an act of sex that dare not speak its actor’s name. The erasure of name, and indeed explicit mention of the social standing of the 15 See Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales, 102; and Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, edited by Jill Mann, 163 16 MED, s.v. “swiven, v.”

17 The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse records no other text that features “swive[n]‌” with a female subject.

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“wife,” could be seen to be an act of censorship: active female sex is written out of decent literary history. Even so, the semantics of “swyve” that I argued for earlier—​competitive, aggressive, masculinist, and vengeful—​are irrelevant in this case. If a thrice-​referred unnamed female is the subject of “swyve” then new connotations come into play. It becomes a question not so much of masculine one-​upmanship as keeping the shout of a woman’s active sexuality down. Poesie’s sexual activity is narrated very differently from that of Phoebus’s wife. There is no suggestion of competitiveness, nor as in the other three tales I  have examined, penile aggression. The unique instance of she-​swyving creates a poetic revolution in social sense. This is why. Even if you argue that the last line of the Cook’s Tale in all its brevity is ultimately dismissive of active female sexuality, then the semantics of “swyven” are still differently inflected from the masculine norm. There is nothing triumphalist or boasting about the use of “swyve” in this context. The neutrality of tone and anonymized speed might be seen to draw a decorous veil over what actually takes place, but that in itself is important. There is no crowing over conquest or outrage. Female “swiving” does not draw attention to itself. There are no adjectives or adverbs in this line, and there is no hint of physicality. We are left in the dark about what kind of sexual activity takes place. How might a sex worker plie her trade? What would she actually be doing? While those questions cannot be answered by the end of the Cook’s Tale, the other tales do not even ask them. Male sexuality is the norm: active, penetrative, and blatant. The Cook’s distinctive use of “swyve” invites us to consider sexuality from a very different perspective. There’s no emotional baggage attached to the word; there’s no dressing up of male sexuality in extravagant terms only to bring it back down to earth. Rather, the Cook’s narration prises an anonymized wife free from the poetic traits of literary precedent. In contrast to the Manciple’s and Merchant’s tales she is not formed out of classical Latin literary traditions. Nor is she contained within fabliaux. It’s worth pausing on the register of that generic term. Why turn to French to codify the actions of those who wouldn’t have known how to speak it or to understand it spoken? Posh literary labelling is a social speech act that always already positions actors and readers. The casual fragmentariness of the Cook’s narration leaves Poesie alone to earn her living without an elaborate poetic or moralistic frame. Only if you examine the social semantics of “swyve” very carefully, do you see just how subtly Chaucer’s precise use of lexicon rearranges normative social and gender assumptions. If power is involved at the end of the Cook’s Tale, then it is not a male who holds it. We do not know what the relationship is like between Poesie and her unnamed husband. The dynamics could be as conventionally feudal as in the other tales I have examined, but we don’t know that. Ignorance opens up the possibility of dissent from established practice. The wife could earn her living independently: “her” sustenance. Or she might need to earn her sustenance by trade because her husband is too dissolute to support her. All manner of intriguing back-​stories emerge from the grammatical positioning of “swyve,” back-​stories not stapled by recognizable literary tradition. Chaucer’s bold precision in his lexical choices challenges the received social views of his readers because a gauntlet is thrown down at their literary feet.

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140 Helen Barr Teasing out what “swyve” means and what work it does impacts very suggestively on other critical approaches to Chaucer. A recurrent question in Chaucer scholarship is the relationship of tale and teller. The early tradition of reading Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales reads the sequence as a roadside drama; the tales are read as an extension of the characters who tell them, rather as a dramatic novel.18 The impact of various critical schools of theory, beginning in the late 1960s and buoyant in literary studies since, posed searching questions about what it means to be a person, and how personhood gets written. Is a narrator a persona rather than a character? A literary device? Might we want to read the relationship between tale and teller psychoanalytically? “Person” can be replaced by the word “subject,” in which case a person may be subject to history and produced by historical discourses rather than imposing their personal experience on history. All of which gives rise to discussions about the “I” and subjectivity.19 In this essay I have worked with the premise that there is a strong sociolinguistic connection between teller and tale. Chaucer has chosen to give us tales whose tellers are individuated by titles of social position. Chaucer is clearly interested in the relationships between language and society, in how the choice of words produces the subject. My critical position on the relationship between tale and teller is partly determined by my choosing to approach the word “swyven” from a sociopolitical approach. Thinking about Chaucer here has produced discussion that clusters around censorship, social positioning, not just of persons but also of language. To my mind censorship and literary experimentation are about social struggle between the voiced and the voiceless. Focus even on a single word used only seven times reveals Chaucer’s radical socioliterary agenda.

Bibliography Primary Sources Arnold, Matthew. “Study of Poetry.” In The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, vol. 9, English Literature and Irish Politics, edited by R.  H. Super. Ann Arbor:  University of Michigan Press, 1973. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales. Edited by Jill Mann. London: Penguin, 2005. Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue: Authoritative Text, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism, 2nd ed. Edited by V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson. New York: Norton, 2005. Gower, John. Confessio Amantis. In The English Works of John Gower, vol. 1, edited by G.  C. Macaulay. Early English Text Society Extra Series 81. London:  Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1900. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Edited by A. C. Hamilton. Harlow: Longman, 1977. 18 See Jordan, “Chaucer’s Sense of Illusion”; and Traversi, Canterbury Tales.

19 See Benson “Trust the Tale”; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History; Leicester, Disenchanted Self; and Gust, Constructing Chaucer.

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Secondary Sources Benson, C.  David. “Trust the Tale, Not the Teller.” In Drama, Narrative and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales, edited by Wendy Harding, 22–​33. Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2003. Burnley, David. A Guide to Chaucer’s Language. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1983. Cannon, Christopher. The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. The Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse. University of Michigan. https://​quod.lib.umich. edu/​c/​cme/​. Elliott, Ralph W. V. Chaucer’s English. London: Deutsch, 1974. Gust, Geoffrey W.  Constructing Chaucer:  Author and Autofiction in the Critical Tradition. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Jordan, Robert M.  “Chaucer’s Sense of Illusion:  Roadside Drama Reconsidered.” English Literary History 29 (1962): 19–​33. Leicester, H.  Marshall, Jr. The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Strohm, Paul. Social Chaucer. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989. Traversi, Derek. The Canterbury Tales: A Reading. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983.

Helen Barr is Fellow and Tutor in English at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford. Her published work includes critical editions (The Piers Plowman Tradition and The Digby Lyrics), and articles on a wide range of late medieval literature and early modern drama. She is the author of Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England, and most recently, Transporting Chaucer. She is currently working on a new critical edition of Patience. The Middle English text will be accompanied by a facing translation into modern idiomatic poetry. The appendices will include visual materials and translated sources and analogues. The thirteenth-​century Latin text De Naufragium Jonae will be translated into English for the first time.

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CRAFT BRUCE HOLSINGER House of Fame Troilus and Criseyde Anelida and Arcite Treatise on the Astrolabe General Prologue Man of Law’s Prologue and Tale Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale Parliament of Fowls The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne […] (Chaucer, The Parliament of Fowls)

Geoffrey Chaucer opens book 3 of the House of Fame by reminding us that he is a creative writer—​and a grouchy, somewhat insecure one at that. Having visited the temple of glass and endured capture by the eagle, the writer–​narrator finds himself standing at the foot of a great hill (actually a mass of ice, as he will soon discover) on which the House of Fame is built. Before describing and interpreting what he sees, the eponymous Geffrey issues an invocation that proposes an indissoluble link between the quality of his versification and the wonders he is about to describe: O God of science and of lyght, Appollo, thurgh thy grete myght, This lytel laste bok thou gye! Nat that I wilne, for maistrye, Here art poetical be shewed, But for the rym ys lyght and lewed, Yit make hyt sumwhat agreable, Though som vers fayle in a sillable; And that I do no diligence To shewe craft, but o sentence. And yif, devyne vertu, thow Wilt helpe me to shewe now That in myn hed ymarked ys—​ Loo, that is for to menen this, The Hous of Fame for to descryve—​ Thou shalt se me go as blyve Unto the nexte laure y see, And kysse yt, for hyt is thy tree. Now entre in my brest anoon! (House of Fame, 1091–​109)

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144 Bruce Holsinger One of the most revealing moments in this self-​consciously writerly passage is the couplet smack in the middle of the invocation: “And that I do no diligence /​To shewe craft, but o sentence.” I won’t make an effort to show my craft in what follows, that is, but only the sentence or meaning. While referring explicitly to the practice of Chaucer’s own literary making, the couplet also conveys a certain degree of self-​consciousness on the writer’s part about putting his poetical tricks on display. And no good writer shows such tricks, at least not deliberately: to do so would be to sacrifice art at the altar of craft, to expose the illusion-​creating work of technique or style, and thus undermine the verity of the story or vision to be limned and believed. The passage as a whole speaks to the mysterious quality of craft in the making of art and culture, whether a Middle English dream vision in octosyllabic couplets or a piece of clever embroidery or a well-​seasoned galantine. Craft is nowhere and everywhere in material culture and daily life: well-​honed finesse with the appearance of effortlessness, the invisibility of confident skill. Craft in this sense seeks to abnegate or deny its relation to sentence, even as the reader knows—​just as the critic knows, and indeed just as the craftperson knows—​that the two are intimate companions, impossible to think separately within the domain of artisanal knowledge. Here the figure of Apollo, “God of science and of light,” as Chaucer describes him, is especially instructive as a figure of initiation and apprenticeship, embodying the distinction and commonalities between science or knowledge and practice, or indeed between theory and practice. This is a category difference that writers, teachers, and students alike grapple with and experience in distinctive ways. How do we balance the practical concerns of writers (putting together good sentences, finishing a piece of work) with the more abstract and theoretical processes of interpretation? Is interpretation a form of craft, and if so, what does it require in terms of training, practice, and the perfection of skill? “Craft” appears dozens of times in Chaucer’s corpus: as a term for artisanal expertise (carpentry, shipbuilding, cookery), professional affiliation (embodied in the so-​called craft guilds), secret or arcane knowledge (alchemy, magic, sacrament, love), and, as in the passage above, literary making. In the broadest sense, craft was central to medieval habits of thought and invention in their various institutional incarnations. Repetition and originality go hand in hand in the domain of craft, and indeed no product of human handiwork (poem, cartwheel, girdle, book) is thinkable outside the cycles of apprenticeship and skill-​honing invested in its making and distribution. As Mary Carruthers writes, “Any craft develops an orthopraxis, a craft ‘knowledge’ which is learned, and indeed can only be learned, by the painstaking practical imitation and complete familiarization of exemplary masters’ techniques and experiences. Most of this knowledge cannot even be set down in words; it must be learned by practicing, over and over again.”1 The histories of such familiarizations—​repetition, painstaking hands-​on experience, trial and failure—​are thus largely invisible, even as we glimpse them in the many ways past writers imagined and replicated the idioms of craft as well as in the 1 Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 1.

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surviving objects of their artisanal labour. Lisa Cooper, in her study of medieval artisans and narrative craft, quotes a wonderful passage from Hugh of St. Victor illuminating this interplay between labour and artifact:  “Though medieval artificers are no longer directly available to our admiring gaze, we certainly have continued to this day to ‘look with wonder’ at the mundane and magnificent products of their skill—​the many books and buildings, paintings and sculptures, and articles of furniture, clothing and jewelry still extant today.”2 In the modern era, craft can have a distinctive and rather old-​fashioned resonance. In popular imaginings, a craftswoman or craftsman is an artisan who works with her or his hands, on a small or individual scale, and within circuits of local rather than international or global exchange (village markets, specialty shops, farmer’s markets, and so on). A craftsperson might make furniture by hand, or weave baskets, or ferment and bottle kombucha in lieu of the mass-​market varietals available at the grocery store. That this notion of craft is a nostalgic stereotype does not mitigate its role in shaping modern conceptions of industrialization, mass production, and mechanization—​most often, of course, by contrast. Craft’s somewhat antiquarian tinge has led to its persistent imaginative role in the history of labour and the organization of work as that quaint formation which has been left largely behind; as Terry Smith puts it, in certain ways “modernity defined itself, centrally, against craft”: Craft bore the brunt of [modernity’s] attacks on the present. Craft became the primary instance of the not-​modern, the anachronistic. The overwhelming success of mass production/​consumption modernity in the early and mid-​twentieth century left craft as  the obvious signifier of modernity’s opposite:  tradition. All the basic elements of craft—​learning through apprenticeship, accumulated knowledges of past practice, individual conception, ingenious adaptation, adjustments between utility and decoration, fashioning by hand, tooling skills, close communities of taste—​were displaced from the centres of our working, public, domestic, and private lives.3

One of Smith’s points here concerns periodization: in the modern world, as industrial mass production avowedly displaced the traditional work of handicraft, craft in turn came to embody the premodern remainder, the residual afterlife of individual artisanship. In this sense craft is to be distinguished from mere competency, as N.  C. M.  Brown has usefully insisted:  “Competency implies little of the virtuosity, guile and rhetoric of craftsmanship. Competency is more protocolic, denoting a kind of technical criterion of success.”4 Craftsmanship, on the other hand, must be adapted to circumstance, customized to the occasion: craft, Brown avows, “implies interpretations improvised for the task by an accomplished craftsperson.”5

2 Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft, 9. 3 Smith, “Craft, Modernity and Postmodernity,” 20. 4 Brown, “Theorizing the Crafts,” 6. 5 Brown, “Theorizing the Crafts,” 6.

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146 Bruce Holsinger This is a rather heavy burden to lay on the individual and small-​ scale work performed by craftspeople. On the other hand, Brown’s emphasis on interpretative and improvisatory dimensions of craft can help defend craft practices against the charge of nostalgia, which can often characterize paeans to craft as a bulwark against an alienating modernity. Certain writers on craft in recent years have enlisted its reclamation as a sort of hands-​on virtue ethics, speaking to a more general collective desire to embrace the immediacy of craft practice against the anonymizing forces of mass production. Thus Matthew Crawford, writing of the Progressive Era in his wildly popular book Shop Class as Soulcraft, suggests that “the tangible elements of craft” found wide appeal in the early decades of the twentieth century “as an antidote to vague feelings of unreality, diminished autonomy, and a fragmented sense of self that were especially acute among the professional classes.”6 Craft provided what Crawford calls a “therapeutic ethic of self-​ regeneration” in an era when labourers often found themselves at risk of falling into the industrial maw. Craft could then be reclaimed as a virtue against the anonymizing vice of the assembly line. For Crawford this resistant notion of the phenomenon hearkens back to a past in which craft played a simultaneously functional and moral role as a centralizing force of social cohesion. Only by pushing back against the “separation of thinking from doing,” in Crawford’s view, can we hope to find a mode of existence capable of overcoming the profound alienation of our subjective selves from the everyday, hands-​ on crafts that model a more soulful life.7 As Cooper and others have recognized, our traditions of academic criticism have tended to relegate craft to the status of an after-​effect or secondary evidence: a study of made things left behind rather than the day-​to-​day practices and in-​the-​moment frustrations endured by writers (even the most famous and canonical ones) struggling to produce decent work. We tend to think of famed writers like Geoffrey Chaucer or Jane Austen as artists, not craftspeople, despite the wealth of “craft talk” produced by contemporary creative writers in workshops, textbooks, and essays (see below). In the study of cultural history, this subordination of craft to art has become a matter of controversy in recent years, with some critics beginning to insist on the “importance of craft in the development and expression of human values,” as Howard Risatti puts it.8 Here again we see the often-​intimate relationship between craft and what Chaucer called “sentence.” So often invisible in its effects, craft nevertheless permeates the ethical and moral register of work, shaping meaning and social significance. Craft has its own ethic, its distinctive habitus or disposition, and as we shall see, Chaucer’s writings are a helpful if idiosyncratic guide to discovering some of the forms assumed by craft at a particular historical moment and in the hands of a specific poet. 6 Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 28. 7 Crawford, Shop Class as Soulcraft, 37. 8 Risatti, Theory of Craft, xiv.

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Craft as Specialty: The Canterbury Tales The word cræft appears some 700 times in Old English literature, as Nicole Guenther Discenza points out, and accrues a wide range of associations in both poetry and prose. The semantic breadth of cræft indicates something of its institutional vibrancy in early insular culture. Monastic discipline, liturgical hymnody, ethical comportment, skill in versification: all could be imagined as crafts, and cræft in turn could embrace a remarkable array of human actions and attributes—​including virtue, as King Alfred insured through his many inventive enlistments of the term: “ðone cræft ðære monnðwærnesse” (the virtue of mercy); “nan cræft nis Gode deorwyrða ðonne sio lufu” (no virtue is more precious to God than love).9 We get a revealing glimpse at the later lexical fortunes of craft in The Owl and the Nightingale, an early Middle English debate poem between two birds over their contrasting modes and moods of life and voice. At one point in the poem the Nightingale, the defender of love, springtime, and the passions, attacks the Owl with a boast on the superiority of her craft: “[H]‌ule, þu axest me,” ho seide, “ȝif ich kon eni oþer dede bute singen in sume tide, an bringe blisse for & wide. Wi axestu of craftes mine? Betere is min on þan alle þine, betere is o song of mine muþe þan al þat eure þi kun kuþe.”10

(“Owl, you ask me,” she said, “if I am capable of anything other than singing in summer time, and spreading bliss far and wide. Why do you question my craft? My singular skill exceeds all of yours; one song from my mouth exceeds everything your kind was ever able to perform.”)

The phrase “craftes mine” embodies all the elements of song and voice distilled by the Nightingale into the work of life. The poem, in its variously bemused and sombre approach to the telling of truth, insists here that the singular craft of song (and by extension, perhaps, poetry itself) has a purchase on the wider world at least as powerful as the grim institutional voice of the Owl. The Owl and the Nightingale stages a contest of “crafts” that posits craft itself as an individuated facility practised to widely varying purpose by its two practitioners. By Chaucer’s day, the word “craft” had accrued an additional institutional connotation as a word referring to the so-​called craft guilds. These were corporations of artisans, merchants, or practitioners joined in solidarity and economic self-​interest by the common skill or profession of their members. As the Oath Book of Colchester puts it, “These be the names of Craftes: Sadelers, Spycers, Smethes, Forwarders.”11 Otherwise 9 See Discenza, King’s English, 106–​7, citing examples from a range of lexical and literary sources. 10 Owl and the Nightingale, lines 707–​14 (my translation). 11 MED, s.v. “craft, n.” (7).

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148 Bruce Holsinger known as guilds or mysteries (hence the “mystery plays,” the pieces of religious theatre put on by these associations), the crafts were focal points of civic organization, with often quite powerful mediating roles to play in local politics and in church–​city relations.12 Membership in a craft was thus one of the most frequent idioms of belonging for workers and craftspeople across the social spectrum; “And of his craft he was a Carpenter,” Chaucer writes of John in the Miller’s Tale (1.3189), using a convenient shorthand for a well-​known marker of professional affiliation (the “Brotherhood of Carpenters of London” had drawn up its ordinances in 1333).13 Similarly, in the Cook’s Tale, the character Perkyn Revelour comes from “a craft of vitaillers” (1.4366), one of several fellowships involved in the food trades, along with the Fishmongers, Butchers, and Bakers.14 These “craftes” were a well-​known part of Chaucer’s world, threads in the fabric of social and economic life in city and town. That they were a frequent object of his literary contemplation is no surprise given the variety of professional encounters he would have had with their members and officers over the course of his career in public service. Yet craft can also serve in Chaucer’s works to denote a more arcane or secretive practice shared only by a select and adept few, as illustrated by a passage from the Treatise on the Astrolabe: & in this Maner maistow wyrke with any latitude Meridional, as I  first seide, saue in Capricorne /​ And yif thow wolt pleie this craft with the arisyng of the Mone, loke thow rekne wel her cours howre by howre; for she ne dwellith nat in a degree of [hire] longitude but [a]‌ litel while, as thow wel knowest /​ but natheles, yif thow rekne hir verreye Moeuyng by thy tables howre after howre [þou shalt do wel ynow. (Astrolabe, 2.40)

This technical evocation of the “latitude Meridional” represents just one way that the user of the astrolabe may “pleie this craft with the arisyng of the Mone,” an extension of the craft as a whole to one of its many components. Anyone who chooses to learn the workings of the astrolabe is capable of practising its “craft,” a skilled disposition toward an object or tool that can in turn be “pleie[d]‌” very much like a musical instrument. Craft can be an enduring part of a particular trade, requiring long apprenticeship and years of devotion; yet it might also be an ephemeral interest or passing hobby, mastered with a bit of practice and focused attention. The activity or purpose that joined members of a craft in association was its daily practice in the workplace: the hands-​on artisanal skill or process shared by its members and thus constellating them as a separate entity. This is the most common Chaucerian usage of the term, appearing in many of his works to denote the particular proficiency 12 In certain locales, such as in fifteenth-​century Norwich, the terms craft and mystery were kept distinct; see Fitzgerald, Drama of Masculinity, 172. 13 Wasserman and Guidry, “Carpenter,” 156.

14 See Phythian-​Adams, Desolation of a City, 101.

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attached to a member of a profession. The portrait of the Shipman in the General Prologue furnishes an illuminating example: If that he faught and hadde the hyer hond, By water he sente hem hoom to every lond. But of his craft to rekene wel his tydes, His stremes, and his daungers hym bisides, His herberwe, and his moone, his lodemenage, Ther nas noon swich from Hulle to Cartage. (1.399–​404)

Aside from its celebration of the Shipman’s skill, the passage homes in quickly on its details:  it is the Shipman’s “craft to rekene” tides, tributaries, and perils, captured by the poet in the jargon of the nautical profession, and here used (as often in the General Prologue, sometimes tongue in cheek) to emphasize the Shipman’s prominence among others of his trade. Craft in the General Prologue seems always to come hand in hand with the idioms of specialization:  tides, streams, dangers, harbours, lunar position, navigational skill. Chaucer’s facility in packing these various elements of a single craft densely into a few lines nearly always strikes the reader as an exemplification of his own craft, as the poet shows off his outsider’s knowledge as the neutral observer who merely tinkers with the argot while admiring its embodiment in a working life. This ear for idiom is typical of Chaucer’s vision of craft; he seems to have delighted in these specialized jargons more than any other contemporaneous writer in the genre of estates satire. Jill Mann famously describes the company of pilgrims depicted in the General Prologue as “a random assembly of people all of whom are the best exponents of their craft in the country or out of it”—​with professional craft being perhaps the central marker of identity and individuation.15 Other crafts, however, are designed and learned precisely for their own potential as mechanisms of deception, artful systems of signs and gestures meant to conceal the false workings of a corrupt practitioner. Consider the portrait of the Pardoner later in the Prologue, a man who excels at his disreputable, morally bankrupt profession through an expert familiarity with its empty signifiers: But of his craft, fro Berwyk into Ware, Ne was ther swich another pardoner; For in his male he hadde a pilwe-​beer, Which that, he seyde, was Oure Lady veyl; He seyde he hadde a gobet of the seyl That Seinte Peter hadde, whan that he wente Upon the see, til Jesu Crist hym hente. He hadde a croys of latoun, ful of stones, And in a glas he hadde pigges bones. (1.692–​700)

Witchcraft is another example of a corrupted craft. In the Friar’s Tale, an archdeacon busily punishes the sins of fornication, defamation, and “wicchecraft,” among other 15 Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, 12.

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150 Bruce Holsinger transgressions. Yet another such craft is the practice of poaching: in the Physician’s Tale the narrator avows that a “theef of venisoun that hath forlaft /​His likerousnesse and al his olde craft /​Can kepe a forest best of any man” (6.83–​85). A reformed poacher, in other words, makes for a forest’s best guardian, his “olde craft” remembered and repurposed toward the good and lawful. In the Merchant’s Tale even widowhood becomes a warily respected “craft”: “this olde widwes god it woot /​They conne so muchel craft on Wades boot /​So muchel broken harm whan that hem leste /​That with hem sholde I never live in reste” (4.1423–​26). The widows’ craft is dangerous, enervating, deceptive, a source of harm for those who dare to live under its shadow. Chaucer’s most extended and elaborate account of craft occurs in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale, a darkly moralizing yarn concerning the practice of alchemy and its attendant moral and social consequences.16 The tale is narrated by a Yeoman riding on the pilgrimage with a Canon, who slips away in embarrassment soon after his servant begins to reveal the depth and intricacy of his master’s knowledge of the alchemical craft: And ye hym knewe as wel as do I, Ye wolde wondre how wel and craftily He koude werke, and that in sondry wise. (8.602-​4)

In this familiarizing description of his master’s craft, the Yeoman enlists the adverbial form of the word, which imputes to the “werke” of the Canon a quality of shrewd cunning that cuts across the various dimensions of his practice. Lee Patterson takes the discourse of alchemy in this narrative as a mode of subjective self-​presentation: it is here more than anywhere else in the Canterbury Tales, Patterson argues, that we catch a glimpse of “Chaucerian modernity” in all its ambivalence and self-​ contradiction.17 It is surely no accident that the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale seems obsessed not only with the alchemical arts but with the very notion of craft: the tale contains many more occurrences of the word than we find in any of Chaucer’s other writings. Yet like Troilus, the narrator keeps the insider’s knowledge of his craft “secree” and “cloos,” a reticence that is itself inherent to the alchemical craft: “Sir preest,” he seyde, “I kepe han no loos Of my craft for I wolde it kept were cloos And as ye love me kepeth it secree For and men knewe al my subtiltee By god they wolden han so green envye To me bycause of my philosophye I sholde be deed ther were non other weye.” (8.1368–​73)

16 For an incisive reading of the language of craft in this tale (and elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales) as a specifically urban phenomenon, see Cannon, “Chaucer and the Language of London,” especially 86ff. 17 Patterson, “Perpetual Motion.”

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The couplets tease out particularist attributes of the alchemical craft that could just as easily be extended to all crafts: the secrecy of its practices, the subtly of its practitioners, even the dangers of its enviable adepts. The unusual adverb craftily appears some three hundred lines later, this time as part of the whispered legend of the Canon’s prowess in his trade: “For, as men seyn, he kan doon craftily,” the Yeoman proclaims in another dark paean to his master’s alchemical adeptness. In this respect the Canon’s Yeoman speaks precisely as an apprentice, and a frustrated one at that. At one point he indicts the entirety of his profession by railing against the futility and folly of its core practices: This cursed craft whoso wole exercise, He shal no good han that hym may suffise, For al the good he spendeth theraboute He lese shal; therof have I no doute. Whoso that listeth outen his folie, Lat hym come forth and lerne multiplie; And every man that oght hath in his cofre, Lat hym appiere and wexe a philosopher. Ascaunce that craft is so light to leere? Nay, nay, God woot, al be he monk or frere, Preest or chanoun, or any oother wyght, Though he sitte at his book bothe day and nyght In lernyng of this elvysshe nyce lore, Al is in veyn, and parde, muchel moore. (8.830–​43)

Key here is the futurity of the injunction:  “whoso wole exercise” alchemy—​that is, those who would practice this “cursed craft”—​shall be doomed to loss and destitution, both material and, the lines imply, moral. The remarkably cynical tone of the passage only crescendos as the Yeoman invites alchemical aspirants to make themselves public and “appiere” and play “a philosopher,” so that all can witness their failure “that craft […] to leere.” The passage arrives finally at the sheer impossibility (even for learned members of the clerisy) of the very apprenticeship the Yeoman has endured. It is a simultaneously learned and mysterious apprenticeship, full of “lernyng” the aspirant will derive from both “his book” and “elvysshe nyce lore,” though all for nothing in the end. The Canon’s Yeoman thus puts on explicit display a darker side of craft that much of the Canterbury Tales goes out of its way to ironize or satirize. At the same time, it is almost irresistible to read the passage as an account of the writer’s own practice, a dimension of craft which, as we shall see, Chaucer engages elsewhere with more directness. “Here, you try it if you think it’s so easy!”, the poet seems to be saying, a cynical injunction that invites less a true participation in the maker-​space of alchemy than a critical distance on its specialized but obscure demands. Craft subtly blurs the lines between artisanship and art, the practical and the literary, labour and creativity, giving us sight-​lines into the multiple ramifications of making in and beyond Chaucer’s works.

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Love-​Craft in Stanzas: Anelida and Arcite and Troilus and Criseyde One of the poet’s favourite forms of “craft” involves neither an established artisanal skill nor an apparatus of deception, but a practice of human emotion: love. In his classic History of English Literature (1873), Hippolyte Taine fancifully describes the troubadours as a company of “love-​penitents, who, in order to prove the violence of their passion, dressed in summer in fur and heavy garments, and in winter in light gauze, and walked thus about the country, so that many of them fell ill and died. Chaucer, in their wake, explained in his verses the craft of love.”18 Love-​craft is as perilous as it is potentially fulfilling, as adumbrated in an ominous set of rime royal stanzas in Anelida and Arcite: This Theban knyght [Arcite] eke, soth to seyn, Was yong and therwithal a lusty knyght, But he was double in love and no thing pleyn, And subtil in that craft over any wyght, And with his kunning wan this lady bright; For so ferforth he gan hir trouthe assure

That she him trusted over any creature. What shuld I sayn? She loved Arcite so That when that he was absent any throwe, Anon her thoghte her herte brast a-​two; For in her sight to her he bar hym lowe, So that she wende have al his hert yknowe; But he was fals; hit nas but feyned chere—​ As nedeth not to men such craft to lere. (Anelida, 85–​98)

Though a devotee of love “subtil in that crafte,” Arcite, we shortly learn, is also subtle in the very doubleness that defines its practice: “But he was fals; it nas but feyned chere /​ As nedeth not to men such craft to lere.” What makes the moral opposition work so well here is the formal opposition of the twinned stanzas. The first stanza embodies Arcite’s point of view. He is the lusty practitioner of love, so adept in its deceptive workings that he successfully gains Anelida’s “trouth”: a loaded term opposed to everything represented by this falsifying model of comportment embodied in “craft.” The second stanza comes at us from Anelida’s point of view. She is the true lover, the believer in appearances, embracing as sentence what may only be the illusion provided by craft. And when we learn how Arcite has beguiled her, the poet–​narrator steps in to take her side, issuing a moralizing injunction against this twisted notion of love-​craft: “nedeth not to men such craft to lere.” The craft of love is also at the thematic centre of Troilus and Criseyde, in which Troilus and Criseyde both hone and perfect their pursuit of one another while mired in the self-​ destructive capacities of a craft they have learned all too well. The word appears in three separate stanzas of book 1, each time accruing a new range of meanings and a distinctive grammatical and emotive force in relation to the words and narrative inflections that 18 Taine, History of English Literature, 182.

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provide its context. In the first stanza, Troilus begins his immersive apprenticeship in the craft under a shroud of secrecy he believes will protect his love from notoriety and spectacle: Thus took he purpos loves craft to suwe, And thoughte he wolde werken prively, First, to hyden his desir in muwe From every wight y-​born, al-​outrely, But he mighte ought recovered be therby; Remembring him, that love to wyde y-​blowe Yelt bittre fruyt, though swete seed be sowe. (1.379)

The stanza hints at Troilus’s coming doom at the hands of the very craft to which he so diligently applies himself. Supposedly already wise in the rules of love—​for example, that a love too widely viewed by the public will yield “bittre fruyt”—​he nevertheless pursues further knowledge despite his avowed expertise in the inherent perils of the “craft.” Like any craft, however, love will often go astray, betraying its practitioner in one of myriad ways. Telling the story of Phoebus, Pandarus follows up with a beguiling lament about his own helplessness in the face of love despite his already established skill in a craft that might resist its pangs: “Phebus, that first fond art of medicine,” Quod she, “and couthe in every wightes care Remedye and reed, by herbes he knew fine, Yet to himself his konnyng was ful bare, For love hadde hym so bounden in a snare, Al for the doughter of the kinge Amete, That al his craft ne coude his sorwe bete.

“Right so far I, unhappily for me; I love oon best, and that me smerteth sore; And yet, paraunter, can I rede thee, And not my-​self; repreve me no more.” (1.659–​69)

Here again we see the idiom of craft channelling all the ambivalence, pain, and false assurances of love. As in the invocation of Apollo in the House of Fame with which this essay began, the summoning of “Phebus” connotes the intimacy of theoretical or “scientific” knowledge of a particular practice (in this case medicine) and its practical application in the domain of craft. Love-​craft functions within an emotional economy of paradox of its practitioners’ own making, requiring a measure of expertise that exceeds the capacities of even its ablest apprentices. Despite his skill in all crafts, Phoebus cannot save himself while practising the most dangerous craft of all. In Chaucer’s hands, then, love acquires all the distinctions and accoutrements of a craft such as carpentry or cookery: first there is an apprenticeship, then a certain kind of skill set acquired and hoarded within a group, and finally an application of craft to the pursuit and experience of love. Like any other craft, love entails custom and precedent

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154 Bruce Holsinger while requiring long immersive practice in the finer points. And yet as the examples of both Phoebus and Pandarus attest, such practice makes the adept vulnerable to the very kinds of dissembling he or she puts into effect. Thus even as part of Troilus wants to shout his love from the mountaintops, he understands that one of the entailments that makes for a successful lover is the successful feigning of evasion: And namelich in his counseil tellynge That toucheth love that oughte ben secree; For of himself it wolde ynough out sprynge, But if that it the bet governed be. Eek som-​tyme it is craft to seme flee Fro thing which in effect men hunte faste; Al this gan Troilus in his herte caste. (1.743–​49)

Here a curious textual variant in the poem’s manuscript tradition may be relevant in teasing out how Chaucer is enlisting the term. The Riverside Chaucer prints line 747 as follows: “Eek som-​tyme it is a craft to seme flee.” Yet the article a is omitted in most manuscripts of the poem, rendering the line as I have reproduced it within the stanza. The differences are subtle but illuminating. The provocative phrase “it is craft” may be applied generically: it is a part of any craft—​it is “crafty,” in other words—​to hide sincere intent beneath the appearance of disinterest.19 Yet this kind of dissembling, if we go with the Riverside emendation, is also a (distinctive and discrete) craft in and of itself. Whether a craft proper or a crafty part of love, deceptiveness is part of the game. Troilus attempts this evasiveness even while these matters of love are “caste” in his heart, a word perhaps meant to evoke the casting of molten metals into objects of artisanal craft. Love is the one “craft” whose mastery dooms its very masters to heartbreak, misery, and, quite often, death.

Craft and/​as Making

Along with its historical associations with work, specialization, and love, craft provides a helpful lens on what has been a more or less continuous tradition of reflection in English literary history regarding the hands-​on practice of literary making and its simultaneously aesthetic and artisanal components. Chaucer was already writing self-​ consciously in what we might call a craft tradition, and many of the English writers who followed him acknowledged his formative role in its instantiation. Literary history is in part and in its most intimate guise a history of literary craft, understood and practised in myriad ways by countless writers over many centuries. Ask any living novelist or poet what she or he means by “craft” and you will get as many answers as respondents. For some writers, craft is a mere tool, or a mechanistic process that anyone can master. Thus Catherine Ann Jones: “Though craft is, of course, necessary in creating a good story, please remember that it is only a tool allowing the 19 See the textual note on this line in Riverside Chaucer, 1164.

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writer to give expression to something much deeper, something uniquely his.”20 Craft here is utterly subordinate to art, a mere servant of something deeper and ineffable. Other writers enlist the word craft as a catch-​all for the mysterious process, even the alchemy, by which writers turn words into story, poem, revelation. Elizabeth Gilbert, noting the false sense of legitimacy some artists seek in advanced degrees or other forms of official approbation, proposes an immersion in craft as the antidote to writerly insecurities:  “if you’re working on your craft every day on your own, with steady discipline and love, then you are already for real as a creator, and you don’t need to pay anybody to affirm that for you.”21 Craft is, in a word, devotion, and it is no mistake that many modern scribblers imagine the writing process as embodying the same virtues of disciplina and caritas that monastic writers of the Middle Ages located in the ascetic life. Thus, for Ursula K.  Le Guin, craft is cultivated and directed skill, a facility developed over time that, if nourished properly, will allows its practitioners to thrive in their chosen pursuit: “A skill is something you know how to do. Skill in writing frees you to write what you want to write. It may also show you what you want to write. Craft enables art […]. I’m not going to discuss writing as self-​expression, as therapy, or as a spiritual adventure. It can be these things, but first of all—​and in the end, too—​it is an art, a craft, a making. And that is the joy of it.”22 This admirably plainspoken account of craft insists on its primacy in the creation of art: by acquiring their skill through an extended kind of apprenticeship, writers can free themselves from the shackles of self-​ consciousness and ascend to a higher plane on which art is possible. Any lughead, after all, can string a few sentences together, or tell part of a clumsy story. So where does art end and craft begin? Notice the appositive style enlisted in those final sentences of the third paragraph, as Le Guin constructs a careful series of substitutions to exemplify the writing process as she wants us to understand it: writing is “an art, a craft, a making.” We are edging closer now to Chaucer’s own sense of the writerly craft he practised for nearly all of his adult life, and about which he wrote with a creative ambiguity worthy of the most perceptive modern thinkers on the craft of fiction.23 This particular mode of craft preoccupies the Introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, one of the two or three most metaliterary moments in the Chaucerian corpus. Here the Man of Law, assenting to the Host’s invitation to share his story next, takes a tricky half-​step out of the frame narrative to evoke the auctor responsible for imagining the pilgrimage and its tale tellers into existence: I kan right now no thrifty tale seyn That Chaucer, thogh he kan but lewedly On metres and on rymyng craftily,

20 Jones, Way of Story, 19. 21 Gilbert, Big Magic, 103. 22 Le Guin, Steering the Craft, xi.

23 For a thorough treatment of the notion of Chaucer as an “artisan of verse,” see Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft, 11–​14.

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156 Bruce Holsinger Hath seyd hem in swich Englissh as he kan Of olde tyme, as knoweth many a man; And if he have noght seyd hem, leve brother, In o book, he hath seyd hem in another. For he hath toold of loveris up and doun Mo than Ovide made of mencioun In his Episteles, that been ful olde. (2.46–​55)

What follows is a partial catalogue of Chaucer’s works, presenting him as a prolific if flawed practitioner of the poetic craft. The evocation of the poet’s own corpus here bespeaks the false modesty often seen in his work while giving us a revealing glimpse at the writer’s sense of craft, in this case a self-​consciously limited capacity to rhyme “craftily,” which the poet can do only “lewedly.” The contrast between the two adverbs seems to pit craft against learnedness but only at the expense of the writer himself. The lines speak to those other scattered moments in which Chaucer reflects on the making of poetry as a craft in its own right—​though perhaps we should follow the Apollonian lessons of the House of Fame in questioning his confidence in its meaning. In Chaucer’s historical era, of course, the writing of vernacular poetry was a craft without a craft, an artisanal practice lacking a guild or an association or a corporate idiom of belonging. The poet’s most direct statement on literature as craft occurs in the opening stanzas of the Parliament of Fowls, and seems to acknowledge the solitary, craft-​less nature of the pursuit. The passage is an apt counterpart to the self-​consciously literary sense of craft we see in the invocation to book 3 of the House of Fame with which this chapter began. Whereas the House of Fame finds Chaucer issuing a tongue-​in-​cheek apology for the inadequacy of his craft, the opening of the Parliament sees him wrestling with the travails of literary making as a craft inseparable from love, and thus worthy of long study and endless pursuit even if its apprentices are lacking: The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne, Th’assay so hard, so sharp the conqueringe, The dredful joye alwey that slit so yerne, Al this men I by love, that my felynge Astonyeth with his wonderful werkynge So sore y-​wis, that whan I on him thinke, Nat woot I wel wher that I flete or sinke. For al be that I knowe nat love in dede, No wot how that he quyteth folk hir hyre, Yet happeth me ful ofte in bokes rede Of his miracles, and his cruel yre; Ther rede I wel he wol be lord and syre, I dar not seyn, his strokes been so sore, But God save swich a lord! I can no more. Of usage, what for luste what for lore, On bokes rede I ofte, as I yow tolde. But wherfor that I speke al this? Nat yore

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Agon, hit happed me for to beholde Upon a boke, was write with lettres olde; And ther-​upon, a certeyn thing to lerne, The longe day ful faste I radde and yerne. (1–​21)

The three stanzas create a simultaneously artful and artless portrait of the writerly craft. A craft that takes so “long to lerne” must be acquired in part through the patient apprenticeship of reading and imitation. And as any modern book on the craft of fiction writing will tell you, in order to hone your writerly craft, you must first study and appreciate the craft of your predecessors. You must read “of olde bokes,” that is, and you must read them exhaustively and voluminously—​not simply as sources, but as practical exemplars of your written craft. In this respect the passage suggests a helpful parallel between medieval modes of craft acquisition and our own apprenticeship as literary interpreters, our desire to distill “sentence” or meaning from the handiwork of our craft forebears. As the last stanza has it, “out of olde bokes, in good feith, /​ Cometh al this new science that men lere.” Craft assumes its rightful place as a form of “science” or scientia:  knowledge and learning, but also, as Robert Grosseteste defined it, “comprehension of the truth of things that are always or most of the time in one way.”24 Knowledge based on stability in practice, “usage,” and custom: for us as for Chaucer, perhaps, this is the apotheosis of craft.

Bibliography Primary Sources The Owl and the Nightingale. Edited by J.  W. H.  Atkins. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1922.

Secondary Sources

Brown, N. C. M. “Theorizing the Crafts: New Tricks of the Trades.” In Craft and Contemporary Theory, edited by Sue Rowley, 3–​17. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Cannon, Christopher. “Chaucer and the Language of London.” In Chaucer and the City, edited by Ardis Butterfield, 79–​94. Cambridge: Brewer, 2006. Carruthers, Mary. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–​1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Cooper, Lisa. Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Crawford, Matthew. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work. New  York: Penguin, 2009. Discenza, Nicole Guenther. The King’s English: Strategies of Translation in the Old English Boethius. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 24 Cited in Pasnau, After Certainy, 146.

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158 Bruce Holsinger Fitzgerald, Christine. The Drama of Masculinity and Medieval English Guild Culture. New York: Palgrave, 2007. Gilbert, Elizabeth. Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear. New York: Riverhead, 2015. Jones, Catherine Ann. The Way of Story: The Craft and Soul of Writing. Ojai: Prasana, 2004. Le Guin, Ursula K.  Steering the Craft: Essays and Discussions on Story Writing for the Lone Navigator or the Mutinous Crew. Portland: Eighth Mountain, 1998. Mann, Jill. Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972. Pasnau, Robert. After Certainty: A History of Our Epistemic Ideals and Illusions. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Patterson, Lee. “Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 15 (1993): 25–​57. Phythian-​Adams, Charles. Desolation of a City: Coventry and the Urban Crisis of the Late Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979. Risatti, Howard. A Theory of Craft: Function and Aesthetic Expression. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Smith, Terry. “Craft, Modernity and Postmodernity.” In Craft and Contemporary Theory, edited by Sue Rowley, 18–​28. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1997. Taine, Hippolyte. History of English Literature. Translated by H. Van Laun. Vol. 1. Philadelphia: Gebbie/​Chatto & Windus, 1897. Wasserman, Julian N., and Marc Guidry. “… and a Carpenter ….” In Chaucer’s Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales, edited by Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin, 154–​69. Westport: Praeger, 1996.

Bruce Holsinger is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia and editor of New Literary History. His new book, The Parchment Inheritance: Animals, Archives, and the Making of Culture, is forthcoming from Yale University Press in 2022. Previous books, including The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory and Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror, have explored the role of the medieval in forming modern critical thought and political discourse. His first book, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer, focused on the relationship of music with the flesh, in literary, musical, and philosophical contexts. He is also a fiction writer, having authored two historical novels set in Ricardian England, including A Burnable Book (2014) and The Invention of Fire (2015). His third novel, The Gifted School, was published in 2019.

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RESPONSE: MERVEILLE, VIRGINITE, SWIVEN, CRAFT SIMON HOROBIN These four words, merveille, virginite, swiven, and craft raise a variety of different

issues for assessing the significance of Chaucer’s lexical practices. As each of the essays demonstrates, as well as considering the words themselves, we must take account of the many synonyms that existed alongside them in Chaucer’s usage. The choice of a particular word might be conditioned by a number of different factors. A word might seem more appropriate in a romance than a fabliau, or might suit a tale told by a miller rather than one narrated by a monk. The choice might be made on stylistic grounds, or because of metrical or rhyming factors. Often we find Chaucer drawing on more than one word, so that the switching between these synonyms becomes significant, such as the shifting between virginite, maydenhede and chastitee in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. This mode of stylistic switching is apparent in the way the wife demonstrates her competence in appropriating the Latinate terms of academic and theological debate, auctorite, diffinicioun, bigamye, and turning them upon her opponents. She adopts a similar register when discussing procreation, or engendrure, and uses euphemisms to refer to thynges smale, such as bele chose, sely instrument and quoniam. But the wife is also able to switch registers effectively, adopting a highly colloquial and insulting tone when addressing her husbands, kaynard, dotard, shrewe, and employing terms that pun on more crude alternatives, such as queynte. In order to fully appreciate such stylistic modulation we need a detailed understanding of Chaucer’s lexical choices and the ways they would have been perceived by his contemporary audience. One way of trying to gauge the status of Chaucer’s words is through an understanding of their etymological origins. In merveille and virginite we have words of Anglo-​Norman provenance, although both are ultimately of Latin origin. Swiven and craft are both recorded in Old English and ultimately go back to Germanic roots. But while such etymological distinctions may be salient to us today, to what extent were they significant or even apparent to Chaucer and his readers? Modern readers of Chaucer can turn to resources such as the MED to establish the etymology of a given word, or the ongoing third edition of the OED for a more extensive narrative account of a word’s history. But medieval readers did not have such resources, and consequently would not necessarily have known the roots of the words they employed. Furthermore, simply establishing an etymological point of origin for a word does not tell us much about the status of that word in a particular speech community. While it is generally true that French and Latin words occupied a higher register than those of Germanic origin, many words of French and Latin origin would have been fully assimilated into English by the fourteenth century. According to the MED, merveille is first recorded in English in the Auchinleck manuscript (National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1), an anthology of

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160 Simon Horobin romances produced in London around 1340. The Auchinleck romances are an important source for consideration of Chaucer’s words, since they provide evidence of literary usage in London the generation before Chaucer’s own works were produced. If we are to assess the extent to which Chaucer’s usage was novel, we need to compare it with that of his predecessors. Comparison with the Auchinleck romances indicates that merveille was already established in literary English when Chaucer came to use it. But while merveille had been in use for some decades when it was used by Chaucer, virginite was a more recent borrowing, with its earliest citations in the MED drawn from works contemporary with Chaucer. Such evidence suggests that, while the facts of etymology would encourage us to group the two words together, Chaucer’s audience may have perceived them differently. But there is more to the process of assimilation than length of use. Tara Williams’s close analysis of the occurrences of merveille in rhyme, where it is found combining with a group of markedly French loans with the termination -​aille, governaille, apparaille, and travaille, reminds us that—​while it may have been in use for some time—​the word’s structure and pronunciation would have continued to mark it out as a foreign borrowing. Analysis of the histories of the two words of Germanic origin, craft and swiven, reveals an important distinction. While both craft and swiven are recorded in Old English, swiven has no recorded history in Middle English before Chaucer’s uses of the word. By contrast, craft has an extensive and unbroken history of use from Old English up to the fourteenth century; Bruce Holsinger discusses its use in Old English and traces its early Middle English development through its appearance in the debate poem The Owl and the Nightingale. So what happened to swiven in Middle English? Did it disappear entirely, only to be reintroduced by Chaucer in the late fourteenth century, rather as Edmund Spenser self-​consciously revived words from Chaucer’s language that had fallen out of currency by the sixteenth century? This seems an unlikely explanation; while Chaucer was apparently familiar with the romances of the Auchinleck manuscript, albeit not necessarily from that specific codex, it is hard to imagine him working his way through the works of King Alfred, given the linguistic barriers. Another possible explanation for the lack of recorded instances is that it is simply an accident of history, exacerbated by the paucity of written sources for early Middle English. But a further, more likely, explanation is that the lack of written instances of the word is evidence of its colloquial status, suggesting that swiven survived in the spoken rather than the written language. Support for this suggestion is provided by its Middle English use, which is strikingly different from that recorded in Old English. Old English swifan is defined as “to revolve, sweep, wend, intervene” in J.  R. Clark-​Hall’s A Concise Anglo-​Saxon Dictionary.1 These senses are not recorded at all in Middle English; instead its uses are defined by the MED as:  “to have sexual intercourse, copulate.”2 This change in meaning suggests a reason why the word may have fallen out of literary usage, as does the word’s taboo status 1 Concise Anglo-​Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “swifan, v.” 2 MED, s.v. “swiven, v.”

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Response: Merveille, Virginite, Swiven, Craft

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amongst the set of words used in Middle English to refer to the sexual act, as we shall see below. We have already seen some of the ways in which historical dictionaries such as OED and MED can help readers better appreciate Chaucer’s lexical choices. A period dictionary such as MED is especially helpful, given the way that it is able to offer a fine-​ grained analysis of the various subsenses recorded in Middle English, in a way that is impractical for OED with its much greater historical sweep. MED is especially generous in its inclusion of citations which supply instances of an individual word in use, allowing readers to assess for themselves the primary evidence upon which a particular sense or subsense is based. But there are limitations to this approach, since a dictionary arranges its constituent words according to the alphabet, rather than according to meaning. If we want to understand the use of a Middle English word in greater depth, we need to consider its place within a broader group of words with similar meanings. This method of research is facilitated by the online Middle English Compendium, which allows searching for words with a similar meaning using the definition field.3 Searching the Middle English Compendium for words whose definition include the term “virginity” brings up seventy-​one hits, including words such as maidehede, chasthede and clennesse. Searching for words which include “copulate” in their definition identifies twenty-​two relevant entries. Some of these, like swiven, are descriptive of the physical act itself, such as stein, “to move up and down.” Others are metaphorical extensions; these include shethen, “to put a knife in a sheath”; riden, “to ride”; swinken and labouren, “to work, toil.” But to derive deeper insights into the status of these different terms we need to look in more detail at the texts in which they appear, their dates, authors, dialects, and genres. A brief analysis of the use of a handful of the words used to mean “virginity” hints at the kinds of distinctions that can be gleaned from detailed consideration of MED entries. The majority of the MED citations for maidehede are from the so-​called AB texts of the thirteenth century, anonymous works whose composition and circulation is thought to have centred upon Wigmore Abbey in Herefordshire. In the fourteenth century, maidehede is mostly attested in the works of the poet John Audelay, another writer whose origins were in the West Midlands. Such evidence, albeit limited given the number of instances, appear to suggest that the word was restricted to the West Midlands dialect of Middle English. The MED entry for chasthede, on the other hand, appears to point to an exclusively Eastern provenance. This word is recorded only in the Ayenbite of Inwyt, a text written in the Kentish dialect in 1340, and in Genesis and Exodus, a text produced in West Norfolk. Examples like this show that individual words and their uses varied diatopically throughout the Middle English period. Such distinctions are important to bear in mind when reading Chaucer, since London English of the fourteenth century was simply one of the dialects of Middle English. The process by which it became selected as a supraregional standard form is a post-​Chaucerian development. While some MED 3 Middle English Compendium.

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162 Simon Horobin entries include notes on dialect variation of this kind, such information often has to be gleaned from detailed consideration of the citations themselves, supplemented with information from the Middle English Compendium Bibliography,4 with its listing of manuscript sources and accompanying dialectal profiles. But since the dictionary was not designed to be used in this way it is not the most efficient way to identify groups of words with related meanings. A  better way would be to employ a thesaurus, where words are arranged according to senses rather than spelling. Regrettably, there is no thesaurus covering the Middle English period; there is, however, the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, covering the same period as the OED from which it takes its data, that allows semantic searching of this kind.5 Using this resource we can identify a more targeted list of synonymous terms. Under the sense heading “virginity” appear the Middle English terms maidhood, flower, virginity, maidenhead, maidhead, virginty, and virginality. Synonyms of craft, in the sense “skill, dexterity,” include craft, i-​wit, angit, skillwiseness, quaintise, cunning, sentence, ingeny, and capacity. While many of these words were likely unknown to Chaucer, an analysis of their use is part of a fuller understanding of discussion of these semantic fields in Middle English. As I have been suggesting, while dictionaries and thesauri are useful resources in sketching out the larger semantic picture, they must also be supplemented by close textual analysis of the use of a particular word or words in context. The Canterbury Tales is a particularly valuable textual resource from this perspective since it contains tales representing a variety of registers, attributed to pilgrims of various professions and social standings. By assessing the distribution of a word across the constituent tales, we can derive insights into its status in Chaucer’s usage. This is a methodology that was put to brilliant effect by E. Talbot Donaldson in his assessment of Chaucer’s use of hende in the Miller’s Tale.6 David Burnley extended this mode of analysis and applied it to similar terms, such as fetys, tretys, coy, and gent. Central to Burnley’s method was the distribution of these terms across Chaucer’s works. Although they may appear in courtly contexts in the Romaunt of the Rose, in later works they are restricted to fabliau tales, refer to characters of dubious social status, and are used for parody in the Tale of Sir Thopas.7 In her essay in this volume, Helen Barr’s close reading of swiven’s various appearances in the Canterbury Tales enables her to extend our understanding of Chaucer’s use of this word, noting that it is only used of extramarital sex, and that it carries connotations of “transgression, virility, rivalry, defiance, and social rebellion.” Such connotations and nuances are not apparent from the MED definition, which simply defines the word as: “To have sexual intercourse, copulate.” 4 Middle English Compendium Bibliography (formerly The HyperBibliography of Middle English). 5 Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. 6 Donaldson, “Idiom of Popular Poetry,” 13–​29. 7 Burnley, Language of Chaucer, 142.

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Barr’s analysis is based solely upon instances in Chaucer’s works, and does not necessarily imply that the same connotations were true of other uses. But supplementing Barr’s close reading of Chaucer’s usage with other instances cited in the MED entry reinforces her claims concerning the word’s status. Most suggestive of the word’s association with extramarital sex is its appearance in an antifraternal poem preserved in British Library, MS Harley 3362, known today by its first line: “Flen, flyys, and freris” (DIMEV 1324). This macaronic verse is best known for its status as the earliest recorded use of the word fuck, albeit concealed in a substitution cipher: “Non sunt in celi quia gxddbov xxkxzt pg ifmk.” That is, the friars who fuck the wives of Ely (“fuccant uuiuys of heli”) are not in heaven. Less well known is the later line: “Fratres cum knyuys goþ about and txxkxzv nfookt xxzxkt,” in which the coded words read: “suuiuyt mennis uuyuis.” The decision to encode both fuck and swive in this way clearly links the two words, and appears to point towards a shared taboo status. This decision to suppress the word in this way would appear to fit with the apparent act of censorship of swiven carried out by the scribe of the Hengwrt manuscript of the Canterbury Tales. At 9.256 of the Manciple’s Tale, the Hengwrt manuscript reads et cetera where the received text prints swyve.8 The montance of a gnat, so moote I thryve! For on thy bed thy wyf I saugh hym swyve. (9.255-​56)

While this is the generally accepted explanation of the Hengwrt variant at this point in the text, it does raise the question of why the scribe was apparently perfectly content to reproduce the word elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales. A possible alternative explanation of this situation is that et cetera is the authorial reading, and that subsequent scribes are guilty of substituting the taboo term for the coy euphemism.9 According to this theory, Chaucer’s narrator avoids using a rude word which might upset his audience, but the absent word’s identity is left abundantly clear to his audience from the rhyme with thryve. By appearing to suppress the word, Chaucer instead draws the reader’s attention to it, rather in the same way as modern euphemistic substitutions such as f*** and f—​k. Casting a veil over a word while simultaneously drawing attention to it in this way recalls Allen Walker Read’s concept of the “ostentatious taboo,” epitomized by substitution formulae like “you-​know-​what” and “you-​know-​who.”10 Carter Revard has proposed a similar explanation for the use of such a straightforward cipher in the antifraternal poem discussed above; rather than intending to conceal the obscene words, the cipher was designed to draw attention to them: “the cipher is meant not to conceal as much as to reveal. Like a bikini, it is meant to draw attention rather than baffle it.”11 This suggestion would help to explain the apparent contradiction suggested by the scribe’s willingness to copy the word elsewhere in the same text. It also helps to 8 Variant readings are cited from the Text of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 5–​8: “Corpus of Variants.” 9 Horobin, Chaucer’s Language, 135.

10 Read, “A Type of Ostentatious Taboo.”

11 Revard, “Deciphering the Four-​Letter Word.”

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164 Simon Horobin explain the evidence that the Hengwrt manuscript is not the only witness to include this reading:  it is also recorded in Christ Church Oxford, MS 152, a manuscript of considerable textual authority closely related to Hengwrt. A more complex scenario appears in the Ellesmere manuscript, which reads swy etc. Here the two readings appear to have been conflated, so that it is not possible to determine the direction of authority. Did the scribe find swyve in his exemplar and decide to censor it, as he had done in the earlier Hengwrt? If so, it seems odd that he should have chosen to include the first three letters of the offending word, thereby leaving the reader in little doubt as to the original reading. Or perhaps the scribe’s exemplar read et cetera and the addition of swy was an unconscious scribal addition, prompted by the rhyme and the context. Comparing the use of the et cetera formula as a scribal substitution with variants found in other manuscripts at this same point casts further doubt on this explanation. In other manuscripts the replacements for swyve are typically words whose pronunciation and meaning more or less fit into the context, such as the Delamere manuscript’s greve, or Bodleian Library Bodley 686’s entreve. The evidence we have been considering above reminds us that the abundance of variant readings generated by Chaucer’s copyists is a further category of evidence offering insights into a word’s status amongst contemporary readers. Such data has typically been viewed as the province of textual critics and editors alone: specialists concerned with identifying and removing “corrupt” and “erroneous” readings introduced by scribes in their manuscript copies. But, while it is of course true that many variant readings were generated in error, prompted by inattention or misunderstanding, others are conscious changes introduced by scribes responding intelligently and sensitively to the text they were copying. Considered as such, variant readings can be used as a valuable index of responses to Chaucer’s language by some of his earliest readers. A groundbreaking attempt to analyse scribal rewriting from this perspective was carried out by B. A. Windeatt in an article focused on the manuscript copies of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde.12 If we consider the Hengwrt reading et cetera in the Manciple’s Tale in the light of other scribal variants generated by this word, we can detect a good deal of scribal uneasiness. While some of these variant readings may of course simply be scribal errors based on a misreading of the word in the exemplar, others seem likely to represent conscious attempts at censorship. A deliberate program of replacing swyve with more delicate alternatives is most apparent in British Library, MS Harley 7333, in which this treatment of a single lexical item is part of a larger policy of censorship implemented by copyists based at the Augustinian abbey of St Mary de Pratis in Leicester.13 In Harley 7333, the word swyve is replaced in every one of its occurrences in the Canterbury Tales, although the reviser does not use one single alternative but several: serued, dyght, pleyed with, and adyght, suggesting that there was no single polite alternative but rather several. The number of scribes who replace swyve in their copies 12 Windeatt, “Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics.” 13 Kline, “Scribal Agendas.”

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of the Canterbury Tales suggests that the word was deemed too sensitive for more than just the Augustinians of St Mary de Pratis. Alongside some unique instances which may be the result of misreading as much as censorship, such as Cambridge University Library Gg.4.27’s hopeful schryue and British Library Additional 35286’s schyfed, the most common replacements are dyght and pleyen. What emerges from this is collective support for the theory that swyve was a markedly taboo term, while dyght and pleyen were more respectable equivalents. Although less contentious than swive, merveille occupied a semantic space that was similarly busy with various synonymous terms. In her analysis of Canterbury Tales, 4.246–​52, Tara Williams notes the “constellation of terms” that describe marvels in Chaucer’s works, such as merveille, wonder, and bigile. Considering their relative frequency, and the tendency for wonder to appear in the tag phrase “no wonder,” Williams proposes that Chaucer’s decision to employ the less common “merveille” appears more marked: “instances of merveille seem reserved for more extraordinary events and objects, or reactions to those.” This point is helpful in underlining how frequency of a particular word needs to be carefully assessed in discussions of Chaucer’s lexical practice. The observed clustering of both wonder and merveille (fourteen occurrences), alongside the no wonder formulation (four instances), in the Clerk’s Tale alerts us to the importance of paying attention to specific moments in Chaucer’s works where use of particular words and phrases is markedly dense. Since the subsequent analysis shows that both merveille and wonder are often found in close association, we are reminded that it is impossible to consider such terms in isolation. Bruce Holsinger’s careful tracing of the history and use of craft draws attention to its considerably more capacious definition in Middle English. This serves as an important reminder that, even though a word may survive into Modern English in an identical form, with a similar meaning, there are likely to be important distinctions between its Middle and Modern English uses. As Holsinger shows, in the Middle Ages there was a close link between the concepts of specialized knowledge and hands-​on practice in the acquisition of a craft. These two concepts are apparent in the word’s history; its origins lie in the Old English cræft, “strength, power”; the transference to the sense of “skilled occupation or trade” is a later development attested only in English of the Germanic languages. As Holsinger rightly observes, the term craft is today chiefly associated with small-​scale artisanal producers, as suggested by recent additions to the OED entry such as “craft beer” and “craft cheese.” Holsinger’s essay also questions the modern distinction between art and craft, which tends to label famous literary writers like Chaucer “artists” rather than “craftspeople.” The semantic histories of the words craft and art show that such a distinction was unknown in the Middle Ages. For much of their history the two words were synonymous, following a closely parallel semantic development. By the seventeenth century, art came to be associated more closely with creative or imaginative skill as opposed to technical ability, leading to a gradual divergence that has resulted in a distinction in their primary modern meanings. Also part of this story is the way that art came to be used in opposition to science, introducing a distinction between creativity and an approach based more upon theoretical and experimental principles. But despite

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166 Simon Horobin these developments, the quotation from Ursula K. Le Guin cited by Holsinger highlights how such distinctions remain subjective and personal for those engaged in the creative process: “it is an art, a craft, a making.” Considering the creative writing process as a craft reminds us of the various crafts involved in the reproduction and distribution of texts in the Middle Ages. This is perhaps most apparent from the artists and limners who added floreate borders to mark the openings of new sections, decorated initials to highlight particular moments in the text, and sometimes even supplied miniatures depicting the author or a scene from the text itself. But as well as artists, the medieval manuscript book was the product of a scribe or textwriter, a highly skilled professional trained to write a variety of different scripts for different types of writing environment, or to distinguish sections within a text. Professional London copyist Adam Pinkhurst, who has been identified as the scribe responsible for producing two of the earliest and most important manuscripts of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and perhaps even as the recipient of Chaucer’s short poem to Adam scriveyn, was a member of the London Scriveners’ Guild, highlighting the close connection between membership of a craft guild and the production and dissemination of Chaucer’s texts.14 Other book artisans who would have played a role in the transmission of literary texts in this period include the parchmenters who prepared the skins used as writing supports, bookbinders, and stationers, who were playing an increasingly pivotal role in the organization of the various components of the nascent book trade, becoming established as a separate guild in 1403. Focusing in on the cluster of uses of craft in the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale draws our attention to the close association between a craft and its associated linguistic terminology. Throughout Chaucer’s works we see instances of how mastery of the correct terminology acts as an external indicator of mastery of the appropriate expertise, and, where such terms are misapplied or mispronounced, as indicating a lack of such knowledge. Examples of the latter include Harry Bailly’s malapropisms, such as phislophye and cardinacle, which prompt the admission: “I kan nat speke in terme” (6.311). In this way technical terms come to serve a gatekeeping capacity, similar to other external markers of belonging such as livery, identifying those who belong and excluding those who cannot speak the lingo. As these four essays show, Middle English was a period of great linguistic diversity, and Chaucer exploited this to the full. Chaucer’s decision to write in his native vernacular allowed him to reflect a range of different registers, from high-​status terms recently adopted from the more prestigious Latin and French languages, to crude colloquialisms, some of which were deemed too coarse by the scribes copying his works. It is precisely that dazzling range of styles that Chaucer achieved that has prompted the kinds of conflicting response noted by Helen Barr, from Spenser’s “well of English undefyled” to Thomas Ross’s Chaucer’s Bawdy.15 Chaucer’s ear was finely tuned to the linguistic 14 Mooney, “Chaucer’s Scribe.” 15 Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy.

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variation he heard around him; it is his ability to draw upon this in his writing that continues to make the close analysis of Chaucer’s words such a richly rewarding exercise.

Bibliography Primary Sources The Text of the Canterbury Tales: Studied on the Basis of All Known Manuscripts. Edited by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert. 8 vols. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1940.

Secondary Sources

Burnley, David. The Language of Chaucer. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988. Donaldson, E. Talbot. “Idiom of Popular Poetry in the Miller’s Tale.” In Speaking of Chaucer, 13–​29. London: Athlone, 1970. Hall, J.  R. A Concise Anglo-​ Saxon Dictionary: For the Use of Students. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1894. Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. Edited by C.  Kay, M.  Alexander, F. Dallachy, J. Roberts, M. Samuels, and I. Wotherspoon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. https://​ht.ac.uk. Horobin, Simon. Chaucer’s Language. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Kline, Barbara. “Scribal Agendas and the Text of Chaucer’s Tales in British Library MS Harley 7333.” In Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–​1602, edited by Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, 116–​44. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Middle English Compendium. General Editor Frances McSparran. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Library, 2000–​18. http://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​english-​dictionary/​. Middle English Compendium Bibliography. https://​quod.lib.umich.edu/​m/​middle-​english-​ dictionary/​bibliography. Mooney, Linne. “Chaucer’s Scribe.” Speculum 81 (2006): 97–​138. Read, Allen Walker. “A Type of Ostentatious Taboo.” Language 40.2 (1964): 162–​66. Revard, Carter. “Deciphering the Four-​Letter Word in a Medieval Manuscript’s Satire on Friars.” In Verbatim, edited by Erin McKean, 322–​27. London: Pimlico, 2003. Ross, Thomas W. Chaucer’s Bawdy. New York: Dutton, 1972. Windeatt, B. A. “The Scribes as Chaucer’s Early Critics.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 1 (1979): 119–​41.

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168 Simon Horobin Simon Horobin is Professor of English Language and Literature and Fellow and Tutor in English at Magdalen College, University of Oxford. He has written extensively on the language of Chaucer and the manuscripts of late medieval English literature. He is the author of The English Language: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 2018), How English Became English (OUP, 2016), Does Spelling Matter? (OUP, 2013), and Chaucer’s Language (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006; 2nd edition 2012).

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VERTU HOLLY A. CROCKER Knight’s Tale Tale of Melibee

Despite its popularity

in the Middle Ages, Chaucer’s Melibee leaves many modern readers cold. Because it uses unpopular genres—​allegory and proverb—​and because it is explicitly didactic in seeking moral reform, it has been characterized as sententious, tedious, and boring.1 To be sure, “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee and Dame Prudence” (7.1889) poses interpretive challenges. Yet I  suggest the main problem modern readers have with the tale comes down to Prudence. Despite insightful readings into her role as counsellor, modern readers balk at Prudence’s advice just as much as Melibee does.2 For recent audiences, it is not that Prudence is simply a woman out of place, giving advice that she has no authority to offer. It is the advice itself that prompts dismissal, derision, and sometimes both. When recent scholars struggle to account for the Melibee’s popularity in the Middle Ages, they point to a gulf between the values of modern and medieval audiences.3 This distance is genuine, I shall suggest, and relies on a medieval conception of virtue that we no longer recognize. Moderns continue to admire a model of virtue derived from the heroic, classical formulation of virtus, an ethical ideal that Chaucer explores in his Knight’s Tale.4 Yet through its representation of Prudence, the Melibee promotes a vernacular conception of vertu, one that challenges virtus by suggesting the good person is vulnerable, open to contingency, and responsive to others. Notwithstanding modern readers’ dissatisfaction, this essay will suggest Prudence’s ethical subjectivity is more feminist than failure:  to be sure, Prudence’s subjectivity is ungratifying, but that is because her selfhood is patently, even performatively, unglorified. In a brief opening turn to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, I  suggest reasons why audiences might find Prudence’s subjectivity less than satisfying. As I detail, the vertu 1 W. Arthur Turner calls Prudence “insufferably patient and pedantic”; see Turner, “Biblical Women,” 94. Charles Muscatine asks, “What wife was ever so learned or pedantic as Prudence in Chaucer’s Melibee?”; see Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 207. Edward E.  Foster suggests most critics do not like the Melibee; see Foster, “Has Anyone Here Read Melibee?,” 398. 2 For analysis of Prudence’s role as counsellor, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 212–​46; Ferster, “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee”; and Green, Poets and Princepleasers, 164. Paul Strohm distinguishes between the intercessory role played by some powerful women and Prudence’s “good counsellor” role; see Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 95–​120.

3 See Lerer, “ ‘Now Holde Youre mouth’ ”; and Sylvia, “Some Fifteenth-​Century Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.” 4 For Western traditions of virtue, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 122–​28, 132, 182.

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172 Holly A. Crocker Prudence advocates stands against a heroic model of virtus, or that ethical tradition that centralizes masculine authority by privileging the empowered, individuated agent as the prime mover in ethical life. Quite famously, Chaucer appears to valorize Theseus’s ability to order his world as an affirmation of his individual authority.5 When he details Prudence’s campaign of moral transformation, however, Chaucer forwards a different model of the subject, one whose agency is directed to openness and endurance, and characterized by contingency and submission. To become virtuous, as the Melibee’s allegorization of feminine counsel details, is to become the kind of person Prudence recommends, but also represents. It is to assume the position of a woman in a moral ecology that remains dominated by masculinist ideals of ethical virtue.

Heroic Subjectivity, Vernacular Ethics, and Feminist Vertues

More than any other Chaucerian narrative, the Knight’s Tale constructs a model of heroic virtus. It is not that the tale rejects Prudence’s conception of virtuous conduct. Theseus chooses peace several times, but his resistance to contingency signals personal power. What has been identified as the Knight’s Tale’s Boethianism—​or the tale’s investment in a governing philosophy that recommends immunity to the rise and fall of fortune—​is mobile, possessed, and fully active.6 Moreover, Theseus’s emphasis on endurance, patience, and what Prudence might call the ability to “suffre” (7.298, et passim) is mostly directed toward others weaker than himself. In other words, rather than adopting a stoic forbearance designed to withstand worldly contingencies, Theseus presses the frailties of mortal embodiment onto others in order to consolidate his active, singular selfhood. We might think nothing of his moral self-​styling, given that this model matches a modern fantasy of subjectivity as Charles Taylor describes it: “This self can see itself as invulnerable, as master of the meanings of things set for it.”7 For a long time, and still for many, Theseus has exemplified chivalric virtue, a warrior ethic that balances action and deference, violence and restraint. Near the end of the tale, when he tells Palamon and Emelye that they must marry, his directive, “To maken vertu of necessitee” (1.3042), evinces a pragmatic integration of virtue into a world riven by contingency. In its conception of how virtue shapes subjectivity, I  shall suggest, the Knight’s Tale is wholly different than the Tale of Melibee. Theseus’s identity is defined by an effort to shape the world in accordance with individual desires. Of course, he situates those desires as a function of grander powers, but his appeal to the “Firste Movere” is compensatory, at best: “And take it weel that we may nat eschue /​ And namely that to us alle is due” (1.3043–​44). And, although there has been a considerable strain of critique detailing how Theseus’s model of governance produces violence, promotes 5 Muscatine, “Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.”

6 For examples of the tale’s Boethianism, see Lumiansky, “Chaucer’s Philosophical Knight”; Kean, Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry, 41–​48; and Salter, Chaucer: The Knight’s Tale and The Clerk’s Tale. 7 Taylor, “Buffered and Porous Selves.” Taylor elaborates this distinction in A Secular Age, 38–​202.

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domination, and thrives upon alienation, these arguments take the model of Theseus’s subjectivity almost for granted.8 In other words, there is considerable evidence that Theseus’s actions undermine his virtues. Nonetheless, scholars largely accept his model of selfhood on its own terms: Theseus might fail at knightly virtue, but this subjectivity retains its cultural authority. In fact, in what I’d call the ultimate humanist fallacy, there are many who maintain the centrality of this ideal because it fails. There is scant acknowledgement that Chaucer might be suggesting the complete inadequacy of this organization of subjectivity. To question this model of selfhood by suggesting its limitations and deficiencies is not a radical intervention on Chaucer’s part, however. That’s because medieval virtue ethics was more varied than hitherto acknowledged. In any survey of virtue ethics, the Middle Ages is rightly prominent: the significance of the virtues to Thomas Aquinas, paired with the florescence of virtue and vice literatures after the Fourth Lateran Council, marks one of the high points of virtue ethics in the history of moral theory.9 On account of the charts, arms, and trees separating virtues root and branch, we might think of medieval virtues as ordered and unyielding; but these depictions also unify virtue as a flourishing and dynamic system of connected excellences in the Middle Ages. As Richard Newhauser explains, medieval virtues were “an intrinsically open system.”10 Medieval virtue was multiple, and it was informed by scholastic and pastoral discourses at once. There was also an everyday language of vertu, which carried meanings that are no longer extant, but which inform Chaucer’s representations. In Middle English, vertu carried a host of meanings that indicated a capacity, a property, or an ability to thrive in a specific physical domain. The simplest definition of this sense of virtue, according to the MED, is “An inherent quality of a substance which gives it power.”11 Rocks, plants, hands—​even armies—​had virtues in Middle English usage. As a consequence, medieval medicine is filled with discussions of vertues. One example, from the collection of surgical treatises, MS Wellcome 564, suggests basic bodily vitality: “þe beste remedie is for to opene Eftsones þe same wounde, if þe pacient be so strong of vertu þat he mowe abide þe parfiȝt craft of surgerie” (the best remedy is to open the same wound once again, if the patient is strong enough to bear the craft of surgery).12 Such usage certainly allowed pastoral writers to mine other discourses for their spiritual aims, as the thirteenth-​ century Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime makes clear when it describes virtues as 8 I engage these views in greater detail in my essay “W(h)ither Feminism?”

9 Virtue ethics is one of the major areas of contemporary ethics. It focuses on moral character, not rules or consequences that might limit or follow actions. For a definition, and a discussion of the different debates that define this movement in contemporary philosophy, see Hursthouse and Pettigrove, “Virtue Ethics.” For a survey of the significance of virtue to ethics in the Middle Ages, see Porter, “Virtue Ethics in the Medieval Period”; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 164–​205; and MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 146–​209.

10 Newhauser, Treatise on Vices and Virtues, 58. 11 MED, s.v. “vertu, n.,” 8(a).

12 London, MS Wellcome 564, 78b/​b.

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174 Holly A. Crocker “remediis” for “morbis ipsius anime,” or “remedies” for “the soul’s diseases.”13 What does it mean that bodies—​even those bodies that appear as passive, inert, and physically powerless—​have a capacity to move those around them through such everyday vertues? Does it make a difference to see Chaucerian vertues in such terms? I suggest that doing so shifts the grounds of ethical subjectivity to those whose capacities arise, or at least become visible, in moments when a conventional expression of agency is impossible. This inquiry could follow different trajectories, and indeed, I  believe Chaucer is interested in proposing multiple accounts of subjectivity—​it is a project upon which he is actively at work in the Canterbury Tales. Even so, the focus for the remainder of this essay will be on Chaucer’s women, Prudence in particular.14 My focus on women arises in part because women have always been treated as quasi-​subjects:  included in this arena, but refused its ethical powers. Even in the earliest domain of virtue ethics, in ancient Greece, women’s single virtue was sôphrosunê, or a power of self-​control.15 Similarly, the figure of the Roman matron extended this emphasis on restraint in ways that largely suppressed women’s public, political, and creative capacities.16 With the medieval formulation of this idea, which described woman as man’s “helpmeet,” we see that women are actors, but that they act in service to men. Such a construction took women’s agency as a complement, and an enrichment to an expanded masculinity, as Richard Maidstone’s late fourteenth-​ century articulation makes clear: “Flectere regales poterit regina rigores, /​ Mitis ut in gentem rex velit esse suam. /​Mollit amore virum mulier: Deus huic dedit illam; Tendat ad hoc vester, o pia dulcis amor” (Let the queen soften royal severity that the king may be forbearing to his people. A woman mellows a man with love: for this God gave her; for this, O blessed woman, may your sweet love aspire).17 In the Middle Ages, women’s virtues are designed to be captive, powers that are exercised under the authority of, and for the benefit of, men. An important response to such misogyny is to acknowledge the plentitude of women’s agency, and to enlarge women’s capacity to wield individual powers. But 13 Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, chap. 1, lines 1–​2. The English translation is taken from page 52 of this edition.

14 The approach I  use here is derived from “standpoint feminism,” which, as Sandra Harding explains, “possesses this organic character in the sense that when marginalized groups step on the stage of history, one of the things they tend to say is that ‘things look different if one starts off thinking about them from our lives’ ” (Harding, Sciences from Below, 115). A good overview of the different practices of this methodology—​mostly found in the sciences and social sciences—​can be found in Intemann, “Feminist Standpoint.” All forms of this feminist approach generally start from the standpoint of women’s experience, and see what kinds of changes that standpoint might make to evidence, claims, and/​or conclusions. It does not require writers to identify with or be women; rather, it works from a structural standpoint of women’s place in a given social arrangement. 15 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 136.

16 For differences between ideal and practice with regard to this figure, see Beard, SPQR, 304–​5. 17 Maidstone, “Concordia Facta,” 190, lines 229–​332.

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expanding the boundaries of selfhood can only go so far. It will never overcome what philosopher Kate Manne has so compellingly described as “the logic of misogyny,” or “the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.”18 That’s because the subject as we have come to understand it is designed to invest men with cultural power. Instead, I suggest we look again at sources of nonhuman agency, not just as they might trouble the conventional account of the subject, but rather as they might offer counter models of subjectivity, those organized according to capacities that have nothing to do with the cultivation of individual agency. The social goods long associated with women, in Manne’s account, “attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, and nurturing,” offer grounding examples for an alternative form of ethical life.19 We have often been suspicious of these feminine-​coded goods because they have been pressed upon women in male-​dominated societies. Yet, outside the domains of patriarchy, qualities including attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, and nurturing are simply, and rather unarguably, fundamental goods that might organize an alternative model of subjectivity. To say that women have different virtues, and that their capacities might structure a different story of the self, is not to impose a gender-​binary on virtue and associate women with an underprivileged ethical position. It is, rather, to dispatch the long history of gender essentialism that gave virtus a universal ethical claim. It is to see different goods as worthwhile, and to contemplate how other vertues, those that cross traditional non/​human boundaries, might render completely different notions of ethical life. These are not “feminine” excellences, then, as a structure of gender difference might insist. Rather, they are capacities that are more frequently associated with women, but that essentially have nothing to do with women. Of course, these powers also require agency, autonomy, and authority. But it is how those capacities are directed (self/​others), and what they consolidate or promote (individual/​collectivity), that produce a different model of selfhood. To say these are “women’s virtues,” I want to be absolutely clear, would therefore be a distortion, since, as my guiding example for the remainder of this essay will attest, what it means to be a woman amounts to a set of virtues that might just as easily come to define a man’s character. In fact, many readers don’t see Dame Prudence from Chaucer’s Melibee as a woman at all.20

Melibee, or Refashioning the Whole Person

In this, of course, the tale follows form:  Renaud de Louens’s Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence, from which Chaucer’s version derives, uses personification allegory to

18 Manne, Down Girl, 33. 19 Manne, Down Girl, 22. 20 As I have argued elsewhere in greater detail, the tale works to present Prudence as an integrated element of Melibee’s moral psychology; see Crocker, Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood 32–​49.

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176 Holly A. Crocker include qualities associated with women within an expanded, empowered masculinity.21 Prudence repeatedly tells Melibee that if he follows her counsel, he will be a better man. By her account, she simply represents a virtue he needs to integrate, and her guidance will help him become prudent. But if we look at the type of man she advises him to become, her counsel appears more radical. With her constant program of peace, Prudence advises Melibee to take up a subjectivity that goes beyond an expansive masculinity. Rather than advising Melibee on the most prudent means to take revenge, or the most prudent time to employ violence, Prudence recommends that Melibee redefine himself according to a program of nonviolence. In doing so, she not only challenges the traditional boundaries of virtus, but she also suggests that virtue resides in a subjectivity defined by yielding, not wielding, power. In remaking Melibee as an ethical subject, Prudence assembles a selfhood from moral qualities that were most frequently associated with women in the Middle Ages. With the tale’s initial episode of violence, women’s experiences of physical vulnerability come to define the subjectivity that Prudence fashions for a remade Melibee. When Melibee wanders the fields, “Upon a day bifel that he for his desport is went into the feeldes hym to pleye” (7.968), he displays the independence, autonomy, and reflection that is idealized in accounts of the masculine, empowered subject. The attack that ensues, perpetrated by “Thre of his olde foes” who “betten his wyf, and wounded his doghter with five mortal woundes in five sondry places” (7.970–​71), also shows how women become the sites where men mete out competitive violence against one another. Yet the tale also acknowledges how women come to terms with the violence that is forced upon them, and the endurance required of survivors. In acknowledging how “patience” arises from the violence Prudence and Sophie withstand, Chaucer both challenges traditional masculinity and makes space for a feminist subjectivity, or a conception of selfhood that derives from women’s experiences. Women’s consistent exposure to vulnerability organizes this tale’s selfhood. In a breathtaking articulation of women’s pragmatic forbearance, Prudence suggests the violence inflicted against her and her daughter is almost routine; certainly, it is not the occasion for self-​aggrandizing shows of weeping: “why make ye youreself for to be lyk a fool?” (7.981). Sophie will survive, she tells Melibee, but even if his daughter were lost, there would be no cause for Melibee’s protracted woe: “But though attempree wepyng be ygraunted, outrageous wepyng certes is deffended” (7.989). Prudence attunes her advice to appeal to Melibee’s gendered fantasies of selfhood, yet her advice has much in common with that form of counsel given to grieving mothers. When the narrator of the late medieval conduct book for women How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter urges, “And God fro thee thi chyld take, /​ thy wreke onne God do thou not take” (And if God takes your child from you, do not direct your anger [grief] against God), she registers the frequency with which mothers lost children, and the ways that their 21 For the text and English translation of Renaud’s Livre de Melibée, along with an account of how Chaucer draws from it, see Askins, “Tale of Melibee.”

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emotional distress was curbed by appeals to divine providence.22 Mothers’ tears were sometimes sanctioned—​especially when they echoed or looked forward to the passion of the Virgin—​but they were often contested, as the Raising of Lazarus play from the N-​Town cycle of mystery plays demonstrates, on account of their subversive potential. Mary Magdalen and Martha, who declare their intentions to “wepe all our fylle,” (weep all our fill), until “no man may let” (no man may stop [us]), are sharply condemned by male mourners: “Arys, for shame! Ye do not right!” (Arise, for shame! You do wrong!)23 Moreover, as Margery Kempe’s weeping affirms, the expression of emotion also involves a performative centring of selfhood that was largely proscribed for laywomen: “And therfor many man & many woman wondyrd upon hir, skornyd hir and despised hir, bannyd hir and cursyd hir, seyde meche euyl of hir, slawndryd hir […]” (And therefore many men and women wondered upon her, scorned her, and despised her, banished her and cursed her, said much evil of her, [and] slandered her.)24 It is not the noisy, disruptive, or personal forms of femininity that Prudence marshals in reconstructing Melibee’s subjectivity. Indeed, the tale invokes a number of femininities, each of which it summarily discards. Prudence positions these genders to establish her own authority, but, more importantly, she uses them to demonstrate which kinds of women’s behaviour Melibee should avoid. Melibee’s misogynist dismissal of Prudence’s recommendations affirms his belief in his empowered, infallible masculinity. But each of these models more closely matches the foibles of character that Prudence seeks to eliminate:  the aggressive, the indiscrete, the vindictive. Most of these models of femininity, according to Prudence, are men’s fictions. In answer to these antifeminist charges, Prudence delineates the qualities of a good counsellor, which also happen to match the qualities of a good woman: like Prudence, counsellors should “be trewe, wise, and of oold experience” (7.1168). That she continues to position her advice as responsive, deferential, and serviceable—​“whan she saugh her tyme” (7.980, et passim)—​confirms her as an accomplished rhetor, as David Wallace has argued.25 By means of a poetic tautology, though, Prudence continually points to her own constitutive virtue in her efforts to reconfigure Melibee’s selfhood. No matter what Melibee says, Prudence recommends peace, and she does so by framing her agency as submission, by presenting her authority as deference. Scholars including Judith Ferster and Richard F. Green have traced Prudence’s ability to the prince pleasing tradition, and it is true that she conforms to the role of good adviser that this tradition represents. But as Wallace contends, there is a greater degree of intimacy in Prudence’s counsel, in so far as she develops a “household rhetoric” that uses the female body to move Melibee.26 This is doubtless correct, and I would go one step further: it 22 How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, lines 173–​4. 23 Raising of Lazarus, lines 168, 169, 173.

24 Kempe, Book of Margery Kempe, chap. 44, lines 3536–​38. 25 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 212–​46.

26 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 234, and 212–​46 passim.

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178 Holly A. Crocker is not just that Prudence uses her allure to influence Melibee; rather, she reconfigures Melibee’s selfhood so that it is based on “suffrance” (7.554) not domination. Prudence remakes Melibee in her own image, as Wallace recognizes, “When a man needs to cultivate mansuetude and its associated virtues, then, he is best advised to mirror himself in a woman (an ideal woman).”27 Nevertheless, Wallace concludes that Melibee ultimately incorporates her virtue into his identity.28 The reform of character is all Melibee’s doing, even though, as Wallace states, “female experience within such a masculine-​headed household stands in for that of every political subject under absolutism.”29 Here there remains an affinity for the acting subject, a mode of selfhood that is similar to women’s experience only when individual agency is suppressed by larger structures of masculine tyranny. It is this view of the subject that gives coherence to Wallace’s claim, which he describes as unconventional, that Prudence has much in common with Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Both, he contends, use rhetoric to get around masculinist domination.30 Alisoun of Bath is plain about this plan: by turns she bullies and flatters her husbands so that she can do as she pleases. Prudence is also careful to deploy agency to solidify her authority: “Thanne bigan dame Prudence to maken semblant of wratthe and seyde /​Certes, sire, sauf youre grace, I love youre honour and youre profit as I do myn owene, and evere have doon” (7.1686–​87). Yet Prudence acts in furtherance of an altogether different end. Alisoun seeks to roam, to talk, and, most of all “to pley.” Her belief in unfettered individual autonomy has led Lee Patterson to hail the Wife of Bath as “The Triumph of the Subject.” By this, Patterson suggests that Chaucer creates a character who “recuper[ates] the speaking subject,” who “both controls her own verbal world and the tale-​telling game itself.”31 Prudence seeks to dismantle this conception of subjectivity. Melibee wants to act, to take vengeance on those who attacked his household. But Prudence advises peace, humility, and a deliberate selflessness. Through a series of proverbs, she argues that enduring suffering expands wisdom and enriches reputation. For later audiences, however, the tale’s prodigious use of proverbs has been something of a problem. J. S. P. Tatlock claims they rehearse the sayings of “dead wiseacres,” an observation, as I’ve noted before, that is trivially true.32 Prudence presents her advice as unoriginal, as part of an established masculinity that Melibee can simply assume. The “wys,” “goode,” “gentil” man, she says again and again, will accept the advice she proffers. Yet as Christopher Cannon urges us to notice, in many ways proverbs make it harder for Melibee to enact his own transformation.33 As Cannon details: 27 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 238. 28 I was more convinced of this in my earlier considerations of Melibee. 29 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 241.

30 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 223–​26.

31 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 284, 286.

32 Tatlock, Development and Chronology of Chaucer’s Works, 189. 33 Cannon, “Proverbs and the Wisdom of Literature.”

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Vertu Proverbs must sometimes have guided action in the Middle Ages, just as they sometimes do today, but I  want to suggest that the medieval proverb was primarily valued […] not because it had something to teach, but because it was so generally and iteratively available, an instruction that could not prevent a crisis, not least because it was the crisis that caused it to be used, but an instruction that could therefore also ameliorate a disaster’s aftermath, the “medicine” that could make whoever cited it feel better.34

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Proverbs contain wisdom that audiences already know—​they circulate universally available forms of knowledge. But it is nearly impossible to put proverbs into practice, despite the permanent availability of their wisdom. This, I  suggest, is because they require a kind of moral practice entailed by the lengthy tradition of Aristotelian virtue ethics. In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously remarks, ““Moral or ethical virtue is the product of habit. […] We become just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts, brave by doing brave acts.”35 This description of what virtue entails is now commonly treated as an invitation for self-​ cultivation, but, as Katharine Breen demonstrates, medieval writers thought that the habitus, or moral disposition, required for virtue involved a long process of spiritual training.36 One could not simply don virtue, as if it were a moral garment outfitting an already-​formed subjectivity. Rather, and as Prudence models, virtue is something someone becomes; it shapes subjectivity, and fashions a selfhood that is fundamentally defined by excellences that are recognizable outside any individuated persona. In other words, Prudence is virtue in this tale, and she is what Melibee is supposed to become. The old Melibee will be no more when he is defined by Prudence; this virtue, like his wife, is not just an instrument that will allow him to exercise his identity with greater moral authority and cultural efficacy. That said, Prudence presents virtues as masculine affordances, as the powers of a man that make him thrive in a privileged relation to all other subjects. Adages from Seneca, like old saws from Cicero, Cassiodorus, and Ovid (among many others), are meant to convince Melibee that the best men already know the truth of what she is saying, and that her advice is really just a compilation written by and directed to wise men. Melibee is smart enough to see through Prudence’s rhetoric. Notwithstanding Prudence’s eloquence, her carefully crafted argument, and her seemingly miraculous negotiating power, near the end of the tale, Melibee is having none of it. After Prudence facilitates peace with Melibee’s enemies, he once again avows his commitment to revenge: “ ‘Certes,’ quod he, ‘I thynke and purpose me fully /​to desherite hem of al that evere they han and for to putte hem in exil for evere” (7.1834–​35). Melibee doesn’t like the look of virtuous subjectivity as Prudence presents it, and he’s not alone. The suggestion that virtuous subjectivity results from practices that negate personal desires, and that prevent the exercise of individual advantages over others, might be something 34 Cannon, “Proverbs and the Wisdom of Literature,” 412. 35 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 2.1, 70–​73.

36 Breen, Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–​1400.

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180 Holly A. Crocker we’ve always known, but it might also be wisdom that we’d still rather neglect. That’s especially true in a domain where this ideal of virtuous selfhood is modelled in its most successful, exemplary form, by a woman.37 And while I am suggesting that Prudence dismantles this form of virtus in the Melibee, I also want to stress that her power does not derive from an individually cultivated subjectivity. It comes just as much from her physical body, from the ability to withstand harms that are unjustly perpetrated against her. Other bodies have this capacity, too, and elsewhere Chaucer uses the physical resonance of Middle English vertu to dismantle virtus.

Middle English Vertu, New Materialism, and Feminist Subjectivity

If we return to the conclusion of the Knight’s Tale, there is good reason to see Chaucer’s presentation of Arcite’s death as its own condemnation. As we all know, when Arcite achieves ultimate triumph, he also suffers complete defeat: in his victory procession at the conclusion of the tournament, Emelye grants him favour, but then the most mundane catastrophe befalls the exalted warrior: “He pighte hym on the pomel of his heed […] His brest tobrosten with his sadel-​bowe” (1.2689, 2691). Despite the heroic invocation of “a furie infernal” (1.2684) as the cause of this malady, in a most unheroic downfall, Arcite’s horse stumbles. Yet this is no meagre embarrassment, but a fatal accident that causes a hideous assortment of injuries: Swelleth the brest of Arcite, and the soore Encreeseth at his herte moore and moore. […] The vertu expulsive, or animal, Fro thilke vertu cleped natural Ne may the venym voyden ne expelle. (1.2743–​44; 2749–​51)

In a groundbreaking reading of the Knight’s Tale, Julie Orlemanski attends to the change in register that accompanies this scene: as she details, Chaucer’s poem, unlike Boccaccio’s Teseida (Chaucer’s source), shifts into the specialized vocabulary of medieval physik.38 In doing so, Chaucer takes advantage of what Jeffrey Jerome Cohen calls, the “inhumanly powerful” valence of Middle English “vertu,” which, in his reading, imagines “humans [as] one actor among many.”39 As new materialism should prompt us to notice, there are 37 Modern readers have been skeptical that a woman would be taken seriously as an adviser. Dolores Palermo, for example, suggests that Prudence is a joke because the tale satirizes her overblown rhetorical style: “While Sir Thopas exudes a sort of medieval machismo […] in the Melibee, by way of contrast, a domineering albeit polite wife argues her husband into acquiescence” (Palermo, “What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Melibee,” 306, 316). 38 Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects, 147–​81. 39 Cohen, “An Abecedarium,” 291.

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multiple forces at work in Arcite’s festering body, none of which can be harnessed by the powers that would consolidate human exceptionalism.40 Theseus certainly seeks to contain this metaphysics of chance, contingency, and violence. Notwithstanding his attempt to impose order and providence on a world of chaos and change, vertu doesn’t work in the ways he declares. Rather, as Prudence demonstrates, virtue is what you become—​there is no getting beyond the body’s vicissitudes, and virtue arises only in response to this vulnerable condition. For Arcite, the natural powers of the body overwhelm his martial prowess in ways no other foe could. His condition might be strictly medical, but his body’s dissolution has moral consequences, as Theseus’s lengthy response to his death affirms. There is no way to contain the vulnerability that living in a material world entails. Rather than seeking to direct this vulnerability onto less powerful others, Prudence shows that remaining open to contingency, that bearing mortality with patience, results in virtue. There is no anterior or ulterior self that uses virtue to manage, deflect, or overcome vulnerability.41 When Melibee understands this precarious condition as a counter conception of human subjectivity, he accedes to Prudence’s counsel and forgives his enemies. As his forgiveness affirms, furthermore, when the common fragilities of existence organize how we think about selfhood, there is no framework in which revenge, domination, or even contest will settle our relations to one another. Arcite’s demise gives the lie to heroic individualism, and Theseus, for all his glorified rhetoric, cannot put this version of subjectivity back together again. Prudence’s counsel, to be sure, constructs a patently unglorified model of selfhood. Because it is organized by vulnerability, it is, I want to reiterate, a model of subjectivity that matches more closely with medieval women’s experiences. Of course, I  am not the first critic to observe how Chaucer uses women to explore certain aspects of subjectivity. As Lee Patterson argues with reference to Alisoun of Bath, “What the Wife champions [… is] the rights of selfhood. It is subjectivity per se that she promotes, a subjectivity that Chaucer, by no means uniquely, here associates with women.”42 Once again, though, Patterson treats subjectivity as settled in all its problematic uniformity. With the Melibee, I  maintain, Chaucer rethinks subjectivity by beginning from the standpoint of vulnerability. He does so not because he was a champion of women, but rather, as several critics have argued—​most convincingly and influentially, Carolyn Dinshaw—​the position of the poet was in many key respects similar to that of his female characters.43 This shared experience of vulnerability, of being forced to remain 40 For new materialist studies of medieval subjects, see Cohen, Stone; Steel, How to Make a Human; and Mitchell, Becoming Human. 41 Paul Strohm convincingly demonstrates that, in contrast to Chaucer, John Lydgate focuses on prudence as a practical mode of applied excellence and promises to enable princes to overcome fortuna through the exercise of this robust virtue. See Strohm, Politique, 87–​132. 42 Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 282.

43 See Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, especially 10–​18.

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182 Holly A. Crocker open to contingencies imposed by powerful others, provides an important challenge to the agential, individualist model of the subject. And, though Chaucer probably had his own reasons for elaborating this alternative form of selfhood, it is feminist, I maintain, in its acknowledgement that women more frequently inhabited this model of subjectivity. Prudence’s virtue issues a rather explicit critique of the model of selfhood that seeks to order the world through a reflexively gratifying exercise of agency, domination, and violence. Her selflessness, however, makes her advice unpalatable even now. That we don’t like her version of subjectivity, I  maintain, should not prevent us from understanding its radical intervention. When subjectivity derives from women’s experiences of vulnerability, it foregrounds modes of action that promote peace, compassion, and forgiveness. Instead of seeing the selflessness of her example as a negative, as a suppression of women’s equal access to agency, expression, and authority, we should recall that Prudence acts, talks, and convinces. She manifests every characteristic we claim to want from a modern conception of subjectivity. That she does so from a place of precariousness, all the while denying our ability to get outside or move beyond the contingencies imposed upon us, is a bit dispiriting, I suppose.44 The moral arc of Prudence’s advice, though it is uncomfortable to recognize, exposes our continued investment in a model of subjectivity that privileges a rather small social group, which still mostly consists of elite men. The virtue of Prudence’s selfhood, however, resides in its ability to reveal how vulnerability reshapes our relations to one another; it lies in its ability to tell us things we already know about gender, about power, and about alternative forms of ethical subjectivity.

Bibliography Primary Sources Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 73. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1926. How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter. In Codex Ashmole 61: A Compilation of Popular Middle English Verse, edited by George Shuffleton, Item 4.  TEAMS, Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute, 2008. University of Rochester, Robbins Library Digital Projects. https://​d.lib.rochester.edu/​teams/​text/​shuffelton-​ codex-​ashmole-​61-​how-​the-​good-​wife-​taught-​her-​daughter. Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. Edited by Barry Windeatt. Cambridge: Brewer, 2004. London, MS Wellcome 564. Circa 1475; 1392. Maidstone, Richard. “Concordia Facta inter Regem Riccardum II et Civitatem Londonie.” Edited and translated by Charles Roger Smith. PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1972. 44 My thinking in this essay owes a rather obvious debt to Butler, Precarious Life, 128–​51; and Butler, Frames of War, 1–​32.

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The Raising of Lazarus. In The N-​Town Plays, edited by Douglas Sugano, Play 25. TEAMS, Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo:  Medieval Institute, 2007. University of Rochester, Robbins Library Digital Projects. https://​d.lib.rochester.edu/​teams/​text/​ sugano-​n-​town-​plays-​play-​25-​raising-​of-​lazarus. Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime. Edited by Siegfried Wentzel. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984.

Secondary Sources

Askins, William. “The Tale of Melibee.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 1, edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, 321–​408. Cambridge: Brewer, 2002. Beard, Mary. SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome. New York: Liveright, 2015. Breen, Katharine. Imagining an English Reading Public, 1150–​1400. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009. ———. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. London: Verso, 2004. Cannon, Christopher. “Proverbs and the Wisdom of Literature:  The Proverbs of Alfred and Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee.” Textual Practice 24 (2010): 407–​34. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “An Abecedarium for the Elements.” postmedieval 2 (2011): 291–​303. ———. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Crocker, Holly A. Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. ———. “W(h)ither Feminism? Gender, Subjectivity, and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 54 (2019): 352–​70. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Ferster, Judith. “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee: Contradictions and Context.” In Inscribing the Hundred Years’ War in French and English Cultures, edited by Denise N.  Baker, 73–​89. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000. Foster, Edward E. “Has Anyone Here Read Melibee?” Chaucer Review 34 (2000): 398–​409. Green, Richard Firth. Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Harding, Sandra. Sciences from Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities, and Modernities. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Hursthouse, Rosalind, and Glen Pettigrove. “Virtue Ethics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Winter 2016 ed., edited by Edward N.  Zalta. https://​plato.stanford.edu/​ archives/​win2016/​entries/​ethics-​virtue/​>. Intemann, Kristen. “Feminist Standpoint,” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 261–​81. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Kean, Patricia M. Chaucer and the Making of English Poetry. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Lerer, Seth. “ ‘Now Holde Youre Mouth’: The Romance of Orality in the Thopas-​Melibee Section of the Canterbury Tales.” In Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, edited by M. C. Amodio, 181–​202. New York: Garland, 1994. Lumiansky, R. M. “Chaucer’s Philosophical Knight.” Tulane Studies in English 3 (1952): 47–​68. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.

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184 Holly A. Crocker ———. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988. Manne, Kate. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. ———. “Form, Texture, and Meaning in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.” PMLA 65 (1950): 911–​29. Newhauser, Richard. The Treatise on Vices and Virtues in Latin and the Vernacular. Turnhout: Brepols, 1993. Orlemanski, Julie. Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Signs, and Causality in Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Palermo, Dolores. “What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Melibee.” Philological Quarterly 53 (1974):  304–​20. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Porter, Jean. “Virtue Ethics in the Medieval Period.” In The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics, edited by Daniel C. Russell, 70–​91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Salter, Elizabeth. Chaucer: The Knight’s Tale and The Clerk’s Tale. London: Arnold, 1962. Steel, Karl. How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Strohm, Paul. Hochon’s Arrow: The Social Imagination of Fourteenth-​ Century Texts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. ———. Politique: Languages of Statecraft between Chaucer and Shakespeare. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Sylvia, Daniel S.  “Some Fifteenth-​Century Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.” In Chaucer and Middle English Studies in Honor of Rossell Hope Robbins, edited by Beryl Rowland, 153–​63. London: Allen & Unwin, 1974. Tatlock, J.  S. P.  The Development and Chronology of Chaucer’s Works. London:  Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907. Taylor, Charles. “Buffered and Porous Selves.” The Immanent Frame: Secularism, Religion, and the Public Sphere, September 2, 2008. https://​tif.ssrc.org/​2008/​09/​02/​buffered-​and-​ porous-​selves/​. ———. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007. Turner, W. Arthur. “Biblical Women in The Merchant’s Tale and The Tale of Melibee.” English Language Notes 3 (1965): 92–​95. Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

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Holly A. Crocker is Professor of English and Director of the new Humanities Collaborative at the University of South Carolina. She is author of Chaucer’s Visions of Manhood (Palgrave, 2007), editor of Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave, 2006), and coeditor of Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debate (Routledge, 2014; with D. Vance Smith), as well as articles on Middle English literature in The Chaucer Review, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Exemplaria, New Medieval Literatures, and numerous edited collections. She recently coedited a book, Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (Cambridge, 2019; with Glenn D. Burger), and published a book, The Matter of Virtue: Women’s Ethical Action from Chaucer to Shakespeare (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). She is currently developing a new book project, Feminism without Gender in Late Medieval Literature.

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WAL MARION TURNER Manciple’s Tale Troilus and Criseyde Book of the Duchess House of Fame Boece

What Is a Wall? Walls figure in our imaginations and political consciousness as potent images of protection and division. From Hadrian’s Wall separating Roman Britain from Scotland to the Great Wall of China; from the Berlin Wall to Trump’s imagined wall between the United States and Mexico, walls function across time as markers of identity. Chaucer was far more familiar with defensive walls than most of us are today: for much of his life he inhabited a walled city (London) and indeed lived above the walls at Aldgate; he was part of a besieging army against a walled city (Reims) in 1359; he was in Navarre in 1366 when the king (Charles the Bad) was desperately fortifying cities against an invasion; he lived through the Rising of 1381 when the walls of London and of the Tower were breached. Yet in Chaucer’s poetry, walls are often walls of wonder, canvases for frescoes, symbols of the mind, surfaces on which sound resounds and shadows play. Across his texts, he is consistently interested in the inability of walls to create effective divisions, and in the productive importance of moving through walls. In Chaucer’s texts, the “wal” is often not what it seems. In later medieval culture, it was perfectly possible to have a clear boundary without a wall: everyone knew where one London ward or parish ended and another began without the need for any physical marker. Equally, walls were not necessarily boundaries at all. Cooling Castle, built for John Cobham in the 1380s, was fronted by imposing walls that were merely a façade as they were open at the back.1 Walls constantly recur in Chaucer’s writing, often in descriptions of walled cities that are being attacked. There are many references to defensive walls not working to keep the city safe, or to keep people out. For instance, Theseus “rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter” (1.990) of Thebes, as a prelude to his total destruction of the city. Later on, Palamon sadly refers to the “waste [devastated] walles wyde” (1.1331) of Thebes. These ruined walls in the background of the landscape of the story undermine 1 Johnson, Behind the Castle Gate, xv–​xvi.

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188 Marion Turner Theseus’s attempts to use walls to create order, when he builds the amphitheatre, “walled of stoon” (1.1888) in the third part of the tale. The most famous walled city whose walls did not hold was Troy. Indeed, the late fourteenth-​century obsession with Troy, and with its relevance to medieval London, encouraged a particular way of thinking about the inefficacy of walls.2 For instance, in the first book of his great Latin poem, the Vox Clamantis, Chaucer’s friend and contemporary John Gower writes in detail about the breaching of the walls of London during the Rising of 1381, comparing the cataclysmic events with the breaching of the walls of Troy.3 In Troilus and Criseyde, the tearing down of the walls lies in the characters’ future (4.1482), a future that we cannot forget and of which many characters within the poem are aware. Most powerfully, Calchas tells the Greeks that Phoebus and Neptune, the gods who themselves built Troy—​they “makeden the walles of the town” (4.121)—​are going to attack the city and cause its destruction. This stanza reminds the reader that just as walls can be built, they can also be destroyed; readers who know the Aeneid would remember the moment in book 2 when Neptune does indeed strike at the walls with his trident to unseat the foundations of the city (Aeneid, 2.610). This sense of the inevitability of the destruction of city walls, as no walls can last forever, is further emphasized in the Knight’s Tale, when Saturn intones that: Myn is the ruyne of the hye halles The fallynge of the toures and of the walles Upon the mynour or the carpenter (1.2463–​65)

The falling of that which is high mirrors the inexorable movement of Fortune’s wheel, and the use of the participle (“fallynge”) also implies that this is an ongoing, permanent action—​walls are always falling. And here, they are falling on those who are themselves trying to undermine them, through constructing engines of war and tunnelling underneath the walls. Both those within and those outside can be harmed by the walls, which turn out to be anything but stable. Walls have many other functions in Chaucer’s texts. He often mentions walls in everyday ways, reflecting their importance in ordinary life. The miller feels about in the dark for a weapon that he knows is next to the wall in the Reeve’s Tale (1.4293); bows are hung on a wall in the Parliament of Fowls (282), for instance. Walls are often used in metaphors and similes—​both Hector and Troilus are compared to walls (Troilus, 2.154, 3.479), two tales refer to shadows on the wall (Merchant’s Tale, 4.1315, Shipman’s Tale, 7.9); Griselda is “sad and constant as a wall” (Clerk’s Tale, 4.1047). But Chaucer also expands his interest in what a wall can symbolize and can do, in idiosyncratic ways. Unlike his English contemporaries, Chaucer was particularly interested in the wall as a surface for visual narrative, often describing wall-​paintings in his poems. In this essay, 2 See Federico, New Troy, 1–​28; Turner, Chaucerian Conflict, 56–​92; and Baswell, “Aeneas in 1381.”

3 See bk. 1 of Gower, Vox Clamantis, 20–​81, translated in Gower, The Major Latin Works of John Gower, 49–​112.

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I will concentrate first on images of the wall as a symbol for the body and the mind, and then on the wall as a surface for art and interpretation, arguing that Chaucer’s greatest interest was in passing through walls, not in remaining inside their boundaries.

Walls of the Body

The image of the walled body suggests that the body is a microcosm of a city or house or other enclosed structure. This is a crucial idea across many of Chaucer’s texts, and indeed is a common literary trope more generally. In the Tale of Melibee, when violent robbers scale the “walles of his hous” (7.970) and attack Melibee’s wife and daughter (Prudence and Sophie), wounding them in five places, on one level this is an allegorical attack on Melibee himself, on his care and wisdom, focusing on his five senses. The Wife of Bath compares the attack on a woman’s chastity with an attack on a walled structure when she accuses her husband of saying that “Men may nat kepe a castel wal, /​It may so longe assailed been overall” (3.262–​63). Here the castle wall is figured as a woman’s genitalia that, according to Alisoun’s husband, will be penetrated in the end by a persistent suitor. In the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, told in the Legend of Good Women as the “Legend of Thisbe,” the wall stands in for multiple barriers separating lovers, but the key feature of even this wall is its “clyfte” (740) through which the lovers can communicate. Their desire to touch each other through the hole makes it an obvious symbol of chastity, or the wall of the female body itself. This is a common way of using the image of the wall: Gower too imagines a lover who can evade locks and “perce […] the harde wall,” in order to be with the object of his desire in “hire bed,” where he can satisfy his desire (Confessio Amantis, 4.2879–​88).4 Troilus deploys the classical trope of paraclausithyron (5.540–​53)—​the lover’s lament before the closed door—​as Criseyde’s closed house represents to him her now-​inaccessible body after her departure for the Greek camp. Walled gardens in particular often represent the female body in medieval texts, perhaps most famously in the Romance of the Rose. In the Merchant’s Tale, January’s locking of the garden to which only he has the key represents his possession of May’s body; Damian’s counterfeiting the key so that he too can enter the walled garden prefigures and represents his entering May’s body. The Black Knight’s description of Blanche, his dead wife and the absent heroine of the Book of the Duchess, obsessively emphasizes how closed in she is: this stresses her chastity, but also more generally suggests a completed, walled-​in self (939–​47). Indeed, the Book of the Duchess is a poem about enclosing frameworks, be they dreams, narratives, or walls.5 The Black Knight makes the explicit comparison of his dead wife to an ivory tower (“a tour of yvoyre,” 946)—​she is so untouchable that she looks like a smooth ivory surface, a building that cannot be entered, made of hard, impenetrable 4 The female body is frequently depicted as an enclosure in many texts and cultures. For discussion see, for instance, Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories:  The Body Enclosed,” 123–​42; Gilchrist, “Medieval Bodies in the Material World,” 43–​61. 5 Ellmann, “Blanche,” 103–​4.

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190 Marion Turner material. The description links her to the perfectly enclosed Mary, by echoing the Song of Songs (sicut turris David collum tuum [Thy neck is as the tower of David], 4:4), and also figures her, again, as a chess piece, carved out of ivory, a beautiful and inhuman object. And of course the ending description of the Black Knight again implicates her as a walled entity: the “long castel” with “walls white” (1318) reminds us of her first name and her family name (Blanche of Lancaster), as well as memorializing the land, buildings, and possessions which she represented in life and which she brought to her marriage. In a very real way she, like any late medieval heiress, represented actual castles and walls to her husband. The lacuna in the poem, however, is the fact that she did not remain walled in and untouchable:  he married her, and she represents a woman who bore multiple children. The ending of the poem, with its emphasis on her death, disturbingly reminds us that she is herself now walled in a tomb: indeed, to be so complete and walled in can only be accomplished in death. The idea of the body as “walled” reached vernacular scientific discourse at the time that Chaucer was writing. In the last decades of the fourteenth century, a period in which there was a dramatic upsurge in vernacular medical writings, several authors and translators started to use the word “wal” to refer to anatomy. The metaphor of the walled body therefore gained new purchase, as anatomical membranes and divisions were described as walls. John Trevisa writes that there is “as it were, a wal and enterclos” between the two parts of a serpent’s womb; an anonymous writer comments that there is “as it were, a wal bitwene these two ventriclis,” of the heart; the translator of Guy de Chauliac’s surgical treatise several times refers to the “wallez” of the breast and of the womb.6 Chaucer refers to Chaunticleer, the rooster in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, as having a comb “batailled [crenellated] as it were a castel wal” (7.2860), a description that emphasizes his enclosure and his grandeur. The repeated use of “as it were” in these examples emphasizes their status as similes—​medical and literary writers alike were not wholly comfortable with miniaturizing walls but instead often emphasized that bodily separations were only “like” walls. Nonetheless, these similes function to draw attention to the comparable nature of the body and a building. In Chaucer’s most striking use of the idea of a wall within the body, he uses a powerful metaphor, rather than a simile. He writes in the Manciple’s Tale that: […] God of his endelees goodnesse Walled a tonge with teeth and lippes eke, For man sholde hym avyse what he speeke (9.322–​24)

The mouth has become an embattled space, with the teeth and the lips separating the inside of the mouth from the rest of the world. This wall, we are told, prevents us from speaking too much and too hastily: the lips and teeth are there because (“for”) each person “sholde hym avyse what he speeke” (9.324). The fact that this advice comes in the middle of an extremely verbose and unnecessarily repetitive speech illustrates 6 These examples are given in the MED, s.v. “wal, n.,” 7.

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the problem with this wall:  it doesn’t work. People do speak, words get through the openings created in the wall. Teeth are gappy; lips open easily. The image occurs in the context of a prologue and tale that demonstrate extreme anxiety about the boundaries between thoughts and words and between the inside and outside of the body, and about the effect of speech and stories in the world. In the prologue, the Manciple’s attack on the Cook focuses on his breath, something that escapes the walls of the teeth and lips and that connects the inside of a body with the outside world. This breath “ful soure stynketh” (9.32) and his open mouth threatens to swallow the rest of the world (9.35–​ 36). The Manciple orders him to close his mouth, saying that the devil is within it (9.37–​ 38) and that his “cursed breeth infecte wol us alle” (9.39). He wants the boundary between inside and outside to be secured in order to prevent contamination, to keep the Cook’s unruly body behind its wall. This anxiety about the open mouth as opening up a boundary that “should” remain closed is expressed in the common idea that one should eat with one’s mouth closed—​as medieval courtesy books, like twenty-​first-​century parents, advise.7 As the Manciple’s Prologue goes on, the Cook is comprehensively silenced and humiliated.8 Silencing also proves to be the theme of the subsequent tale: in a change to his source, Chaucer inserts the loss of the crow’s voice (9.300–​306). This is an unnerving story about the end of poetry. Crossing the walls of the body by opening one’s mouth and speaking is dangerous. The mother’s opinion given at the end—​that the walled mouth should be kept closed—​is certainly not Chaucer’s, but the Manciple has exposed the dangers that he perceives of speaking across the threshold of the mouth. At the same time, Chaucer shows us the futility of trying to prevent communication. A few lines before the end of the tale, the mother comments that a “Thyng that is seyd is seyd and forth it goth” (9.355). She says this to warn her son, but it also acts as a comment on the inevitability of speech, texts, and ideas escaping from one mind, mouth, or hand, and making their way in the world. The walls of the body need to be penetrable—​we need to breathe, and we need to communicate with others.

Walls of the Mind

Walls often stand in for the mind as well as the body in Chaucer’s writings, and again Chaucer shows us how important it is to be willing to break down mental boundaries. The idea of the walls of the mind is made explicit in Chaucer’s Boece, his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, as he chooses to keep Boethius’s metaphor of the mind as a room. As part of an extended comparison of the earthly city to a metaphorical city representing the devout community, Lady Philosophy compares the “face” of a room or city with the face of the prisoner. She then goes on to say: “ne I ne axe not rather the walles of thy librarye apparayled and wrought with yvory and with glas, than 7 Rickert and Furnivall, in “The Young Children’s Book,” 24.

8 For a more detailed discussion of the Manciple’s Prologue and Tale see Fradenburg, “The Manciple’s Servant Tongue.”

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192 Marion Turner after the sete of thi thought, in whiche I put noght whilom books, but I putte that that maketh bokes worthy of prys or precious, that is to seyn the sentence of my books” (book 1, prosa 5, lines 38–​42). She here compares the walled library with the enclosed mind, books with meanings and thoughts, encouraging readers to visualize the mind as a beautiful, walled enclosure, decorated with aesthetically pleasing, carefully crafted objects. The detail of ivory and glass helps us to conceptualize the mind as a “real” room in miniature, as a private space that the owner alone can fully access. Yet the “sentences” of the books within it come, of course, from outside the mind: this room needs doors and access to other minds. The metaphor of the mind as a room was deeply familiar to readers from classical to medieval times, as mnemonic techniques focused on imagining the mind as a series of rooms—​the memory palace.9 In the later medieval period, the increased interest in private rooms and spaces made the relationship between the mind and the closed room particularly acute.10 This idea of the mind as a walled place resonates in many of Chaucer’s other writings. In a powerful section from Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer describes Troilus’s desperate grief through his physical movements within an enclosed space. He writes: He rist hym up, and every dore he shette, And window ek, and tho this sorwful man Upon his beddes syde adown hym sette, Ful lik a ded ymage, pale and wan; And in his brest the heped wo bygan Out breste, and he to werken in this wise In his woodnesse, as I shal yow devyse.

Right as the wylde bole bygynneth sprynge, Now her, now ther, idarted to the herte, And of his deth roreth in compleynynge, Right so gan he aboute the chamber sterte, Smytyng his brest ay with his fistes smerte; His hed to the wal, his body to the grounde Ful ofte he swapte, hymselven to confounde. (4.232–​45)

Just as his “heped wo,” bursts out of him, so Troilus physically throws himself around his enclosed room, smashing his body against the walls and the floor in a physical enacting of his mental turbulence. As we see so often in this poem, Troilus needs physically to be alone in a closed room in order to express his agonies. We are later told that there is someone outside the room guarding it to ensure privacy for Troilus (4.351–​52). In another recurring motif, it is Pandarus who penetrates the room and offers some measure of consolation to Troilus (4.353–​658), representing the fact that he has privileged access to Troilus’s mind too. 9 See Carruthers, Book of Memory.

10 For the changing architecture and arrangement of domestic space in the later medieval period, see Schofield, Medieval London Houses, 66 and Kowaleski and Goldberg, Medieval Domesticity.

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But Troilus’s tragedy more generally is that he cannot escape the walls of his identity. Indeed, the idea of love as an enclosing prison was expressed by many writers at this time: it appears in the Romance of the Rose, in Baudouin de Conde’s Li Prison d’Amours, and in Froissart’s Prison amoureuse, for example.11 Troilus constructs himself as an archetypal courtly lover, utterly passive before the power of the God of Love. He is unable to compromise, to take action, or to relate to Criseyde as anything other than a perfect courtly Lady. In his final song, in book 5, he is still deploying the idealistic imagery of courtly love, still referring to Criseyde as an unattainable guiding star (5.638), unable to see her as the complex individual that she really is. Trapped in the Petrarchan language of extreme passion, he remains not only within the walls of Troy, but within the idealizing walls of fin’amor. Troilus’s limits are aptly reflected in another image of the wall: in book 5, Troilus and Pandarus impotently play “on the walles of the town” (5.1112). Unable to go beyond them, they fantasize about a possible future that cannot come to pass, a future in which Criseyde will return to the walled city, and those walls will hold against the Greeks. Troilus imagines that a merchant’s cart might be Criseyde (5.1162) and later refuses to believe the evidence of his dream and Cassandra’s interpretation of it (5.1450–​533) as he walls himself within his idealizing fantasy life. The walls on which Troilus spends so much time in book 5—​he is “on” or “upon” the walls in 666, 1112, and 1194—​represent his limits and, as readers, we know that he is wrong. Troilus, unlike Criseyde, cannot escape the mental walls that will be his destruction—​the walls of his mind are the fixed ideas that he has about love and Criseyde, walls that he has no wish to breach, walls that destroy him in the end. It is Criseyde’s ability to escape the walls of Troy and the metaphorical walls of her relationship with Troilus (he is her “wal /​ Of stiel” [3.479–​80]) that allows her to survive.

Walls of Wonder

In the dream visions, the walls of the mind are brought vividly to life—​but here they become gateways, or thresholds, stimulating the dreamer to learn from them and—​crucially—​to move beyond them. Both the Book of the Duchess and the House of Fame open with a story about a dreamer who reads a book, falls asleep, and finds himself in a walled room, a room in which the walls are decorated with paintings of great narratives.12 Unlike other contemporary English poets, Chaucer was fascinated by wall art, and very frequently writes about the inner surfaces of walls as places of aesthetic beauty, and as places for story-​telling. This is perhaps the kind of wall that interested him most: the wall as narrative scene. Chaucer’s descriptions of such walls, most notably in the Knight’s Tale, the House of Fame, and the Book of the Duchess, are crucial meditations on the art of narrative itself. 11 See Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 93–​96.

12 Kathryn Lynch links the importance of walled structures in these poems to their use of enclosed and partitioned narratives, in “Partitioned Fictions,” 107–​25.

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194 Marion Turner Chaucer uses the literary image of paintings on the wall to suggest the importance of moving beyond images that others have painted, poems that others have written, and enclosing walls. In the Book of the Duchess and the House of Fame, the mind is not ultimately a prison or a closed-​in walled space. On the contrary, the narrator moves outside the walled chamber/​temple with its literary paintings, and changes his mind, moving through different—​and in both cases interactive—​spaces and experiences. In both poems, he goes beyond the walled room, meets an interlocutor, and writes a profoundly contemporary poem. Both poems suggest that the classical past, represented especially in the walled room, is important, but not enough. The narrator can think for himself and can get outside the walls of his literary heritage; in the Book of the Duchess by vigorously riding “Out of my chamber” (358), in the House of Fame by finding his way through a “wiket” (gate, 477), which leads him to an open desert space. In the Book of the Duchess, the dreamer falls asleep and finds himself in a beautiful chamber. Birds are sitting on the tiled roof and singing sweetly, filling the room with music. The windows are glazed so well that there are no cracks, and the story of Troy is depicted in the stained glass. Furthermore: Alle the walles with colours fine Were peynted, bothe text and glose, Of al the Romaunce of the Rose. (332–​34)

The story of Troy and the Romance of the Rose are the key foundational texts for Chaucer’s literary heritage, one from the classical past and written in Latin in its most influential versions, the other written relatively recently (in the thirteenth century), and in the vernacular. Both texts were vital texts for Chaucer, texts that he returns to again and again. He writes about Troy in detail in the House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde, and the Legend of Good Women, and more briefly in numerous other texts. He translated at least part of the Romance of the Rose, and it stands behind all texts about the art of love from this period.13 By decorating the walls of this chamber with these texts, Chaucer signals to us that the room represents the mind of his avatar, a mind filled with the texts that he is reading. Even at this very early stage in his writing, Chaucer was interested in using walls to think about psychology. As we have already seen, he continued to develop these metaphors in later texts such as Troilus. Similarly, in the House of Fame, the narrator—​here called “Geffrey”—​dreams that he is in a “temple ymad of glas” (120). This turns out to be the temple of Venus, and it is a kind of art gallery, filled with statues, elaborate niches, and “portreytures” (125). As he roams up and down, Geffrey sees “on a wall” (141) a version of the opening lines 13 Chaucer tells us in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women that he translated the Roman de la Rose; Deschamps also comments on the translation. However, there is critical debate about how much of the extant Romaunt of the Rose is in fact Chaucer’s translation. Most critics agree that Fragments B and C are not by Chaucer, and that Fragment A  may represent all or part of his translation. For further discussion, see Dahlberg, Romaunt of the Rose, 3–​23. See also Knox, Romance of the Rose in Fourteenth-​Century England, 219–​46.

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of the Aeneid, the most authoritative fictional text in medieval literary tradition: “I wol now synge, yif I kan, /​ The armes and also the man” (143–​44). He spends the next 300 lines describing what he saw “graven” and “peynted on the wal” (193, 211), in a major expansion of the fledgling ekphrasis of the Book of the Duchess. What Geffrey sees on the walls in the temple of glass is the story of the Aeneid—​or so it seems, until it morphs into Ovid’s Heroides. The particular importance of this silent change is that the source changes from a version of the story that focuses on Aeneas’s virtues and heroic mission in founding Rome, to a version that focuses on Dido’s fate when she is abandoned by Aeneas. The paintings on the walls thus represent Geffrey’s poetic heritage, and signal Chaucer’s awareness of the contradictory nature of different authorities and of the play between various perspectives within the author’s mind—​themes that go on to dominate the House of Fame.14 Chaucer’s decision to open both of these poems with images of wall-​paintings, frescoes that represent the books by which he himself has been strongly influenced, is telling in a number of ways. His contemporary, John Gower, never uses the word “wal[le]” to talk about wall art, in contrast to Chaucer. The tradition of ekphrasis—​ describing works of art through language—​is a classical trope. It is also used by poets such as Boccaccio, a crucial influence on Chaucer, and Chaucer uses this technique most obviously in the magisterial descriptions of the paintings on the walls of the temples of Venus, Mars, and Diana in the Knight’s Tale (taking Boccaccio’s Teseida as the key source).15 The focus on paintings of Troy in both the Book of the Duchess and the House of Fame is particularly appropriate as the Aeneid itself features a famous scene in which Aeneas sees the story of his own fallen city depicted on a wall in Carthage, and this prompts him to tell his own story about what happened to Troy. Describing in words (“First sawgh I the destruction /​ Of Troye […]” [House of Fame, 151–​52]) a work of art (the painting on the wall) that itself depicts a literary text (the Aeneid) adds an extra layer of complexity to Chaucer’s narratives. Indeed, in both poems, there is some ambiguity about whether words or visual images are painted onto the walls. In the Book of the Duchess, the reference to “text and gloss” could suggest that the texts and glosses are themselves painted on the wall, rather than pictures of both text and gloss (it would be much harder to paint a picture of a gloss). Geffrey, in the House of Fame, tells us that the opening lines of the Aeneid are “writen on a table of bras,” and frequently refers to the story being “graven” which could refer to carved words or images. The nature of the descriptions, however, and the emphasis on “portreytures” as well as the tradition of depicting the story through painting on the wall, suggests that we are supposed to imagine a series of visual images, perhaps supplemented by some writing. Indeed, the focus on paintings of stories and texts makes particular sense if we think about the kind of wall art with which Chaucer was familiar by the time he wrote 14 For further discussion see Gillespie, “Authorship.”

15 For discussion of Chaucer’s use of ekphrasis, see Johnston, “Ekphrasis in the Knight’s Tale,” and Epstein, “ ‘With many a floryn he the hewes boghte.’ ”

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196 Marion Turner the House of Fame. Chaucer was already interested in the idea of using wall art to depict the richness of mental interiority in the Book of the Duchess. But ekphrasis took a much more central role in the House of Fame, with hundreds of lines dedicated to describing the paintings. We might link this not only to Chaucer’s crucial encounters with Italian poetry in the 1370s, especially that of Boccaccio, but also to his knowledge of Italian visual art. As well as experiencing walls as defensive barriers around cities, Chaucer also encountered the full glory of wall art on his travels. Chaucer visited Florence in 1373, a generation after Giotto and his pupil Taddeo had frescoed some of the great churches of the city. In particular, in the Florentine church of Santa Croce, Giotto had painted the walls of the Bardi chapel and the adjacent Peruzzi chapel. These were two of the most important Italian merchant-​banking families; both appear frequently as creditors of Edward III. Nearby, Giotto’s pupil Taddeo frescoed the chapel of the banking Baroncelli family. Chaucer was likely in Florence in order to negotiate with the Bardi family on behalf of Edward III. Given Chaucer’s interest in culture, the compact nature of Florence, the centrality of worship to everyday life, and the close relationship between the Bardi family and Santa Croce, the overwhelming likelihood is that Chaucer saw the art of Giotto and consciously experienced the artistic revolution that had taken place.16 Santa Croce was the Bardi family’s favourite church.17 There, Chaucer could see extraordinary experiments with the depiction of space, of light, and of movement painted on the walls of the chapels. Most dramatically, the dynamic frescoes emphasize that any representation is partial, in both senses: the scene continues beyond the frame, and the eye is directed to certain foci. Giotto’s paintings are also intensely invested in spatial dynamics. As well as portraying depth and the individual’s situation within an environment, Giotto and his school were particularly interested in city scenes. The frescoes are packed with loggias, arcades, buildings, and carefully delineated interiors, and characters reach across and move through boundaries such as archways in walls.18 In this context, it is particularly interesting to remember that both Boccaccio and Chaucer wrote poems in which their avatars are stimulated by seeing frescoes to embark on their own journeys.19 Both Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione and the House of Fame depict the poet-​narrator viewing wall-​paintings and then himself moving through a variety of different spaces, unable to gain a complete understanding of what his guide wants to show him.20 Geffrey moves through a desert and then the Milky Way itself, before finding his inspiration in the House of Rumour, a porous structure of chaotic openings and dynamic invention. 16 I discuss Chaucer’s trip to Florence in detail in ­chapter 6 of Chaucer: A European Life. 17 Hagiioannu, “Giotto’s Bardi Chapel Frescoes and Chaucer’s House of Fame,” 30. 18 Martines, Power and Imagination, 250–​51.

19 For a recent discussion of the relationship between the Amorosa Visione and the House of Fame see McKinley, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts. 20 See Boccaccio, Amorosa Visione.

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Walls are not barriers, they are gateways to interpretation in these poems. In the Book of the Duchess, the Black Knight describes himself: As a whyt wal or a table; For hit is redy to cache and take Al that men wil therin make. (780–​82)

The white wall resonates with the later description of the castle itself, with Blanche’s name, and with the feudal identity of the Knight. As a lover, he is initially empty, ready to take on the literary tropes of fin’amor, to be written by tradition. But there is also something fascinating about his choice to imagine himself as a wall. He constructs himself as a surface—​either a wall or a wax tablet—​on which someone could paint, engrave, or write. There’s a metatextual joke here, as a literary character announces that he is ready to be written. But by reminding us that art is something that is indeed often constructed on surfaces, Chaucer also encourages us to probe its depths, to interpret. And he reminds us that someone does the writing, or making—​that all art reflects particular perspectives, not objective truth. The wall needs to be looked at, challenged, analyzed, not taken at face value. Over and over again in his writing, Chaucer suggests that walls are ineffective at keeping people in or out, and that they are porous. Moreover, his texts demonstrate that those who do not get outside the walls—​of cities or minds—​can’t survive in a world of change. The narrators of the House of Fame and the Book of the Duchess, Criseyde, the speeches and texts that escape despite the wall of teeth in the Manciple’s Tale, are all able to make their way in the world after passing beyond walls. We need walls, but we also need doors, gates, and gaps in them. Walls encourage interpretation and interaction in Chaucer’s poems. In thinking about the wall as an opportunity, not an impenetrable restriction, Chaucer demonstrates that the failure of boundaries is not only inevitable but can even be productive. Far from being an instrument of oppression or exclusion, in Chaucer’s poetry the wall is a thing of wonder. It marks the beginning, not the end, of a journey.

Bibliography Primary Sources Boccaccio, Giovanni. Amorosa Visione: Bilingual Edition. Translated by Robert Hollander, Timothy Hampton, and Margherita Frankel, with an Introduction by Vittore Branca. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986. Dahlberg, Charles, ed. The Romaunt of the Rose. Vol. 7 of The Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999. Gower, John. The Major Latin Works of John Gower: The Voice of One Crying, and the Tripartite Chronicle. Translated by Eric W. Stockton. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962. Gower, John. Vox Clamantis. In The Complete Works of John Gower, vol. 4, The Latin Works, edited by G. C. Macaulay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902.

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198 Marion Turner “The Young Children’s Book.” In The Babees’ Book:  Medieval Manners for the Young, edited by Edith Rickert and Frederick James Furnivall, 21–​25. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923.

Secondary Sources

Baswell, Christopher. “Aeneas in 1381.” New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 7–​58. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Ellmann, Maud. “Blanche.” In Criticism and Critical Theory, edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, 99–​110. London: Edward Arnold, 1984. Epstein, Robert. “ ‘With many a floryn he the hewes boghte’: Ekphrasis and Symbolic Violence in the Knight’s Tale.” Philological Quarterly 85 (2006): 49–​68. Federico, Sylvia. New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Fradenburg, [Aranye] Louise O. “The Manciple’s Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales.” ELH 52.1 (1985): 85–​118. Gilchrist, Roberta. “Medieval Bodies in the Material World:  Gender, Stigma and the Body.” In Framing Medieval Bodies, edited by Sarah Kay and Miri Rubin, 43–​61. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994. Gillespie, Vincent. “Authorship.” In A Handbook of Middle English Studies, edited by Marion Turner, 135–​54. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013. Hagiioannu, Michael. “Giotto’s Bardi Chapel Frescoes and Chaucer’s House of Fame: Influence, Evidence, and Interpretations.” Chaucer Review 36.1 (2001): 30. Johnson, Matthew. Behind the Castle Gate: From Medieval to Renaissance. London: Routledge, 2002. Johnston, Andrew James. “Ekphrasis in the Knight’s Tale.” In Rethinking the New Medievalism, edited by R. Howard Bloch, Joachim Küpper, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-​Toulet, Alison Calhoun, and Jeanette Patterson, 181–​97. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. Knox, Philip. The Romance of the Rose in Fourteenth-​Century England. DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2015. Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984. Kowaleski, Maryanne, and P.  J. P.  Goldberg, eds. Medieval Domesticity: Home, Housing, and Household in Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lynch, Kathryn. “Partitioned Fictions:  The Meaning and Importance of Walls in Chaucer’s Poetry.” In Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative, edited by Robert T. Edwards, 107–​25. Cambridge: Brewer, 1994. Martines, Lauro. Power and Imagination: City-​States in Renaissance Italy. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988. McKinley, Kathryn. Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2016. Schofield, John. Medieval London Houses. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.

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Stallybrass, Peter. “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed.” In Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret W.  Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy Vickers, 123–​42. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1986. Turner, Marion. Chaucer: A European Life. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. ———. Chaucerian Conflict:  Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-​Century London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Marion Turner is an Associate Professor and Tutorial Fellow in English at Jesus College, University of Oxford. Her most recent book is a biography of Geoffrey Chaucer, Chaucer: A European Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Her other books include Chaucerian Conflict (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and, as editor, A Handbook of Middle English Studies (Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013). She has edited a special issue of the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies on the topic of Medical Discourse in Premodern Europe, and has written articles on numerous topics related to Chaucer and late medieval literature, including the senses, form, medieval Europe, and gendered spaces. Her next book is about the Wife of Bath and her life across time.

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THING STEELE NOWLIN Legend of Good Women Truth

Arguing that Chaucer’s poetry is full of things would seem to be claiming the

obvious. Things are, of course, all over the place in Chaucer’s poetry: the pilgrims of the General Prologue achieve their sharp characterization in large part through the clothes they wear and effects they carry; the tales of the Canterbury collection are likewise brimming with things that are crucial to plot and theme (the hot coulter of the Miller’s Tale, the book of scripture in the Man of Law’s Tale, Griselda’s shift in the Clerk’s Tale, the rocks of the Franklin’s Tale, to name only a few examples); early dream visions like the House of Fame and the Parliament of Fowls prominently feature objects of landscape (trees, sand, a glacier even) and architecture (temples, engravings, gates, walls); and even Chaucer’s short, lyric poems like the Former Age are littered with things and materials. Indeed, Chaucer’s inclusion of so many and so many kinds of things gives his poetry a feeling of materiality that has in part contributed to the notion that Chaucer looked past his own, fourteenth-​century moment by composing “realistic” narratives made so because of the real-​seeming people who live in real, physical worlds full of palpable objects. What happens, then, when we try to think about things in Chaucer as things? What interpretive opportunities might that open—​and how exactly might one do that? As the title of this chapter suggests, I hope to take on these questions by thinking carefully about Chaucerian things. My own approach will be grounded in the theoretical framework of what I’ll call “object” or “matter” studies, a variegated collection of philosophical and theoretical writing that seeks to reshape our understanding of what things, objects, and matter are and what our relationship is to them. Scholars have taken increasing interest in the matter and things of medieval literature and culture, but to focus my effort here, I’d like to take a somewhat different approach, looking closely not at a particular object or thing, but at Chaucer’s use of the word “thing” itself. In important instances, Chaucer uses this word in a way that emphasizes how things (objects, matter, seemingly inanimate materials) take on a “life of their own”—​that is, they exhibit a kind of energy, a potential for action, even an agency—​while never ceasing to be objects and things. Matter and object studies gives us a vocabulary to think about what this means and how this happens. When Chaucer uses a word like “thing,” he not only signals this kind of agency, but also uses that conceptualization of agency to think about other complex literary and cultural ideas. To provide examples of how the word “thing” might be working in this way, I want to concentrate on two texts: the Legend of Good Women, the tale collection that precedes the Canterbury Tales, and the short lyric poem Truth. Each of these texts develops this “agentic” sense of “thing” differently, but

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202 Steele Nowlin in both of them, thing retains a strange, energetic quality that can help us experience in new ways how these poems engage their themes.

Inventional Things in the Legend of Good Women

The Legend of Good Women seems at once to be Chaucer’s last formal dream vision and his first tale collection, following his earlier dream narratives and long romance, Troilus and Criseyde, and preceding sustained work on the Canterbury Tales.1 The dream section takes the form of a lengthy prologue in which the narrator (Geoffrey himself) falls asleep in a meadow and meets the God of Love and his queen, Alceste, who command him to compose a series of legends (short narratives) of “good women,” who, it would seem, are “good” because of the way they suffer and die for love. The Legend is particularly noteworthy among Chaucer’s works in that critics seem perpetually divided about what it was intended to be or do. So much about the poem simply does not “feel right”: its at times overwhelming (perhaps satirical) pathos, its problematic definition of “good” women as those who suffer or die for men, its exaggeratedly terse and at times dismissive narratives, its disparate prologues, its apparent incompleteness. In this palpable awkwardness—​those many moments in which the poem seems to register a sensation of some kind of disruption or nonlocalized discomfort—​I want to examine how the poem’s excessive use of the word “thing” calls attention to this strange feeling of unsettledness, of something not quite “adding up.” Ultimately, I  want to argue that the poem presents itself as a kind of thing, working to estrange itself from typical or conventional meaning systems, and compelling us to think about the Legend not in terms of how it fits into received literary traditions or cultural patterns, but how it stands apart from those discursive constructs. In other words, the poem works relentlessly to signal its own strange “thingness.” This effort is apparent right from the start, when the prologue introduces the Legend as a poem obsessed with things. Some form of the word “thing” is repeated five times in just thirteen lines at the beginning of the prologue when the narrator proclaims that, because an individual person cannot see or experience firsthand so many phenomena of the universe, we can instead rely on only what we hear and read about such phenomena: But God forbede but men shulde leve Wel more thing then men han seen with ye! Men shal not wenen every thing a lye But yf himself yt seeth or elles dooth; For, God wot, thing is never the lasse sooth, Though every wight ne may it nat ysee. Bernard the monk ne saugh nat all, pardee! Than mote we to bokes that we fynde, Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde, And to the doctrine of these olde wyse,

1 For a concise discussion of the dating of the Legend, see Minnis with Scattergood and Smith, The Shorter Poems, 325–​30.

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Yeve credence, in every skylful wise, That tellen of these olde appreved stories Of holyness, of regnes, of victories, Of love, of hate, of other sondry thynges, Of which I may not maken rehersynges. (F.10–​24, emphasis added)

That’s a lot of things, yet they don’t all share a common definition: the specific meaning of the term shifts as the passage progresses. “Thing” first refers to an inaccessible aspect of material reality like a thing or event (lines 11, 12, 14), a “thing” that happened or that existed or that was experienced by humans (or, in the case of the joy of heaven, is assumed to be experienced by humans now gone). Next, “thing” refers to the “olde thinges” that “bokes” enable us to see or hold “in mynde,” even though, as things, they no longer exist or are occurring. As such, “thing” is not simply a “thing” itself (as in 11, 12, and 14), but a fusion of lived experience, material reality, and poetic subject matter, a kind of middle space in which a thing is mediated by textual codification (18). These “olde thynges” exist only in the liminal, imaginative space as forms accessible through the act of reading about them. Finally, the “thing” of the many “other sundry thinges” in the passage refers to poetic subject matter that has already been coded as written texts (23). These “thinges,” and the casualness that marks their place at the end of a catalogue of stuff already written about, become a sort of late medieval equivalent of Library of Congress subject headings, topics for “makyng” or inventing poetry, not the “things” themselves. Thinking about this catalogue of things as a whole suggests an arc in which things move from being somehow alive, energetic, and full of potential, to being flat, dead, and having life only when someone reads about them in a text. We might go so far as to say that the prologue’s definitional trajectory pares away a sense of the unstructured potential of things, their “allure,” “excess,” and “agentic capacity,” stripping things of their somehow unquantifiable life and energy and flattening them into topics and then texts long ago tamed, processed, and written down. Putting it even more bluntly, we could say that this little passage works hard to kill the “strange” thingness of things. And it’s here that recent work in object and matter studies can help us. The quoted words in the last sentences of the preceding paragraph are terms used by different writers working in these fields of study, and these terms signal (in different ways) the strange sense of alterity that we get about a thing when we try to extract that thing from an anthropocentric viewpoint. A broad array of related object and matter studies focuses on things as things and includes diverse subfields like object-​oriented philosophy (or object-​oriented ontology, frequently referred to by the wonderful acronym “OOO”), speculative realism, thing theory, actor network theory, and new (or vital) materialisms. In the past decade or so, medievalists have drawn on what has evolved into a rather stable bibliography of object and matter studies in which to ground their readings.2 2 Several concise and helpful summaries of this theoretical and philosophical work precede more detailed close readings of medieval texts and provide speedy introductions to some of the key theoretical concepts relevant to medieval studies. See, for example, Robertson, “Medieval Things,”

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204 Steele Nowlin These approaches are in no way unified, and at times even oppose each other. Even fundamental terms like “thing,” “object,” and “matter” are not interchangeable or do not mean the same thing across subfields, and by lumping these three terms together, I am already doing an injustice to different theoretical approaches. But these subfields are all grounded in an effort to revise commonplace understandings about the relationship between human and nonhuman things and can therefore help us conceptualize Chaucer’s Legend. First and foremost is the idea that things, including nonhuman and inanimate things, have agency. New materialist writer Jane Bennett frames it most clearly when she describes “vital materialism” as a means of seeing “nonhuman materialities […] as […] bona fide agents rather than as instrumentalities, techniques of power, recalcitrant objects, or social constructs.”3 Bennett famously calls this characteristic of matter “vibrant,” and her goal is to make matter “start to seem strange.”4 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost note that this notion of agency is shared by many new materialist approaches and is characterized by “emergent, generative powers (or agentic capacities) even within inorganic matter,” a conception of “matter as possessing its own modes of self-​transformation, self-​organization, and directedness, and thus no longer as simply passive or inert.”5 “Inanimate” objects, then, are in fact animate, acting in ways that may not be immediately detectable by humans but are nevertheless present, real, and “vital” to their ontological states. There is an energy, a power, a life in things that operates wholly independently from human beings, and it is this formulation of “thing” that I think those lines of the Legend’s prologue work to strip away. If nonhuman and inanimate things have a life of their own, it follows then that this vital energy is difficult for human beings to observe, since it operates outside anthropocentric systems of understanding. Bill Brown, who coined the term “thing theory” some twenty years ago, works to get at the “thingness of objects,” and, in a helpful shorthand, he argues that “We begin to confront the thingness of objects when they stop working for us.”6 This formulation recalls Heidegger’s famous “tool-​analysis,” in which we notice a hammer as a “thing” only when the hammer breaks, when it stops working as intended—​that is, when it is removed suddenly from a system of use and meaning that did not previously warrant attention or contemplation. In Brown’s terminology, objects become things once we’ve made this realization of their thingness, this something extra. Thingness, Brown claims, refers to “what is excessive in objects, as what exceeds their mere materialization as objects or their mere utilization as objects—​their force Cohen, “Introduction:  Ecostitial,” and Schuurman, “Materials of Wonder.” For important—​and differing—​book-​length studies of matter and things in medieval texts, see especially Robertson, Nature Speaks, and Cohen, Stone. 3 Bennett, “Vitalist Stopover,” 47.

4 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, vii–​viii.

5 Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 9–​10.

6 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 4.

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as a sensuous presence or as a metaphysical presence.”7 For Graham Harman, the philosopher credited with inventing object-​oriented philosophy (aka OOO), objects “withdraw” from us, and from other objects. Even when we notice a thing when it breaks or stops working, he argues, we still don’t really know it: “No matter how hard I work to become conscious of things, environing conditions still remain of which I never become fully aware.”8 There is, then, a whole secret world of things that not only cannot simply be relegated to anthropocentric hermeneutical systems, but also that cannot be engaged directly by those systems.9 If things are unknowable—​even while they’re so clearly all over the place—​then how are we supposed to “engage” with them at all? For many writers, the answer is “indirectly.” Since reason and intellect threaten to reinscribe the thing into anthropocentric systems of knowing and meaning, an engagement with them that hopes to preserve their vital, alien thingness in its own terms must happen affectively—​that is, somehow feelingly, rather than simply rationally. A crucial component of Bennett’s project is “to induce in human bodies an aesthetic-​affective openness to material vitality” that is essentially an affective occurrence and a kind of readiness for an encounter with material things.10 Harman likewise writes that “withdrawn” objects are approachable not by “intellect,” but only “indirectly, by way of allusion, whether in the arts or in the sciences.”11 He uses the term “allure” to describe “the structure” in which “the reality of” an object is only ever “hint[ed] at,” not made “directly present to the mind.”12 The critic’s goal is to make things feel “strange” (to use Bennett’s term) or “weird” (to use Harman’s and Timothy Morton’s), to estrange things from readers in an effort to simulate the affective experience of registering the “allure” (à la Harman) or “excess” (à la Brown) or ultimately inscrutable thingness of something. It’s exactly a movement between these poles of engagement—​things as commonplace, and things as suddenly remarkable because of their inherent thingness—​that plays out in the opening of the Legend. The prologue’s list of things moves strategically from emphasizing their “agentic potential,” “excess,” and “allure,” to stripping them of that sense of their thingness: The “thynges” referred to in line 23 only thinly echo the 7 Brown, “Thing Theory,” 5. Coole and Frost write that “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter: an excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-​ creative, productive, unpredictable”: Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 9. 8 Harman, Quadruple Object, 39. For a concise survey of Harman’s major ideas with regard to literary studies, see Harman, “Well-​Wrought.”

9 For efforts to engage things independently of human relations, see especially Harman (cited above), and Morton, “Object-​Oriented Defense.” For the importance of considering things precisely because of their encounter with the human, see Bennett, “Systems and Things.” For this perspective with an eye toward medieval texts and culture, see Cohen, Stone; and Mitchell, Becoming Human, especially chap. 2, “Childish Things” (59–​115). 10 Bennett, Vibrant Matter, x.

11 Harman, Quadruple Object, 28. 12 Harman, “Well-​Wrought,” 187.

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206 Steele Nowlin unknowable, vibrant agency of the “thing” of line 11. In the prologue, these things are inventional things—​stuff to write about and the written stuff itself. Indeed, “thing” is also something of a technical term in Middle English, referring to a finished written piece, as in the “litel thyng in prose,” for example, that the pilgrim Chaucer promises the Host after breaking off the Tale of Sir Thopas (7.937), as well as the “raw material” out of which such a piece was invented.13 Charles Wuest shows how in the Parliament of Fowls Chaucer uses “thing” as a technical term to register this potential, as it marks the very “interstices where new poems form.”14 In the thing-​laden opening passage of the Legend, the early uses of the word convey this sort of agentic potential to the protomatter of poetic invention itself, charging the process of poetic making and its emergent textual products with the same vibrancy and energy we have seen in nonhuman including the inaccessibility to human beings of this vital agency. Poetic things—​ inventions too, it would seem, have a life of their own, especially at that strange moment when they first emerge as inventions. This, then, is what I refer to when I suggest that this short passage from the prologue works to “kill” the agency of its things. This effort to quell the vital, energetic agency of things continues across Chaucer’s wholesale revision of the prologue as well. The prologue exists in two very different versions, referred to as “F” and “G.” Most scholars agree that F represents an earlier form of the prologue, and G, extant in only a single manuscript, represents a substantial revision by Chaucer himself. The trajectory I  mapped above of thingness being dulled extends to the process of revision as well. There simply aren’t as many things in G as there are in F: eleven appearances of thing in F drop to a mere three in G. Critics have thus seen G as the more bookish of the two prologues, the version that would consciously nudge Chaucer closer to the status of authoritative auctor, and as things disappear between F and G, F’s inventional potential flattens into the fixed products of authorship and literary reputation.15 Here I  will cite just two, among many, examples. The narrator’s claim in F “that men mosten more thyng beleve /​ Then men may seen at eye, or elles preve” (F.99–​100) becomes in G “men shulde autoritees beleve, /​There as there lyth non other assay by preve” (G.83–​84). The nebulous “thyng” becomes fixed textual “autoritees.” Similarly, in part of her effort to plead on the narrator’s behalf before the God of Love, Alceste reports in F that it may be the case that “this man ys nyce, /​ He myghte doo yt, 13 See Nuttall, “ ‘Many a lay and many a thing,’ ” for a survey of Chaucer’s use of technical and literary terms to describe his own poetry. 14 Wuest, “Chaucer’s Enigmatic Thing,” 486.

15 Even the way critics have described F in relation to G demonstrates their detection of some kind of energy in F. Helen Phillips argues that “G has a clearer sequence of thought” than F, including fewer “kaleidoscopic shifts of theme” (Phillips, “Introduction,” 281). David Wallace argues that the G Prologue shows us “Chaucer as Petrarchan Humanist,” and that “the general effect of the G revision is to preserve both text and author from those linguistic traps that made F such dangerous and exhilarating territory […] Indeed, the Legend [as presented in G] now seems to think of itself as an old book, a text that has become familiar and hence less remarkable” (Chaucerian Polity, 370, 373).

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gessyng no malice, /​But for he useth thynges for to make; /​Hym rekketh noght of what matere he take” (F.362–​65). In G, Alceste’s plea becomes, “for that this man is nyce, /​He may translate a thyng in no malyce, /​ But for he useth bokes for to make, /​ And taketh non hed of what matere he tak” (G.340–​43). In G, Geoffrey’s custom is makinge bokes, not makinge thinges as it is in F, and those thinges are now in G not the poetic things that Chaucer has made but others’ inventions that he has translated.16 Like the opening passage, the revised G Prologue works to strip things of their strange agentic potential. Even the inventional imperative at the end of F is flattened in G.  Cupid’s original instructions command Geoffrey to transfer thingness structurally to the legends themselves. He specifically orders that for the protagonists’ stories Geoffrey should “reherce of al hir lyf the grete” (F.574), rather than “al” of what “swiche lovers diden in hire tyme” (F.570–​71)—​that is, each narrative should strive to capture the event of martyrdom itself, with its accordant affective and phenomenological components, rather than the fuller life of its protagonist.17 The God of Love’s directive essentially asks for the making of things as we’ve seen them portrayed in F (and questioned in G)—​narratives as events, whose unnerving brevity emphasizes the encounter with “excess”—​even as his directive also locks each protagonist’s life into a teleological trajectory, casting off any other material particulars and estranging the protagonists from their own stories. It is here, perhaps, that we feel the vibrant thingness of the Legend most jarringly, suddenly encountering a space between inventional thing and ideological construct—​a discomforting invitation to encounter the poem’s own thingness. Cupid’s command and its problematic complexity are absent from G. As if recognizing the unnerving thingness of the very poem it frames, G pacifies thingness, turning thinges into bokes and vacating the “excess” of F’s sensitivity to its own thingness.18 What, then, about the legends themselves, which do not appear to have been revised when Chaucer revised the prologue? Do they maintain the F Prologue’s effort to emphasize—​even dramatize—​the thingness of the Legend? Kellie Robertson has demonstrated how the poem consciously plays with the idea of poetic matter itself. For medieval poets, Robertson shows, the Middle English word matere refers to both the matter of the physical world and the subject matter of poetry. The Legend stages a tension between agentic, Aristotelian matere that gets away from “the ‘passive’ poet-​ maker dramatized in the Legend’s prologue,” and in so doing it ultimately “resists a Neoplatonic vision of a writer as master over his passive matter by staging a neglectful

16 Rita Copeland notices the change of “thynges” to “bokes” in this line as well, though she reads the change as “substituting terms more specific to a textual culture for the more general terms in F” (Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 264n24). See her discussion of the revisions, pp. 190–​97. 17 See the MED s.v. “gret, adj., adv., n.,” 8.i.

18 For a consideration of the agency of books to speak, generate, and deceive, see Collette, Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend, 23–​31.

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208 Steele Nowlin artisan unaware of the potentially lively literary matter that eludes his own design.”19 Extending Robertson’s thinking, we can observe that the Legend goes even further. In several important places, the specific use of the term thing works to emphasize the inventional thingness of the Legend, and if the prologue and its later revision demonstrate the energy of thing by attempting to curb its metatextual agency, then a narrative like the Legend of Ariadne explores the volatile intricacies and the consequences of agentic thingness in the context of narrative experience. The Legend of Ariadne explores thing from within the narrative space demanded by Cupid’s command for specific, gendered narratives. It relates the story of how Ariadne helps Theseus escape from prison, the labyrinth, and the Minotaur, only to be abandoned on a remote island by Theseus, who then returns to his home with Ariadne’s sister, Phaedra. Phaedra hatches the plan of arranging for Theseus to be equipped with a sword, a ball of twine with which to mark his path through the labyrinth, and a ball of wax and tow to thrust into the monster’s mouth, but it is Ariadne who negotiates for the future stability of her and her sister.20 Ariadne secures a pledge from Theseus that, should she help him slay the Minotaur and escape Crete, he must take back with him both her and Phaedra, who will marry his son Hippolytus. As she succinctly puts it at the end of her offer to Theseus, “This is the final ende of al this thyng” (2101). By “thyng,” Ariadne refers to the entirety of her narrative, which includes preparations for Theseus’ escape, their own futures in Athens, and the “techynge of this Adryane” (2146), that is, the careful narrative she conveys to Theseus to help him defeat the Minotaur. As Sheila Delany argues, Ariadne is the “generator of the narrative of herself and Theseus,”21 and thing here is thus the sum total of Ariadne’s elaborate narrative making, one which weaves together discursive forms, material items, and future marriage plans. When, after their escape, Theseus later abandons Ariadne and she watches his ship sail away, Ariadne for the first time cannot see her own future, her own place in a narrative of events, the “final ende of al this thyng” that she has so far been writing: “I can myselven in this cas nat rede,” she says, before the narrator cuts off “hire compleynyng” to direct his readers to Ovid (2218). For Delany, Ariadne represents the author whose own character—​Theseus—​“escapes the neat script she has prepared.”22 Robert Worth Frank, Jr. writes that, “In Ariadne content flows outside available form. It is not art—​at least not conventional, courtly, fourteenth-​century forms of art—​but experience that is labyrinthine here.”23 But let’s push these readings further and suggest that it is not 19 Robertson, “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto,” 113; Robertson examines in particular lines 1580–​85 in the Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea, which compare Jason’s lust to matter lusting after form. See also her “Materiality and the Hylomorphic Imagination,” 369–​72.

20 Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women, 178. 21 Delany, Naked Text, 210.

22 Delany, Naked Text, 212. For a discussion of the equation of labyrinths with texts and women’s bodies, see Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 78–​80. 23 Frank, Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women, 133.

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simply a maze of lies that has trapped Ariadne, but rather the cumulative effect of a preponderance of narrative process—​the inventional result of following a thing to its fruition, its “final ende,” within the narrative reality demanded by Cupid and made by Chaucer—​that prevents for her any possibility of social connection and thus the chance to activate—​that is, to invent—​those narrative things by which she had previously imagined alternatives to preexisting discourses of power. It’s in this way, then, that the Legend registers the “excess” or “agentic potential” of inventional things and suggests some larger implications of doing so, particularly using the jarring realization of a poem’s “thingness” as a way to ask new questions about literary and cultural forms, in this case, the thematic purpose and generic characteristics of a “legend” of a “good woman,” and a broader, pervasive discourse about gender. But how might this sort of reading of “thing” work in other Chaucerian texts, especially those that might fit—​unlike the Legend—​more neatly into “comfortable” generic and cultural categories, and in cases where the use of “thing” does not seem explicitly to register metatextuality?

The Sufficient Thing of Truth

To approach this question, I  want to look finally at Chaucer’s short lyric poem, Truth, and argue that its rather straightforward and recognizable philosophical advice—​that one should avoid the politicized and materialistic competition of life at court and dwell, instead, “with sothfastness,” or truth—​is grounded in how the poem presents the material things that populate it. Truth bounces back and forth between concrete and abstract things in a way that charges the poem with the “weird” and “vibrant” materiality that I’ve suggested appears in the Legend. Unlike in the Legend, however, which raises more problems than it solves, Truth uses this process to take the extraordinary step of defining what exactly it means by its vague and commonplace advice to be “delivered” by truth and to “dwell with sothfastnesse.” In other words, the things of Truth help the poem to deliver its own conventional advice in a remarkable way, giving its reader a sense of what dwelling with truthfulness might actually feel like. Truth seems to have been the most popular of Chaucer’s short poems,24 and as advice literature, it belongs to the genre of what V. J. Scattergood labels “epistolary curial satire,” which urges its addressee at the start of the first stanza to abandon the “prees” or crowd at court in order to find a sense of freedom and stability that is rooted in one’s sense of self and is achievable only by moving elsewhere both geographically and spiritually.25 The opening stanza establishes this conventional pattern of contrast between the soul-​ crushing political machinations of court and its idyllic alternative: Flee fro the prees and dwelle with sothfastnesse; Suffyce unto thy thing, though it be smal,

24 Chaucer (edited by Pace and David), Minor Poems, 49; Hanna, “Authorial Versions,” 27. 25 Scattergood, “Chaucer’s Curial Satire.”

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210 Steele Nowlin For hord hath hate, and climbing tikelnesse, Prees hath envye, and wele blent overal. Savour no more than thee bihove shal, Reule wel thyself that other folk canst rede, And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. (1–​7)

The things of this stanza are decidedly abstract: hord, hate, envye, tikelness, sothfastnesse, trouthe, but perhaps most puzzling among these is “thy thing” of line two. The sole appearance of the word in the poem, “thing” here refers to the material possessions and the sociopolitical status that readers already have and to which they should “suffyce” themselves, rather than attempt to “climb” in order to gain more stuff and status. The use of thing here is highly charged and rather complicated, and to begin to approach this complexity, I want to take a look first at some of the more ordinary and everyday things that populate the poem, before returning to this stanza and its strange, singular thing. The advice in the second and third stanzas broadens, encouraging readers to forsake Fortune and to govern themselves rather than work to correct worldly wrongs, remembering that real stability can be found only with God. In the middle of this rather abstract and familiar advice, Truth introduces a short catalogue of objects remarkable for their sudden materiality: Tempest thee noght al croked to redresse In trust of hir that turneth as a bal; Gret rest stant in litel besinesse. Be war therefore to sporne ayeyns an al, Stryve not, as doth the crokke with the wal. Daunte thyself, that dauntest otheres dede, And trouthe thee shal delivere, it is no drede. (8–​14)

Contrasting the abstract nouns of the first stanza, these lines offer a ball, an awl (a pointed tool used for making holes, imagined here as piercing a kicking foot), a crock (that is, a piece of crockery), and a wall. While they are presented as figurative comparisons for the self-​destruction that comes from striving in this world rather than focusing on the truth of the next, these things nevertheless take on lives of their own. Kicking against an awl registers the poem’s materiality with wincing sharpness, but the imperative to “Stryve not, as doth the crokke with the wal” presents a sudden image of the crokke itself, independent of human agents, caught in the very moment before it meets the wall to be smashed to pieces. The phrasing of the line emphasizes the agency of the crock: it’s not that someone has thrown the poor thing at a wall, but rather that the crock itself demonstrates agency, perhaps a desire, to “stryve” against the wall. The image of this crock is also captured here at the very last moment of its “crockness”—​in a second, it will be transformed into several new things (shards of crockery), and no longer be a crock. The comparison of worldly striving with the kind of striving a self-​propelled crock does with the wall is, frankly, strange, and the image succeeds in large part because it demands an effort to engage with the point of view of the crock at the precise moment before its self-​destruction. These elements of the crock’s momentary existence in the

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poem combine to heighten an awareness of the thingness of the crock itself, a thingness that will be utterly changed the moment after it hits the wall. But the stanza also consciously plays within a liminal space it establishes between the concrete and the abstract, between the material and immaterial. Its first line of advice, “Tempest thee noght al croked to redress,” bluntly orders its reader not to be troubled by the idea of redressing all crookedness in the world wherever it is encountered. The adjective “croked” means “crooked” in a moral or ethical sense, and it operates here substantively, with its accordant noun, “things,” only implied.26 Aurally, “croked” looks forward to “crokke” in line 12, and the material piece of crockery thus literally echoes the more general condition of moral and ethical crookedness. The connection here is not simply metaphorical, that is, that a piece of crockery is somehow thematically akin to immorality. Instead, the connection established is between materiality and immateriality, and the poem generates a kind of resonance effect, heard between croked and crokke, that bounces us back and forth, focusing on that materiality and immateriality, working to register for us a sense of the thingness of some of these things, their excess, allure, and vitality. It’s here that I’d like to return to the first stanza and the mysterious “thing” of line two. Taken together, the things of the poem and their oscillation between the concrete and abstract are what capture most feelingly the initial urging of the poem: to avoid the “prees” and “suffyce unto thy thing.” This thing is a literal translation of the Latin res, and the line draws on a popular Latin saying misattributed to Seneca: “Si res tue tibi non sufficiant, fac ut rebus tuis sufficias” (If your possessions are not sufficient for you, make yourself sufficient for your possessions).27 John Gower, Chaucer’s friend and contemporary, in his own poetry translates this maxim’s res as “good,”28 but Chaucer’s choice of “thing” inaugurates in the poem an attentiveness to materiality that perhaps matches what Bruce Holsinger calls the lyric’s “muscular prosody.”29 The line’s advice, after all, is not simply to forgo material things in favour of “truth,” but to develop a stable sense of self by “sufficing unto” the material “thing” you already possess. In essence, these lines encourage a particular kind of self-​fashioning that asks readers to shape a sense of self around a thing, rather than to privilege the self over the thing. The poem suggests that this sense of a singular self is knowable because of its contrast to the fractious multiplicity of the prees. Indeed, the “thing” of line two is “smal” because it is singular, self-​contained, and irreducibly individualized when compared to the “prees,” a 26 The Riverside Chaucer provides this implied “things” in its gloss on the line, 653.

27 Text and translation from Chaucer (edited by Pace and David), Minor Poems, 60. The proverb is actually from the De nugis philosophorum of Caecilius Balbus (Scattergood, “Curial Satire,” 39).

28 Cited in Scattergood, “Curial Satire,” 39. Gower’s text is from Confessio Amantis 5.7736–​39, in Complete Works of John Gower, vol. 3, 163.

29 Holsinger, “Lyrics and Shorter Poems,” 198. “Thing” does not appear in line 2 of all copies of the poem, but Pace and David write that “thing, while supported by only four MSS, is obviously the lectio durior, and the MSS are early” (Chaucer, Minor Poems, 60). In fact, fewer than half have thing; the most popular alternative noun here is “good.”

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212 Steele Nowlin collective body whose cumulative material thing is sprawling and acts to blind, confuse, and destabilize any individual who would “climb” by wading into the world of factional politics. To “suffyce unto” your “thing” is to embrace the political and personal stability threatened by the “tiklenesse” of courtly striving—​but this definition of self is achieved only by describing what it is not. As such, it’s something that isn’t so much known as felt. The thing-​sufficed self, then, becomes a sort of materialized condition of displacement, something real and felt, but ultimately unknowable and indescribable, articulable only by contrast. Truth conceptualizes the feeling of an achieved stable self in terms of the kinds of inaccessible agency that modern object and matter studies assigns to things, approaching it only tangentially or in the language of displacement. What the poem finally does, then, is to use this friction created among the different kinds of things to give a more energetic, lively demonstration of what it might mean to “Daunte thyself” and “suffyce unto thy thing,” or to embrace “trouthe” as an alternative to the tickleness and striving of the world. Truth makes into things both the self and the thing to which the self should suffice. In the end, we might say that Truth becomes a “substantive” poem not for its weighty philosophical and spiritual advice, but for its actual, material substances, the particulars of material reality—​the crocks, awls, walls, and central mysterious thing—​which populate it. The work of these overlapping patterns of figuration is ultimately to estrange the material thing itself, to call the addressee to examine the strangeness of striving for such things in the hostile environment of the court, and more generally, to rethink one’s social identity not simply in terms of the forgoing of material things as a whole, but also as a reconceptualization of the idea of thy thing itself. What I’ve tried to do in this chapter is offer object-​or matter-​oriented readings of the word “thing” in two very different poems by Chaucer, showing how in the Legend, the agency of inventional things helps achieve that poem’s project of destabilization and questioning, and how in Truth, the agency of things helps more firmly to establish and dispense very conventional philosophical advice. How might this sort of approach encourage us to rethink the seemingly ordinary thingness of, say, the items I listed in the first paragraph of this chapter? Alternatively, what might we make of some of the more “miraculous” and magical things that appear in some of the Canterbury Tales? Are they Perhaps not really “things”—​in a new materialist or object-​oriented-​ontological sense—​at all?30 How might mapping out the relationship between things and the conditions of their production help us to see more clearly the systems of relation that constitute life for Chaucer’s fourteenth-​ century readers and, by extension, perhaps help us to reconsider those that constitute our 30 Miraculous objects in particular have been the focus of much study. See Caroline Walker Bynum, who likewise argues for the need to consider premodern theories of objects (Bynum, Christian Materiality, 280–​84). For recent work that uses thing theory and object-​oriented ontology to demonstrate how medieval literature registers the strangeness of objects and the unclear boundary between human and nonhuman, see Gayk, “ ‘To wonder upon this thyng,’ ”; and Schuurman, “Materials of Wonder.”

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own?31 And, extending the metatextual approach I’ve tried to offer here, how might we think about form itself as a thing?32 Whatever approach future investigations take, I hope this chapter has at least suggested how looking again at one of the most ordinary words in Chaucer’s poetry, “thing,” might reveal new places for entering an already crowded scholarly conversation, but also for reconsidering the ways in which literature, the things we write and read, becomes a part of the world.

Bibliography Primary Sources Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Minor Poems. Edited by George B. Pace and Alfred David. Vol. 5 of The Variorum Edition of the Works of Geoffrey Chaucer. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. Gower, John. The Complete Works of John Gower. Edited by G.  C. Macaulay. 4  vols. Oxford: Clarendon, 1899–​1902.

Secondary Sources

Bennett, Jane. “Systems and Things: A Response to Graham Harman and Timothy Morton.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 225–​33. ———. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. ———. “A Vitalist Stopover on the Way to a New Materialism.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 47–​69. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Brown, Bill. “Thing Theory.” In Things, edited by Bill Brown, 1–​22. Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2004. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. New York: Zone, 2011. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Introduction: Ecostitial.” In Inhuman Nature, edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, i–​x. Washington: Oliphant, 2014. ———. Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. Collette, Carolyn P. Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2014. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–​43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 31 See, for instance, the work of Cohen, “Introduction:  Ecostitial,” and Stone; Mitchell, Becoming Human. 32 See, for instance, Smith, “Death and Texts.”

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214 Steele Nowlin Delany, Sheila. The Naked Text: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Frank, Robert Worth, Jr. Chaucer and The Legend of Good Women. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. Gayk, Shannon. “ ‘To wonder upon this thyng’:  Chaucer’s Prioress’s Tale.” Exemplaria 22 (2010): 138–​56. Hanna, III, Ralph. “Authorial Versions, Rolling Revision, Scribal Error? Or, the Truth About Truth.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 10 (1988): 23–​40. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Object. Washington, DC: Zero, 2011. ———. “The Well-​Wrought Broken Hammer:  Object-​Oriented Literary Criticism.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 183–​203. Holsinger, Bruce. “Lyrics and Shorter Poems.” In The Yale Companion to Chaucer, edited by Seth Lerer, 179–​212. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Minnis, Alastair J., with V. J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith. The Shorter Poems. Oxford Guides to Chaucer. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Mitchell, J. Allan. Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Morton, Timothy. “An Object-​Oriented Defense of Poetry.” New Literary History 43 (2012): 205–​24. Nuttall, Jenni. “ ‘Many a lay and many a thing’: Chaucer’s Technical Terms.” In Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, edited by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, 21–​37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Percival, Florence. Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Phillips, Helen. “Introduction to the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women.” In Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, edited by Phillips and Nick Havely, 281–​305. New York: Longman, 1997. Robertson, Kellie. “Materiality and the Hylomorphic Imagination.” In Medieval Literature: Criticism and Debates, edited by Holly A. Crocker and D. Vance Smith, 367–​75. New York: Routledge, 2014. ———. “Medieval Materialism: A Manifesto.” Exemplaria 22 (2010): 99–​118. ———. “Medieval Things:  Materiality, Historicism, and the Premodern Object.” Literature Compass 5/​6 (2008): 1060–​80. ———. Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Scattergood, V.  J. “Chaucer’s Curial Satire:  The ‘Balade de bon conseyl.’ ” Hermathena 133 (1982): 29–​45. Schuurman, Anne. “Materials of Wonder:  Miraculous Objects and Poetic Form in Saint Erkenwald.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 39 (2017): 275–​96. Smith, D. Vance. “Death and Texts.” Minnesota Review New Series 80 (2013): 131–​44. Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wuest, Charles. “Chaucer’s Enigmatic Thing in The Parliament of Fowls.” Studies in Philology 113 (2016): 485–​500.

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Steele Nowlin is a Teaching Professor and the Internship Coordinator in the Department of English at Penn State University, where he teaches writing and literature courses, before which he was an Associate Professor of English at Hampden-​Sydney College in Virginia. He is the author of several articles on Chaucer and Gower, and his book, Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention, was published by Ohio State University Press in 2016.

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BLAK CORD J. WHITAKER Miller’s Tale

An essay on

“Black Chaucer” might readily call to mind the question of how Chaucer has been deployed and appropriated by African-​American, Afro-​Caribbean, and other black writers. It might bring to mind work of the sort done by Reginald Wilburn in his magisterial study of African-​American appropriations of Milton or the brilliant essay on Chaucer in the Caribbean by Michelle. R. Warren.2 More such work must be done, and it will be significantly aided by studies that aim to investigate Chaucer’s appeal to black Anglophone writers. Indeed, this study argues that Chaucer might appeal to such writers not only for the same reasons that all medieval literature might appeal to black writers—​namely, that writers in the Anglophone African diaspora have just as much right as any other Anglophone writers to claim the entirety of the English literary canon—​but also that Chaucer’s work lays open to view the value of blackness as an epistemic tool, an apparatus that enables knowledge accumulation, in the medieval English literary and cultural contexts. Black has multiple valences in Chaucer: it is the colour of natural objects, it adorns people, and it constitutes settings. The common denominator is that blackness, the condition of being black, often connotes loss. In Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale, the heroine Dorigen fixates on the “rokkes blake” off the coast of Brittany while she pines for her husband who is away on chivalric endeavours. In the Book of the Duchess, a knight adorned all in black, a metaphor for Chaucer’s real-​life patron and political player John of Gaunt, mourns for his lost beloved, who is herself a metaphor for John’s late wife Blanche. In the Knight’s Tale, suffering Theban noble widows beg Theseus to avenge them and their husbands on the vicious Creon. The widows are clad all in black, and they reveal their plight when Theseus asks them why they dress this way. Blackness connotes the threat of violent death in the Franklin’s Tale, and it connotes the aftermath of death in the Book of the Duchess and the Knight’s Tale. There is strong evidence for the association of blackness with mourning—​whether the context is love, war, or the inevitability of natural death. Suppose, however, that mourning does not encompass the full range of blackness’s meanings in Chaucer. Though all of the above associations with threat and privation are properly classified as causes for mourning, there remains among them significant 1

1 Portions of this essay have already appeared in Whitaker, Black Metaphors, used here by kind permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press. 2 Wilburn, Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt; Warren, “ ‘The Last Syllable of Modernity.’ ”

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distinction—​between love and war, for instance, and between violent death by crashing into the rocks and natural death caused by illness. The breadth of blackness’s deployments within the context of mourning suggest that blackness is extraordinarily malleable: that if deployed in another context, its available uses may be equally multitudinous, and that blackness can be deployed in a similarly broad array of contexts. What if blackness in Chaucer, and in the Middle Ages more generally, is more complicated, more useful, even more pleasant than the black mourning in my examples in the Franklin’s Tale, the Book of the Duchess, and the Knight’s Tale have suggested? What happens if blackness is wrested from its then-​as-​now common associations with privation and instead is not symbolic of a particular affect or condition in an individual nor even a condition distributed across a group, but rather it is an epistemic tool imagined to be universally applicable and meant to aid in the production of knowledge no matter in whom, on whom, or where it appears? Indeed, Chaucer’s work demonstrates that blackness’s epistemic implications far supersede the limits of mourning. In Troilus and Criseyde black is offered as a key player in a semiotics, a sign-​system used to convey meaning, with near universal implications: By his contrarie is every thyng declared.

For how myghte evere swetnesse han ben knowe To him that nevere tasted bittrenesse? […] Eke whit by blak, by shame ek worthinesse, Ech set by other, more for other semeth, As men may se, and so the wyse it demeth. (1.637–​44)

Just as you cannot tell white without black and vice versa, you cannot tell sweetness without bitterness or righteousness without shame. It is every thing that is “declared” in this way. Blackness with its contrary, whiteness, produces meaning in contexts material, such as sweetness and bitterness, and abstract or spiritual, such as shame and worthiness. Though mourning engages material and spiritual conditions, Troilus demonstrates that the semiotics of black-​and-​white contrariety exceed the context of mourning. Taking its cue from Troilus, Black Chaucer, this essay’s novel method, posits blackness as a universal tool whose implications, uses, and meanings extend beyond, even as they are informed by, any one individual instance, whether in Chaucer’s oeuvre or elsewhere. This essay puts Black Chaucer, as a mode of analysis, to the test by applying it to one of Chaucer Studies’ most perplexing problems. Since at least Charles Muscatine’s 1957 Chaucer and the French Tradition, scholars have puzzled over the treatment of justice in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.3 Why does Alisoun, an unrepentant adulteress, go unpunished while her husband is punished for jealousy, her lover for adultery, and her would-​be lover for covetousness and transgressing the Church’s requirement of clerical celibacy? Muscatine details the errors of the men: the error of folksy religion, the error of faith in 3 Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition, 226–​28, details the errors of the men. He deals with Alisoun in 228–​30.

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intellect, and the error of faith in romantic Love rather than God. Of Alisoun, however, he says only that she “sets in motion the lovemaking of the poem.” Critics have continued to question, as John Hines puts it, why “the only character in the tale who cannot be regarded as the target figure in any way is Alison […] who sails through […] laughing and unscathed.”4 Building on Janette Richardson’s argument that Alisoun acts “purely in accordance with ‘nature’ ” and Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s that Alisoun is an animalistic, objectified woman, Hines has suggested that Alisoun’s objectification, in and of itself, may be the reason she escapes unscathed.5 After all, he writes, she is “seen totally from the outside,” characterized only by her appearance and actions. All these critics argue that Alisoun is objectified and superficial. I  wholeheartedly agree, and it is this very fact—​her skin-​deep character, her “sheer embodiedness”—​that makes Alisoun and the Miller’s Tale an ideal case study for deploying the Black Chaucer method. Black Chaucer offers us new conclusions about the Miller’s Tale, and at the same time enlightens its reader about the functions of difference (physical and otherwise) in the medieval European world. Alisoun, and her husband, suitor, and would-​be suitor, are all English and ostensibly white. Late medieval thought, however, would not have readers limit their consideration of Alisoun to the colour of her skin. Such a limitation would be decidedly modern. In the Middle Ages, one of the most important ways to think about physical difference was through physiognomy, or “the art of deciphering one’s character by the external appearance of his or her bodily organs and an analysis of their size, proportion, shape, colour, hairiness, and motion.”6 A person’s clothes and other accessories can be integral to their physiognomic depiction, too. Alisoun’s description in the blazon, or effictio, with which the Miller characterizes her is resplendent with physiognomic signs: A ceynt she werede, barred al of silk, A barmclooth as whit as morne milk Upon hir lendes, ful of many a gore. Whit was hir smok, and broyden al bifoore And eek bihynde, on hir coler aboute, Of col-​blak silk, withinne and eek withoute. The tapes of hir white voluper Were of the same suite of hir coler; […]

4 Hines, Fabliau, 113. 5 Hines, Fabliau, 115, 225.

6 Joseph Ziegler, “Text and Context,” 159. Some scholars argue that medieval physiognomy is not racial because it focuses on the individual rather than groups. In Ziegler, “Skin and Character,” 527, he writes that “generally the physiognomic texts of the middle ages and the early renaissance avoided ethnic physiognomy and focused their attention on the human individual.” Yet, his findings support the thesis that medieval physiognomy is part of the development of racial ideology in that “the occasional ethnic references in Pseudo-​Aristotle’s physiognomy encouraged his commentators to make a contribution to the ethnic debate […] In c­ hapter 9 the author determines that northerners are stronger and have rougher hair while southerners are more timid and have softer hair.”

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Cord J. Whitaker Ful smale ypulled were hire browes two, And tho were bent and blake as any sloo. […] Ful brighter was the shynyng of hire hewe Than in the Tour the noble yforged newe. (1.3235–​56, emphasis added)

Alisoun’s effictio is the pair of contraries from Troilus brought to life: “whit by blak.” Her apron is white. Her smock is white and embroidered. Either the embroidery is black on her smock and her collar, or her collar is made of black silk yet equally embroidered. The syntax is unclear. The ribbons that hang down from her cap are the same as her collar: either white with black silk or mainly of black silk with other embroidery. Her eyebrows are black as a sloe, the small, black, plum-​like fruit of the blackthorn, and they are set off against skin that is as bright as a new gold coin. The “brightness” of her “hue” suggests not that it is golden like a coin. Rather, the comparison is between how much her skin shines and how much a new polished coin might. In other words, her skin reflects a lot of light. The prominence of that reflection suggests her skin’s whiteness. The details demonstrate the main point: the interplay between black and white characterizes her beauty—​that of her body as well as what she uses to cover it. Alisoun’s blackness and whiteness, in her clothes and in her phenotype, respond to the theological and philosophical importance of black-​and-​white pairing in medieval thought. In the Middle Ages, no colours elicit “moral shades” more than black and white. Referring to an episode in the Cursor Mundi, an encyclopedic text written around 1325, in which four black hideous monsters turn white and beautiful upon conversion to Christianity, Geraldine Heng writes: “Black is damned, white is saved. Black, of course, is the colour of devils and demons […] Elite human beings of the 14th century have a hue, and it is white.”7 Alisoun confounds the dichotomy on display in the Cursor Mundi in that she is depicted in black and white. Alisoun is not damned, and she is not saved. Indeed, the interplay of “morally shaded” black and white in her appearance is peculiar in that neither overpowers the other. Many other texts often cited in critical medieval race studies, such as the crusades romance King of Tars, feature protagonists who are characterized by whiteness and antagonists who are depicted with blackness. In such cases, interpretations appear, at least at first, to be simple cases of “black is damned, white is saved.” Alisoun’s depiction, in which neither colour is dominant, is particularly demanding of interpretation. The complexity of Alisoun’s presentation registers the value of the physiognomic tradition. The physiognomic tradition can be exemplified by the case of the Secretum Secretorum. Physiognomic science’s importance can be discerned in the fact that, while we have only eighty-​two manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, whether in whole or in part, over 500 manuscripts of the Secretum Secretorum remain extant: the Secretum, a purported letter of advice from Aristotle to Alexander the Great, contains one of the 7 Heng, Invention of Race, 16.

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Middle Ages’ most popular physiognomic texts—​one whose circulation was so varied, and so often independent from the rest of the text, that it had “a life of its own.”8 Alisoun’s presentation also registers the complexity of blackness’s place within the physiognomic tradition. Tracing blackness in the Secretum, it quickly becomes clear that its significance is contested. In medieval physiognomies, “temperate” colour is categorically lauded as a sign of good character, a person who embodies spiritual rectitude. Historian of physiognomy Joseph Ziegler notes that mediocritas—​in-​the-​middle-​ness—​is the ideal physiognomic state, and in medieval Christendom physiogonomies employ the face of Christ as mediocritas’s paradigm.9 In fact, the paradigmatic face’s colour often included brown, as it does in the Secretum physiognomy version that appears in British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E.16.10 In addition to darkness’s association with evil and inferiority, as the “colour of devils and demons,” darkness is also a necessary element in the most desirable, even the holiest, of appearances such as that of Christ. Attention to medieval colour theory reveals that Alisoun is crafted in the image of mediocritas. As conveyed in Aristotle’s Physics and Metaphysics, classical and medieval colour theory held that all colours are made up of only two primary colours: black and white. In Physics 1.5, Aristotle builds on earlier philosophical observations that principal elements are some couple of “antithetical qualities or forces” such as hot and cold. These qualities or conditions, “because they are primary, they cannot be derived from anything else, and because they are antithetical, they cannot rise out of each other.” Aristotle clarifies this formulation with the thesis that whenever anything comes into being or ceases to be it moves along “a determined line,” across a spectrum of being, that is bookended by two contrasted primary elements. Using colours as his example, he writes: since the intermediates are compounded in various degrees out of the opposite terms of the contrasted couple (colours, for instance, out of white and black), it follows that all things that come into existence in the course of nature are either opposites themselves or are compounded of opposites.11

In the Metaphysics, Aristotle alludes to black and white’s primacy again when he examines the nature of being—​similarity and difference, unity and plurality: in the sphere of colours unity is a colour, e.g. white; that is if all the other colours are apparently derived from white and black, and black is a privation of white, as darkness is of light.12

8 Keiser, “Filling a Lacuna,” 382.

9 Ziegler, “Physiognomy,” 184, writes that “like Adam, [Christ] enjoyed a perfectly balanced complexion.” This included a face that “was without a wrinkle or any spot, and that a moderate touch of red beautified it.”

10 Keiser provides the text of the Cotton Vespasian Secretum physiognomy in “Filling a Lacuna.” See also my discussion of colour, the skin, and physiognomic abbreviation in Whitaker, Race and Conversion, 95–​107. 11 Aristotle, Physics 1.5 (188b22–​26).

12 Aristotle, Metaphysics 10.2 (1053b25–​36).

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Black, with white, is a fundamental and essential building block. All other colours are comprised of them. Alisoun’s depiction, encompassing the bookends of blackness and whiteness, embodies her in-​the-​middle-​ness. Her position is bolstered by the fact that she is the object of desire for three men. She is as much in the middle as a person might be. But is Alisoun’s in-​the-​middleness the same as that of Christ, in whom mediocritas is a sign of perfection? To answer the question requires recognizing that blackness operates variously in the making of meaning. An example that makes clearer the complexity of blackness’s position in Chaucer’s late Middle Ages is to be had in Oxford Franciscan Roger Bacon’s mid-​thirteenth-​century scholarly version of the Secretum physiognomy. While brown is certainly associated with black in the physiognomic tradition, as it is in the Cotton Vespasian manuscript, Bacon’s version demonstrates that blackness per se is often discussed as part of temperate colour. In Bacon’s version, blackness is a key part of what makes up the optimal complexion. Bacon writes: Quando vero natura declinat ad nigredinem et croecitatem, tunc est optima temperancia; creacio hec placeat tibi, hanc habeas tecum.13 (When in truth nature declines toward blackness and yellowness, then this is optimal temperance; this creation will please you, this person keep with you.)

While the Cotton Vespasian and closely associated manuscript versions use brownness, and some texts, including another portion of Bacon’s, use the vaguer fuscus (dark), this portion of Bacon’s text is clear and forceful: optimal temperance is conveyed by skin so dark it “declines toward blackness.” This gives a strikingly positive air to a colour otherwise associated with evil and lack. Blackness is sometimes deployed as a positive in addition to its more standard negative meaning. The life of blackness in manuscripts derived from Bacon’s shows that, though blackness’s sometimes-​laudatory-​and-​sometimes-​derogatory valences are notable, its role in the creation of meaning is more complicated still. Bacon’s treatment of blackness was not ubiquitous, and as physiognomies were copied and recopied, became freestanding texts, and were incorporated into narratives such as Chaucer’s, they also became compressed and their information less nuanced. Despite a rather direct relationship between Bacon’s Secretum and later abbreviations circulating in Europe, the explicit mention of blackness’s role in temperateness became too much for the abbreviated physiognomies to bear. French and English abbreviations held in the British Library and at Cambridge, MS Royal 18.A.7, and Cambridge University Library, MS F.f.I.33, follow exactly the portion of Bacon’s Vulgate Secretum that mentions “temperately dark colour” (fuscus color temperatus). But these manuscripts, and with them the Cotton Vespasian version, are silent on the worth of a man whose complexion “declines toward blackness.” The Royal and Cotton Vespasian texts’ proclamation on the worth of a man 13 Bacon, Opera, 167.

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with the “visage round, coloured white & rede & bron medled togedres” (round face, coloured white and red and brown mixed together) is followed by Þoo men haue hole hertes and trewe þat haue þe hede mene not to litell ne to grete and speken litell but if hit be need and þe voice swete. Such complexioun is good and suche men take nygh to þe.14 (those men have whole and true hearts whose heads are average, not too little nor too big and who speak little unless speech is necessary and whose voices are sweet. Such a complexion is good and such men take near unto yourself.)

This passage corresponds to the Vulgate’s passage on the size of the head and the voice. The only detail from that section that this passage in the abbreviations does not render is the “optima temperancia” [optimal temperance] of a man whose skin approaches blackness and yellowness. Indeed, this is the sole detail from this section that the English abbreviations do not render. They avoid the word blackness (nigredinem) altogether, preferring to translate instead the section immediately before it that uses the less committal fuscus color temperatus (dark temperate colour).15 The complicated nature of blackness meant that scribes were happy to omit explicit instances while keeping vaguer and more murky references that leave intact a fairly pronounced trace of blackness. Establishing the variety of blackness’s deployments facilitates the examination of exactly how blackness underwrites meaning in the Miller’s Tale per se. To view Alisoun through the black Chaucerian lens is to take into account the presence of blackness’s power to produce meaning when it is explicitly present, when it appears absent, and when its status is unclear or little more than a trace. Alisoun’s black brows over a shining face, her milk-​white and coal-​black adornments—​even when there is no black-​skinned character in the tale—​draw to attention the abiding presence of blackness. The blackness in Alisoun’s depiction does not occur in a vacuum, and blackness produces meaning in concert with its contrary primary colour, whiteness. Indeed, 14 Keiser, “Filling a Lacuna,” 386; MS Cotton Vespasian, fol. 83b.

15 Immediately before extolling blackness, Bacon’s Vulgate Secretum (Opera, 167) reads “Equior et temperacior creatura est que convenit mediocritati stature cum nigredine oculorum et capillorum et cum rotunditate vultus. Albedo vero commixta rubedini est bona. Et fuscus color temperatus cum integritate corporis, et rectitude stature ac capitis mediocritas in parvitate et magnitudine, et raritas verborum nisi cum necesse fuerit, mediocritas in sonoritate vocis et subtilitate” (The creature more even and temperate is he that brings together mediocre stature with black eyes and hair and with a round face. White, in truth, mixed with red is good. And temperately dark colour with a whole body, and right stature and a head midway in between smallness and largeness, and rare of words unless they become necessary, moderateness in melodiousness and refined nature of the voice). Though we cannot be certain either the Royal, Cotton Vespasian, or the Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.I.33 scribes had access to Bacon’s version, which was circulating in England as early as the late 1260s, we do know that the English versions follow the French in rendering the word for dark, fuscus, as brown instead of black. The French reads “La meilleur complecion qui sort est de celui qui est de moyenne forme quia les yeux et les cheueux noirs et le visaige ront et la couleur entre blanche et vermeilles et broune meslee ensemble.”

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Alisoun’s in-​the-​middleness calls for a closer consideration of late medieval thought on black and white as signs in relation to one another and the world. Pseudo-​Aristotle’s De coloribus, believed to have been translated from Greek into Latin by Bartholomew of Messina between 1258 and 1266, strives to offer a comprehensive explanation for why and how colours exist.16 There are only two simple primary colours, the text follows Aristotle in asserting, and these are white and black. From these “the rest are derived in all their variety of chromatic effects by blending of them and by their presence in varying strengths.”17 Pure elements—​air, water, fire, and earth—​are, according to the text, “by nature white.” Black, the text continues, “is the proper colour of elements in transmutation.”18 White and black are central to meaning. White is the colour of an entity with a stable and uncontested identity, while black is the colour of change. White is the colour of meaning fixed and finished, and black is the colour of meaning in the process of being made. If the written-​over page is mostly white, it is imperative to remember that the ink flowing from the pen is black. Black Chaucer, the examination of blackness’s deployments in the European Middle Ages and in premodernity more broadly, lays open to view Alisoun’s semiotic implications. Alisoun is a transitional being:  between men, between beauty and rottenness—​like the sweet-​smelling but quickly rotting fruit of the pere-​jonette tree to which the tale compares her—​and between meaning made and meaning in the making, she sports the colours that enhance her beauty because contraries “constitute coexisting differences” and encompass all other colours. They define one another “in a way that,” to quote Helen Solterer, “admits the separate distinctiveness of each.”19 Alisoun’s depiction is a study in how disparate parts—​especially elements that might seem opposed—​work in concert and inextricably to create meaning. In addition to what it reveals about the complexity of blackness’s semiotic and moral implications, physiognomies’ interest in Christlike mediocritas suggests a focus on spiritual improvement. The freestanding Secretum physiognomy often begins with an exemplum in which physiognomy shows the historical Hippocrates to be by nature “lecherouse and baretous and boystous” (lecherous, quarrelsome, and coarse). But through “high wisdom and reason” he “refrains himself” from his negative traits.20 In Roger Bacon’s version, Hippocrates explains, “I positioned my soul king over itself.”21 Alisoun’s case is different:  she strives against nothing; she fulfills all her desires. In embodying blackness and whiteness, she enfolds the two extremes of the colour spectrum, the two primary colours out of which all things are made. Ultimately, she 16 For further treatment of De coloribus’s authorship, translation, and transmission, see Dod, “Aristoteles Latinus,” 49. 17 Aristotle (Pseudo-​), “De coloribus,” 792a.

18 Aristotle (Pseudo-​), “De coloribus,” 791a. 19 Solterer, Master and Minerva, 103.

20 Cotton Vespasian version in Keiser, “Filling a Lacuna,” 386. 21 Bacon, Opera, 165.

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embodies all: sin and salvation, darkness and light, wrong and right. She embodies all the things we have come to associate with black and white. Yet, in her, neither overpowers the other. Alisoun’s intertwined blackness and whiteness means that she represents the whole spectrum by which things are defined and the things being defined, the instrument and that which it measures. Because she physically embodies blackness and whiteness and the meaning their interplay facilitates, or the page and the writing upon it, is why she is not judged in the end. Black Chaucer opens to view new critical possibilities for the Miller’s Tale and other Chaucerian texts, but its critical utility is not limited to Chaucer, nor England, nor the Middle Ages. Using Chaucer as representative of premodernity’s immanence in modernity, Black Chaucer speaks to the value of identifying black’s and blackness’s presences in classical as well as medieval premodernity. The method speaks to the value of examining black’s and blackness’s premodern deployments, their roles, and the expectations hung upon them. Black Chaucer is a method of exploring how black and blackness in premodernity presage, influence, and direct modernity. Writing phenomenologically on “black social life” and in answer to Frantz Fanon’s “Fact of Blackness” in Black Skin, White Masks, Fred Moten defines black people as “the extra-​ ontological, extra-​political constant—​a destructive, healing agent; a stolen, transplanted organ always eliciting rejection; a salve whose soothing lies in the abrasive penetration of the merely typical […] a dangerous supplement, as the fact out of which everything else emerges, [as] constitutive.”22 Blackness makes meaning. Black Chaucer demonstrates just how thoroughly, fundamentally, and inescapably this is the case—​in modernity as in the Middle Ages, and when, as with Alisoun, it is not at all apparent at first glance. Though modes of expression may change drastically, the making of meaning knows no temporal bounds.

Bibliography Primary Sources Aristotle (Pseudo-​). “De coloribus.” In The Works of Aristotle Translated into English under the Editorship of W. D. Ross, M.A., vol. 6, edited by T. Loveday and E. S. Forster, 791a–​799b. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913. Reprinted as “On Colours.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 1219–​28. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Reprint, 1995. Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by H.  Tredennick. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard University Press, 1935. ———. Physics. Translated by P. H. Wicksteed and F. M. Cornford. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1929. Reprint, 1957. Bacon, Roger. Opera hactenus inedita Rogeri Baconi, edited by Robert Steele. London: Oxford University Press, 1920. 22 Moten, “Case of Blackness,” 186–​87.

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Secondary Sources “The 21-​Second Excitation.” The Big Bang Theory. Aired November 11, 2010. www.youtube. com/​watch?v=g_​OgWZfP-​qA. Accessed September 11, 2018. Bristow, Jane. “The Miller’s Tale:  Wahala Dey Oh!” FringeGuru, August 25, 2012. www. fringeguru.com/ ​ reviews/ ​ e dinburgh- ​ 2 012/ ​ t he- ​ m illers- ​ t ale- ​ wahala- ​ d ey- ​ o h.html. Accessed September 26, 2018. Broadberry, Stephen, and Leigh Gardner. “Africa’s Growth Prospects in a European Mirror: A Historical Perspective.” The CAGE-​Chatham House Series 5 (February 2013), 1–​12. www. chathamhouse.org/​sites/​default/​files/​public/​Research/​International%20Economics/​ 0213bp_​africagrowth.pdf. Accessed September 10, 2018. Dod, Bernard G. “Aristoteles Latinus.” In the Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, vol. 2, edited by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Hannaford, Ivan. Race: The History of an Idea in the West. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press/​Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1996. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Hines, John. The Fabliau in English. London: Longman, 1993. Kaplan, Paul H.  D. The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1985. Keiser, George R. “Filling a Lacuna in a Middle English ‘Secretum Secretorum.’ ” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 96.4 (1995): 381–​88. McBain, Sophie. “Is Sub-​Saharan Africa like Medieval Europe?” New Statesman (October 2, 2013). www.newstatesman.com/​world-​affairs/​2013/​10/​sub-​saharan-​africa-​medieval-​ europe. Accessed September 10, 2018. Moten, Fred. “The Case of Blackness.” Criticism 50.2 (2008): 177–​218. Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Otterson, Joe. “Delayed Viewing Ratings:  ‘Big Bang Theory’ Winter Premiere Starts 2018 Strong.” Variety, January 22, 2018. https://​variety.com/​2018/​tv/​news/​delayed-​viewing-​ ratings-​big-​bang-​theory-​1202672447/​. Accessed September 25, 2018. Parsons, Gordon. “Edinburgh Fringe 2012 Round-​up.” Morning Star, August 16, 2012. www. Accessed September summerhall.co.uk/​?press=edinburgh-​fringe-​2012-​round-​up. 12, 2018. Redfern, Rebecca C., Michael Marshall, Katherine Eaton, and Hendrik N. Poinar “ ‘Written in Bone’: New Discoveries about the Lives and Burials of Four Roman Londoners.” Britannia 48 (2017): 253–​77. “RIB 1064: Funerary Inscription for Victor.” In Roman Inscriptions of Britain, vol. 1, edited by R. G. Collingwood and R. P. Wright. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965. Reprint, 1995. https://​ romaninscriptionsofbritain.org. Accessed September 10, 2018. Solterer, Helen. The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Warren, Michelle R. “ ‘The Last Syllable of Modernity’: Chaucer in the Caribbean.” postmedieval 6.1 (2015): 79–​93.

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Whitaker, Cord J. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-​Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. ———. Race and Conversion in Late Medieval England. PhD dissertation, Duke University, 2009. Wilburn, Reginald A.  Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt: Appropriating Milton in Early African American Literature. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2014. Ziegler, Joseph. “Physiognomy, Science, and Proto-​Racism 1200–​1500.” In The Origins of Racism in the West, edited by Miriam Eliav-​Feldon, Benjamin Isaac, and Joseph Ziegler, 181–​99. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. ———. “Skin and Character in Medieval and Early Renaissance Physiognomy.” Micrologus: natura, scienze e societa medievali 13 (2005): 511–​35. ———. “Text and Context: On the Rise of Physiognomic Thought in the Later Middle Ages.” In De Sion exibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem: Essays on Medieval Law, Liturgy, and Literature in Honour of Amnon Linder, edited by Yitzhak Hen, 159–​82. Turnhout: Brepols, 2001.

Cord J. Whitaker is Associate Professor of English at Wellesley College. He works on the development of racial ideology and its intimate relationship with medieval rhetorical theory as well as the roles of popular and scholarly medievalisms in nineteenth-​ through twenty-​first-​century racial politics. His Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-​Thinking (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) argues for the close relationship between race, medieval rhetoric, and modern politics. He is writing another book on African-​American writers’ radical uses of medievalism and the Middle Ages in the Harlem Renaissance. Whitaker is also the editor of the award-​ winning postmedieval special issue “Making Race Matter in the Middle Ages” (6.1, 2015). He is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Institute for Advanced Study, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other organizations.

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RESPONSE: VERTU, WAL, THING, BLAK CAROLYN DINSHAW A night dark as pitch, an open window, a kiss, a blade, somebody’s “hole”: it’s a setting full of angry, mean possibilities where anything can happen. Humiliation and rage confront brash self-​confidence and erotic energy with a sharp object. A fart brings it all down: bodies and intentions, pokers and odours collide. This is, of course, the denouement of the Miller’s Tale, the tale Cord Whitaker has so provocatively taken up in his essay. Whitaker focuses on the effictio of Alisoun, the description of her body, at the outset of the tale; I want to shift to the final scene in order to explore the implications of Whitaker’s essay as well as the essays by Holly A. Crocker, Marion Turner, and Steele Nowlin. All four are set against fixed boundaries, lead us productively into category confusion, share an antifoundational orientation. The identity categories these articles take up (race, gender, the human) are not binary in their internal dynamics (white or black, male or female, human or nonhuman) but, rather, there’s an “interplay,” to use Whitaker’s term, between black and white; between male and female; between human and nonhuman. Both/​and rather than either/​or: this is the way even walls can work in Chaucerian fictions. These articles collectively argue against pure and stable categories. Let’s pick up the Miller’s Tale where Whitaker leaves off, then, and see what this antifoundational orientation leads us to see. This fateful final scene shows Alisoun and Nicholas, having engineered a night of sex, interrupted by the eager would-​be lover Absolon at the bedroom window. As everyone who has read the tale will remember, Alisoun tricks him into kissing her nether parts; in a fury he returns to avenge himself on her with a hot blade, but instead finds himself in the line of fire of Nicholas’s flatulence. As a result of this scene, poetic justice is rendered for all the characters: Absolon is too fastidious and especially hates farts, so he receives one full in the face; the poor husband John, too old and jealous for his hot wife, is ridiculed by his neighbours, his arm broken in a fall occasioned by his ignorance and credulousness; Nicholas steals the wife for an adulterous escapade, so he gets burned in the ass. It’s a contrapasso scene worthy of Dante. Except, as Whitaker and a host of critics have noted, Alisoun is not punished. Why not? Whitaker’s powerful answer to this long-​standing critical conundrum is that because Alisoun embodies a principle of meaning making itself, she alone is exempted from the punitive judgments visited on the others. They are treated to adjustments of their personal character imbalances, but she has a much more general function:  she is knowledge production itself, the blackness of her eyebrows and the whiteness of her smock shimmering in productive epistemic interplay.1 Extending 1 “Shimmer” is the verb Whitaker uses for this dynamic interplay in his full-​length exploration of blackness in medieval literature; see Whitaker, Black Metaphors.

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Whitaker’s analysis, we can see that the narrative action itself in this final scene shimmers between light and dark: in the brightness of morning the carpenter leaves for business, in the darkness of night Nicholas, Alisoun, and Absolon get up to their amorous hijinks. The night for ignorant John is full of perils that flash up—​wicked creatures, evil spirits (1.3484–​85); for the blacksmith from whom Absolon gets his weapon it’s work time, lit up by his hearth; for Nicholas and Alisoun it’s play time, sparked by desire; for Absolon, too, nighttime is the right time (but staying up late requires a disco nap in the afternoon [1.3685–​86]). Nighttime is when the day’s plans unfold, when meanings are unmade—​what was that that Absolon kissed? “[W]‌el he wiste a womman hath no berd” (1.3737)—​and remade. Alisoun in the midst of it all physically embodies knowledge production and knowledge accumulation itself; these are valued, Whitaker maintains, and therefore require no punishment, discipline, correction.2 I will return to the guiding question of Alisoun’s impunity, but first let me observe that all of this action takes place not only at night, lit up by sparks of the blacksmith’s anvil, but also at a “wyndowe /​That stant ful lowe upon his [the carpenter’s] boures wal” (1.3676–​77). Marion Turner’s article helps us see, and even expect, that the walls in the Miller’s Tale will be sites where definitions can’t hold, where dangerous crossings take place. John the carpenter has taken a lodger, for starters:  the outside has come inside, the threat to his January–​May marriage lives within his walls. And memorably, that wily boarder shuts himself inside his room to inaugurate the scheme to violate John’s marriage: the room’s door must be violently broken down in order for the plan to begin. In fact, if walls in Chaucer’s works are ineffective and porous boundaries, as Turner so astutely shows, windows are where all hell breaks loose. Hinting at the chaos to come, Absolon’s shoes are described as decorated with “Poules wyndow” (1.3318). He serenades Alisoun—​on a previous night as she is sleeping with her husband—​“under oure boures wal” (1.3367); when he comes back on the fateful night, thinking her alone, he sidles up to the window, asks for a kiss and ends up with his lips touching “hir hole” (1.3732). Bent on revenge, Absolon returns to the window after grabbing a red-​ hot “kultour” (1.3776), an iron plow blade, from the obliging blacksmith. The rest of the narrative is played out jollily as Alisoun and Nicholas run into the dark street—​beyond those domestic walls—​to share the fun with the neighbours, burned butt and all. Narrow definitions, narrow cages be damned. So Alisoun runs free of her husband’s dreary control, and also free from retributive judgment. We’re back to that question of why: what would Holly A. Crocker’s answer 2 Whitaker’s argument is fascinating in its intention to trace a “universally applicable” principle that will “presage, influence, and direct” modern racialization. He takes up a Chaucerian tale that appears not to engage racial dynamics at all (unlike, say, the Man of Law’s Tale, whose narrative world includes Syrian Muslims and indigenous Britons), because he understands those dynamics of racialization to be working always. For a groundbreaking survey of racialization in premodern Europe, see Heng, Invention of Race. For an analysis of racial dynamics, and their intersections with religion, gender, and sexuality, in the Man of Law’s Tale, see Dinshaw, “Pale Faces”; here, “paleness” plays a role complementary to “blackness” in Whitaker’s work: both terms work against the stability and integrity of the concept of whiteness.

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be? Alisoun is no Prudence, God knows, and modern readers have tended to like her a whole lot more than they do that virtuous figure of speech. The current readerly aversion to Prudence in the Melibee is Crocker’s starting point, of course, but she goes on to demonstrate the potential attractiveness—​even to us now—​of a model of subjectivity that emerges from vulnerability, contingency, and openness to others. This is a feminist subjectivity, Crocker argues, not because those virtues are intrinsic to women but, rather, because they are most often found in women in the late medieval period under discussion. But they are neither masculine nor feminine in themselves; they are not even necessarily human, Crocker avers: being vulnerable means being open to the material world of which we are a part. Alisoun of the Miller’s Tale has nothing to do with such ethical vertu—​“Tehee!” (1.3740) is more her style—​and indeed, as Whitaker positions her, she might even be seen as a “master of meanings” to which Crocker seeks an alternative.3 Be that as it may, it’s incontestable that to inquire into the virtue of Alisoun makes no sense. But Crocker’s analysis helps us pose the question of how gender—​an explicit element of the narrative, unlike its implicit racialization—​factors into Alisoun’s meaning and function in the tale. Does she—​like the allegorical Prudence—​model a subjectivity or a self at all? If, as Whitaker’s analysis suggests, she is the condition of the tale itself, its principle of meaning making, can she also have a self? Some feminist criticism over the years has asserted that Alisoun, the sole woman among the tale’s personnel, eludes judgment because femininity itself is unknowable; it defies and defeats dominant masculine epistemologies.4 Prudence is an open book (or books, since, as Crocker notes, her speech consists of well-​known proverbs), but Alisoun skips and plays (1.3259) and can’t be defined. Maybe she even disappears at the end, a vanishing into the dark night that confirms her ultimate mystery and power. Or her ultimate disempowerment—​for there’s no feminist critical consensus on Alisoun’s force, capacity, or agency. Some critics have darkly pointed out that she may not be punished but she was certainly supposed to be: Absolon’s red-​hot iron blade was intended for her, and “it’s only an accident […] that saves the female from punishment.”5 Nicholas substitutes his “ers” (1.3802) for Alisoun’s, and with that “accident” the whole scenario shifts from the figurative rape of a woman to contact between two men, achieved with a phallic blade. Critics have noted these homosocial dynamics between Nicholas and Absolon, with Alisoun the token between them; she may be thus deprived of any real agency or subjectivity at all (this would be Elaine Tuttle Hansen’s point).6 Or, rather, 3 Crocker quotes philosopher Charles Taylor here.

4 The classic articulation of this theoretical argument is Kristeva, “Woman Can Never Be Defined.” For an extension to the Miller’s Tale, see Bishop, “ ‘Of Goddes pryvetee nor of his wyf.’ ”

5 Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, 226. Nicole Nolan Sidhu maintains that the tale “avoids the problem of rape and bypasses male violence against women by having Nicholas take the brunt of Absolon’s revenge”; see Sidhu, Indecent Exposure, 87. Karma Lochrie observes that Alisoun disappears at the end of the tale, her absence a consequence of her abstraction into a prank between men; see Lochrie, “Women’s ‘Pryvetees.’ ” 6 See Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, 226–​40.

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her feminine marginalization, “resonant presence/​absence” and “abjection” are being explored as models for productive powerlessness, as Glenn Burger hypothesizes in a critical reading that draws from feminist criticism but revalues it queerly: a lack of selfhood could be grounds for liberation.7 The distinction between male and female is completely muddled at the window, and this category breakdown is one route to the heart of the tale’s dark analysis—​and the reason Alisoun is not punished. Prudence is beaten by Melibee’s foes, and their daughter Sophie is wounded “in fyve sondry places—​ /​ this is to seyn, in hir feet, in hire hands, in hir erys, in hir nose, and in hire mouth” (7.971–​72): the narrative of the Melibee delineates the body precisely and the body’s allegorical meaning is clear. But what body part, exactly, did Absolon kiss? Readers have been uncertain how to interpret the three different terms used, “hole” (1.3732), “ers” (1.3734), and “nether ye” (1.3852). It could be her “vagina” that he “[f]‌ul savourly” kissed (1.3735) but it seems more likely, because of her positioning at the window, that it was her anus—​and if the anus, then, well, everyone has one, so gender difference (either thrillingly or terrifyingly) shimmers in the dark. Not either/​or but rather both/​and: this woman does have a beard.8 Following this thought further—​this failure of exclusive binary gender categories to hold—​perhaps the narrative presents a different kind of body altogether. John Block Friedman has recently suggested that here Chaucer morphs “face and bottom,” beard and “eye” and ass and genitals, creating a “hybrid.”9 Avoiding the fixity that “hybrid” implies and embracing, rather, the dynamism of crossing, mixing, and confounding binary gender categories, we might call this a trans body. Transgender theory—​with its focus on embodiment—​may best illuminate what’s happening here to identity and subjectivity in the dark.10 We could move on in the text to focus on the gender panic 7 See Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 1–​36.

8 Consider the many cultural performances deploying the figure of the bearded lady in order to enlarge narrow gender categories: recently, for example, women paleontologists donned beards to make a symbolic point about discrimination in scientific fields. See The Bearded Lady Project. (Note that the unquestioned categories of “women” and “females” still govern the project.) Yet as Jennifer Miller of Circus Amok attests, the bearded lady is not merely symbolic: for an interview with Miller and consideration of how religion factors into gender performance, see Horwitz, “ ‘Bearded Lady’ and ‘Gender Terrorist.’ ”

9 Friedman, “Bottom-​Kissing,” 139–​40. It should be noted that Friedman, following in a long line of critics, is primarily concerned with class status in the tale; this is an important identity category that I don’t discuss in the present article because of its limited mandate but should be factored into any full analysis of the tale. 10 Feminist theory, queer theory, and trans theory, as I understand them, share a goal of expanding lived gender possibilities; with their different social histories and genealogies emerge different foci. Feminisms emerged from social justice movements centred on women; nonetheless, feminist trajectories have been theoretically capacious:  it shouldn’t be forgotten that Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, a groundbreaking work in the field of queer studies, is subtitled Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. While queer theory has tended to analyze both gender and sexuality, and has been seen as problematically abstracting the body, trans theory focuses on gender tout court and issues of embodiment are foregrounded; see Love, “Queer.” For “a manifesto for trans

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and re-​establishment that follow, as Absolon wields the hot poker and the adulterous couple is welcomed back into the community; all that does indeed happen. But if we linger in this moment at the window we can catch a hint of a new kind of being. Brought into existence in the shimmer of dark and light, confounding exclusive masculinity and femininity, and asserting a potent selfhood and subjectivity, this is not the horrifying snaky Medusa of Freud (women’s exposed genitals that threaten castration but reassure by exciting an erection) but rather the dark trans body glistening with new life.11 Extending the importance of this moment, let’s add a consideration of that crucial object, the “kultour,” that Absolon will use in his effort to re-​assert order. Steele Nowlin’s elegant argument encourages us to look at this item “crucial to plot and theme” as a thing in itself with a life of its own. A  coulter is a plow blade, in this context, though the word can also mean simply “knife.” It’s sharp and getting sharper in blacksmith Gerveys’s shop. “[L]‌ene it me; I have therwith to doone,” demands the insulted Absolon of the smith (1.3777). It will be the instrument of his revenge, and as he aims it at the ass stuck out the window it’s fairly easy to read it as a metaphor as well: the shamed lover intends to regain his phallic power with one thrust. The prominence of plowing as a metaphor for having sex in late medieval literature is witnessed by the elaborate figure of speech employed in the Romance of the Rose: the character Genius exhorts his followers to populate the earth by plowing, plowing, plowing. “Unless they use them to plough properly, may their plows and plowshares have their bones broken in pieces, so that they can never be erected again!”12 Both the instrumental use for revenge and the metaphorical meaning that emphasizes failed masculinity relegate the coulter to a mere appendage of Absolon. These interpretations certainly drain the coulter of its “thingness,” of any “strange sense of alterity” that it might have had beyond the “anthropocentric viewpoint,” as Nowlin would see it. The word “kultour” puns on “cul,” “ass,” foreshadowing the action to come.13 The coulter exists as a human tool, for use in human plots. And yet we can still see a “revis[ion]” of the “relationship between human and non-​human” here:  if, from one point of view, the human use drains the blade of its thingness, from another point of view the blade drains the human of its unique and exceptional humanness. For the edge is a prosthesis: as he grabs it, it becomes part of the vengeful man, and he, like any

theory in medieval studies,” see Gutt, “Transgender Genealogy in Tristan de Nanteuil,” here quoted at 129. And for an important guide to trans terms and usage, see Spencer-​Hall and Gutt, “Trans and Genderqueer Studies.” For a crucial analysis of the overlapping categories of blackness and transness, see C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides.

11 Reading the “Tehee” of Alisoun in relation to Hélène Cixous’s classic feminist article “The Laugh of the Medusa,” see Leicester, “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism.” 12 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, 303.

13 On “kultour” as a pun on “cul,” see Walls, “ ‘Kultour’ Meets ‘Cul.’ ” For a masterful discussion of the centrality of puns in the Miller’s Tale see Bryan, “ ‘A berd! A berd!’ ”

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knight, is one with his weapon.14 Absolon wielding his makeshift sword is, from this vantage point, a composite or assemblage of human and nonhuman. This category breakdown happens in the dark of night, when meanings are unmade, at the open window, that perilous passageway in the wall, where gender binaries dissolve. The human, too, is not a pure, unadulterated category; it is constituted by its other: the nonhuman makes the human. And as theorists of race and gender have demonstrated, the history of the category “human” emerges through raced and gendered force.15 Indeed, the body part Absolon intends to punish, Alisoun’s “ers”-​“hole,” is referred to itself as a “thyng al rough and long yherd” (1.3738). Nowlin’s analysis encourages us to look hard at that word “thyng.” The use of this term could be interpreted to underscore Alisoun’s “objectification” in a world of men in power, but we already have seen a more capacious way to read that presence in the window. Moreover, as Nowlin helps us see, “thynges” are not merely metaphoric human appendages—​even when they are literally human appendages: Alisoun’s body at that moment, the trans body, is part of the whole world of interrelated human and nonhuman things. As are all the bodies in this tale. With its “nether ye,” it is organized not according to ordinary hierarchies of head and body, reason and will (or desire), top and bottom, the human governing all the rest of creation; that “nether ye” is itself material, embodied reason, sharing its “strange alterity” with the window out of which it obtrudes. Clear categorization is needed in a world of poetic justice, but categories break down in the world that has been revealed at this rear window.16 The “just punishment” of Alisoun is in this sense impossible. No categories are fixed or unmixed. And as I have been trying to demonstrate through my reading of this scene, none of these identity categories are mutually exclusive: they operate interactively, or intersectionally, or multiplicatively with one another.17 This final point is a crucial one now, when it seems we all (and I really mean all) are struggling to understand how in the world we can live together and thrive. It’s not race or gender or the human that we need to understand; one is not white or female or human, but all of the above at once. We never encounter racialization without a gendered body and a judgment about that body as human or less than human or not human at all. And vice 14 For a stimulating analysis of the human/​nonhuman unit that is warrior knight and horse, see Crane, Animal Encounters, 137–​68. 15 See, for example, Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality.”

16 The window opens out to the street; it may well be in the front of the house, but I  am suggesting with this word play the ontological proximity of window and ass. Related to the problem of judgment in a world of collapsed categories, Cary Wolfe isolates a potential problem for posthumanist approaches (another rubric closely related to the new materialism, of which Steele Nowlin speaks) in their apparent elimination of categorical hierarchies of value. See Wolfe, “Moving Forward, Kicking Back.” 17 Legal scholar Kimberlé Ann Crenshaw—​and black feminists before her—​observed the interconnected workings of multiple identity categories in rendering black women illegible in the law; legions of scholars and activists following Crenshaw have elaborated, extended, and critiqued her concept of “intersectionality.” For a bracing review of this literature, see Cooper, “Intersectionality.”

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versa. We need to understand how some bodies are rendered illegible or unknowable, as they fall out of view in schemes of humanism based on racial and gendered dominance. And we need to pursue analyses that help us bring such bodies into the picture—​even if they require completely new ontological and epistemological paradigms. So—​to shift from visualizing world peace back to writing an article on Chaucer or a paper for an English class—​when we choose critical race theory or feminist critique or queer analysis or trans analysis as our approach, we understand that this is a choice of focus rather than an assertion that race or gender or sexuality is the only adequate explanatory paradigm. We do have to analyze things, which means taking them apart; this may make our discussions seem less multiplicative or intersectional. But that’s an effect of discourse, not an indictment of theories of intersectionality.18 What’s finally important is that we respond to the complexity of our worlds. And reading Chaucer’s poetry can actually help us do so.

Bibliography Primary Sources Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun. The Romance of the Rose. Translated by Frances Horgan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.

Secondary Sources

The Bearded Lady Project: Challenging the Face of Science. https://​thebeardedladyproject. com. Bishop, Louise M. “ ‘Of Goddes pryvetee nor of his wyf’: Confusion of Orifices in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale. Texas Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002): 231–​46. Bryan, Jennifer. “ ‘A berd! A berd!’: Chaucer’s Miller and the Poetics of the Pun.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 38 (2016): 1–​37. Burger, Glenn. Chaucer’s Queer Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New  York: Routledge, 1990. Carbado, Devon. “Colorblind Intersectionality.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38 (2013): 811–​45. Cooper, Brittney. “Intersectionality.” In The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, edited by Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 385–​406. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Crane, Susan. Animal Encounters: Contacts and Concepts in Medieval Britain. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

18 “The strictures of language require us to invoke race, gender, sexual orientation, and other categories one discursive moment at a time” (Carbado, “Colorblind Intersectionality,” quoted in Cooper, “Intersectionality,” 396).

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Dinshaw, Carolyn. “Pale Faces:  Race, Religion, and Affect in Chaucer’s Texts and Their Readers.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 23 (2001): 19–​41. Friedman, John Block. “Bottom-​Kissing and the Fragility of Status in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 54 (2019): 119–​40. Gutt, Blake. “Transgender Genealogy in Tristan de Nanteuil.” Exemplaria 30 (2018): 129–​46. Hansen, Elaine Tuttle. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Heng, Geraldine. The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Horwitz, Simi. “ ‘Bearded Lady’ and ‘Gender Terrorist’ Take Performance Art Beyond the Fringes. Forward, June 23, 2014. https://​forward.com/​culture/​200341/​bearded-​lady-​ and-​gender-​terrorist-​take-​performance/​. Kristeva, Julia. “Woman Can Never Be Defined.” In New French Feminisms, edited by Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron, 137–​41. New York: Schocken, 1981. Leicester, H. Marshall, Jr. “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Difference ‘It’ Makes: Gender and Desire in the Miller’s Tale.” ELH 61 (1994): 473–​99. Lochrie, Karma. “Women’s ‘Pryvetees’ and Fabliau Politics in the Miller’s Tale.” Exemplaria 6 (1994): 287–​304. Love, Heather. “Queer.” TSQ 1 (2014): 172–​76. Sidhu, Nicole Nolan. Indecent Exposure: Gender, Politics, and Obscene Comedy in Middle English Literature. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Snorton, C. Riley. Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Spencer-​Hall, Alicia, and Blake Gutt. “Trans and Genderqueer Studies: Terminology, Language, and Usage Guide.” In Trans and Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography, edited by Alicia Spencer-​Hall and Blake Gutt. Amsterdam:  Amsterdam University Press, 2021 (forthcoming). Walls, Kathryn. “ ‘Kultour’ Meets ‘Cul’: More Wordplay in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.” Notes and Queries 66 (2019): 28–​30. Whitaker, Cord. Black Metaphors: How Modern Racism Emerged from Medieval Race-​Thinking. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2019. Wolfe, Cary. “Moving Forward, Kicking Back: The Animal Turn.” postmedieval 2 (2011): 1–​12. Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/​Power/​Truth/​Freedom:  Towards the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation: An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003): 257–​337.

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Carolyn Dinshaw is Dean for the Humanities and Julius Silver Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and English at New  York University. She is the author of Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), the first full-​length feminist study of Chaucer, and two books that analyze desires for past times: Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre-​and Postmodern (Duke University Press, 1999)  and How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time (Duke University Press, 2012). With David Wallace, she edited The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2003). And with David M. Halperin she founded and edited (1993–​2005) the flagship journal of LGBT Studies, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke University Press). In the classroom she has taught topics ranging from Medieval Misogyny to Queer NYC.

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AUCTORITE/​AUCTOUR R. D. PERRY Womanly Noblesse Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale Troilus and Criseyde House of Fame Experience, though noon auctoritee Were in this world, is right ynough for me To speke of wo that is in mariage.

So begins the

(3.1–​3)

Wife of Bath’s Prologue, with three of the most famous lines in all of Geoffrey Chaucer’s oeuvre and what is certainly his most memorable use of the word “auctorite.” Alisoun of Bath begins by making an epistemological distinction, that knowledge—​in this case specifically the knowledge of the “wo” found in marriage—​can come either from experience or authority. Given how fundamental this claim is to the Wife of Bath’s opening monologue, it is surprising to note that this is the only time she uses the word “auctorite.”1 But the word requires further definition as Alisoun abandons it in favour of more specific targets. At first, she seems to mean the “scriptural authority” of the Christian Bible, but she quickly reveals herself willing to use that authority to make her own points. Instead, Alisoun narrows in on “clerical authority,” excoriating clerks, those members of the clergy and other associated men who spend their time reading and writing about the Church and who cannot help themselves in disparaging women: “it is an impossible /​That any clerk will speke good of wyves /​But if it be of hooly seintes lyves” (3.688–​90). By the time one reaches this “impossible,” it has become abundantly clear that the opening semantic ambiguity has become pragmatically determinate. The Wife begins by saying either “Experience, even if there were no authority in this world …” or “Experience, even if I had no authority in this world …”: that is, either no clerk would agree with her or she has no personal authority. In the end, clerks do agree with her about marriage being full of “wo,” but it doesn’t matter because she is a woman and therefore without any authority in the mind of clerks.2 The epistemological reveals itself to be political as well: it becomes a question of what can justify speech. Indeed, much 1 The agon between experience and authority lies behind three of the most famous readings of the Wife; see Carruthers, “Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions,” Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 113–​31; Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 280–​321.

2 For a discussion of Chaucer’s use of “impossible”—​which is a term derived from medieval logic—​see Perry, “Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale and the Logic of Literature.”

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242 R. D. Perry of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue can be understood as the Wife clearing up the semantic ambiguity of these opening lines, and of the word “auctorite” more specifically. After all, “auctorite” needs further specification because the word has multiple meanings in late fourteenth-​century English: it can have what I will distinguish as a political or a literary valence, which are interrelated but by no means identical. The Wife uses both. More often than not in late medieval writings, the literary valence is primarily scriptural or hermeneutic in focus; that is, one makes claims based on the authority of scripture or one of the influential interpreters of scripture, especially the Fathers of the Church. But the literary valence is not restricted solely to the Bible; it can also frequently refer to the writings of classical authors, as the Wife demonstrates when she includes “Ovides Art”—​presumably Ovid’s Ars Amatoria—​along with Tertullian, St. Jerome’s Contra Jovinianus, and others in her last husband’s misogynist miscellany (3.680). The Wife most obviously refers to this literary valence throughout her prologue. However, as shown by the Wife’s impassioned complaint about the depictions of women—​and who is allowed to make those depictions or who is allowed to speak—​the literary valence of “auctorite” will also have political ramifications. What is more, “auctorite” can be overtly political as well; it is something that the king, the queen, or the king’s ministers, for instance, possess. As Alisoun concludes her prologue and moves on to the Wife of Bath’s Tale, her concern with “maistrie” and “soveraynetee” reveals that the overtly political form of “auctorite” is also at issue. Indeed, the political “auctorite” in the Tale runs counter to the literary “auctorite” of the Prologue, as the Tale shows women both wielding and being granted political “soveraynetee,” perhaps as a phantasmagoric compensation for the “auctorite” denied to them by clerks. Even as the Wife uses her prologue to specify both who possesses the authority she does not have—​clerks—​and what they do with it—​oppress women—​multiple connotations of “auctorite” remain at play so that the Wife can undermine any uncomplicated notion of authority. Ultimately, though, it is necessary to move beyond the Wife of Bath’s discussion of authority to look at Chaucer’s use of the concept across his wider corpus. Such a change in perspective is salutary not only because the Wife’s narrowing of her subject means that certain uses of “auctorite” are more difficult to find in her performance, but also because Chaucer himself is intimately imbricated in discussions of “auctorite.” After all, the literary valence of “auctorite” necessarily touches on the medieval concept of authorship:  that is, who counts as an “auctour” in possession of that literary form of “auctorite.” As Alastair Minnis puts it, “the term auctor denoted someone who was at once a writer and an authority, someone not merely to be read but also to be respected and believed.”3 Strictly speaking, Chaucer is not an “auctour;” he, like any living poet in the Middle Ages, would more likely have identified as a “maker” instead.4 Definitional modesty notwithstanding, however, Chaucer seems to have understood what he was 3 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 10. 4 On the meaning of “maker” as opposed to “author” or “poet” see Olson, “Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer,” and Middleton, “Chaucer’s New Men.”

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doing as not altogether dissimilar from the work of an “auctour.” In fact, as this essay will show, Chaucer is more interested in questioning what an “auctour” is than in keeping to any clearly demarcated boundaries of literary “auctorite.” But questioning is not the same as discarding or attacking. Chaucer does not want to get rid of authority altogether, but neither is he willing to submit to it without limitations. Instead, Chaucer’s engagement with authority stages a conflict between undermining authority and showing it due reverence. Chaucer does both, exhibiting at times a desire for authority—​both his own authority and to live under rightful rule of authority—​and at others a desire for freedom, in the end finding himself stuck in the antinomy between the two, in an irreconcilable tension between authority and freedom born of the very nature of authority itself.

Some Etymologies and Distinctions

Emily Steiner has argued that “any discussion of authorship, medieval or modern, implicitly refers to an analogy between authorship and authority,” but the relationship of authorship to authority has deeper than analogical roots.5 “Auctour” and “auctorite” both derive from Latin, “auctor” and “auctoritas” respectively.6 In its most basic meaning, “auctoritas” means “the state of being an auctor.” By the period of classical Latin (ca. 75 BCE–​200 CE), “auctor”—​and thereby “auctorite”—​had picked up the political and the literary valences that the words carry over into English. In Lewis and Short’s Latin Dictionary, an auctor is “he that brings about the existence of any object, or promotes the increase or prosperity of it, whether he first originates it, or by his efforts gives greater permanence or continuance to it.” This primary definition includes more literal uses of the term—​such as “a progenitor of a person,” a “founder of a building,” and “a maker of a work of art”—​but also by extension more metaphorical meaning—​including “one by whose influence, advice, command, etc., any thing is done; the cause, occasion, contriver, instigator, counsellor, adviser, promoter.”7 The etymological root of “auctor,” however, suggests that the political connotations of the word may be the primary ones. “Auctor” derives from the past participle of “augeo, augēre,” which Lewis and Short claim originally meant “to produce, bring forth that not already in existence; in which signification only the derivative auctor is now found,” but which comes to mean “to increase, enlarge, augment, strengthen, advance that which is already in existence.” Given the tendency to accept translation and commentary as a form of authorship—​a tendency adopted from classical rhetorical models—​the idea of authorship as advancing “that which is already in existence” would not be foreign to medieval concepts of the “auctor.”8 But the idea that an “auctor” is one who augments 5 Steiner, “Authority,” 145.

6 All etymologies come from the OED and both the OED and MED supply definitions of the English words. 7 All Latin definitions and etymologies are from Lewis and Short (LS), A Latin Dictionary.

8 On this tendency, see Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages.

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244 R. D. Perry something preexisting is more thoroughly bound up in Roman political theory. Philosopher Hannah Arendt best illuminates the conceptual role of augmentation in Roman politics in her essay, “What Is Authority?” She explains: what authority or those in authority constantly augment is the foundation. Those endowed with authority were the elders, the Senate or the patres, who had obtained it by descent and by transmission (tradition), from those who had laid the foundations for all things to come, the ancestors, whom the Romans therefore called the maiores. The authority of the living was always derivative, depending on the auctores imperii Romani conditoresque, as Pliny puts it, upon the authority of the founders, who no longer were among the living.9

For Arendt, this is in perfect keeping with the Roman political imagination in general: “At the heart of Roman politics […] stands the conviction of the sacredness of foundation, in the sense that once something has been founded it remains binding for all future generations. To be engaged in politics meant first and foremost to preserve the founding of the city of Rome.”10 After laying out the Roman origins of “authority,” Arendt quickly traces the historical narrative by which the concept was transferred from the Roman imperium to the Church hierarchy, how the Senate’s authority became the authority of prelates and archbishops; for the foundation of the city of Rome, the Church had the foundation of scripture; for the derivative authority of the living Church’s ecclesiastical orders, there was the dead “auctores” of the Apostles Paul and Peter, and eventually the Church Fathers.11 This etymological detour serves a greater purpose than satisfying purely antiquarian interests; the origins of “authority” provide insight into the odd way in which it is expressed as a political relation, a peculiarity that carries over into its literary valence as well. Arendt stresses the Roman origins of “authority” because it is distinct from the two modes of political expression that ruled the Ancient Greek world: force and persuasion. As Arendt explains: since authority always demands obedience, it is commonly mistaken for some form of power or violence. Yet authority precludes the use of external means of coercion; where force is used, authority itself has failed. Authority, on the other hand, is incompatible with persuasion, which presupposes equality and works through a process of argumentation. Where arguments are used, authority is left in abeyance.12

A person with authority might have the capacity to resort to force or to persuasion, but those are distinct modes of political relation, ones that might even undermine authority. When a king depends on force, rather than authority, to make his people follow his will, 9 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 121–​22. 10 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 120.

11 The history by which the early Church adopts the political power of the Roman Empire has also been tracked by Peter Brown; see Brown, Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity and Authority and the Sacred. 12 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 92.

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that only proves the limits of his authority. In Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, Dame Prudence tells Melibee as much when she advises him to avoid vengeance because it would be outside the law and against “youre propre auctoritee” (7.1385). Ultimately, according to Arendt, “authority implies an obedience in which men retain their freedom.”13 This retention of freedom is crucial. A  king may issue a command, but his people choose freely to follow it based solely on his bearing and position, without force or persuasion. That freedom is also what allows authority to be undermined, even to the extent to which authority ceases to exist in the modern world, or so Arendt claims. The Middle Ages, for her, were the heyday of authority. And it is true that she would not have found in Chaucer someone who fought against authority altogether: he does not advocate anywhere for the extermination of monarchy, nor does he anywhere suggest that he thinks Ovid just isn’t that good. But Chaucer seems to have recognized the freedom he had under those authorities, and he made use of it. He was interested in authority’s abuses, those moments it bleeds over into tyranny. He was likewise interested in authority’s limits, that while one could recognize the beauty of Ovid that did not mean one was stuck writing as Ovid wrote or retelling the same stories. Chaucer made use of the freedom he had under authority to show its constructedness, to play around with having it and to caution his readers about what happens if you have too much of it.

“Womanly Noblesse”

If the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale represents Chaucer’s extended engagement with one type of authority, a more surprising extended meditation on authority comes in “Womanly Noblesse,” one of Chaucer’s most beautiful and formally complex ballads; here it is in full: So hath myn herte caught in remembraunce Your beaute hoole and stidefest governaunce, Your vertues al and yowre hie noblesse, That you to serve is set al my plesaunce. So wel me liketh your womanly contenaunce, Your fresshe fetures and your comlynesse, That whiles I live myn hert to his maystresse You hath ful chose in trewe perséveraunce Never to chaunge, for no maner distresse. And sith I shal do [you] this observaunce, Al my lif withouten displeasaunce You for to serve with al my besynesse, And have me somwhat in your souvenaunce. My woful herte suffreth greet duresse, And [loke] how humbly with al symplesse My wil I conforme to your ordynaunce, As you best list, my peynes for to redresse. 13 Arendt, “What Is Authority?,” 105.

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246 R. D. Perry Considryng eke how I hange in balaunce In your service, such, lo, is my chaunce, Abidyng grace, whan that your gentilnesse, Of my grete wo liste do alleggeaunce, And with your pite me som wise avaunce In ful rebating of myn hevynesse; And thynketh by resoun that wommanly noblesse Shuld nat desire for to do the outrance Ther as she fyndeth non unbuxumnesse. Lenvoye Auctour of norture, lady of plesaunce, Soveraigne of beautee, floure of wommanhede, Take ye non hede unto myn ignoraunce, But receyveth of your goodlihede, Thynkyng that I have caught in remembraunce, Your beaute hole, your stidefast governaunce.

The text of the only copy is corrupt—​it lacks an a-​rhyme line in the second stanza. The body of the ballad should use 9-​line stanzas with the rhyme scheme aabaabbab, a form deployed in only one other work of Chaucer’s, in Anelida’s interior complaint in the formally experimental Anelida and Arcite. Unlike the complaint in Anelida and Arcite, though, Chaucer maintains the same two rhymes—​aunce and esse—​throughout all the body stanzas of the ballad, something more typical of his shorter ballads. Unlike the other ballads, however, this ballad lacks a refrain. Also unique among the ballads, the last two lines closely echo the first two, although this too is similar to Anelida’s complaint, in which the last line echoes the first. In short, Chaucer is applying the techniques of formal experimentation he uses in Anelida and Arcite to the ballad form of “Womanly Noblesse.” As one moves into the ballad’s envoy, the formal experimentation continues. Here, this experimental form occurs in a poem that is in some sense about authority. The addressee of “Womanly Noblesse” is unnamed, but she is a “lady,” as the opening line of the envoy attests: “Auctour of norture, lady of plesaunce.” The “plesaunce” modifying the lady is more aspirational in nature than anything else; the poem is one of those love complaints that asks for “plesaunce,” that begs for the lady’s “pite” to alleviate the narrator’s “duresse” and “hevynesse.” The epithet “auctour of norture” is a bit more obscure. “Norture” literally means “nourishment,” but here the meaning—​as the Riverside’s editors gloss it—​extends to “good manners.” “Auctour” is not quite literal either; this lady is not necessarily Emily Post. But taking “auctour” as one should here—​as something closer to “the font or origin” or, to recall the etymological discussion, “one who brings about the increase in a thing”—​still has something of a pedagogical function: her “noblesse” and gentilnesse” would serve as a mirror by which others might measure their own behaviour. Indeed, the call for the woman’s “pite” here is predicated on the assumption that such a gift would be fitting of the high ideals that she embodies. “Auctour of norture,” then, works in a manner similar to the epithet “flour of womanhede” in the envoy’s second line. The lady is a kind of paragon of the thing—​“norture” or “womanhede”—​to such a degree that she seems like the origin from which it has sprung.

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As origin, “auctour” is imbued with authority. In Chaucer’s English, “auctour” is not so obviously tied to political authority, but it is not wholly a stranger to that either. One would not call the king an “auctour,” but one would use the word for divinities.14 In “Womanly Noblesse” that sense of political authority is solidified by another of the lady’s epithets, “Soveraigne of beaute,” but it has been at work in that poem all along as well. In the lyric poetry coming out of the courtly love tradition, the idea of the lady as a ruler is so integral that it almost ceases to be a poetic conceit. And yet, even for a love ballad, “Womanly Noblesse” is strikingly saturated with the language of authority and rule. The repeated opening and closing of the poem explicitly link the lady’s “beaute hoole and stidefest governaunce.” The speaker refers to her as his heart’s “maytresse” and pledges to “conforme to your ordynaunce, /​ As you best list” and promises that in him she will find “non unbuxumnesse.”15 In the organizing metaphor of “Womanly Noblesse,” authority and rulership are the vehicle to love’s tenor. But that metaphor breaks down the more closely one looks at it. Despite the performance of courtly love, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue has already shown us that women cannot have “auctorite”; they cannot, outside of the rarified language of lyric poetry, be “auctours.” In fact, giving in to the speaker’s request in “Womanly Noblesse” and bestowing on him her “pite” will result in her loss of “soveraynetee”—​as the Wife of Bath puts it; a “lady of plesaunce” cannot in fact be “soveraigne” because she will instead be one of those women of whom clerks refuse to speak well. By concentrating on the metaphor, Chaucer is able to expose its artificiality, to estrange us from the typical language of love poetry. He uses a similar strategy to a more obvious and comical effect in “To Rosemounde,” where lines like “it is an oynement unto my wounde” and “Nas never pyk walwed in galauntyne /​as I in love am walwed and ywounde” undermine the tropes of love as a salve or love as bondage (7, 17–​18). In “Womanly Noblesse,” lines like “You for to serve with al my besynesse” provoke not laughter but discomfort: “Oh, that’s a bit much. Isn’t he overdoing it?” The feeling is confirmed by the way “besynesse” is handled in the other short poems, as in the axiomatic disavowal from “Truth”: “Gret reste stant in litel besinesse” (10). Finally, the overwrought content returns us to questions of form. I  have already observed that “Womanly Noblesse” is suffused with the language of authority and governance, but the same can be said of French words. Indeed, almost all of the a-​rhymes in the poem are not only French in origin, but also in use; they are mutually intelligible in both languages and when heard in isolation a speaker would be hard pressed to say “that is an English word” or “that a French one.”16 One reason the poem is replete with both words for political authority and French words is because those are one and the 14 Chaucer calls God or Christ, “auctour of matrimoyne” (Parson’s Tale, 10.882), “auctour and the makere of hele,” and “your auctour and yowr makere” in the Boece (1.pr6.85; 3.m6.11). In Troilus and Criseyde, God the “auctour is of kynde” and Jove is “auctour of nature” (3.1765, 3.1016). In Boece, things are known “by the auctoritee of God” (4.pr1.49). 15 As I will discuss in the last section, “list” can signal a deeply troubling authority. 16 Butterfield, “Fuzziness and Perceptions.”

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248 R. D. Perry same:  “governaunce,” “observaunce,” “ordynaunce,” and “soveraigne” are many of the French words for rule that come into English after the Norman conquest. Chaucer is using a French form—​the ballad—​full of French words to write the kind of romantic sentiment that was at that time very popular in France.17 Like most of Chaucer’s short poetry, “Womanly Noblesse” has no identifiable source, although critics have noted the similarity between it and many of Guillaume de Machaut’s poems, who was the guiding spirit of such formes fixes poetry and the closest thing to a living French “auctor” that Chaucer would have known.18 And yet, while Chaucer might relate to Machaut as he does to an “auctour,” he is nowhere near as servile to him as the speaker of “Womanly Noblesse” is to his “auctour.” No single poem of Machaut’s serves as a source for “Womanly Noblesse” and no single poem of Machaut’s could possibly serve as a source for the simple reason that—​unlike Chaucer—​Machaut never attaches envoys to his ballads. The very existence of the envoy is another formal experimentation: ballads did not have envoys in either England or France until the late fourteenth century, when Chaucer and Eustache Deschamps began adding them. For a long time, the critical assumption was that Deschamps made the innovation and Chaucer adopted it, but now the direction of influence is not so clear.19 What is clear is that Chaucer seems to have been more experimental with his envoys, varying greatly their length and form.20 So, in terms of content, form, and language, Chaucer remains close to his French model, but he undermines it. Chaucer does not attack the conventions of French love poetry, but he reveals them to be overdone. He does not abandon the ballad form completely, but he adds a formal feature wholly of his own design. And he does not artificially keep to only English-​derived words, but uses the French language to let his alterations of content and form speak to one another. “Womanly Noblesse,” then, is paradigmatic of Chaucer’s relationship to authority: he does not abandon it, but neither is he overawed by it. Chaucer plays with authority, exposes its absurdities and limitations, but he still values it, adapting aspects of it for himself even as he abandons those aspects he finds too restrictive. And “Womanly Noblesse” allows Chaucer to make distinctions between different modes of authority and the freedom to resist them. There are different stakes, after all, between Chaucer’s resistance to French poetry and a woman’s resistance to actual social conventions; whereas the worst Chaucer risks by eschewing literary authority and tradition is unintelligibility to his audience, a woman risks great emotional and physical harm by ignoring political authority and social convention. By pushing on the conventions of the formes fixes love lyric, Chaucer exposes their absurdities, but that should serve 17 The classical critical works that deal with Chaucer’s relationship to French literature are Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries; Butterfield, Familiar Enemy; and Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition. 18 Wimsatt, “Guillaume de Machaut and Chaucer’s Love Lyrics.”

19 The earlier view is present in Wimsatt, Chaucer and His French Contemporaries. For the latter view that sees more mutual influence, see Butterfield, Familiar Enemy. 20 On this experimentation, see Nuttall, “ ‘Many a lay and many a thing.’ ”

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as a salient reminder that, when literary authority fails, it is liable to retreat back to persuasion to make its point, but when political authority fails, it is just as likely to fall back on force.

Myn Auctour and Grete Auctoritee

My second and third examples allow us to see how Chaucer’s play with authority resonates widely throughout his corpus; they are Lollius in Troilus and Criseyde and the man of great authority from the end of the House of Fame. The first, Lollius, trades on the most common usage of “auctour” in Middle English more generally and in Chaucer’s work in particular:  a writer of ancient texts, either sacred or secular.21 These are the figures Alastair Minnis has in mind when he quips “it would seem that the only good auctour is a dead one.”22 It is in this well-​established sense of an “auctour” as a writer of authoritative ancient text that Chaucer reveals that he is translating Troilus and Criseyde as it was “writ [by] myn auctour called Lollius” (1.394). Chaucer remains emphatic about how closely he hews to Lollius: “For as my auctour seyde, so sey I” (2.18); “Myn auctour shal I folwen, if I koone” (2.49); “As to myn auctour listeth for t’endite” (2.700); “That wolde, as seyth myn autour, wel contene” (3.502); “somtyme I moot, /​After myn auctour, tellen hire gladnesse (3.1195–​96); “though I  kan nat tellen al, /​ As kan myn auctour, of his excellence” (3.1325); “As to myn auctour listeth to devise” (3.1817); and he even avoids speculating on something when “Nought list myn auctour fully to declare” (3.575). But there is no Lollius; Chaucer made him up, giving new meaning to the fact that he insistently refers to him as “myn auctour.”23 Chaucer, instead, translates much of his poem from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Teseida—​like Machaut, another of Chaucer’s older contemporaries—​but he nowhere makes mention of that, nor indeed mentions Boccaccio anywhere in his work despite translating him more than once. Chaucer’s coyness about his source is an authorizing trope with a long literary history, but it is also in keeping with his general play with authority, both throughout

21 This sense of “auctor” is ubiquitous: “auctours shal I fynden” (Wife of Bath’s Tale, 3.1212), “herkneeth what this auctour seith” (Clerk’s Tale, 4.1141), “an authour that hight Macrobes” (Romaunt, A.7), “what so myn auctour mente” (Legend, F.470), “auctours writen” (Astrolabe, 2.26.5), “sayn somme auctours” (Astrolabe, 2.39.32), “al the world of autours maystow here” (Legend, G.308), “thise olde auctours lysten for to trete” (Legend, F.575), “oure autour telleth us” (Legend, 1139), “as myn auctour seith” (Legend, 1352), “oon of the greeteste auctour that men rede” (Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 7.2984), “many a man moore of auctoritee” (Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 7.2975), “rede auctours, where they trete of swiche mateere” (Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 7.3263), “two auctoritees” (Melibee, 7.1470). 22 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 12.

23 Or, rather, attributes the poem to what he thought was a lost poet of the Trojan War, but whose name is really derived from a corrupted citation of Horace. See Kittredge “Chaucer’s Lollius,” and Pratt, “Note on Chaucer’s Lollius.”

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250 R. D. Perry his corpus and in Troilus more specifically.24 Referencing a lost author and obscuring his true source gives Chaucer a great deal of leeway to alter or expand his story, and he does just that. But he does more; he creates a sense that he is dealing with a host of competing authorities, a whole history of different “auctours” covering the same material and disagreeing with one another. On how long it took Criseyde to forsake Troilus for Diomedes, Chaucer’s narrator claims “Ther is non auctour telleth it, I wene” (5.1088); on whether or not Criseyde actually loved Troilus, “Men seyn—​I not—​that she yaf hym hire herte” (5.1050).25 Chaucer is elsewhere interested in what authorities do not say either because it can be suggestive—​as when, in the Legend of Good Women, the “autour maketh of it no mencioun” as to whether or not anyone followed Dido and Aeneas into their fateful cave—​or because it gives him room to create—​as when he tells the same story at the beginning of the House of Fame, adding an original lament for Dido with a claim of authorship, “Non other auctour allege I” (314). In these instances, as with his substitution of Lollius for Boccaccio, Chaucer shows himself unwilling to operate solely without authority, even if he is not content in blindly following it either. When faced with a powerful literary authority, sometimes the best way to assert one’s freedom is neither persuasion—​convincing the reader that one’s version of the story is better—​nor force—​one cannot prevent a reader from seeking out other authors—​but to outflank that authority with a better one, especially if it’s an authority of your own creation. Such competing tendencies between authority and freedom find themselves at a crux in the House of Fame. In some sense, the work serves as a paean to authority, as there is no greater concentration of named “auctours” that celebrates their achievements anywhere else in Chaucer’s oeuvre. And yet, they are depicted literally holding up the house of the fickle Lady Fame, whose capriciousness could eventually obliterate even them from memory. As the Boece reminds us about pieces of writing, “eelde doth awey, bothe hem and ek hir auctours” (2.pr7.92). And so Chaucer favours the House of Rumour over the House of Fame and depicts the former as a giant whirling wicker house where truth and lies flow in and out of all holes, sometimes colliding and intermingling. The hustle and bustle of the place enchant the narrator, until the din ceases and everyone looks to a figure newly emerged onto the scene: “he semed for to be /​ A man of grete auctoritee” (House of Fame, 2158). And with that the poem ends incomplete. As it must; how else could it continue? The most likely action the man of “grete auctoritee” would take would be to sort through the rumours, perhaps in a loose narrative that perhaps would have anticipated the generic and stylistic variation of the Canterbury Tales. But to have an authority organize the House of Rumour would be as good as returning to the House of Fame; the same authoritative logic that made the latter untenable would 24 On not citing one’s sources, see Schwebel, “Legend of Thebes” and Strakhov “ ‘And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace.’ ”

25 Note too that these authoritative gaps allow the Narrator to avow his famous love for Criseyde. On that narrative tendency, see Donaldson, “Criseyde and Her Narrator.” For a different reading of these gaps as a sign of narrative freedom, see Steven Justice, “Chaucer’s History-​Effect.”

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have invaded the free-​wheeling excitement of the former. In the end, what the House of Fame’s incompleteness dramatizes is an impasse between the desire for authority and the desire for freedom.

The Antinomy of Authority and Freedom

The problem is that authority is ripe for abuse. The unquestioning allegiance to authority slides into the unconscionable horrors of authoritarianism with disconcerting ease. The Clerk’s Tale—​pace Petrarch’s allegorization of it—​is a veritable parable of this tendency. The terror of that tale stems from the fact that Walter can do whatever he “leste” (4.105). Chaucer, as we have already seen, applies that same verb to what authors do: in a third of the lines that mention “myn auctour” in Troilus, Chaucer is concerned with what Lollius “list.” In both the literary and political spheres, unchecked authority leads to diminished freedom, in the guise of a stifling atmosphere in which to produce art or, simply, tyranny. But too much freedom is also an issue for Chaucer. Chaucer wants Troilus and Criseyde to join “Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace,” not to consign them to the dustbin of history (Troilus, 5.1792). Tyranny is not omnipresent in Chaucer’s works—​Priam’s rule, for instance, in Troilus and Criseyde, is not tyrannical—​but tyranny does exist at limit cases, those moments where Chaucer wants to test the logical extension of an idea. Griselda’s obedience in the face of Walter’s cruelty is one such case.26 The Wife of Bath’s Prologue likewise demonstrates the stifling effects of literary authority. Her complaints about authorities silencing and oppressing women are immediately proven at the end of her performance, when the Friar tells her to settle down and “lete auctoritees, on Goddes name” do the preaching (Friar’s Prologue, 3.1276).27 The lack of female authority is bad enough, but tyranny can threaten to expand that situation, eventually making all writing impossible; such is the chilling lesson of the Manciple’s Tale: “My sone, be war, and be noon auctour newe” (9.359). 26 For the Clerk’s Tale as a meditation on tyranny that negotiates the political differences of Boccaccio and Petrarch, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 261–​98. Other tyrannical figures include January, who “chees hire [May] of his owene auctoritee” (Merchant’s Tale, 4.1597); Almachius, who claims he has “bothe power and auctoritee /​To maken folk dyen or to lyven” (Second Nun’s Tale, 8.471–​72); the Pardoner’s abuse of “the auctoritee /​ Which that by bulle ygraunted was to me” (Pardoner’s Prologue, 6.387–​88). Tyranny is one of the reasons that the Boece advises against letting “remes [realms—​by extension, political activity] be auctour and makere of blisfulnesse” (3.pr.5.10). 27 A different misogynist misuse of authority causes Proserpina to ask exacerbatedly “What rekketh me of youre auctoritees?” (Merchant’s Tale, 4.2276); it’s important to remember that such misogyny was all too real: a wife “hath noon auctoritee to swere ne to bere witnesse without leve of hir housbounde” (Parson’s Tale, 10.931). It is interesting to note here that both the OED and MED give specialist legal definitions for “auctour” and “auctorite,” but this is the only use by Chaucer that approaches those uses. Such an absence may tell us something about Chaucer’s relationship to the legal profession.

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252 R. D. Perry The potential for tyrannical authority, though, does not justify overthrowing all forms of authority; such an action would be a variety of the sin of pride, as Chaucer’s Parson informs us: “Contumax is he that thurgh his indignacioun is agayns everich auctoritee or power of hem that been his sovereyns” (10.402). After all, there are legitimate authorities. God is an obvious one.28 Most of the time here on earth, though, Chaucer recognizes that authority is not so clearly legitimate.29 The problem finding legitimate authority occasionally leads Chaucer to posit authority mixed with something else. The Wife of Bath may insist that one must choose experience or authority—​and indeed that is a division that has been forced upon her—​but most of the time Chaucer seems to think that experience and authority allows for much greater certainty.30 As Dame Prudence reminds us in the Melibee—​and in agreement with Arendt—​Cicero says that great things are accomplished not by force but by “good conseil, by auctoritee of persones, and by science” (7.1165). Chaucer does not choose authority over freedom or freedom over authority. He lets them remain antinomies, conceptual opposites between which one must navigate. His competing alliances to authority and to freedom are perhaps nowhere else so clear as they are in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women: But wherefore that I spak, to yeve credence To bokes olde, and don hem reverence, Is for men shulde autoritees beleve, There as there lyth non other assay by preve. For myn entent is, or I fro yow fare, The naked text in English to declare Of many a story, or ells many a geste, As autours seyn; leveth hem if yow leste. (G.81–​88)

Men should believe authorities. That is, if there is no other proof to be had about a topic. Even so, Chaucer’s intent is to tell “many a story” or “many a geste” after his “autours.” You should believe them, “yeve credence /​ To bokes olde, and don hem reverence,” 28 So is Lady Philosophy in the Boece: “of so imperial auctorite, I wax al abayssched” (1.pr1.80), “certes ryghtful is thin amonestynge and ful digne by auctorite” (5.pr1.5); Plato, “thilke auctorite” (1.pr4.62); and Boethius himself, “by the auctorite of me put ayens perils (that is to seyn, put myn auctorite in peril for) the wreche pore folk” (1.pr4.63).

29 Calchas is called a “lord of gret auctorite,” although it is not clear that his role in the Troilus supports this claim (1.65). The “fol kokkow” says he “wol of myn owne autorite” speak for the common good, even though it is not clear what legitimacy that speech has (Parliament, 506).

30 Often this takes the form of a speaker asserting how right they are even if there were no authorities to agree with them, and such speakers usually then list the authorities that do agree with them:  Theseus “needeth noght noon auctoritee” for the first mover speech (Knight’s Tale, 1.3000), the Old Woman of the Wife of Bath’s Tale speaks “even though noon auctoritee” might agree with her (3.1208), Justinus keeps his speech short saying “he wolde noon auctoritee allege” even as he goes on to cite the “Wyf of Bath” herself (Merchant’s Tale, 4.1658, 4.1685). Things also might be known “as wel by werk as by auctoritee” (Squire’s Tale, 5.482), in addition to “by preve as wel by autorite” (Legend, 2394).

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and therefore believe and do reverence to him. That is, “if yow leste.” Authorities have written what they “lesten;” Chaucer has been emphatic that Lollius—​and therefore Chaucer himself—​has written what he “lesteth.” But, as we have seen, doing simply and only what one “lesteth” is the pathway not to proper authority but to tyranny. In order to temper the authority of the author, then, the unfettered will passes from the author to the reader. You have to “leste” to obey authority; if it is forced on you or if you have to be persuaded by it, it is no longer a legitimate authority. Chaucer cannot force you to read his work or persuade you to keep going if you do not wish to do so. Instead, he reminds us that authority is a participatory relationship: in order for authority to be legitimate, you have to choose, of your own free will, to follow it. The authority of the author, then, is ultimately met with the authority of the reader, which has its own constraints: it works on the author not by persuasion—​we cannot tell Chaucer to write differently—​nor force—​Chaucer is far beyond the reach of even the most fanatical reader—​but by the free movement of our own will to read whatever we like. Chaucer is aware of the reader’s authority and so, while he uses his freedom to play with the expectations of literary and political authority that have been handed down to him, he remains aware of the reader’s freedom from his own authority: your ability to read him or not, “if yow leste.”

Bibliography Secondary Sources Arendt, Hannah. “What Is Authority?” In Between Past and Future, 91–​141. New  York: Penguin, 2006. Brown, Peter. Authority and the Sacred: Aspects of the Christianisation of the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. ———. Power and Persuasion in Late Antiquity: Toward a Christian Empire. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Butterfield, Ardis. The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. ———. “Fuzziness and Perceptions of Language in the Middle Ages: Part 1: Explosive Fuzziness: The Duel.” In Fuzzy Studies. A Symposium on the Consequence of Blur Part 2. Special issue of Common Knowledge 18.2 (2012): 255–​66. Carruthers, Mary. “The Wife of Bath and the Painting of Lions.” PMLA 94 (1979): 209–​22. Copeland, Rita. Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages: Academic Traditions and Vernacular Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Dinshaw, Carolyn. Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Donaldson, E.  T. “Criseyde and Her Narrator.” In Speaking of Chaucer, 65–​83. New  York: Norton, 1970. Justice, Steven. “Chaucer’s History-​Effect,” In Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England, edited by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, 169–​94. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2013. Kittredge, George Lyman. “Chaucer’s Lollius.” Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 28 (1917): 47–​133.

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254 R. D. Perry Middleton, Anne. “Chaucer’s New Men and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales.” In Literature and Society, edited by Edward Said, 15–​56. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Minnis, Alastair. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Muscatine, Charles. Chaucer and the French Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957. Nuttall, Jenni. “ ‘Many a lay and many a thing’: Chaucer’s Technical Terms.” In Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, edited by Thomas A. Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, 21–​37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Olson, Glending. “Making and Poetry in the Age of Chaucer.” Comparative Literature 31 (1979):  272–​90. Patterson, Lee. Chaucer and the Subject of History. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Perry, R. D. “Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale and the Logic of Literature.” Poetics Today 41 (2020): 37–​57. Pratt, R. A. “A Note on Chaucer’s Lollius.” Modern Language Notes 65 (1950): 183–​87. Schwebel, Leah. “The Legend of Thebes and Literary Patricide in Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Statius.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 36 (2014): 139–​68. Steiner, Emily. “Authority.” In Oxford Twenty-​First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, edited by Paul Strohm, 142–​59. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Strakhov, Elizaveta. “ ‘And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace’:  Reconstructing the Spectral Canon in Statius and Chaucer.” In Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, edited by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, 57–​74. Martelsham: Boydell and Brewer, 2015. Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Wimsatt, James. Chaucer and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991. ———. “Guillaume de Machaut and Chaucer’s Love Lyrics.” Medium Aevum 47 (1978): 66–​87.

R. D.  Perry is an Assistant Professor of English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. He works on late medieval and early modern English literature as well as critical theory and the history of philosophy. Currently, he is writing two books: one on Chaucerian coteries and the beginnings of the English literary tradition, and one on the incompleteness of the Canterbury Tales. He is also coediting three essay collections: the first on the English aesthetic of Charles d’Orléans, the second on the Hundred Years War and European literary history, and the last on mid-​twentieth-​century intellectuals’ use of the Middle Ages.

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SECULERE CATHERINE SANOK Merchant’s Tale Nun’s Priest’s Tale

In Chaucer’s time,

as in ours, the term “seculere” (secular) could be used to refer to a person, system, or institution that was not religious, often to distinguish it from a similar kind of person, system, or institution that was. So, a “secular lord” was a layman with property and authority over the people who inhabited that property, and in this he was analogous to an abbot, who also was a “lord” who ruled over a “house” and lands that extended beyond it. “Secular law” refers to customary law and royal law, as opposed to ecclesiastical law, which claimed jurisdiction over certain behaviours (such as violations of Christian sexual morality) and certain places (particular precincts). But this distinction between secular and religious was grounded in another meaning of “seculere” that has largely fallen out of the term’s modern usage: that is, “seculere” as a category of time, and in particular the forms and experiences of time that structure earthly life and so include, for example, historical time, human lifetimes, seasons, etc. The English word derives from the Latin, saeculum, whose semantic range showcases some of the many secular temporalities: it can refer to an individual lifetime, a generation, the term of a reign, a hundred years, a division of historical time, future ages, or the full extent of human history.1 For medieval Christians, secular temporalities such as these stood in contrast to sacred ones (to return to the more familiar sense), including liturgical time (which is calendrical and thus cyclical), eschatological time (linear time leading to the end of time in the Apocalypse), and especially divine timelessness—​the atemporality of the Christian God, who exists not “before” Creation but “outside” time altogether. Indeed, time is one of the things God creates, from his position in a divine non-​time. The medieval use of “seculere” to refer to temporality or temporal orientation (how something is understood to be directed by or toward a particular kind of time) can be perplexing to modern readers, especially when it refers to a religious person, practice, or institution. In a modern context, a “secular priest” is an oxymoron. But secular here indicates an orientation by and toward human and historical times: in the case of a “secular priest,” it indicates a vocation defined by pastoral responsibilities. A secular priest is concerned with the earthly lifetime of his “flock”—​that is, with what happens to them in the time they live on the earth, during which they are baptized, sin, repent, etc. These events matter for their spiritual afterlife, of course, but a secular priest is, like 1 OLD, s.v. “saeculum, n.”

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those in his spiritual charge, focused on things of “this world,” whose temporal form is the saeculum. This is a key difference between the secular priest and people who are “religious” in the more restricted medieval sense: that is, monks and nuns, hermits and anchoresses, whose vocation is theorized as a separation from the “world” that allows them (in theory) to dedicate themselves more absolutely to a life of devotion, prayer, and obedience. Although they do of course live in the world in a literal sense, Christian monks in the Middle Ages are understood to live at a maximal remove from it: that is why they are supposed to stay in the monastery, a zone in which the priorities of the “secular” are muted as much as possible. A monk out of his cloister is like a fish out of water (according to the truism that Chaucer’s Monk rejects) because he thereby enters the ether of historical time and the concerns of earthly life, and these are antithetical to the “religious” rule to which he is vowed. In Chaucer’s work, the term “seculere” tilts away from its sense indicating a category of time (human life and history, chronology and change) toward its more general, and now familiar, sense as the opposite of “religious.” It appears twice in the Canterbury Tales—​in the Merchant’s Tale and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale—​and in both instances its primary meaning is in contrast to “religious” broadly understood. If, however, we recognize that the term also retains a connection to the more fundamental sense of earthly time, attending to it can help us recognize a concern in these tales with different kinds of time and different experiences of time. Because both references also marshal the secular/​religious opposition explicitly in relation to sexual activity, thinking about the full semantic range of “seculere” can also advance our understanding of some of the themes of desire, embodiment, reproduction, and gender that are thematically central in both tales. It may also help us see how concerns with time, timing, and time passing are a forum for thinking about the special temporalities of narrative.

Alle Thyng Hath Tyme

Sexuality is related to secularity in medieval Christian communities because of a heteronormative expectation that sex is related to procreativity. Most obviously, secular persons—​if only married ones—​are licensed to have (procreative heterosexual) sex, while religious persons are obligated to sexual abstinence. But sexuality is also linked to the secular specifically as a category of time:  Christian patriarchal thinking links (procreative) sex to linear time and futurity—​a model of time that has recently received a great deal of attention in queer theory. Scholars such as Lee Edelman have drawn attention to the way that genealogy is a key model for linear time (think of the way family “trees” map time in a vertical or horizontal direction), and how the figure of the “Child” claims a biological purchase on the future.2 This string of associations (sex therefore procreation therefore children therefore forward-​moving secular time) is important to 2 Edelman, No Future. Temporality is a significant concern in queer theory. In addition to Edelman, some essential contributions are:  Dinshaw, How Soon Is Now; Freeman, Time Binds; Jagose, Inconsequence; and Love, Feeling Backward.

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the medieval Christian understanding of religious life as oriented, in contrast, to the end of time (Judgment) and/​or cyclical time (liturgy) and/​or divine atemporality. The difference between sexuality and asexuality is thus a prime forum for thinking about time in the Middle Ages. In the Merchant’s Tale, the term “seculere” surfaces precisely as a category relevant to sexual identity. The Merchant tweaks the usual distinction between secular sexual activity and religious chastity. The protagonist of his tale is introduced as a man who in his youth indulged whatever “bodily delyt” (4.1249) he desired with (various) “women”: a pursuit of sexual pleasure the Merchant identifies as the behaviour of “fooles that ben seculeer” (4.1251).3 Marriage is presented as the antithesis of this “secular” sexuality: it is a “hooly boond” (4.1261), closer to a religious vocation that constrains sexual pleasure than a lay institution that is the forum for it. The Merchant later clarifies that it is only secular men who are “helplees and al desolat” (4.1321) if they are unmarried—​in implicit contrast to religious men who establish their institutional and social authority through sexual abstinence. But this again curiously associates the secular estate with unmarried lay people. Here, to be unmarried is to be “secular” and marriage is quasi-​religious, whereas it is usually marriage that is the “secular” alternative to a religious vocation. This deviation from the usual way that marriage is recognized as a key secular institution derives precisely from understanding the secular as a kind of time: time that passes, especially in pursuit of earthly value. At the beginning of the tale, the young knight, not yet identified as January, is thoroughly steeped in the present moment, the signature time of the secular, and this is signalled by his pursuit of sex for pleasure, not procreation. It’s only as the older January—​feeling the passage of time in terms of his own mortality—​that he conceives a desire to marry in order to have a legitimate heir: to establish, that is, some biological purchase on the future. It’s no coincidence that the reference to his age when this occurs, “whan he had passed sixty yeer” (4.1252), rhymes with “seculeer” (4.1251), nor that questions of time and timing will prove essential to the plot. Immersed in the secular present, January’s life sped along, leaving him temporally disoriented: now nearing the end of his life, he is both nostalgic for his youthful vigour and preoccupied with his posthumous legacy. January wants to marry because it promises to dilate his secular existence, primarily into a biological future, but also, he thinks, back to an Edenic past. Marriage, January claims, is how God “first” bound man and woman in Paradise, and he imagines that it can thus give him access to the timelessness of prelapsarian Eden.4 Hence his belief

3 Albert Baugh long ago identified this as evidence that the prologue and tale were originally assigned to a pilgrim with a religious vocation: Baugh, “The Original Teller of the Merchant’s Tale,” 15–​26. Such speculation privileges the modern meaning of the term, however, at the expense of its broader semantic range in Chaucer’s day; and this obscures the important way that the lines associate unmarried sex (or nonprocreative sex for pleasure) as “secular” in contrast to marriage as a “holy bond” analogous to a (sexless) religious vocation. 4 January’s belief that marriage is unchanged since Eden runs counter to its historical development in the high and late Middle Ages, including its relatively new status as a Christian sacrament, which blurred its “secular” status. See Lipton, Affections of the Mind.

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that marriage offers “sikernesse” (4.1355) or stability, in contrast to the precarious existence—​on “brotel ground” (4.1279)—​of the unmarried. January profoundly misunderstands the Genesis story: the Edenic origin is irrevocably lost, and it represents sudden change not permanent stasis. January’s belief in marriage as a secular heaven on earth, that is, is both a spiritual misstep—​a failure to prioritize heaven over earth, virtue over pleasure—​and a refusal to recognize that (secular) time passes. His failure to recognize Genesis as a story of temporal change dooms him to repeat it: his spouse, too, will pluck forbidden fruit from a tree in an all too earthly garden. The pear tree in January’s garden can itself be read as a central figure for different conceptions of time. For January, it is a material instantiation of the fanciful simile by which he proclaims perennial youth:  his white hair, January claims, makes him like a “blosmy tree” (4.1263)—​a blossom-​laden tree—​a tree in spring, perhaps in May, covered with flowers that will soon bear fruit. January’s boast, essentially that his white hair is a sign of his abundant fertility, forms an ageist joke that old men are both vain and impotent. But it is also a way the tale marks his confidence in a particular kind of (forward-​oriented) cyclical time’  what we might call generational time, in which youth, maturity, and parenthood repeat in overlapping cycles within a biological family. January’s self-​figuration as a flowering tree exposes this as a fantasy of seasonal return—​the fantasy, that is, that procreativity extends one’s life into the future, what queer theorists, especially Lee Edelman, have identified as a fantasy of “reproductive futurity” embodied by an imagined “Child.”5 The metaphor of an old man’s white hair as spring blossoms highlights how the conceptualization of human generation as a “cycle” on the model of other cyclical times is January’s desperate and ineffectual way to imagine his own earthly afterlife through a patriarchal fantasy that his identity will be reproduced in and by his child. January’s fantasy of his future is also compromised by the way his metaphor inadvertently accelerates (and so abbreviates) the human lifespan, as if young adulthood (hair as spring blooms) lapses into old age (blossoms as white hair) at the rate of seasonal change. January wants a renewed springtime, but to imagine the human lifespan on the model of the solar year is to shorten it drastically—​or to acknowledge, inadvertently, how short it feels to him. January’s very name identifies him with the year, and this too signals the forward movement of time that he wishes to suspend or reverse. May’s name likewise references a time of year and associates her with the youth and fecundity that January’s name forecloses. Yet May is not the personification of May; rather, she is “lyk the brighte morwe of May” (4.1748). She’s a woman, who might be compared to that month, or, more specifically, compared to a time of day—​the morning, any typical morning—​during that month. Why make so obvious a comparison? Perhaps because the simile has the paradoxical effect of limiting rather than creating her identification with the month, whose name she already shares. This might also suggest that January is not just a personification of the month that names him, though we are 5 Edelman, No Future.

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tempted at first to read him that way (not least because January is not a usual proper name). More interestingly, by identifying a specific time of day, the May/​morning simile further shrinks the temporal metaphor for the human lifespan, from January’s self-​ deluding seasonal association (a personal winter he mistakes for a spring) to the day (May’s youth compared to the morning, part of one day). The shift in temporal scale—​ from lifetime, to year, to day—​is one way the tale explores the theme of the human experience of time, as it stalls or accelerates, here especially as an effect of an awareness of human mortality. Such awareness seems even to infect the sun, agent of both the daily and annual cycles invoked in the tale’s metaphoric language. The wedding feast draws to a close when the sun’s own “body” is weakened like that of an exhausted person: “No lenger may the body of hym [the sun] sojurne /​On th’ orisonte, as in that latitude” (4.1796–​97). The image does not bode well for January’s own vigour. Despite his violent rape fantasy (4.1752–​61), and the many remedies he takes to enhance his sexual potency (4.1807–​12), May finds their wedding night unremarkable. At dawn, January is very pleased with himself, but May “preyseth nat his pleyyng worth a bene” (4.1854). May, less concerned than her husband with the way time passes (temporal duration), is instead attentive to the particular moments in time (temporal location) that allow her to act. She “saugh her tyme, upon a day” (4.2001) to respond to Damian’s love suit. The lie that allows her to climb the pear tree—​hinting at a (false) pregnancy in order to have sex—​is, in the first place, a recoding of a familiar trope of seasonal fruitfulness: from a metaphor of procreation (womb as pear-​like) to a figure for female desire (the pear as phallus).6 But it’s also a sort of time puzzle, as if from a post-​Einsteinian understanding of time. Her lie either reverses time (her pregnancy precedes the sex that might cause it) or suspends time altogether by refusing a causal (and thus temporal) relation between sex and procreation.7 The tale thus exposes procreative fictions of futurity: that is, the fiction that a man can extend his presence in the saeculum, beyond his own mortal life, through an heir who will “continue” his identity. The Merchant’s Tale helps us see more clearly that the “Child” as a figure for futurity is not only a heteronormative fiction, as Edelman shows, 6 Pears and pear trees were, in medieval England, symbols of male fertility, as seen, for example, in the playful poem, “I have a fair garden,” in which the male speaker boasts of his pear tree and of “grafting” a shaft/​scion onto a maiden only to learn later that the fruit she bears comes from a different varietal/​lover.

7 On “sexual sequence,” see Jagose, Inconsequence. This theme is highlighted in oblique but significant ways by the myth of Pluto and Proserpina, a story about the seasons that connects time and sex:  Proserpina is ravished by Pluto as a young girl and then sought by her mother, Ceres, the goddess of fruitful harvest. Although Proserpina is recovered, she is obligated to join Pluto in the underworld annually on account of fruit she ate during her capture. Ceres’s grief at her absence is the etiology of seasonal change. More generally, allusion to this classical myth extends the tale’s concern with time by introducing, as key plot points, astrological time and literary time: the  configuration of constellations at a specific moment in time, as well as the hold that prior traditions might have on the present (4.2219–​33).

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but more specifically a patriarchal one: the Child is the future for men of privilege, men whose futures take the form of “legacy” or “inheritance,” and is therefore embodied by sons. The Merchant’s Tale also reveals a link between this vision of futurity and sexual violence against women (in January’s wedding-​night rape fantasy). The tale exposes this fiction, above all, through its own antifeminist anxieties about women’s infidelity. May’s appetite for pears points not to January’s future/​child, as she insinuates, but rather to the possibility that someone else will father his heir—​a fiction that January ultimately accepts as an alternative to the certain future of his own mortal end, a future that all fictions of genealogy seek to remedy or obscure. January and May occupy one temporal (narrative) frame, but—​as their names suggest—​they are at different points in a temporal cycle or sequence, and this fundamentally shapes their experience. May embraces the evanescent qualities of present pleasures (as her husband had in his own youth). Fruit, to her, is a way to satisfy herself now, not a promise of a next generation. January—​like his namesake, Janus—​is caught between his past and future, his youth spent and his age advancing. The Merchant’s Tale shows us different ways people are oriented in secular time by their age, gender, and status, in ways that shape their sense of past times, their experience of an evanescent present, and their relation to an unknown future.

A Clokke or an Abbey Orologge

Delighted by the Nun’s Priest’s “merry tale,” Harry Bailly suggests that its teller is—​or could have been—​a human avatar of his rooster protagonist, at least in one respect: “if thou were seculer,” Bailly exclaims, “Thou woldest ben a trede-​foul [breeding cock] aright” (7.3450–​51). But what does the Host mean by “seculer”? Does it mean that the Nun’s Priest would be a “trede-​foul” if he were not a priest? Or could he mean that the Nun’s Priest would have a more rooster-​like life if he were a secular priest, without a monastic affiliation?8 A secular priest, the implication might be, may act like a barnyard rooster by imagining his female parishioners as sexually available to him. The Nun’s Priest, in contrast, has nuns, not laywomen, in his spiritual charge, and his job is to foster their chastity, even if he has, as Bailly imagines, the physical capacity to have sex with many, many of them (seven times seventeen women, in his strangely specific calculation). Given this prodigious sexual potency, Bailly’s uncertainty about whether the Nun’s Priest’s “corage” (7.3452)—​ desire—​takes women as its object provokes palpable anxiety. His physicality becomes suddenly more threatening: instead of a rooster, Bailly begins to imagine the Nun’s Priest as a sparrowhawk, a bird that preys on other birds. This shift echoes the arc of the tale he has just heard, in which a fantasy of masculine primacy, grounded in sexual dominance over women, is threatened by another, more rapacious, male. Bailly’s initial conceit, that the Nun’s Priest would be a “trede-​foul” 8 Bailly has already proposed that the Monk would have been a “trede-​foul” were he not a religious, and that echo keeps the sense of secular as a category of time in play here as well.

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if he were “seculere,” gives way to the realization that the priest could also dominate other men. No wonder this vision of the Nun’s Priest as predator alarms the Host, self-​ proclaimed “aller cok” (1.823) to the pilgrim company. As in the Merchant’s Tale, then, the “seculere” is defined in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale through sexuality.9 Sex (not religious vocation) is the primary dividing line between those who are “secular” and those who are not. It’s not just the Nun’s Priest who resembles his rooster protagonist, after all: for Bailly, secularity/​sexuality is a forum for the display and exercise of virility (especially in its aggressive forms). By identifying the Nun’s Priest’s similarity to a rooster in terms of sexual activity, secular men in general are affiliated with a bird who was a primary symbol of secular/​time. A story about a rooster, by a rooster-​like teller, is bound to be preoccupied with time. The rooster’s symbolic association with temporality is pervasive and multivalent. As the animal that announces the sunrise (the function which leads Harry Bailly to self-​ identify as a rooster), it is associated with what is arguably the primary increment of secular time, the day, and thus more generally with time marking and temporal regulation. So Chaunticleer is compared to a “clokke or an abbey orlogge” (7.2854)—​ that is, a mechanical clock, like the kind found on some cathedrals and civic buildings in this period, that tells the so-​called “equal” hours (twenty-​four hours of equal length), or a time-​keeping mechanism that tracks monastic (or canonical) hours, which shift as days lengthen and shorten across the year. Mechanical clocks might feature a rooster automaton, such as the magnificent fourteenth-​century example from Strasbourg Cathedral (perhaps the world’s oldest functioning robot).10 This object and its original function point us to other times, as well. As a part of a cathedral clock, the rooster represents Christological time, and the Passion in particular, both through Jesus’s prediction that Peter will deny him three times before the cock crows and through the rooster’s familiar function as herald of the new day, and hence its symbolic association with the Resurrection. This association, in turn, points to a typological anticipation of the Second Coming and so the eschaton, the end of time. The rooster thus forms a nexus of secular and religious time. Or rather, from the medieval definition of the secular as earthly time, it forms a nexus of different secular times, including the (earthly) histories of salvation and the Church. From this perspective, we can recognize more clearly that the rooster figures time itself. Norbert Elias argues that time is a “complex symbol” that conjoins repeating phenomena and unrepeatable events, a conjunction that allows for a sense of temporal duration (via the regular pattern established by recurrent phenomena) and temporal progress (via that singular status of some events, which establish a sense of “before” and “after”), and thereby allows humans to measure, compare, and locate events in a forward-​moving linear “time.”11 In Christian temporal systems, the rooster is a special instantiation of 9 The sexual figures the secular, defined against the sacred, throughout the Canterbury Tales. 10 Information and photograph are from Achim Timmerman, personal communication. 11 Elias, Time: An Essay.

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Figure 1. The rooster automaton from Strasbourg Cathedral.

just such a “complex symbol,” insofar as it conjoins a recurrent temporal pattern (the solar day) and an unrepeatable historical event (the Passion),12 which together create an image of the forward movement of time in the saeculum.13 Roosters, biological and mechanical, are thus a primary symbol of the secular.14 This is, I would argue, why a story about one hosts Chaucer’s virtuoso mash-​up of so many different forms of knowledge. The tale draws on and rehearses knowledge about dream psychology, astronomy, physics, music, medicine, and rhetoric: that is, disciplines that make sense of the material world, which is to say make sense of the secular world, 12 The tale does this elsewhere, as well, in some of its many incidental temporal references, such as March as the month “when God first made man.” The identification of Christ’s Incarnation and Passion as events that structure historical time, creating a pivot between “before” and “after,” is a key element of medieval anti-​Semitism, which represents Judaism as the “Old Law” which is superseded by the “New Law” of Christianity.

13 It may be helpful to note that this conceptualization of secular time as Christian is not a contradiction. As cultural theorists such as Talal Asad have shown, even the modern conceptualization of the “secular” depends on Christianity as paradigmatic: it represents a kind of time as theorized in a particular religious culture (rather than a neutral or “universal” kind of time). See Asad, Formation of the Secular. 14 As E.  R. Truitt writes, clock automata like the Strasbourg rooster “performed the passage of time” (Medieval Robots, 141).

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as a world of becoming, of change, in time. Critics have long noted that the tale is a kind of mock encyclopedia of premodern learning: we might specify that it focuses on knowledge production relevant to secular experience. Perhaps even more specifically, it draws on knowledge production that is attentive to secular temporality: time as it passes, as it structures human experience, as it mediates historical change and accident and so the possibility of free will, independent of the supratemporal perspective of an all-​knowing God. Chaunticleer himself is acutely attentive to time as linear and unidirectional, and hence its passing as irremediable. Every day, when the sun has climbed fifteen degrees of its daily course, he crows “that it myghte nat ben amended” (7.2858): that is, he crows that nothing can alter the relentless advance of time. Most glosses read this line differently, understanding “it” to refer to Chaunticleer’s crowing (rather than reading the whole phrase as the semantic content of his utterance):  that is, to mean that Chaunticleer’s crowing itself cannot be improved. Of course, the quality of Chaunticleer’s crowing will be a key element of the story, and this line anticipates that. Here, however, the focus is on its temporal precision. Fifteen degrees, as Skeat noted long ago, measures one “equal” or “equinoctial” hour—​an hour as measured by a mechanical clock, which always divides the solar day in twenty-​four equivalent increments, making them available for comparison, regularization, and abstraction from any particular circumstance or activity.15 Only on an equinox, however, will fifteen degrees represent a seasonal (or unequal) hour: that is, the hour as a division of daytime and nighttime, which fluctuate across the year. Chaunticleer crows, that is, as if he were the rooster automaton of a mechanical clock, rather than a living rooster. What is at stake in representing him in this way? The important technological capacity (and limitation) of the mechanical clock and its equal hours is that they segment time exactly, a precision which marks these divisions as abstract, which is to say arbitrary. This allows for phenomena to be understood as serial, rather than sequential—​happening one after the other without necessarily following one another, without, that is, having any meaningful relation to previous events. The clocklike Chaunticleer, it turns out, is challenged precisely by time as it flows: by the way current circumstances are related to the past (his father) or bear on the future (prophetic dream). Such temporal relations are foregrounded in the tale through the debate that Chaunticleer and Pertelote have about the ontological status of dreams (that is, the question of what a dream is). Are dreams structured by causality—​a consequence, for example, of what one eats, the progress (or not!) of one’s digestion? That is, can they be plotted on a temporal vector from the past (what was eaten) to present (a dream induced by that food)? Or are they instead the product of a current physiological state that registers simultaneously in the dream—​perhaps (in medieval medical vocabulary) from the composition of one’s “humours” (the mix of fluids believed to affect a person’s 15 Elias, Time: An Essay. Cf. Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, who explores how these calculations explore time as a philosophical and epistemological problem.

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physical and emotional state)? Or do they provide access to a future event before it happens, through some wrinkle in time? Chaunticleer’s own answer to these questions insists on dreams as “significations” precisely of secular experience: dremes been significaciouns As wel of joye as of tribulaciouns That folk enduren in this lif present. (7.2979–​81, emphasis added)

But he’s fuzzy about how this signification works. His initial claim is that dreams are predictive, which is to say proleptic: they skip ahead of the chronological order of events. But the exemplum he uses to illustrate this claim—​of a pilgrim who dreams twice that his friend appears to him to announce he will be murdered, and then, in a third dream, that he is now murdered—​ultimately turns out to prove that knowledge of an event will inevitably follow the event, not that a dream accurately predicts it: the “conclusion” (the point or lesson) of his story, Chaunticleer twice insists, is that “Murder will out” (7.3052, 7.3057, emphasis added). This shift in temporal orientation, from future prediction to the inevitable discovery of proof that something already happened, is mediated by the third dream, which coincides with the murder: “I am now slawe” (7.3014), the victim says. The pilgrim’s dream gives him access to events happening in real time—​a status update from his friend via a premodern virtual medium. Although Chaunticleer offers his story as a forum for thinking through the diachronic relation between an event and knowledge about it (whether through prophecy or material proof), it hinges on the simultaneous relation between an event and its “signification” (the murder and the representation of that murder in a dream). The problem of time (or temporal orientation) raised by both Chaunticleer’s dream and his story about a dream is profoundly philosophical and therefore, when voiced by barnyard animals, ridiculous. At the same time, this voicing captures something of the question (or the answer) insofar as nonhuman animals are thought to inhabit a present time that lacks significant extension: they dwell in the fleeting “now” that is the signature time of the secular. Nonhuman animals are imagined to lack both a sense of the past made possible by memory and a sense of the future, which requires intellectual capacities of anticipation or imagination. And they lack the (supposedly) distinctive human capacity of language, which was important to one of the most influential conceptualizations of temporal extension in the Middle Ages: the theologian Augustine of Hippo uses language (in particular, recitation of a psalm) to model our experience of time as structured by past, present, and future. Animals in a beast fable—​and especially these very talkative animals!—​do have access to human language:  they are specially positioned, then, to pose questions about the forms, nature, and limits of linear time. Part of their role here is to respond to the Monk’s Tale, a series of tragedies defined by their linear trajectory from triumph to ignominy or death. Tragedy borrows this downward slope from the medieval idea of Fortune, represented often by a wheel, whose turn represents the fall from a happy situation to a woeful one. But Fortune’s wheel, unlike tragedy, cycles around:  misfortune turns back again to good fortune.

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The Monk’s version of tragedy, which always only moves from apex to nadir, flattens Fortune into a downward-​sloping vector. This is the substance of the Knight’s objection, and it is the narrative temporality the Nun’s Priest’s Tale corrects. Teasing the audience with its Monk-​like tragic arc—​pride to fall—​it rewinds, or cycles forward, by replaying that pattern with the fox in the place of the cock as (comi-​)tragic protagonist. As “Daun Russell” (7.3334) repeats Chaunticleer’s moral error and is subject to the same consequence (pride and fall), Chaunticleer’s own good fortune rises. Or, rather, it turns, like the hands of the mechanical clock he resembles.

So Siker as In Principio

In a Christian worldview, time is created on the first day, when God makes light and dark and calls them day and night. The first words of the Latin Bible—​which Chaunticleer famously quotes—​“In principio,” that is, mark the beginning of time itself. The biblical reference is thus another nod—​a foundational one—​to the secular. And it signals time’s special problem with beginnings. Indeed, aside from this inaugural moment of Creation, nothing in secular time has a sure “beginning” because something else has always already occurred. Take the antifeminist meme that Chaunticleer authorizes when he invokes Creation as the beginning: “Mulier est hominis confusio” (Woman is the destruction of man) (7.3164). Paired as parallel truths—​underscored by “principio” and “confusio” as a rhyme pair—​the two Latin phrases open questions about both time and beginnings. Is the suggestion that Eve’s “confusion” of Adam is the inaugural event of human history, the event that precipitates the end of Edenic stasis and start of secular time, especially through the divine curse that condemns humans to procreation and mortality? Or, is the start of secular history signalled by Chaunticleer’s mistranslation of the second Latin phrase as “Woman is mannes joy and al his blis” (7.3166). The pair this line forms with one it claims to translate traces Christian history very differently, with the Fall as the beginning of salvation: man’s destruction through woman in Genesis is redeemed by Mary, agent of “al his blis” as mother of God—​a salvific “translation” captured by the neat palindrome, Eva/​Ave, which inverts Eve’s name to form the angel’s greeting to Mary in the moment of Incarnation. Perhaps the Latin truism and its putative translation can even be read in reverse order, since the English does not actually “follow” the Latin in sense. If the reader is confused by that, and so (re)reads the Latin again after reading the English gloss, they may also be reminded that before she tempts him Eve is all Adam’s bliss (the part of the story that January invokes in citing it as the authoritative “beginning” of marriage). Beginnings, as a problem of time and temporal sequence, are also a narrative problem. Chaunticleer “treads” Pertelote twenty times before “prime,” the “first” hour, a temporal beginning that comes after quite a lot: indeed, it marks the end of the story’s first half. Chaucer’s interest in time stems at least in part from his interest in narrative, where the choice of a beginning (the temporal starting point assigned to a story or a phenomenon) determines its meaning. Meaning in narrative is produced by temporal order (linear

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or cyclical, recursive or proleptic, unified or multiple), and temporal extension (length or duration), and most obviously by the position of events within those frameworks, especially when positioned as the beginning or end. As we’ve seen, this is the basis of the Knight’s criticism of the Monk’s Tale: a story could start, rather than end, with a tragic event, and arc to some happy conclusion (like his own tale, at least for Palamon). The Nun’s Priest’s Tale could end (or could have ended) with the cock in the jaws of the fox, making it a Monk-​style tragedy and fulfilling the Nun’s Priest’s own misleading assertion that “ever the latter end of joy is woe.” Instead, that moment is just the beginning of the fox’s own minor tragedy and Chaunticleer’s happy end. Just because stories have a beginning and an end, though, and we (usually) read them in a unilinear direction, they do not necessarily, or only, model chronological time, even when they narrate events in sequential order. We often reread stories we have already read, or read stories (such as a fable) we already know, and so we sometimes understand narrative images or events with a certain retrospection, reading them through elements of the narrative that (will) occur later in the story. Even without rereading, we may think “backward” to earlier moments in a narrative, whose sense or significance shifts in relation to later ones (as I suggested above might happen if a reader considers “Mulier est hominis confusio” after reading its English mistranslation). Paul Ricoeur, an important theorist of both literature and temporality, theorizes time in relation to narrative because he thinks they are analogous, even coconstitutive, experiences: narrative structure gives us a way of understanding how the forward-​ moving advance of time is experienced variously in relation to what has come before and what is to come later. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale makes such narrative temporalities the object of self-​ conscious literary play. Take, for example, the seemingly cliché imagery used to figure Chaunticleer’s erotic attachment to Pertelote:  she “hath the herte in hold /​ Of Chauntecleer” (7.2874–​75). Four lines later, Chaunticleer and Pertelote sing a song, “My lief is faren in londe!” (7.2879). Through uncommon serendipity (or perhaps its contemporary ubiquity), we have a Middle English lyric that begins with just this line, and it turns out that the earlier phrase, “hathe the herte in hold,” is an allusion to it: My lief is faren in londe—​ Allas, why is she so? And I am so sore bonde I may nat come her to. She hath myn herte in holde Wherever she ride or go—​ With trewe love a thousand folde.16

Chaunticleer’s affective attachment to Pertelote takes the form of an (unmarked) quotation of a popular love song, the very song he sings with her a few lines later: this second allusion to the song retrospectively makes the cliché in the earlier line an allusion to it as well. Just so Chaunticleer’s dream becomes prophetic through its realization as 16 On this poem and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, see Yager, “Is ‘My Lefe in a Lond.’ ”

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an event: it precedes his encounter with the fox, but its meaning (and truth value) is changed retrospectively by that story. At the same time, the fox’s arrival both follows the dream and in some way precedes it, insofar as the dream is the re-​presentation of that event. In the case of the love song, this temporal ambivalence points to a bigger, more interesting question about how literature mediates experience. The song in performance and the affective relationship it helps to name are closely parallel: the imagery of confinement in “hath in hold” anticipates the way that singing the song itself “binds” the chickens together “in sweet accord.” It’s impossible to know whether Chaunticleer’s feeling comes first, and later finds expression in the language of the song, or whether the song comes first, and informs Chaunticleer’s experience of love. The double allusion to the song—​first as characterological imagery and then as direct quotation spoken by those characters—​creates a bidirectional temporality that moots the question of which came first. Literary experience opens a reciprocal or reversible temporality as an alternative to unidirectional, forward-​oriented time.17 Time that flows in two directions makes it hard to mark beginnings, and this difficulty registers in how hard the Nun’s Priest labours to start the story of Chaunticleer’s encounter with the fox, the fable proper, which comes halfway through the tale. The effort tells especially in lines that echo the start of the Canterbury Tales itself: Whan that the month in which the world bigan, That highte March, whan God first maked man, Was compleet, and passed were also, Syn March [was gon], thritty dayes and two. (7.3187–​90)

The passage is hard to parse, and scholars have long tried to determine the exact date intended, on the assumption that one is meant. But these efforts stall because the reference is caught between a beginning and an end.18 The Nun’s Priest dates the event to March, a month of beginnings: it is the start of the English new year, as well as the month in which the world, and human life, began. More specifically, however, it occurs at the end of March, when that month is “complete,” after the passage of thirty-​ two days, so, then, at the start of April. Unless the thirty-​two days themselves begin at the end of March, in which case the date is early in May. This uncertainty about dates mirrors uncertainty about the story’s own beginning:  does the story start here, with Chaunticleer’s capture? Or is this a sequel to his dream? These pedantic lines point to the fundamental doubleness of narrative temporality. The confusion hinges on whether they refer to two different lapses of time that occur sequentially (the month followed by an additional thirty-​two days) or refers twice to the same lapse of time using two different units of measurement (by month and by day, the full tally of which is necessarily met when the month is “complete”). Caught between 17 On bird calls and the temporality of verse, see Chaganti, “Avian Provocation.” 18 Cf. Peter Travis, Disseminal Chaucer, chap. 6.

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sequence and simultaneity, the uncertain lines recall Chaunticleer’s exemplum of the murdered pilgrim in the dungcart. The conjunction of successive and simultaneous temporalities modelled in these moments in the tale highlights the way all stories allow us to read within the temporal order they construct and also from the external perspective of the story as a whole, when the beginning and end are available to us—​a temporal perspective available only in, and so only through, narrative.

Bibliography Secondary Sources Asad, Talal. Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Baugh, Albert. “The Original Teller of the Merchant’s Tale.” Modern Philology 35 (1937): 15–​26. Chaganti, Seeta. “Avian Provocation:  Roosters and Rime Royal in Fifteenth-​Century Fable.” Exemplaria 29 (2017): 314–​30. Dinshaw, Carolyn. How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012. Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2004. Elias, Norbert. Time: An Essay. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham, NC:  Duke University Press, 2010. Jagose, Annamarie. Inconsequence: Lesbian Representation and the Logic of Sexual Sequence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Lipton, Emma. Affections of the Mind: The Politics of Sacramental Marriage in Late Medieval English Literature. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011. Love, Heather. Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Oxford Latin Dictionary. Edited by P. G. W. Glare. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Travis, Peter. Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Truitt, E. R. Medieval Robots: Mechanism, Magic, Nature, and Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015. Yager, Susan. “Is ‘My Lefe in a Lond’ or ‘My Lief in Londe’?” The Once and Future Classroom. TEAMS, Consortium for Teaching Medieval Studies XII.2 (Spring 2016).

Catherine Sanok is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints’ Lives in Late Medieval England (Penn, 2007) and New Legends of England: Forms of Community in Late Medieval Saints’ Lives (2018), and coeditor, with Robert Meyer-​Lee, of The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form (Boydell and Brewer, 2018). Her current research focuses on secular temporalities—​from the solar day to the Boethian future—​in medieval romance and lyric.

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FLESH RICHARD H. GODDEN General Prologue Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale Merchant’s Tale Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale Parson’s Tale

The opening lines of the Canterbury Tales powerfully give voice to the desire to go on pilgrimage: the return of spring not only stirs the world of nature to grow and procreate, it stirs people to “longen” for pilgrimage (1.12). Curiously, while these opening lines depict the urge to go on pilgrimage as an almost natural, universal force, the closing lines of this prologue describe a more specific purpose for undertaking the journey to the shrine of St. Thomas at Canterbury: “The hooly blisful martir for to seke, /​ That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke” (1.17–​18). Although people in the Middle Ages went on pilgrimage for many reasons, including for as disparate purposes as religious renewal or as an expression of social status, the seeking of health, particularly of a miraculous restoration to wholeness, animated many visits to saints’ shrines.1 The lists of miracles attached to various saints tell the story, repeatedly, of individuals with far more severe conditions than Chaucer’s pilgrims being cured.2 Some shrines had a greater reputation for miraculous healing than others, but we need only look to Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend for a description of visits to the tomb of the “hooly blissful martir” St. Thomas Becket: And the pope thanked God that it pleased him to show such miracles for his holy martyr, at whose tomb by the merits and prayers of this holy martyr our blessed Lord hath showed many miracles. The blind have recovered their sight, the dumb their speech, the deaf their hearing, the lame their limbs, and the dead their life.3

Though Chaucer raises the possibility of travelling to Canterbury for health reasons, most of the pilgrims do not easily conform to the catalogue of disabilities listed in The Golden Legend. The Wife of Bath is partially deaf, but none seem lame, blind, or mute. And yet, the Wife is nevertheless one of several figures of embodied difference. Looking just at the pilgrims, the Wife’s deafness stands alongside the Pardoner’s indeterminate

1 Theilmann, “On the Road to Health.”

2 See Godden, “Mobility Impairments”; Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe. 3 Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, 197.

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270 Richard H. Godden gender and possibly phlegmatic condition,4 the Summoner’s diseased face,5 and the Cook with his ulcerous leg.6 Their presence in the pilgrimage to Canterbury is not a surprise, especially as many disabled pilgrims in the Middle Ages travelled great distances looking for medical or spiritual aid.7 What is noteworthy, however, is the fact that these figures of embodied difference remain unchanged throughout the narrative. Chaucer not only includes no instances of miraculous healing amongst the pilgrims, but they never actually arrive at Canterbury. The failure to reach Canterbury, then, introduces narrative indeterminacy and openness as a fundamental quality to the Tales. Chaucer explicitly invokes the idea of seeking healing at the shrine of a saint, but then his narrative avoids any such resolution where a disabled body is restored to health or wholeness. Instead, the Tales is populated with divergent bodies, both among the pilgrims and within the tales they tell.8 To understand the resistant, stubbornly divergent bodies of Chaucer’s pilgrims, I  turn to Disability Studies; I  seek, following the work of David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, to consider “a more fleshy engagement with material bodily variation.”9 Mitchell and Snyder, in their The Biopolitics of Disability, argue for the creative capacities of divergent modes of embodiment, exploring how “alternative cognitions/​corporealities allow us to inhabit the world as vulnerable, constrained, yet innovative embodied beings rather than merely as devalued social constructs or victims of oppression.”10 Rather than seeing disabled individuals in the Middle Ages merely as metaphors for social or spiritual ills, or as bodies primed for divine healing, this essay explores how disabled bodies in the Middle Ages, particularly those in the Canterbury Tales, resist the regime of normalcy. I focus on the Wife and the Pardoner, two pilgrims with notoriously ambivalent embodiments, and who also have the distinction of receiving longer and more dramatic confessional prologues than the other pilgrims. I argue that Chaucer’s two most vivid creations owe their power, in part, to their divergent bodies. First, I  introduce some key tenets of Disability Studies to demonstrate how this discourse can illuminate the “alternative embodiments” of the Wife and the Pardoner. From there, I  detail the multitude of meanings related to flesh, including medieval senses of bodily material and contemporary analyses of flesh from a Disability Studies viewpoint, in order to explore how uses of the word “flesh” often seem to occur in Tales that feature divergent 4 For discussion of the Pardoner and complexion theory, see Whitney, “What’s Wrong with the Pardoner?”

5 For discussion of the Summoner’s possibly leprous body, see Whearty, “Leper on the Road to Canterbury.” 6 For discussion of the Cook’s mormal, and the openness his body causes, see Sweany, “Cook’s ‘Mormal.’ ” 7 Metzler, “Have Crutch, Will Travel.” 8 Hsy, “Diverging Forms.”

9 Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability, 43. 10 Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability, 7.

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and disabled bodies, either as characters or tale tellers. This chapter charts a path for reading disability in Chaucer and in the Middle Ages that emphasizes the materiality of disabled bodies. My readings examine the complicated and varied meanings of flesh, drawing out how this entails a similarly complicated view of disability.

Disability Studies

The study of disability in medieval literature and culture has been a fruitful project.11 As Irina Metzler has observed, however, there was no term for disability in the Middle Ages that corresponds with our modern conceptions.12 In order to recuperate or understand how disability was construed in the Middle Ages, therefore, Metzler applies the social model of disability to medieval texts. Under the social model, a twentieth-​ century conception, there is a distinction between impairment, or the physiological and cognitive manifestations of difference, and disability, a hindrance experienced due to barriers in the built or social environment. The social model is largely a response to the medical model, which pathologizes disability as something always in need of treatment or a cure. Other models have proliferated, including the cultural model, which sees impairment and disability as both socially constructed,13 and in medieval Disability Studies, there is the religious model, articulated by Edward Wheatley, which views religion as substituting for medicine.14 While I recognize the value of separating “disability” from “impairment,” and I acknowledge the potential anachronism of using these terms,15 in the readings that follow I generally employ them interchangeably, and to them I add “embodied difference” and “divergent.” I often prefer “divergent” or “embodied difference” because they are capacious terms that describe bodies that are not immediately recognizable as “normal.” A key argument of Disability Studies is that “normalcy” is, itself, a constructed, elusive concept. Lennard Davis, for instance, argues that he focuses “not so much on the construction of disability as on the construction of normalcy […] because the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person.”16 Further, the word “normal,” like “disability,” is a term not used in its modern sense in medieval discourse, but this tension between normative bodies and bodies that diverge from that norm is still operative; and, without rigid terms such as “disability” or “normal,” we can better recognize the fluidity and divergence of bodily forms. As Julie Singer notes, “Disabled bodies manifest a particular potential to perturb 11 For an overview, see Godden and Hsy, “Analytical Survey.” 12 Metzler, Disability in Medieval Europe, 5. 13 Eyler, Disability in the Middle Ages.

14 Wheatley, Stumbling Blocks before the Blind. 15 For further discussion of anachronism in medieval disability studies, see Godden and Hsy, “Analytical Survey,” 330ff. 16 Davis, Enforcing Normalcy, 23–​24.

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272 Richard H. Godden existing social categories in the largely non-​exclusionary, pre-​institutionalization, pre-​nursing home Middle Ages, where the much-​vaunted (apparent) lack of a notion of ‘disabled’ identity renders a broader swath of social boundaries permeable to the non-​normative body.”17 In other words, the pre-​Enlightenment representations of non-​ normative bodies in the Middle Ages provide a particularly useful vantage point for understanding and interrogating constructions of normalcy and difference. One influential way of reading disabled bodies in the Middle Ages examines the tension between embodied difference and the narrative drive toward normalcy, doing so through Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis. In Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Mitchell and Snyder demonstrate how narrative often depends upon the idea of deviance, arguing “all narratives operate out of a desire to compensate for a limitation or to reign in excess.”18 The presence of disability in a narrative, according to Mitchell and Snyder, calls out for the figure of embodied difference to be neutralized, either moved to the margins, somehow cured, or even eradicated. For example, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, the deformed monarch is both seductive and villainous, and he is ultimately defeated by the future Henry VII, an able-​ bodied and virtuous hero; normalcy, therefore, is achieved at the end of the narrative. Such a reading is immediately useful for medieval literature.19 Consider, for example, all the miraculous moments of healing that permeate not just medieval romance, but also the literature of the saints. In the Canterbury Tales, however, this happens rarely, if at all. Though January’s blindness is suddenly cured in the Merchant’s Tale, evidence of disability and physical difference otherwise persists throughout Chaucer’s narrative. The Wife’s deafness is never cured, and the Cook’s mormal never closes up. Mitchell and Snyder’s theory of narrative prosthesis is not, as they would most certainly agree, the only way to read the functioning of disability in literature, however. It might be more accurate to think of narrative prosthesis as an expression or reassertion of dominant cultural forces through narrative, but there are ways to read counternarratives, to see bodies that resist rather than disappear. In contrast to the social model, which locates disability in the social or physical environment, Mitchell and Snyder, in their recent work, argue for a more fleshy understanding of disability; specifically, they read the materiality of the flesh, of the body, in order to consider the ways in which disabled bodies resist neoliberal and other cultural forces.20 In considering the materiality of flesh, Mitchell and Snyder draw on not just Disability Studies, but also a field of inquiry termed the “new materialism.” Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, for instance, describe how “materiality is always something more than ‘mere’ matter:  an 17 Singer, “Disability and the Social Body,” 137.

18 Mitchell and Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis, 53. 19 Pearman, Women and Disability.

20 See Mitchell, Antebi, and Snyder, Matter of Disability, and Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability.

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excess, force, vitality, relationality, or difference that renders matter active, self-​creative, productive, unpredictable.”21 Though new materialist writing often considers nonhuman matter, Coole and Frost’s articulation also captures the liveliness of flesh in many of its human manifestations. And, though much of new materialist work centres upon modern ecological concerns, Caroline Walker Bynum examines medieval writings about religious relics, including organic and inorganic material, and argues that matter possesses “a sort of autonomy of actuality or desire.”22 In other words, liveliness inheres in matter, potentially producing unforeseen results. By attending to flesh’s materiality, Mitchell and Snyder observe what they describe as “antinormative novels of embodiment,” where such texts “represent crip/​queer bodies as [a]‌productive difference” that challenges normative ideas of labour and value.23 Although they work with more contemporary genres and modes, I would argue that antinormative modes of embodiments are not restricted to the novel or to the neoliberal present. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, particularly through the figures of the Wife and the Pardoner, puts forth modes of embodiment that are antinormative; and, through a close reading of his deployment of the multifaceted idea of “flesh,” we can see how these bodies reinforce alternate modes of embodiment that support notions of dependency, vulnerability, and interdependency, qualities that Disability Studies holds up in contrast to an elusive and unattainable idea of the normal body.24

Prosthetic Flesh

To more fully explore divergent bodies in Chaucer, it is first necessary to explore the complicated network of meanings associated with the medieval word “flesh.” “Lo how I vanysshe, flessh and blood and skyn!” (6.732), bemoans the Old Man in the Pardoner’s Tale as he considers his withering body, a body that continues to live on and not die. The three rioters, who have banded together to slay Death, cannot understand the Old Man’s desire to die. His “staf” knocking upon the ground as he walks, he cries out “Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste?” (6.730, 733). In his lament, the Old Man dissects his body, separating out flesh, blood, and skin from his bones. The former vanish away while the latter hold out hope for some rest. In this moment, he represents a body in pieces, parcelled into its constituent parts, a vulnerable assemblage dependent upon a walking 21 Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 9. 22 Bynum, Christian Materiality, 236.

23 Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability, 180. Some recent work in Disability Studies finds common cause with the queer theory. Just as the word “queer” is reclaimed by activists and scholars, so too is the word “crip” for some. For an example of how queer theory and Disability Studies can interesect, see McRuer, Crip Theory.

24 In particular, see Garland-​Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies. Garland-​Thomson describes the idea of “the normate,” a figure of authority and cultural capital that emerges only when all markers of difference are peeled away (8).

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274 Richard H. Godden stick for mobility. While his rhetorical deconstruction of his body may be surprising, his invocation of “flesh” is not. Chaucer’s deployment of the word “flesh” in the Canterbury Tales cuts across several conceptual frameworks for understanding the materiality of flesh in the Middle Ages. When the Old Man refers to flesh, for example, he is certainly contemplating his own mortality. On one hand, then, “flesh” is the essence of the human, but on the other, “flesh” often means meat, a consumable, nonhuman body carved into pieces; the Prioress, for instance, is observed to have “smale houndes […] that she fedde /​ With rosted flessh, or milk and wastel-​breed” (1.146–​47). These two distinct meanings, human and nonhuman, also come together in the enthusiastic declarations of January in the Merchant’s Tale when he anticipates having a wife: “Oold fissh and yong flessh wolde I have fayn” (4.1418). Further, the word “flesh” can activate not just biological meanings, but also medicinal, mercantile, culinary, and quite often, spiritual and theological ones.25 In the Tale of Melibee, Dame Prudence warns her husband that “ ‘for certes, the three enemys of mankynde—​that is to seyn, the flessh, the feend, and the world—​thou hast suffred hem entre into thyn herte wilfully by the wyndowes of thy body, and hast nat defended thyself suffisantly agayns hire assautes and hire temptaciouns, so that they han wounded thy soule in fyve places’ ” (7.1421–​23). This triad of the world, the flesh, and the devil is a familiar one to the Middle Ages. The Parson returns to this theme repeatedly in his sermon, and roots Man’s capacity for sinfulness in the corrupt matter of the flesh, declaring that “For God woot, the flessh is a ful greet enemy to the soule” (10.458). Several of these meanings of “flesh” come together quite suddenly and quite forcefully when the Wife of Bath refers to the tribulatio carnis, or the tribulation of the flesh. In a pivotal moment of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Alisoun starkly describes the nature of her power over her husband: An housbonde I wol have—​I nyl nat lette—​ Which shal be bothe my dettour and my thral, And have his tribulacioun withal Upon his flessh, whil that I am his wyf. I have the power durynge al my lyf Upon his propre body, and noght he. Right thus the Apostel tolde it unto me, And our housbondes for to love us weel. Al this sentence me liketh every deel! (3.155–​62)

This is a well commented on passage where the Wife invokes the authority of Saint Paul to legitimate her desire to hold her husband as “bothe [her] dettour and [her] thral.” She refers to “his flessh” and to “his propre body,” suggesting for just a moment that his flesh is his own, but then forcefully claims “I have the power […] noght he.” Her mention of “tribulacioun” invokes 1 Corinthians 7:28 where Saint Paul declares that the 25 MED s.v. “flesh, n.”

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married have not sinned but “shall have tribulation of the flesh.” Medieval preachers and theologians understood tribulatio carnis to refer to the unwelcome worldly temptations that can occur in marriage, temptations which can detract from the spiritual life. She also draws on 1 Corinthians 7:4 where Saint Paul does indeed state that the wife shall have power over her husband’s body, but she omits the part suggesting a reciprocal relationship, where the husband shall have power over the wife’s body. While it is important to note how she co-​opts Saint Paul (and other antifeminist discourse) for her own purposes, I  am, for the moment, more interested in the image of her husband’s vulnerable flesh. She rhetorically carves out his flesh for her own devices, divorcing it from his ownership and assuming power not only over it, but from it. Her husband’s flesh is rendered seemingly inert, a passive object she takes possession of and upon which she acts. In this moment, he is little different than a piece of flesh she might procure for supper. And as Alisoun would remind us, she takes no “delit” in “bacon,” (3.418) that is, old flesh. More to the point, however, her husbands’ flesh acts as a sort of prosthethic supplement to the perceived deficiencies of the female body. In the traditions of thinkers like Galen, Aristotle, and Augustine, the female body was often seen, in the Middle Ages, as subordinate to the male body. In her examination of philosophical, theological, and medical treatises in the medieval period, Tory Pearman develops what she terms the Gendered Model of disability, a model which notes the overlap in the social processes that construct ideas of femininity, monstrosity, and disability.26 Specifically, Pearman examines the perceived “defectiveness of women in male-​authored discourses” of the Middle Ages, where the female body is, in an Aristotelian framework, “an undercooked male.”27 “Such qualities,” she argues, “cast the female body as incomplete in relation to the male body, or norm, and subsequent medical writings iterate these value-​laden notions.”28 This is not to say, nor does Pearman argue, that all women are disabled. However, following Pearman, I would argue that women’s bodies are often presented as incomplete; even more, they are also represented as excessive in biological terms such as menstruation or in social terms as unruly behaviour and appetites. In either case, masculine medieval discourse construed female bodies as missing the supposed mark of integrity and wholeness of the male body. Medieval discussions of pregnancy, menstruation, and women’s health in general often revolve around these seemingly opposite but co-constituting concepts of incompleteness and excessiveness. Alisoun, the Wife of Bath, seems to exemplify fears of the unruly, excessive woman, and her reliance upon marriage and the bodies of her husbands casts into relief the potential incompleteness of all bodies. The Alisoun that we meet in the General Prologue, however, is a self-​sufficient woman, a merchant, and a world traveller. Her self-​ sufficiency sets her apart, especially as she is the only nonreligious female pilgrim in the 26 Pearman, Women and Disability, 11ff. 27 Pearman, Women and Disability, 24, 8. 28 Pearman, Women and Disability, 8.

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276 Richard H. Godden group. As she narrates her life story in her prologue, though, it becomes clear that her independence is gained through the power and capital she amasses through the flesh she claims through her successive marriages. This power is not just an expression of her sexual or marital dominance, but an illustration of how she compensates for the social limitations that emanate from her supposedly incomplete, defective womanly body. If a woman’s body in the Middle Ages is seen as physically and socially deficient, Alisoun capitalizes upon the flesh of the men in her life, turning them into prosthetic aids to expand and grow her own authority. In arguing that Alisoun fashions her husbands into a prosthetic aid, I am considering the potential of flesh to be a prosthesis. Katie L. Walter, in her work on surgical manuals and miracle narratives, delineates the types of flesh as it was understood in the Middle Ages. There, we find three different types of flesh:  glandular, such as the breast or testicles; muscular; and “ ‘symple fleisch,” which “fill[s]‌ up hollow, empty spaces in the body.”29 As Walter details, “simple flesh” acts as a prosthesis when bodily integrity is compromised. In cases where, for example, the skin has been torn, new flesh can grow to supplement and fill the opening; it is “this natural capacity for flesh to supplement that surgical theory utilises and artificially enhances in its treatment of the wounds or diseases that disrupt the continuity of the body.”30 Opposed to the discursive or linguistic idea of prosthesis that Mitchell and Snyder use, a prosthesis in every day usage is understood to be an inorganic replacement for a part of the body, such as a leg or eye.31 Recently, however, prosthesis has become a crucial word in Disability Studies for exploring the vulnerable body and the array of social, economic, and technological networks that disabled individuals live in. Prosthesis, as a supplement, lays bare the dependencies, deficiencies, and diversity of forms for the disabled body.32 How Alisoun might use her husbands as a prosthetic support to supplement the social and cultural limitations of her sex becomes clearer when compared to how January treats May in the Merchant’s Tale. When contemplating having a wife, he firmly declares “Oold fissh and yong flessh wolde I have fayn” (4.1418). Treating his soon-​to-​be wife like a literal piece of meat, January wishes to ensure that she will not be past her prime. In describing her as “yong flessh,” January revealingly casts his wife as an object, not as a subject. Like roasted flesh, a wife can presumably be acquired or bought, and then consumed for the maintenance of the self. Of course, in a sense, this is exactly what he attempts to do as he increasingly traps May for his own needs and pleasures, both carnally and as a prosthetic support to compensate for his blindness. But, as Karl Steel would caution, nonhuman flesh is not always inert. Exploring how biopolitics—​regimes 29 Walter, “Fragments for a Medieval Theory of Prosthesis,” 1346. 30 Walter, “Fragments for a Medieval Theory of Prosthesis,” 1346.

31 The Oxford English Dictionary lists the first recorded use of “prosthesis” in English as 1550, when it was a rhetorical term meaning “the addition of a letter or syllable to the beginning of a word.” The first recorded use of prosthesis as a medical device is 1706.

32 For additional discussion of theories of prosthesis and how it could be applied to the Middle Ages, see Godden, “Prosthetic Ecologies.”

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of control over bodies for the purposes of sustaining and expanding life—​operates in the forest, Steel observes that “Biopolitics deals with bodies, and bodies resist; they have their own energies, sometimes capable of turning biopolitical interventions to other ends.”33 January and Alisoun might think they are making an expression of power and control when they rhetorically turn their partners into nonhuman flesh, but flesh sometimes acts on its own. January certainly discovers this, or he would if he were not so obtuse, when May carries out her affair with the squire Damian. January’s reflections upon the joys and the needs of the flesh thus lead to a collapsing of several categories. First, by treating his would-​be wife as a piece of meat to consume, he confuses the categories of human and nonhuman. Like Alisoun, he will derive his power and mastery from her flesh. Just prior to his expression of voraciousness, the narrator considers Ephesians 5:25, when Saint Paul instructs husbands to love wives as Christ loved the Church. The narrator goes on: “If thou lovest thyself, thou lovest thy wyf; /​No man hateth his flessh, but in his lyf /​He fostreth it” (4.1385–​87). To love your wife is to love yourself. Conversely, to hate her would be to hate your own flesh. So, not only does the mention of flesh here blur the line between human and nonhuman, it also blurs the line between January and May. The blurring between bodies can be witnessed in the shared liveliness of the “one flesh” of the married couple. Alisoun might imagine her husbands as flesh, but she also does so with the promise of sex, something that could lead to shared delight, a mixture of pleasure and pain. January, when preparing himself for his wedding night with May, takes various supplements in order to make himself more appealing to his wife (4.1807–12) He reveals some genuine concern for May’s experience when he worries about her reaction to his “slake skyn” (4.1849). The attempt to turn May into flesh to be consumed exerts his fantasy of dominance, but his recognition of a shared and affective liveliness of flesh draws attention to the vulnerability of bodies. This mingling of the flesh of two people becomes literalized when January loses his sight. There are certainly moral and symbolic readings of January’s blindness, and how his physical blindness accords with his inner blindness; one might be miraculously cured in the text, but the other remains.34 However, by attending to his literal blindness, we can see how he turns May into a prosthetic aid. After he becomes blind, “He nolde suffer hire for to ryde or go, /​But if that he had hond on hire alway” (4.2090–​91). This is a complicated moment—​on one hand, he is being abusive toward his wife as he exerts further control; on the other, this is a recognizable image of someone blind needing the help of another person. When January decided to obtain “yong flessh,” he could not have foreseen the different ways in which this flesh would resist and rebel while also nourishing and sustaining.35 And, although he regains his sight, it is worth noting 33 Steel, “Biopolitics in the Forest,” 43.

34 For further discussion of blindness in the Merchant’s Tale, see Brown, “Optical Theme”; Palmer, “Your Malady.” 35 For a discussion of how May uses her own divergent body to achieve her own ends, see Pearman, “ ‘O Sweete Venym Queynte!’ .” Also, see Crocker, “Performative Passivity.”

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278 Richard H. Godden that his temporary sightlessness enables the farcical actions of May and Damian which might lead to her pregnancy, ironically legitimating January’s manhood. Putting Alisoun and January together, we can see the prosthetic relationship that develops between people. In both instances here, there is a dehumanizing quality that cannot be ignored, especially when it comes to January. Mixed in with this, however, is also the reality that many if not most bodies are vulnerable. The prosthetic treatment of flesh here reveals the interdependency and vulnerability of bodies. It might be comforting to think of one’s flesh as one’s own, but as Alisoun reveals, one’s “propre body” might become a support for another.

Rebel Flesh

The varied uses of flesh in Chaucer suggest both dependence and interdependence. In addition to the prosthetic relations with other people, one’s own flesh bears the potential for other modes of being. Returning to the Wife: although she casts her several husbands as experiencing tribulation and the vulnerability of the flesh, she is the one who most directly suffers in her own body. After her husband Jankyn repeatedly reads to her from the “book of wikked wyves” (3.685), she tears a leaf out of the book. In response, her husband hits her so hard that she loses hearing in one ear: He nolde suffre nothyng of my list. By God, he smoot me ones on the lyst, For that I rente out of his book a leef, That of the strook myn ere wax al deef. (3.633–​36)

This is a profoundly upsetting moment of domestic violence. While the moment of abuse cannot be forgotten, I wish to focus for the moment on her deafness and how it is more than just a pitiable detail. Melvin Storm, in his essay “Alisoun’s Ear,” notes the importance of the Wife’s deafness, as it is mentioned in the second line of her General Prologue portrait and is the concluding episode of her prologue.36 In his reading of her deafness, Storm argues that “Chaucer uses the Wife of Bath’s deafness iconographically to reflect her intellectual abilities and her spiritual state, echoing a long patristic tradition of equating the ears and hearing with the apprehension of truth”; further, her deafness signifies a spiritual state that leads her to “distort” and “misunderstand” not only the Word of God but also the written (masculine) authorities she relies upon in her discourse.37 This line of argument treats disability as representative of some greater spiritual or social ill, often linking disability with either sin or some sort of deficiency. Pearman rightly critiques Storm, however, noting that he “fails to read Alisoun closely enough.”38 Storm’s argument, supported by medieval interpretations of deafness, fails to 36 Storm, “Alisoun’s Ear,” 219.

37 Storm, “Alisoun’s Ear,” 220, 223.

38 Pearman, Women and Disability, 68.

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capture the full nature of her disability, nor does it completely explain what her deafness contributes to her character in the Canterbury Tales. Rather than simply being a static representation of her spiritual deficiency, I  argue that Alisoun’s deafness represents what Mitchell and Snyder would term her “capacity of incapacity.”39 The materiality of her own flesh, including her deafness and her status as a woman, enables her almost overwhelming presence on the pilgrimage. What is perceived as “incapacity” within normative frameworks becomes, instead, the locus of her “capacity,” and power. Other than her deafness, the single most important detail about the Wife would be her overt and unabashed expression of desire. Indeed, the Wife’s sexual voracity is inseparable from her deafness. As Edna Sayers argues, these two aspects of her character come together in Chaucer’s “homophonic rhyme on ‘list’ desires and ‘lyst’ ear.”40 Chaucer goes out of his way to make this connection: in the other contemporary attested instances in which “lyst” refers to the ear, the rhyming word is almost always “fist.”41 Critics like Storm, and D. W. Robertson, Jr. before him, would agree on this point, but where we would disagree, however, is on the value or function of this pairing. Read in a negative light, the Wife’s deafness can be linked to both her spiritual ignorance and the act of physical violence that led to her deafness. Jankyn’s battering of the Wife corresponds, as Pearman argues, with conduct manuals that described the proper punishment for excessive, unruly, and sexually voracious wives.42 It cannot be disputed that these horizons of meaning are operative in the Tales. And yet, setting aside for the moment the moral dimension of her promiscuity, the Wife’s desires lead not only to the longest prologue by a pilgrim, but also to her being the only pilgrim to be cited as an authority by another tale teller. Just as the Wife appropriates and redeploys antifeminist discourse, so too, I would argue, does the text acknowledge these potential meanings for deafness and the deficiency or deviancy of her body without fully accepting them. The Wife’s deafness is inextricable from her embodied experience. Having detailed the multiple meanings of flesh, it seems too simplistic to read her own flesh, flesh that suffered tribulation, as only a symptom or metaphor for her spiritual state. In place of a symptomatic reading, I follow Jonathan Hsy’s insistence that we also read disability more literally: In the case of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath, a notion of surface reading productively resists an urge to treat deafness only as a metaphor for some deficient or disadvantaged condition (spiritual, social, or gendered). Non‐symptomatic readings of the Wife (such as those of Sayers, and my own reading here) engage with her deafness as an embodied attribute shaping her entire performance. Such methods also direct the reader away from increasingly distancing modes of abstraction and more toward the phenomenology of deafness as lived experience.43

39 Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability, 196.

40 Sayers, “Experience, Authority, and the Mediation of Deafness,” 82–​83. 41 Sayers, “Experience, Authority, and the Mediation of Deafness.” 42 Pearman, Women and Disability, 47–60. 43 Hsy, “Symptom and Surface,” 5.

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280 Richard H. Godden To read the surface of the Wife’s impairment is to acknowledge the variety of her embodied experience rather than imposing meaning upon it. It has become a critical commonplace to read the figure of Dame Alisoun through a feminist or gendered theoretical perspective, but her disability cannot be disentangled from other aspects of her body. To further explore the “capacity of incapacity,” I return briefly to the Pardoner’s Tale, where the Old Man that the three rioters meet bemoans his aging, but not dying, flesh. Depicted with a walking stick, he raises the spectre of both old age and of disability: “Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf, And on the ground which is my moodres gate, I knokke with my staf, bothe erly and late, And seye, ‘Leeve Mooder, leet me in! Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood and skyn! Allas, whan shul my bones been at reste?’ ” (6.728–​33)

This man is mysterious. Who is he? Can he really not die? Most anything is possible in the suggestive and symbol-​rich allegorical landscape of the Tale. What is less mysterious, though, is the hard fact of his emaciated body, a product of his old age, causing him impairments for which he compensates with the use of a walking stick. He has perhaps lost the “simple flesh” that Walter describes, the material that fills out the empty spaces of the body. Flesh, along with both blood and skin in this instance, signify life and health. Yet, despite his loss, he is still a fleshy reminder of mortality. Unfortunately for the three rioters, this reminder goes unheard. The Old Man has knowledge greater than the three young men—​he understands that old age and death are not necessarily something to be vilified, and they certainly cannot be conquered. Reading the surface of his bodily form, like Hsy suggests doing with the Wife, reveals that death is not only unavoidable, but perhaps something to be accepted, if not embraced. Young, drunk, and of a rage, the young men cannot understand this. What cannot be overlooked is how the Old Man’s knowledge and wisdom is indistinguishable from his physical state. As Tobin Siebers argues, “disability is a body of knowledge”;44 it is not something to be cured, but a source of creativity and knowing. Although the Old Man is not a narratorial stand-​in for the Pardoner, together these two figures of embodied difference anchor the Prologue and the Tale. At first glance, the Pardoner might not seem to signify a disabled character. Most scholarly attention has revolved around the ambiguity of his sexual and gender identity, spurred by the narrator’s remark that “I trowe he were a geldying or a mare” (1.691). In addition to his ambivalent sex, he has “heer as yelow as wex” (1.675), a voice “as small as hath a goot” (1.688), and finally, “No berde hadde he, ne never sholde have” (1.689). These physical features have prompted a wide array of identifications and diagnoses. Elspeth Whitney, for example, compellingly refers to medieval complexion theory to identify the Pardoner 44 Siebers, “Returning the Social to the Social Model,” 47.

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as phlegmatic. My purpose here is not to diagnose him; in fact, the attempt to diagnose not only literary characters, but also figures from the past, can be a critical move that can sometimes shut meanings down instead of opening them up. Disability Studies, on the other hand, is often less concerned with specific diagnosis or identification, especially as these are often an aid to pathologizing, and instead explores, as I discuss above, how the idea of the “normal” body as a stable and intelligible entity is a social and cultural construction. In place of fixing the Pardoner’s body with a condition or status that can be physically or spiritually cured, then, I  would instead suggest that we attend to its “productive difference.” The Pardoner’s body is made up of meaning-​making elements that do not make up a “whole,” and therefore resists the desire to make his body wholly legible and understandable. His is a body that, like the Wife of Bath’s, varies from socially constructed representations of the normal body, and in so doing, carries its own knowledge. The narrative openness in the Canterbury Tales, I argue, is centred upon the divergent bodies of the Pardoner and Wife of Bath. In closing this exploration of flesh in Chaucer and the Wife of Bath’s and Pardoner’s bodies, I return to the suggested but frustrated promise of a restoration to health mentioned in the General Prologue. Interestingly, the divergent bodies of the Wife and Pardoner bear the spectral traces of miraculous healing yet to occur, and in both instances, this healing is quite specifically connected to Thomas Becket. As Jacobus de Voragine relates, the deaf have their hearing restored when visiting the Shrine of Thomas Becket. The Pardoner’s bodily instability might allude to a miracle performed through Becket’s intervention for a man named Eilward. Wrongfully accused of stealing, Eilward has his genitals mutilated and his eyes put out. He prays to Thomas Becket, and the Saint miraculously restores him to health. Afterwards, physical witness is rendered by the townsfolk’s handling of the newly restored testicles of Eilward. Helen Barr argues that “[t]‌hese images of bodily assault, disfiguration, and restoration are part of a widespread cluster of signs that mark the bodies of the Chaucerian Pardoners.”45 So, when the Host abrasively declares “I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond” (6.952), he is not only attacking the Pardoner, but re-​enacting the story of Eilward. Thus, both the Wife and the Pardoner possess bodies that invoke miraculous healing by St. Thomas Becket, yet their bodies remain unchanged. Like these early lines of the General Prologue, there is a promise of a restoration of normative bodies that is never fulfilled. If narrative prosthesis reinforces normative bodies and the structures of control they underwrite, the resistant bodies of the Wife and the Pardoner correspond to Mitchell and Snyder’s antinormative embodiments, where the “experiences of severe disability prod those in crip/​queer bodies to give up investments in the impossible normalcy of stasis as the foundation of our coherent relations to others.”46 When reading disabled bodies in the Middle Ages, it is necessary to unpack the dense set of meanings associated with specific conditions and with flesh 45 Barr, Transporting Chaucer, 29. See Sturges, Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory. 46 Mitchell and Snyder, Biopolitics of Disability, 196.

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282 Richard H. Godden in general. Even more, it is just as necessary to focus on what the bodies do and not just frame them through available sets of interpretation. The fleshly figures of the Canterbury Tales loom large because of, not in spite of, their embodied difference.

Bibliography Primary Sources Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend, or, Lives of the Saints, as Englished by William Caxton. Edited by Frederick Startridge Ellis. Vol. 2. London: Dent, 1900.

Secondary Sources

Barr, Helen. Transporting Chaucer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Brown, Peter. “An Optical Theme in the Merchant’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, no. 1 (1984): 231–​43. Bynum, Caroline Walker. Christian Materiality: An Essay on Religion in Late Medieval Europe. Cambridge: Zone, 2011. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost. “Introducing the New Materialisms.” In New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, 1–​43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. Crocker, Holly A. “Performative Passivity and Fantasies of Masculinity in the Merchant’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 38.2 (2003): 178–​98. Davis, Lennard J. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso, 1995. Eyler, Joshua R.  ed. Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Garland-​Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Godden, Richard H. “Mobility Impairments: The Social Horizons of Disability in the Middle Ages.” In A Cultural History of Disability in the Middle Ages, edited by Jonathan Hsy, Tory V. Pearman, and Joshua R. Eyler. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020. ———. “Prosthetic Ecologies:  Vulnerable Bodies and the Dismodern Subject in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” Textual Practice 30.7 (2016): 1273–​90. Godden, Richard H.,  and Jonathan Hsy. “Analytical Survey:  Encountering Disability in the Middle Ages.” New Medieval Literatures 15 (2013): 313–​39. Hsy, Jonathan. “Diverging Forms:  Disability and the Monk’s Tales.” In Chaucer and the Subversion of Form, edited by Thomas A.  Prendergast and Jessica Rosenfeld, 85–​98. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ———. “Symptom and Surface: Disruptive Deafness and Medieval Medical Authority.” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 13.4 (2016): 1–​17. McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Metzler, Irina. Disability in Medieval Europe: Thinking about Physical Impairment during the High Middle Ages, c.1100–​1400. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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———. “Have Crutch, Will Travel: Disabled People on the Move in Medieval Europe.” In Travels and Mobilities in the Middle Ages: From the Atlantic to the Black Sea, edited by Marianne O’Doherty and Felicitas Schmieder, 91–​117. Turnhout: Brepols, 2015. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L.  Snyder. The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism, Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015. ———. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. Mitchell, David T., Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, eds. The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Palmer, James M. “Your Malady Is No ‘Sodyn Hap’: Ophthalmology, Benvenutus Grassus, and January’s Blindness.” Chaucer Review 41.2 (2006): 197–​205. Pearman, Tory Vandeventer. “ ‘O Sweete Venym Queynte!’:  Pregnancy and the Disabled Female Body in the Merchant’s Tale.” In Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, edited by Joshua R. Eyler, 25–​38. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. ———. Women and Disability in Medieval Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Sayers, Edna Edith. “Experience, Authority, and the Mediation of Deafness:  Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.” In Disability in the Middle Ages: Reconsiderations and Reverberations, edited by Joshua R. Eyler, 81–​92. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Siebers, Tobin. “Returning the Social to the Social Model.” In The Matter of Disability: Materiality, Biopolitics, Crip Affect, edited by David T. Mitchell, Susan Antebi, and Sharon L. Snyder, 39–​47. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2019. Singer, Julie. “Disability and the Social Body.” postmedieval 3.2 (2012): 135–​41. Steel, Karl. “Biopolitics in the Forest.” In The Politics of Ecology: Land, Life, and Law in Medieval Britain, edited by Randy P. Schiff and Joseph Taylor, 33–​55. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Storm, Melvin. “Alisoun’s Ear.” Modern Language Quarterly: A Journal of Literary History 42.3 (1981): 219–​26. Sturges, Robert Stuart. Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Sweany, Erin E. “The Cook’s ‘Mormal’: Reading Disease, Doubt, and Deviance on the Body of Chaucer’s Cook.” In Writing on Skin in the Age of Chaucer, edited by Nicole Nyffenegger, Katrin Rupp, and Elizabeth Robertson, 119–​44. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. Theilmann, John. “On the Road to Health: Pilgrimage in Medieval England.” In Travel, Discovery, Transformation, edited by Gabriel R. Ricci, 177–​99. New Brunswick: Transaction, 2014. Walter, Katie L. “Fragments for a Medieval Theory of Prosthesis.” Textual Practice 30.7 (2016): 1345–​63. Whearty, Bridget. “The Leper on the Road to Canterbury: The Summoner, Digital Manuscripts, and Possible Futures.” Mediaevalia 36.1 (2016): 223–​61. Wheatley, Edward. Stumbling Blocks before the Blind: Medieval Constructions of a Disability. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010. Whitney, Elspeth. “What’s Wrong with the Pardoner? Complexion Theory, the Phlegmatic Man, and Effeminacy.” Chaucer Review 45.4 (2011): 357–​89.

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284 Richard H. Godden Richard H.  Godden is Assistant Professor of English at Louisiana State University. His research and teaching interests include medieval romance, Chaucer, and digital humanities, as well as representations of disability and monstrosity in the Middle Ages. His book project, Material Subjects: An Ecology of Prosthesis in Medieval Literature and Culture, focuses on the material objects with which medieval bodies were so intimate, including not only recognizable prosthetics that serve as assistive devices, such as eyeglasses and crutches, but also more common literary and cultural objects such as armour, clothing, and religious relics. He is coeditor of the collection Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World and he is also coeditor of The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury Tales.

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MEMORIE RUTH EVANS Anelida and Arcite Troilus and Criseyde Retraction

Chaucer’s early, formally

experimental love-​complaint Anelida and Arcite (ca. 1380) looks like a try-​out—​the poem is apparently unfinished—​for his later tragic romance Troilus and Criseyde (ca. 1382), although it memorializes a woman betrayed by a man, rather than a man betrayed by a woman, and its setting is Thebes, not Troy. Invoking the aid of the classical gods Mars, Bellona, and Pallas Athena, the narrator declares that he will write an English version of the classical story of Queen Anelida and her faithless lover, the Theban knight Arcite, because that story is one that elde, which that al can frete and bite, As hit hath freten mony a noble storie, Hath nygh devoured out of oure memorie. (Anelida, 12–​14)

The idea that writing preserves the memory of stories that would otherwise be forgotten due to the ravages of time is of course common in both late antiquity—​in Horace’s Odes, for example—​and the Middle Ages. In his Etymologies, the Spanish encyclopedist Isidore of Seville (ca. 560–​636) claims that “[t]‌he use of letters was invented for the sake of remembering things, which are bound by letters lest they slip away into oblivion” (1.3.2).1 But although Isidore appears to suggest that writing is merely a support for the oral faculty of memory, the critic Mary Carruthers argues that medieval texts make no distinction in kind between “writing on the memory and on some other surface,” that is, they not only view writing as a form of memorization but memory itself as a form of writing.2 This is an important corrective to the idea that memory in the Middle Ages was unreflective and that it had an organic connection to lived experience. Although Isidore refers to “things” in general, rather than “noble stories,” he later yokes the “monument” (a commemorative object, such as a literary text) and memory through their shared etymology: “both ‘monument’ and ‘memory’ (memoria) are so called from ‘the admonition of the mind’ (mentis admonitio)” (15.11.1). This etymological convergence underlines the idea, crucial to medieval thought, that there is an ethical imperative (mentis admonitio)—​and, we might also argue, a political imperative—​to remember. 1 Isidore, Etymologies. Parenthetical references are to book, chapter, and verse.

2 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 30. See also Frow, “Toute la mémoire du monde.”

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286 Ruth Evans Isidore’s phrase the “admonition of the mind” may also allude to the Greek understanding of how memory works, namely, in Carruthers’ words, that it “stores, sorts, and retrieves material through the use of some kind of mental image,” that is, memory works with, and on, representations—​forms—​that are imprinted in the mind.3 Chaucer’s narrator seems to refer to this tradition in his comment that Anelida’s story “ful depe is sonkyn in my minde” (Anelida, 8). Chaucer’s poetry often demonstrates the urgent and difficult obligation to keep alive the memory of past stories. For some readers, this represents Chaucer’s Oedipal struggle “with poetic precursors.”4 But I will argue that Chaucer is fascinated by what John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti call, in the context of early modern literature, “the erotics of remembrance.”5 In this erotics, desire depends on memory, and the absence or loss of the beloved feeds on obsessive recollection. Chaucer’s poetry enacts these thematic concerns in formal terms through the patterns that Vance Smith sees as structuring both history-​writing and memory in the Middle Ages, namely “repetition, rhythm, and acts of returning.”6 In Chaucer’s erotic poetry these formal patterns work to structure the self in terms of an erotics of remembrance. The role of this erotics of remembrance in making sense of the self is recalled in Anelida’s two references to the pain of “remembraunce” of her own erotic loss. In calling on the Muse Polyhymnia (Many Sacred Songs), who sings “with vois memorial in the shade” (line 18), the narrator indicates literature’s memorial function and signals that the poem takes the form of an elegy of lamentation. Although Anelida’s former lover Arcite is not dead, the lyric seems on the face of it to fit with Peter Sacks’ definition of elegy as “a poem of mortal loss and consolation:”7 it performs the work of mourning, turning loss into remembrance by recovering what has been “devoured out of our memory.” But it doesn’t fully do this. While the poem preserves Anelida’s searing loss, the lost object has not been completely converted into a memorial object, since the poem is unfinished. The final stanza promises the audience that “ye shal after here” the continuation of the story, but there it ends. Anelida frames her Complaint with a repeated reference to the anguish of continually remembering that her lover forsook her for another woman, as if neither she nor the poem can come to terms with this loss or turn it into a satisfactory memorial. Memory works against the transformative project of consolation, by making it impossible for Anelida to forget. She will forever be haunted by the painful memory of sexual betrayal, sharp as a swordpoint, that has entered her heart and lodged there. That haunting is reinforced by the envelope pattern of the Complaint, which begins: 3 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 19. On the role of visual memory in medieval culture and in Chaucer’s poetic making, see Kolve, Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative, 18–​25, and 42–​48.

4 Fradenburg, “ ‘Voice Memorial,’ ” 171.

5 Garrison and Pivetti, “Introduction,” 2. 6 Smith, “Irregular Histories,” 161. 7 Sacks, English Elegy, 3.

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and ends:

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So thirleth with the poynt of remembraunce The swerd of sorowe, ywhet with fals pleasaunce Myn herte, (Anelida, 211–​13) So singe I here my destinee or chaunce, How that Arcite Anelida so sore Hath thirled with the poynt of remembraunce. (348–​50)

The enclosing phrases of the Complaint work thematically and structurally to foreground repetition with variation, in the grammatical swing between present and past tense (thirleth /​ hath thirled), in the elaborate chiasmus of the envelope pattern (V + S + O /​ S + O + V), and in the contrast between the opening assertion that the “sword of sorrow” pierces Anelida’s heart and the closing assertion that Arcite has pierced Anelida. The twice-​ repeated reference to being pierced by “the poynt of remembraunce” suggests a breach in the defence of the self, but also emphasizes the role of memory in constituting that self, as Anelida marks the interval of time between one self and another, condensed in the difference between “thirleth” and “hath thirled,” between the heart that is pierced and the self that is pierced, and in the shift in self-​presentation from first to third person (“Myn herte” /​“How that Arcite Anelida so sore /​Hath thirled” [emphasis added]).8 According to Vance Smith, [m]‌aking sense of the world, even sensing the world, is in medieval terms an act of memorialization. [… T]he dependence on memory is the most complex and compelling way in which medieval thought confronts its temporality. Declaring its presence only in the intervals of time, the self is constituted by internal difference and mnemonic deferral: the interval, as Augustine says, “inter me ipsum et me ipsum [between myself and myself].”9

Just as medieval historiography (“making sense of the world”) is dependent on memory and on the narratological forms that memory takes—​“on repetition, rhythm, and acts of returning,”10 so also the medieval self is dependent on memory, as it makes sense of, and senses, the world. In remembering the interval between a single, past, violent act 8 On puncture-​wounds of the skin as a medieval rhetorical figure that was part of the “master model of memory as a written surface,” see Carruthers, “Reading with Attitude,” 3, 4.

9 Smith, “Irregular Histories,” 164–​65. The reference is to Augustine’s Confessions, 10.30.12. The phrase occurs in a passage in which Augustine discusses how the habits of his past life, imprinted in his memory, produce “deceptive sights” in his sleep that can convince him “to do what the real ones can’t” while he’s awake. He questions where his real self resides: “Could I really not be myself at such times […]? Yet there’s so much difference between the two selves [inter me ipsum et me ipsum] from the moment I pass from here into sleep or pass back from there to here”: Augustine, Confessions, 315.

10 Smith, “Irregular Histories,” 161. Smith argues that “the project of memory constitutes much of the function of narrativity,” and names the Canterbury Tales as one of the three great

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288 Ruth Evans (“thirled”) and a present agony that continues to be felt (“thirleth”), Anelida’s Complaint records the temporal nature of the medieval self as it constitutes itself through internal difference and mnemonic deferral. These two processes are also fundamental to poetics, linking form to history, since, in the words of Franco Moretti, formal patterns “are what literature uses in order to master historical reality.”11 With this in mind, we may hear in “the point of remembrance” an ironic reference to “the arrow of love,” and thus an allusion to the medieval idea of love as suffering, suggesting that Anelida’s pain, which she experiences twice over—​first, when she “loved Arcite so /​That when he was absent any throwe /​ Anon her thoghte her herte brast a-​two” (92–​94), and then when Arcite repeatedly makes false accusations about her behaviour in order to cover up his own duplicity—​is a form of mnemonic deferral, or time gap, the memory of the first pain haunting the later rejection. The formal experimentation of Anelida and Arcite—​its elaborate repetitions, the unusual 9-​line stanzas of the Complaint that rhyme so tightly (aabaabbab)—​can be seen as a way of mastering the historical reality of human sexual love, which is fictionalized in Chaucer as a source not only of intense pleasure but also of unbearable anxiety. The memorialization of the beloved, and the erotics of that recollection, which are the main preoccupations of Anelida and Arcite, are, as I  will show, a major theme of Chaucer’s poetry, but “memorie” and its cognate terms “remembraunce” and “remembre” occur frequently, and with a wide semantic range, in Chaucer’s works.12 The evidence of word counts alone does not do justice to Chaucer’s rich understandings of these terms, which are informed by their various meanings in late fourteenth-​century England, including the faculty of the brain that encodes, stores, and retrieves information (the model of the medieval brain was tripartite, composed of memory, intellect, and “engine” [innate ability or skill], or, in the Christianized version of this derived from Augustine’s De Trinitate, memory, intellect, and will),13 personal or cultural mental storage and recall, fame or reputation, a physical monument, memorial or commemorative act, and a written record.14 Moreover, as Smith observes, remembering was a “vital activity” in the Middle Ages because of “ethical imperatives and political practices.”15 The cult of the memory of the dead called the faithful to be mindful of dead saints, the dead fourteenth-​century English poems that undertake what he calls “the memorial work of the interval” (the others are Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman): 165. See also Smith, “Medieval Forma,” 73. 11 Moretti, Way of the World, xiii. I owe this reference to Lerer, “Endurance of Formalism.”

12 In the Canterbury Tales, there are 26 instances of forms of “remembre,” 24 instances of “remembrance/​remembraunce,” and 10 of “memorie,” the overwhelming majority of these in the Parson’s Tale. There are also large clusters of memory words in the Boece, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, and the Romaunt of the Rose. For these word counts, see Litwhiler’s Chaucer Concordance. 13 Le Goff, History and Memory, 71. 14 See MED s.v. “memorie, n.”

15 Smith, “Irregular Histories,” 170.

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departed, and their own death,16 as the Parson’s Tale urges in its discussion of remedies against avarice: in order to remind themselves that temporal goods are useless in the afterlife, every Christian should “han remembrance of the deeth that he shal receyve, he noot whanne, where, ne how” (10.812). Whereas the lay remembrance of death was not tied to any particular chronology, Christian liturgical memory was circular, with daily, weekly, and annually recurring commemorations of the body and life of Christ, of the martyrdom or death of the saints, and of the living and dead benefactors of the community.17 Medieval cultural memory was also strongly invested in the idea of auctoritas: the authority of ancient books, which included the Bible, and the works of particular classical and Latin Christian authors (the so-​called auctores), who were “not merely to be read but also to be respected and believed.”18 As Chaucer reminds us in the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, his ambitious but oddly underpowered meditation on loss and memory, these venerated books unlock the memory of the past: “if that olde bokes weren aweye, /​ Yloren were of remembrance the keye” (Legend, G.25–​26). The metaphor of books as the “key of remembrance” is an important indicator that memory in the Middle Ages was considered to be mediated through texts, and that memory was as much a form of writing as writing is a means of memorializing.19 The primary metaphors for memory in the Middle Ages, as Carruthers notes, were the wax tablet (or any written surface) and the thesaurus (storehouse). Both of these metaphors assume that memory takes material forms—​calling in question the nostalgic view that memory in past societies was unmediated—​and that memory traces are objects stored in particular locations. The terms topoi and loci (places; topics of argument) are used both in mnemonic systems and in ancient and medieval logic and rhetoric: to construct an argument is to retrieve material from a specific place.20 These two metaphors—​book and storehouse—​are closely related to the medieval mnemonic techniques that were used to sort, store, and retrieve information. In the Latin treatises on how to train the memory, readers are first advised to mentally visualize a set of architectural backgrounds—​the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium (ca. 86–​82 BCE, but popular from the twelfth century onward) suggests “a house, an intercolumnar space, a recess, and arch, or the like,” arranged in discrete, numbered series—​and then to place memorable images in those backgrounds, like letters impressed on wax tablets.21 The images themselves should be made “as striking as possible,” for example, 16 Le Goff, History and Memory, 68, and 71–​73. On late medieval traditions of memento mori and the cult of the dead, see Duffy’s chapter, “Last Things,” in Stripping of the Altars, 301–​37. 17 Le Goff, History and Memory, 68, and 71–73. 18 Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 10.

19 See Frow, “Toute la mémoire du monde,” 223–​24.

20 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 16–22 and 33–45; Frow, “Toute la mémoire du monde,” 223.

21 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 208. See also Carruthers, Book of Memory, 18. For examples of medieval treatises on the arts of memory, see Carruthers and Ziolkowski, Medieval Craft of Memory.

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290 Ruth Evans by disfiguring them, “as by introducing one stained with blood or soiled with mud or smeared with red paint, [… to] ensure our remembering them more readily.”22 Unusual images are preferred because “ordinary things slip easily from the memory while the striking and the novel stay longer in the mind.”23 This locational, visual, and associative schema allows large amounts of information to be fixed in the memory and recalled later at will. At one especially poignant moment in Chaucer’s tragic romance Troilus and Criseyde, this same mnemonic system provides a support for erotic recollection. In the fifth and final book, Troilus attempts to ease the pain of Criseyde’s absence by taking an anguished stroll down memory lane with his friend Pandarus. First, they visit Criseyde’s palace—​now mournfully “empty and disconsolat” (5.542), and then, to counter the mournfulness, they ride up and down the streets of Troy, revisiting each place in the city that Troilus associates with his happy memories of Criseyde, with Troilus eagerly pointing out each site in turn to Pandarus, and naming its significance as a marker of the stages of their sexual relationship: And every thyng com hym to remembraunce As he rood forby places of the town In which he whilom hadde al his plesaunce. “Lo, yonder saugh ich last my lady daunce; And in that temple, with hire eyen cleere, Me kaughte first my righte lady dere. “And yonder have I herd ful lustyly My dere herte laugh; and yonder pleye Saugh ich hire ones ek ful blisfully; And yonder ones to me gan she seye, ‘Now goode swete, love me wel, I preye’; And yond so goodly gan she me biholde That to the deth myn herte is to hire holde.

“And at that corner, in the yonder hous, Herde I myn alderlevest lady dere […] Syngen so wel […]; […] and in that yonder place My lady first me took unto hire grace.” (5.562–​81)

In this lengthy vignette, based on a passage in Chaucer’s immediate source, Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato and punctuated with references to multiple locations (“yonder […] yonder”),24 Troilus turns Troy into his personal medieval memory-​theatre. The places in Troy that formed the backdrop to his unfolding affair with Criseyde correspond to the architectural backgrounds that the arts of memory recommend as screens on which 22 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 220. 23 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 219. 24 For a comparison of the two passages in Boccaccio and Chaucer, see Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, 476.

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to pin memorable images, backgrounds in which Troilus has mentally pinned—​and now, under the pressure of Criseyde’s absence, retrieves—​the joyful things he wants to remember about her: where he last saw her dancing, where he first caught sight of her, where she first looked on him favourably, that is, where she first inclined to think of him as her lover. These memories are not explicitly sexual, but they are certainly erotic. And Troilus’s pleasure in recalling them suggests that the act of remembering is itself erotically charged.25 Indeed, Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s Poetria nova libidinizes the faculty of memory: “the little cell that remembers is a cell of delights, and it craves what is delightful, not what is boring.”26 Abandon Cicero’s reliance on “unusual images as a technique of training the memory,” the text advocates, and substitute those that give you pleasure.27 The passage is a reminder that love affairs depend on lovers’ sharing of erotic memories. In his exhaustive list of supports for memory in his rhetorical handbook, the Rhetorica novissima (1235), the thirteenth-​century Bolognese rhetorician Boncompagno da Signa, includes “the nods and signals of lovers.”28 One of the great ironies of the presentation of memory in Chaucer’s poem is its gendered asymmetry:  exiled in the Greek camp, Criseyde does not recollect the erotic gestures exchanged between her and Troilus. Part of the poignancy of the scene in book 5 is that Troilus appears to ignore the advice of the Roman poet Ovid, one of the great arbiters—​for the Middle Ages—​of all things to do with sexual love. In his Remedia amoris (“Remedies of Love,” or How to Get Over a Breakup), Ovid recommends avoiding the places that will remind the lover of his beloved: “Places, too, can be dangerous: /​Shun scenes of former love, they stir up grief, /​ Telling you, Here she lay, that’s the bedroom we slept in, /​Here’s where she gave me a good time /​All night. Nostalgia will rub love raw, the old wound’s opened /​Afresh.”29 Yet Troilus deliberately returns to those dangerous places, ignoring the Ovidian warning and thus risking twisting afresh “the poynt of remembraunce” in his wound. Troilus deploys a memory theatre here to augment his experience of love as suffering, not to assuage it. While the allusion to Ovid reinforces the theme of the erotics of recollection, there is an interesting tension between the scene’s disciplined mapping of the processes of trained memory and Troilus’s delight in his erotic remembrance. By invoking the high intellectual tradition of artificial memory in an erotic context the poem not only extends that tradition in vernacular literature but also powerfully argues that sexual love is 25 Garrison and Pivetti, “Introduction,” identify this dynamic in early modern texts: “We search for not just the recollection of erotics but the erotics of recollection” (4).

26 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 87. 27 Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 89.

28 Boncompagno da Signa, On Memory, 111.

29 Ovid, Remedia Amoris, lines 725–​30, emphasis added; the Latin reads:  Et loca saepe nocent; fugito loca conscia vestri /​ Concubitus; causas illa doloris habent. /​ “Hic fuit, hic cubuit; thalamo dormivimus illo:  /​ Hic mihi lasciva gaudia nocte dedit.” /​ Admonitu refricatur amor, vulnusque novatum /​ Scinditur. On Ovid as the ultimate source for this scene in both Boccaccio and Chaucer, see Besserman, “Note on the Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ V, 540–​613.”

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292 Ruth Evans a form of knowledge that is worthy of remembrance: a kind of amorous politics that engages the relationship between desire, memory, loss, and our fidelity to the beloved. The passage is also a reminder that Troy itself is a potent site of memory in late medieval England, from the mythology of Brutus’s supposed naming of London as the “new Troy” to the numerous contemporary poems that use the so-​called “matter of Troy” to address what Sylvia Federico calls “fantasies of empire,” including John Lydgate’s Troy Book, John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and—​of course—​Troilus and Criseyde.30 In the dark scene that takes place outside Criseyde’s house, and which immediately precedes this episode, in which Troilus repeatedly and forlornly apostrophizes her empty palace, his devotion to her memory is overlaid with the Christian cult of death and the veneration of the memory of saints, as here, in his last goodbye: “ ‘And farewel shryne, of which the seynt is oute!’ ” (5.553). “Shrine” (Latin scrinium), originally denoting a letter-​case, book-​case, or archive, is also an ancient and medieval metaphor for memory.31 This and the following scene, where Troilus recalls his happy memories of Criseyde, emphasize spaces and locations, but they also evoke the medieval temporality of recollection, which is concerned with the individual’s ethical relationship not only to the past, but to the present and the future. As Anke Bernau observes, yoking place and time together, “Having a good memory [in the Middle Ages] is understood locationally, as knowing where (and who) you are, in relation to others and to your past and future.”32 Troilus’s long erotic recollection commemorates his shared past with Criseyde (recalled in the past tense), but he is also reliving that past in the present, allowing himself to be seduced all over again. He is at the same time re-​positioning those memorably seductive images of Criseyde in their architectural loci so that he can remember them in the future. This is not quite what is implied by the medieval ethics of remembrance, but it is a remarkable presentation of desire, as it circles around its object without ever fully grasping it. Is there a sense in this early scene in book 5 that Criseyde is already slipping from his memory? In reinforcing the emotional connections between Criseyde and the places where she used to be Troilus is not only remembering Criseyde: he is remembering not to forget her. The distinction seems slight, and yet it is important: he is consciously memorizing Criseyde, so that he will later be able to recollect her. It is too easy to say that Troilus and Criseyde is a tragedy because Criseyde all too easily forgets Troilus, and yet here Troilus seems to be replacing the physical presence of Criseyde with fantasies of her—​the phantasiai (mental images) of memory, turning her into something fictive.33 Yet insofar as this passage imagines Criseyde as a memory place, in the sense that Troilus attaches memory to her, so—​and this is an important feminist point—​she can 30 Federico, New Troy. See Benson, History of Troy in Middle English Literature. 31 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 39. 32 Bernau, “Memory,” 46.

33 On phantasiai, see Carruthers, Craft of Thought, 14. For a similar dynamic in Robert Henryson’s Orpheus and Eurydice, see Bernau, “Memory,” 36.

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never represent a truth (of Woman, of God, of love), but can only be a representation of a representation. In the words of Pierre Nora: “all lieux de mémoire [memory sites] are […] objects en abîme, which is to say, objects containing representations of themselves (hence implying an infinite regress).”34 There is no “truth” of Criseyde. Troilus’s return to those places in Troy that awaken his memories of the past emphasizes physical movement and repetition. The repeated use of deixis—​“yonder,” “yond”—​and of parataxis—​a series of clauses joined with “and,” looping across the stanzas—​enacts Troilus’s movement from one location to another but also shapes the material form of the poem. Troilus’s thoughts, like memory, are not linear: they circle around, they repeat. As Smith argues, Actions and places are remembered by the repetition of physical acts. Since memory is derived from sensual impressions, it is fundamentally a bodily practice, and the repetitions that invoke the exercise of memory are really the rhythms that configure the body, or that are produced by its natural movements. The return of the body to particular places is often enough to awaken traces of memory that were impressed there.35

The arts of memory focus on mental processes, but Smith reminds us that memory depends on repetition, and takes its cue from sensory stimulations and the rhythms of the body. The formal counterpart to this, which links textual form—​the shape of a work—​ to memorial practice—​ perambulating around a town in one’s head and retrieving the images stored there—​is the medieval rhetorical concept of the ductus (compositional flow): in Carruthers’s words, “the way(s) that a composition, realizing the plan(s) set within its arrangements, guides a person to its various goals, both in its parts and overall,” so that through its formal disposition “the work in and of itself ‘directs’ movement.”36 After his rehearsal of the places of their courtship, Troilus turns to address the God of Love: […] “O blisful lord Cupide, Whan I the processe have in my memorie How thow me hast wereyed on every syde, Men myght a book make of it, lik a storie.” (5.582–​85)

This striking passage has no known source. Troilus’s observation that anyone might turn his personal tragedy into a book, “lik a storie,” could be seen as an ironic comment on the gap between the intimate experience of grief and the detached writing of that experience by those that have not suffered. It’s a comment that adds to our sense of the character’s three-​dimensional quality, because it produces a strong effect of interiority. But it is not clear that Troilus is being ironic here. His claim that he must first stow in his “memorie” the “proces” (order of events; narrative) of Love’s hostility towards him 34 Nora, “General Introduction, 16.

35 Smith, “Irregular Histories,” 165.

36 Carruthers, “Concept of Ductus,” 200–​201. See also Mary Carruthers, “Poet as Master Builder.”

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294 Ruth Evans before anyone can write a book about it, “lik a storie” (the Middle English word, like Latin storia, means both a fictional “story” and a true “history”) is curious. In effect, he is saying: don’t turn me into a book until I’ve had a chance to commit my version of events to memory. Troilus’s comment is baffling:  what is the connection between his memory of events, which is in any case fictional, and what an author writes about him? This is an abyssal moment in which Troilus displays an ironic awareness of his own fictional status. It anticipates his ascent, in the poem’s epilogue, to the eighth sphere, from where he looks down and judges the poem’s events from a Christian vantage point (5.1814–​27). But here he is still firmly in pagan Troy. The poem seems to offer a notion of recollection that transcends the individual subject. Recollection takes place neither completely inside the narrative nor outside it. From the present of the narrative Troilus looks back to his past and forward to his future commemoration in Chaucer’s poem. There is something very odd about the chronology here: after all, his story already exists, and he is in it. But how can the subjective mental operations and memory traces of a character within a text make possible the later, objective writing of his history by people outside the narrative? These temporal and logical aporia compel the reader to ask how individual recollection, imaginative reconstruction, and historical “truth” are related to each other. Just as certain operations of memory—​those that cognitive psychologists describe as enabling “the individual to mentally travel back into the personal past”37—​involve a looping of time back on itself, so do stories and histories represent different ways of reclaiming and remodelling the past, and, in some cases, of imagining the future. Although Troilus is a pagan, the “book” that he refers to could be the Christian “book of life,” in which everything in one’s life will be written down for the day of judgment.38 Troilus might fear the possibility that he might be unworthy of inclusion in the memory-​ books of the dead. Stories and histories are also technologies of memory: as we have seen, the medieval book is “the chief external support of memoria throughout the Middle Ages.”39 So Troilus may simply be equating memory and the material book. But the book-​as-​memory metaphor appears at the beginning of La Vita Nuova (1292), a text that Chaucer almost certainly knew and may have been thinking of here, where Dante contemplates the writing of his life after meeting Beatrice: In that part of the book of my memory before which there would be little to read is found a rubric which says: “Here begins a new life [Incipit vita nova].” It is my intention to copy into this little book the words I find written under that rubric—​if not all of them, at least their significance.40

37 Tulving and Lepage, “Where in the Brain,” 211.

38 On the Book of Life metaphor, see Carruthers, Book of Memory, 246–​47.

39 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 240.

40 Dante, La Vita Nuova, 3 (translation modified). On Dante’s conceit of “the book of my memory,” see Singleton, Essay on the Vita Nuova, 25–​42.

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Dante reworks the idea of the book of memory to make an important point about erotic recollection and the erotics of recollection in the construction of the self. Meeting Beatrice inaugurates Dante’s new life. Before that meeting, there is nothing to remember, nothing worth remembering. When Dante claims that he finds the work already written, this makes it seem as if the narrative of his life is already “fixed” in his memory: that it is already present, only needing to be copied out. But Dante’s before and after selves are clearly defined: the former contains little to be read, the latter represents a “new life.” This erotic rebirth is his version of a self that is constituted in the intervals of memory, “inter me ipsum et me ipsum.” In his address to Cupid, Troilus struggles with the idea that the narrative of his life is already present in his memory, and only needs to be copied out. He insists rather on the labour of remembering. And Chaucer’s radical move is to make Troilus’s “book of memory” a history not of the virtuous deeds through which the dead might be remembered in the prayers of the living, but a history of fallible human sexual love. Troilus’s abyssal speech forms a diptych with Criseyde’s rueful imagining of her postbetrayal textual afterlife: “Allas, of me, unto the worldes ende, Shal neyther ben ywriten nor ysonge No good word, for thise bokes wol me shende. O, rolled shal I ben on many a tonge! Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge!” (5.1058–​62)

Criseyde utters her own epitaph, lamenting that that books will defame her and that no good words will ever be spoken of her: “rolled shal I ben on many a tonge!” (5.1061). The effect of her speech, like Troilus’s, is also of mise-​en-​abyme, infinite regress, as we see Criseyde refer from her position in the present to a future time when she will be proclaimed as faithless. Although Criseyde, like Troilus, shows an awareness of her fictional status, she struggles to stand outside her own text: to evade the inevitability of her story and its memory. But if the narrator cannot intervene successfully to change the collective memory of Criseyde, then perhaps we as readers can take a lesson from some other, more recent, models of memory. Chaucer’s poem is not a “reflex of real events” but a representation of a popular (hi)story: like memory itself, it offers an experience that John Frow would describe as “always reconstructed rather than recalled.”41 I turn finally to a work that is not about erotic recollection, but about the disavowal of works that commemorate erotic recollection, and one of Chaucer’s most puzzling commemorations of himself as a writer of vernacular literature. At the end of the Canterbury Tales, immediately following the Parson’s Tale, Chaucer wrote a short prose coda, commonly known as “Chaucer’s Retraction” (10.1081–​92),42 in which he asks his 41 Frow, “Toute la mémoire du monde,” 234.

42 The manuscript evidence overwhelmingly points to the text being genuine, and in all the complete collections of the Canterbury Tales it always follows the Parson’s Tale:  see Riley, “Retraction and Re-​Collection,” 263. In the prologue to the Legend of Good Women, the God of Love

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296 Ruth Evans readers to forgive him for his “giltes” (sins), which he defines not as the medieval vices but as his profane works: my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the whiche I  revoke in my retracciouns:  /​ as is the book of Troilus; the book also of Fame; the book of the XXV. Ladies; the book of the Duchesse; the book of Seint Valentynes day of the Parlement of Briddes; the tales of Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne; /​the book of the Leoun; and many another book, if they were in my remembrance, and many a song and many a leccherous lay, that Crist for his grete mercy foryeve me the synne. (10.1084–​86)

Although “the book of the Leoun” has been lost, these works, “the whiche I revoke in my retracciouns” (the phrase is legalistic, as well as being a performative utterance: it puts into action what it describes), make up a large portion of Chaucer’s back catalogue. He then opposes these works with those he categorizes as edifying: his translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, and his “othere bookes” of saints’ lives, homilies, “moralitee,” and devotion, for which he thanks Christ, Mary, and all the saints of heaven. But these pious texts are only a fraction of what he wrote. Critics have argued a great deal about how to interpret this disavowal, given that it immediately follows the Parson’s Tale, which is a penitential treatise: does Chaucer speak in propria persona or is he performing an ironic mock-​confession of his sins? To what extent is his retraction of certain of his works, in Peter Travis’s words, “a single and unified utterance”?43 However, critics never discuss Chaucer’s curious use of “remembrance” when he asks to be forgiven for the sins of “many another book, if they were in my remembrance” (10.1086). Why does he use this phrase? Does he mean “many additional (profane) books that I can remember writing” (where “if” introduces a conditional clause that is within the realm of possibility)? Or that those books are too numerous for him to be able to recall (where “if” means “if only I could remember”)? Chaucer may be echoing the use of “remembrance” in the Parson’s Tale, where it is used ten times, all within a religious context, but it’s not clear if he wants to remember his own “giltes” (his profane works) or if he’s asking his audience to expunge them from collective memory. However, though sins may be forgiven, they should never be forgotten, and of course books as material objects cannot be recalled, just as texts once read cannot be deleted from memory, so this may be Chaucer’s ironic take on the impossibility of a “retraccioun” of one’s works. Both Anelida and Arcite and Troilus and Criseyde are concerned with keeping alive the memory of past stories of sexual love. So Chaucer’s “remembrance” of his own writings is a loaded term in the context of a revision of the value of his entire oeuvre. The Canterbury chides “Chaucer” the narrator for translating the Roman de la Rose, which is “an heresy ageyns my lawe” (G330; F256) and for writing Troilus and Criseyde—​and the F Prologue goes into this in far more detail—​because it speaks badly of women. But this chiding is ironic, and is not to be taken as a disavowal of those works.

43 Travis, “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction,” 146. Travis offers a pungent—​if now dated—​ summary of the divergent critical views. See Riley, “Retraction and Re-​Collection,” 265–​66.

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Tales, as I noted above, is one of the three medieval English texts that Vance Smith names as undertaking “the memorial work of the interval,” that is, beginning “with adverbials of time,” it demarcates “intervals that challenge the ability of the reader to draw consonances between those very beginnings in time and what proceeds from or before them.”44 The “Retraction” makes us think about how the ending of this loose collection of stories—​if “ending” is the right word for a text that is unfinished—​is consonant with its beginnings in time. It is also about the memory of Chaucer that Chaucer desires the reader to have at the culmination of his writing career, as he thinks how his works will serve as a lasting monument in the shadow of his death. The “Retraction” stages a before and after Chaucer, someone that once wrote profane works but now, oddly, wants to be known as pious, a self constituted “by internal difference and mnemonic deferral”:  a version of Augustine’s “inter me ipsum et me ipsum [between myself and myself].”45 We don’t have to take the “Retraction” at face value to see that Chaucer is playing here with some of the same ideas about the bidirectionality of memory that we saw in Anelida and Arcite and Troilus and Criseyde, and especially about the way that we retrospectively modify the past.

Bibliography Primary Sources Augustine of Hippo. Confessions. Translated by Sarah Ruden. London: Penguin, 2018. Boncompagno da Signa. On Memory. Translated by Sean Gallagher. In The Medieval Craft of Memory, edited by Mary Carruthers and Jan M.  Ziolkowski, 103–​17. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Dante Alighieri. La Vita Nuova. Edited and translated by Mark Musa. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Reprint, 1999. Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Poetria Nova of Geoffrey of Vinsauf. Translated by Margaret F. Nims. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1967. Isidore of Seville. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Translated, with introduction and notes, by Stephen A. Barney, W. J. Lewis, J. A. Beach, and Oliver Berghof. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Ovid [Publius Ovidius Naso]. Remedia Amoris. In The Love Poems, translated by Peter Green. London: Penguin 2004. Rhetorica ad Herennium. Edited and translated by Harry Caplan. New York: Loeb, 1954.

44 Smith, “Irregular Histories,” 165.

45 Smith, “Irregular Histories,” 164–​65.

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298 Ruth Evans Secondary Sources Benson, C.  David. The History of Troy in Middle English Literature: Guido delle Colonne’s Historia Destructionis Troiae in Medieval England. Woodbridge: Brewer, 1980. Bernau, Anke. “Memory.” In A Handbook of Middle English Studies, edited by Marion Turner, 33–​48. Chichester: Wiley-​Blackwell, 2013. Besserman, Lawrence. “A Note on the Sources of Chaucer’s ‘Troilus’ V, 540–​613.” Chaucer Review 24, no. 4 (1990): 306–​8. Carruthers, Mary. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. “The Concept of Ductus, or Journeying Through a Work of Art.” In Rhetoric Beyond Words: Delight and Persuasion in the Arts of the Middle Ages, edited by Mary Carruthers, 190–​213. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. ———. The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–​1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. “The Poet as Master Builder: Composition and Locational Memory in the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 24 (1993): 881–​904. ———. “Reading with Attitude: Remembering the Book” In The Book and the Body, edited by Dolores Warwick Frese and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe, 1–​33. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Carruthers, Mary, and Jan M.  Ziolkowski, eds. The Medieval Craft of Memory. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–​1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992. Federico, Sylvia. New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Fradenburg, [Aranye] Louise O. “ ‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry.” Exemplaria 2 (1990): 169–​202. Frow, John. “Toute la mémoire du monde: Repetition and Forgetting.” In Time and Commodity Culture: Essays in Cultural Theory and Postmodernity, 218–​46. Oxford:  Clarendon Press, 1997. Garrison, John S., and Kyle Pivetti. “Introduction: The Erotics of Recollection.” In Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Erotics of Recollection, edited by John S. Garrison and Kyle Pivetti, 1–​13. New York: Routledge, 2016. Kolve, V. A. Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984. Le Goff, Jacques. History and Memory. Translated by Steven Rendall and Elizabeth Claman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Lerer, Seth. “The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies.” Literature Compass 1 (2004): no pagination. Litwhiler, Henry. Chaucer Concordance. www.columbia.edu/​~hfl2110/​cconcord.html. Minnis, Alastair. Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Moretti, Franco. The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture. New York: Verso, 2000.

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Nora, Pierre. “General Introduction: Between Memory and History.” In Realms of Memory: The Construction of the French Past, edited by Pierre Nora and Lawrence D. Kritzman. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Volume 1: Conflicts and Divisions, 1–​20. New  York:  Columbia University Press, 1996. Riley, Deirdre. “Retraction and Re-​Collection:  Chaucer’s Apocalyptic Self-​Examination.” Mediaevalia 36/​37 (2015/​2016): 263–​90. Sacks, Peter M.  The English Elegy:  Studies in Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Singleton, Charles. An Essay on the Vita Nuova. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1949. Reprint, 1979. Smith, D. Vance. “Irregular Histories: Forgetting Ourselves.” New Literary History 28 (1997): 161–​84. ———. “Medieval Forma: The Logic of the Work.” In Reading for Form, edited by Susan J. Wolfson and Marshall Brown, 66–​79. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006. Travis, Peter W. “Deconstructing Chaucer’s Retraction.” Exemplaria 3.1 (1991): 133–​58. Tulving, Endel, and Martin Lepage. “Where in the Brain Is the Awareness of One’s Past?” In Memory, Brain, and Belief, edited by Daniel L.  Schacter and Elaine Scarry, 208–​28. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Ruth Evans is Dorothy McBride Orthwein Professor of English at Saint Louis University, and a former President and Executive Director of the New Chaucer Society. She works on medieval European literature of the period 1300–​1580, with focuses on gender and sexuality, memory, and translation. Her books include Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature (with Lesley Johnson), The Idea of the Vernacular (with Jocelyn Wogan-​Browne, Nicholas Watson, and Andrew Taylor), Medieval Virginities (with Anke Bernau and Sarah Salih), Medieval Cultural Studies: Essays in Honour of Stephen Knight (with Helen Fulton and David Matthews), A Cultural History of Sexuality in the Middle Ages, and Roadworks: Medieval Roads, Medieval Britain (with Valerie Allen). Her articles have appeared in Studies in the Age of Chaucer, postmedieval, New Medieval Literatures, Exemplaria, Manuscripta, and Textual Cultures. She is working on a monograph that is provisionally titled Chaucer and The Book of Memory.

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RESPONSE: AUCTORITE, SECULERE, FLESH, MEMORIE ANDREW COLE Thinking alongside these essays by Catherine Sanok, R. D. Perry, Ruth Evans, and Rick Godden, I  found myself returning to three major themes—​time, experience, and narrative. It seems that a discussion of time inevitably turns to a discussion of experience or narrative. Likewise, thinking about narrative invites the mind to wander into the problems of time and experience. Each term resembles the other and by some philosophical accounts, they are identical to each other. But each enjoys autonomy, too, formed by their own histories—​etymologically, philosophically, and politically. While this may seem like a confusing state of affairs, it simply means that when Chaucer writes about time, he is also telling us something about experience and narrative, and so on. Perhaps this is what makes the poet philosophical. The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, and the Franklin’s Tale are all good examples of these three interlinked themes, which I will discuss in turn.

Time

Time is embodied in sound in the medieval Christian West through what Gustaf Sobin calls the “sonorous aura” of bells.1 Bells were everywhere, sounding out every liturgical hour or special feast, all day, every day of the year. Depending on where you lived, you could hear many bells and would notice that none started at the same time, or tolled at the same tempo, pitch, or volume. Just look at a map of medieval London and see what you hear.2 Every religious foundation marked on the page indicates a sound as much as a building, and the whole map is a cacophony of bells. Because bells were everywhere in the Middle Ages, you see them in the strangest of places, like the hands, paws, and hooves of animals. Books of Hours and Psalters contain fantastic images of monkeys, sheep, asses, and rabbits ringing bells.3 There were reasons for giving bells to animals: people belled their hawks, falcons, cats, cows, sheep, and horses in order to know their location. That bells and animals go together, as it were, is corroborated by the fact that the Modern English word, “bell” comes from the Old English “bellan,” which means to make animal noises: “To bellow, to make a hollow noise, to roar, bark, grunt”4—​a sense preserved in Middle English as well. 1 Sobin, “Inaudible Aura,” 30.

2 You can find such a map in Cole and Galloway, Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman, xvi.

3 For the monkey, see Pierpont Morgan Library, MS M.1004, folio 125v. For the sheep, ass, and rabbit, see MS Walters W.102, folios 73r, 75r, and 81r. See also the rabbit ringer in the so-​called “Rutland Psalter,” London British Library, MS Additional 62925, folio 54r. 4 See Toller, Anglo-​Saxon Dictionary, s.v. “bellan.”

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302 Andrew Cole Roosters in the Middle Ages were always a special kind of sonically embodied time. They marked time much like a bell, and thus didn’t need a bell. They were the bell. Indeed, they were like clocks, as Catherine Sanok astutely points out in the example of the clock in Strasbourg Cathedral, writing: “As a part of a cathedral clock, the rooster represents Christological time, and the Passion in particular, both through Jesus’s prediction that Peter will deny him three times before the cock crows and through the rooster’s familiar function as herald of the new day, and hence its symbolic association with the Resurrection.” I would like to elaborate on this idea by homing in on the specific times or “hours” of the day during which these events transpired. Roosters were so known for their punctuality that they came to be associated with the precise “hours” in the European Middle Ages: lauds, prime, terce, sext, none, vespers, compline, matins. These are the liturgical times throughout the day when prayers were said, scripture read out, and masses sung. Roosters, no doubt, were linked to these hours. For example, the midnight mass at Christmas is called “Missa in gallicantu”5—​the “Mass at the rooster’s crow.” Additionally, in the Book of Hours preserved in MS Walters W.102 on folio 77v, a rooster is pictured alongside an image of Jesus’s crucifixion at terce (after Mark 15:25–​27, “And it was the third hour [9:00 a.m.]: and they crucified him.”) I pick out this latter example because this is no ordinary rooster. He happens to be a character in a tale of Reynard the fox, specifically, the tale of Reynard’s funeral.6 Stories of Reynard—​and there are many—​comprise exactly the narrative tradition from which Chaucer draws in writing his Nun’s Priest’s Tale concerning Chaunticleer and the fox, and the poet seems keen on making his rooster the sonic embodiment of time. Take Chaunticleer’s name in light of the aforementioned “Missa in gallicantu,” taking “cantu” (from the Latin “cantus”) more literally as “rooster’s song” or “chant.” “Chaunticleer” translates as “clear song” from the French—​as if to say it is beautiful—​but I’d point out that “Chaunticleer” can also means “clear chant” or, better, “plain chant,” this being the type of song that, in monasteries, cathedrals, and churches, was performed during canonical hours.7 We get a feel for this latter sense in the following passage: His voys was murier than the murie orgon On messe-​dayes that in the chirche gon. Wel sikerer was his crowyng in his logge Than is a clokke or an abbey orlogge. (7.2851–​54)

Significantly, Chaucer wishes us to think about religious music when we “hear” this rooster’s “song.” Because Chaunticleer’s voice is so “murie,” he doesn’t need the accompaniment of an organ—​he can sing solo. His singing is therefore in the tradition of the plain chant from which his name derives (a total stretch, if you’ve ever lived with a raucous rooster). 5 The Sarum Missal, 26. 6 McCulloch, “Funeral of Renart”; Camille, Image on the Edge, 23–​30. 7 See Hiley, Western Plainchant.

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If Chaunticleer both performs and embodies plain chant, then it makes sense that many of the temporal markers in the Nun’s Priest Tale correspond with the liturgical “hours.” Perhaps the most significant instance is when Chaucer implies that the time of Chaunticleer’s near demise is the time of Christ’s crucifixion: the fox laid in wait until “terce” or “Til it was passed undren [9:00 a.m.] of the day” (7.3222).8 But we wouldn’t want to miss the other examples, as when Chaunticleer mounts Pertelote until daybreak, named here as “prime”: “And trad hire eke as ofte, er it was pryme” (7.3178). There are other great passages to consider (7.2877–​81; 3187–​88; 3197–​98; 3301–​8; 3269–​72). The main point, however, is that Chaunticleer almost deep-​sixes himself at the right—​as in wrong—​liturgical hour: none. As the story goes, a fox comes to flatter Chaunticleer, praising his singing (7.3289–​94) and persuading our rooster to contort himself in song in supposed imitation of his father (7.3301–​8). In response, This Chauntecleer stood hye upon his toos, Strecchynge his nekke, and heeld his eyen cloos, And gan to crowe loude for the nones. And daun Russell the fox stirte up atones, And by the gargat hente Chauntecleer […] (7.3331–​35, emphasis added)

What “nones”? Here is where the canonical hours matter in a reading of this tale, because the answer is hidden in that temporal marker, “nones.” For centuries, “nones” was “The fifth canonical hour, set for the ninth hour of the day (3 p.m.)” (s.v. MED). But this isn’t just any hour. “Nones” is mealtime, the occasion when fasting is over and it’s time to eat.9 In his writings Chaucer uses the term “nones” in a very generalized way, often to mean simply “occasion.” But in the General Prologue he does offer a rather specific sense that, if you were Chaunticleer or a chicken reading these words, would be a bridge too far even to imagine: “A cook they [four guildsmen pilgrims] hadde with hem for the nones /​ To boille the chiknes with the marybones, /​ And poudre-​marchant tart and galingale” (1.379–​81). Chaunticleer, it turns out, is crowing “for the nones”—​for the meal that is his very body he unwittingly serves up to the fox. And note that he began to “crowe loude 8 Pertelote also warns Chaunticleer that if he has an excess of “humours hoote” (7.2957) he’ll have a fever every three days (“ye shul have a fevere terciane” [7.2959]).

9 There are various attestations to this fact from Old English penitentials to William Langland’s Piers Plowman. For examples of the former, see Frantzen, Food, Eating, and Identity, 243. Examples from Piers Plowman include: “And ouersyen me at my soper and som tyme at Nones /​That I, Gloton, girte it vp er I hadde gon a myle” (5.371–​72, “And over-​stuffed myself at supper and sometimes at midday, /​ So that I, Glutton, got rid of it before I’d gone a mile”); “Ac Ancres and heremites þat eten but at Nones /​And na moore er morwe […]” (6.145–​46, “But anchorites and hermits that eat only at noon /​And nothing more before the morrow ….”). The Middle English quotations are cited by passus and line number and taken from Langland, Piers Plowman: The B Version. The Modern English translations are taken from Langland, Piers Plowman: An Alliterative Verse Translation. That “nones,” meaning 3:00 p.m., was considered too late to eat for some monks is the reason why “nones” itself was gradually shifted back to earlier in the day; whence we get our modern “noon,” time for lunch. See Bilfinger, Die mittelalterlichen horen und die modernen stunden, 8–​16.

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304 Andrew Cole for the nones” (emphasis added): one would be remiss not to cite the scriptural source for “nones,” parodied here: Matthew 27.46 (and 27.50), in which it is said (twice) that “Jesus cried with a loud voice” before dying at the hour of nones (3 p.m.). Good thing our rooster got away—​his second chance parodying the resurrection. So, time takes in narrative—​a certain story about time involving a Chaucerian tale where sacred rites are given over to roosters. This wouldn’t be a shock to medieval readers, who are accustomed to a great deal of play with religious motifs, and it’s in so-​called religious art that we often find the most play. But are experiments with time a whole other problem, in the sense that we may witness an author from the past thinking about time, abstracting time, multiplying time, in a manner that seems modern? And is that what we have here in Chaucer around the question of the “seculere”? Time is a tricky thing, for there’s never not an example from the past when an author innovates within the temporal models of her or his moment. There’s always untimeliness, always anachronism abounding.

Experience

Speaking of anachronism: the Wife of Bath seems unmedieval to many modern readers in the way she expresses her voracious libido and refutes clerical authority. In defending her idiosyncratic views, the Wife famously appeals to experience, as we see when, well into her prologue, she exclaims: “The experience woot wel it is noght so” that “membres maad of generacion” (3.124, 116) aren’t there simply so that we can distinguish between bodies, “to knowe a femele from a male” (3.122). Experience, rather, proves they’re “for office and for ese /​ Of engendrure” (3.127–​28; see also 134). The Wife goes on to qualify this point in saying that you needn’t procreate simply because you’re having sex and are married:  “In wyfhod I  wol use myn instrument /​ As frely as my Makere hath it sent” (3.149–​50). So this is “experience.” Now, in any other Chaucerian text, “experience” would qualify as “authority,” judging by the wisdom of Prudence in the Tale of Melibee: “But looke alwey that thy conseillours have thilke thre condiciouns that I have seyd bifore—that is to seyn, that they be trewe, wyse, and of oold experience” (7.1169). Experience is life wisdom. It is authority. Theseus in the Knight’s Tale bolsters this idea with his observations about the natural order in his First Mover speech: “Ther needeth non auctoritee allege /​ For it is preved by experience” (1.2142–​43). Here, experience seems more authoritative than authority, because you needn’t bother with authorities if you can appeal to experience, and several of Chaucer’s other references to “experience” reinforce this notion that experience is a valid authority for making truth-​ claims (see the Summoner’s Tale, 3.393; Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 7.212; House of Fame, 370). So Dame Alice would seem to enjoy what Prudence calls “oolde experience,” informed by many years of doing what she knows the most about: “sith I twelve yeer was of age, /​Thonked be God that is eterne on lyve, /​Housbondes at chirche dore I have had fyve” (3.4–​6). Such seasoned wisdom informs her rationale for her modus vivendi. But the curious thing is that she begins her prologue by announcing that her experience isn’t authority: “Experience, though noon auctoritee /​Were in this world, is right ynogh

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for me” (3.1–​2). Why must this be? In his outstanding essay, R. D. Perry observes that the “division” between experience and authority “has been forced upon her,” upon Alice. This is no doubt the case, and I’d like to explore further how it’s so. To begin with, the Wife is a stereotype of the worst but most learned kind, drawn from “auctoritees”—​some parts antifeminist rhetoric in biblical, patristic, and other sources, and some parts the character La Vieille (Old Woman) from the Roman de la Rose. Her authority isn’t hers, in other words, because—​and this may seem ironic—​it’s the stuff of which she is made, which is why Chaucer instead assigns to her “experience.” Yet in so doing he changes the rules about the authority of “experience,” relegates it to its own domain to develop into something else: “subjectivity,” personality, opinion, feeling, and of course femininity—​in other words, a domain in which a writer might get carried away with unsympathetic and often vicious claims about half of the human species—​a point I return to below. Meanwhile, the Wife’s very first words in the prologue would lead us to believe that “experience” is the key term of her performance, a counterweight to “authority.” It isn’t, surprisingly. The term shows up a total of three times in the Wife’s prologue (and once in the tale). These occurrences are worth investigating, if for no other reason than to collaborate on the large topic of Chaucerian terminology to which Perry’s study of “authority” nicely contributes. I’ll look at the other two instances from the prologue—​one involving the Pardoner’s interruption, and the other concerning the Wife’s reading of Metellius’s murder of his wife to see what Chaucer makes of experience. To the first:  When speaking about her “husband” in principle—​that is, when expressing quite how she’ll handle any man in marriage—​the Wife declares, “Upon his flessh, whil that I am his wyf. /​ I have the power durynge al my lyf /​ Upon his propre body, and noght he” (3.157–​59). As Rick Godden points out in his essay, a love who is a hunk of “flessh” is a “piece of meat.” Something about the Wife’s admission that she craves “power” over her husband’s “flessh” makes the Pardoner perk up and interrupt the Wife: Up stirte the Pardoner, and that anon; “Now, dame,” quod he, “by God and by Seint John! Ye been a noble prechour in this cas. I was aboute to wedde a wyf; allas! What sholde I bye it on my flessh so deere? Yet hadde I levere wedde no wyf to-​yeere!” (3.163–​68)

In wondering whether it’s worth the cost of giving over his body in matrimony, the Pardoner is clearly responding to the Wife’s provocation that in marriage, “I have the  power […] / Upon his propre body, and noght he” (3.158–​59). But I  don’t think the Pardoner is concerned about relinquishing fleshly “maistrie” in marriage so much as surrendering his own way of life, and it’s here I’d want to see in the term “flessh” many possibilities, not all of which are bodily. For the Pardoner wants to remain the incarnation (caro meaning “flesh”) of the so-​called works of the flesh, as detailed by the Apostle Paul in Galatians 5:19–​21: “Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual

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306 Andrew Cole immorality, impurity, depravity, idolatry, sorcery, hostilities, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish rivalries, dissensions, factions, envying, murder, drunkenness, carousing, and similar things.” Most of these are attributes of the Pardoner, and there’s no way he’s ready to give them up in marriage. This scene concerns not only “flessh” but also “experience.” That is, the Wife declares to have a certain expertise, indeed an amount of “experience” that makes her an “expert” gifted with age-​old and old-​age wisdom: And whan that I have toold thee forth my tale Of tribulacion in mariage, Of which I am expert in al myn age—​ This is to seyn, myself have been the whippe—​ Than maystow chese wheither thou wolt sippe Of thilke tonne that I shal abroche. Be war of it, er thou to ny approche; For I shal telle ensamples mo than ten. “Whoso that nyl be war by othere men, By hym shul othere men corrected be.” The same wordes writeth Ptholomee; Rede in his Almageste, and take it there. (3.172–​83)

The Wife’s message has the backing of “authority”—​ Ptolemy. And in Cambridge University Library, MS Dd 4.64, folio 69r, it has the authorization of a Latin gloss, signalled by a red paraph (or paragraph marker): “Qui per alios non cor[r]‌igitur /​Alij per ipsum cor[r]igentur” (translated into Middle English in lines 180–​81 above).10 It’s here that things change in her characterization—​the authority that is her substance comes to the surface to become her style, her way. This is also the first time we return to her opening theme, “To speke of wo that is in marriage” (3.3)—​that “experience” of marriage. We would expect that her message is that marriage is awful, steer clear folks. Well, that is indeed her view, with the proviso that she likes that it’s awful.11 The “tribulacion in mariage” she wishes to describe is the kind she espouses, the sort she admits she willingly stirs up as “the whippe” of the relationship. Before this point in the prologue, she deftly reworks, rewrites, rethinks, reauthorizes scriptural and patristic texts to argue her case and expose the hypocrisy of authority itself, widen its contradictions, so that she can open up a space for “experience.” But now, Chaucer gives her a different project, which seems less clever on the poet’s part: she now embodies or personifies, for the first time in the unfolding narrative, antifeminist writings about women and marriage. Chaucer flattens her character into the stereotype we already knew she was 10 This quotation comes from Gerard of Cremona’s Preface to Ptolemy’s Almagest, according to Hanna and Lawler, “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue,” 381, where London, British Library, MS Burney 275, folio 390r, is cited. 11 That she confesses this view to the Pardoner makes sense, for she’s addressing the other character who is utterly transparent about his practices, deceptions, misbehaviors, what have you.

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but couldn’t pinpoint until now—​the moment when she as much says, “Yes, all that men say about women in marriage is true.” We have every reason to suspect “experience” when the Wife recounts her fourth husband’s revelry as well as her own youthful exuberance of singing, dancing, and general “ragerye” (3.455). Once upon a time, she could party like none other, “Whan I had dronke a draughte of sweete wyn!” (3.459). She then launches into an exemplum: Metellius, the foule cherl, the swyn, That with a staf birafte his wyf hir lyf, For she drank wyn, thogh I hadde been his wyf, He sholde nat han daunted me fro drynke! (3.460–​63)

Here the Wife cites a story in Valerius Maximus’s Factorum dictorumque memorabilium libri (book 6.3.9).12 It seems we’re at a moment of authority again, and the margins of the Ellesmere manuscript confirm it, repeating the Wife’s words but in Latin, adding the auctor’s name:  “Valerius libro 6°. c°. 3°. Metellius vxorem suam /​ eo quod vinum bibisset /​fuste percussam interemit” (translated in lines 660–​62 above, with the Wife’s addition of “foule cherl”). But, as Marilynn Desmond points out, the Wife isn’t citing this exemplum to challenge spousal abuse and murder.13 There is one grim reason why this is the case, I would add: the source text itself says, “Nobody prosecuted him for doing this, and nobody even criticized him; everyone thought Mecennius [sic] set an excellent example by punishing his wife in this way for violating the rules of sobriety.”14 Neither the Wife nor Chaucer “criticize” Metellius—​and I think it would be too convenient to say that Chaucer is adopting a feminist point of view by his silence about what the source says, as if he’s cleverly exposing the terrifying misogyny on display. Rather, we see how the misogynist authority that is the substance of the Wife is now on the surface, as if to haunt, possess, and engross her, when all along she’d been challenging patriarchal assumptions. It’s unsettling. And it continues in this mode, when she says: And after wyn on Venus moste I thynke, For al so siker as cold engendreth hayl, A likerous mouth moste han a likerous tayl. In wommen vinolent is no defence—​ This knowen lecchours by experience. (3.464–​68)

Something odd is going on with “experience” here. We’re reading about the Wife’s experience as a young woman when suddenly she speaks about the experience of “lecchours,” who hold that—​paraphrasing—​“drunk women cannot defend themselves when sexually assaulted.” There’s a disturbing conflation here between what the Wife enjoys—​wine that makes her horny—​and what the “lecchours” claim to be truths, “by 12 Compare Pratt, “Chaucer and the Hand That Fed Him.” 13 Desmond, Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath, 132.

14 Valerius Maximus, Memorable Deeds and Sayings, 212.

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308 Andrew Cole experience,” about “wommen” who are intoxicated. As Carissa M.  Harris has shown, literature that takes up the topic of sexual assault in medieval and early modern England typically issues from one of two points of view: either cavalier masculinist witticisms about sexually assaulting women in taverns; or advisory texts (said to be) from mothers to daughters cautioning them to stay out of taverns on account of such predatory lechers.15 What’s frightening, then, is the way in which Chaucer collapses any distance (real or imagined) between these two perspectives when he merges the Wife’s experiences with wine with the lechers’ own.16 “Experience” is the space within which the destructive source texts become the Wife’s subjectivity, her desires. Quite unlike the poet at his best, then, Chaucer reduces polyvocality to monovocality, perspectivism to prejudice, to construct a character, a woman, who is shown, in so many words, to be asking for it.

Narrative

We could still say that “experience” isn’t so different from “auctorite” if we take the latter simply to be not texts so much as narratives, which is an important terminological difference in so far as “narrative” involves temporality as narrative time in a way that a similar term, like “text,” does not. Why we need time is simple:  for time is also the experience of experience itself, if you will, a point on which fine minds from Augustine to Hegel, agree. I make this observation to propose a model of reading Chaucer. Sometimes, it seems that experience in his works is coterminous with narrative in a special way, not as moments where a character exhibits inwardness or describes her interiority but rather instances where sources, authorities, or citations are used to qualify or thematize a subjective state, such as a “mood.” This is to say that there are narrative phenomena in Chaucer’s poetry that I don’t think have been described before, but whose features would sit nicely beside Ruth Evans’s thought provoking paper, especially where Evans describes Troilus’s “memorie” of Criseyde: “In the fifth and final book, Troilus attempts to ease the pain of Criseyde’s absence by taking an anguished stroll down memory lane with his friend Pandarus. [… T]hey ride up and down the streets of Troy, revisiting each place in the city that Troilus associates with his happy memories of Criseyde, with Troilus eagerly pointing out each site in turn to Pandarus and naming its significance as a marker of the stages of their sexual relationship” (see Troilus and Criseyde, 5.562–​81). As Evans rightly explains, Troilus here seeks to “augment his experience of love as suffering, not to assuage it.” Dorigen in the Franklin’s Tale finds herself in a subjective state similar to Troilus’s own. Recall that Troilus, who is depressed in Criseyde’s absence, proposes to check out her empty palace (5.523, 542). Chaucer doesn’t tell us Troilus’s purpose here, but we 15 See Harris, “ ‘Drunken Cunt.’ ”

16 Harris comments, “[The Wife’s] use of the phrase ‘by experience’ is especially chilling: lechers know that intoxicated women have no ability to defend themselves because they have experienced this incapacity for themselves.” “ ‘Drunken Cunt,’ ” 130.

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assume this knight believes that seeing where Criseyde once lived would make him feel better—​when it only saddens him more, intensifying his focus on the fact that she is gone. Similarly, Dorigen sorely longs for her husband Arveragus to return. She is inconsolable, and so her friends wager that a walk along the sea cliffs would cheer her up (5.841–​46). Wrong: “whan she saugh the grisly rokkes blake” down on the shore, “For verray feere so wolde hir herte quake” (5.859–​60), because to her the rocks are murderers—​“An hundred thousand bodyes of mankynde /​Han rokkes slayn” (5.877–​78)—​with designs, we presume, to kill her husband on his return by ship. And so “Hire freendes sawe that it was no disport /​To romen by the see” (5.895–​96)! Subjectivity overtakes objectivity. Dorigen’s mood is cast upon absolutely everything in nature and culture, each item in the world, be it ships or rocks, appearing as extensions of “hire derke fantasye” (5.844) and even enhancing it. Chaucer is masterful at characterizing this psychology. Arguably, however, the poet is even more skilled at showing how subjectivity can overtake and subsume narratives. Here we alight upon the narrative phenomena I’m after. Back to Dorigen:  alone at home with just her thoughts, and contemplating the possibility of sleeping with a man other than her husband—​all because of a rash pledge in hopes of making an annoying suitor go away—​Dorigen says: Hath ther nat many a noble wyf er this, And many a mayde, yslayn hirself, allas, Rather than with hir body doon trespas? “Yis, certes, lo, thise stories beren witnesse: […]” (5.1364–​67)

For nearly one hundred lines, she cites story after story bearing witness to her idea (indeed ideation) that it’d be better to slay oneself than commit adultery. One way to read this long swath of poetry is to isolate each example and probe its relevance to the story. Another is to sit back and take in the narrative effect of story after story after story on the theme in question, an effect that allows us to experience thematization at work. This thematization is called “compleynt” (5.1354)—​and it’s one heck of an example, lasting “a day or tweye” (5.1457). Obviously Chaucer isn’t going to write a single scene that takes two days to read, and so he has to resort to shorthand, writing just enough to portray subjectivity, but in a special proto-​Sartrean way, where interiority is exteriority: in the existence of someone else’s stories Dorigen actuates her essence and thematizes her situation. Follow the movement: Chaucer first tells us how Dorigen appears, the look of her face (5.1340, 1353), what it’s like to behold her in this state (5.1349). He then shows us how Dorigen feels on the inside by going completely outside, in the catalogue of stories that generate an atmosphere, a quality above and beyond the quantity of in-​gathered narratives and their autonomous significances. The passage goes on for so long that it becomes longeur, but in a powerful way—​indeed in the same way we might listen to sad songs or watch depressing films when we’re feeling terrible, as if to sustain the mood rather than elevate it. Everyone does it. Everybody hurts. Which is to say, too, that this narrative phenomenon can be weaponized, intended to hurt not the self but others, as I think is the case in the final scene of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue where the Wife is compelled to rip three folios out of Jankyn’s “book of wikked

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310 Andrew Cole wyves” (3.685). Why does she do this? For one, it’s because this book is a compilation of authorities mansplaining why women are awful, but that’s not the only reason. I think what compels the Wife to assault Jankyn is his endless citation of authorities at the Wife. He reads this book for great lengths of time, preparing us to expect an effect not unlike that produced by Dorigen’s two-​day complaint: “He hadde a book that gladly, nyght and day, /​For his desport he wolde rede alway” (3.669–​70; basically repeated at 682–​85). Chaucer does an amazing thing in the passage that follows. He writes in such a way that your reading becomes a kind of looking.17 He inscribes in these passages familiar forms of rubrication, as you see in tables of contents and other modes of textual organization in manuscript books, where the formula “de” or “of” sticks out to the discerning medieval eye: Of Eva first […] Of Hercules and of his Dianyre […] Of Phasipha […] Of Clitermystra […] Of Lyvia tolde he me, and of Lucye […] (3.715, 725, 733, 737, 747)

He organizes the information on the page by placing proper names at the beginning of lines, thus: Amphiorax at Thebes loste his lyf. […] Eriphilem […] Lyvia hir housbonde […] Lucia, likerous, loved hire housbonde so (3.741, 743, 750, 752)

These are all locating devices, signalling that each narrative is a discrete unit. They train the eye to look out for the other proper names salted throughout the lines: Tho redde he me how Sampson loste his heres: […] That Socrates hadde with his wyves two, How Xantippa caste pisse upon his heed. […] Thanne tolde he me how oon Latumyus Compleyned unto his felawe Arrius (3.721, 728–​729, 757–​758)

The effect here is not only that we’re reading Jankyn’s book of wicked wives. We’re also holding his book: the manuscript page with these lines looks like a book—​or better, a book within a book. By these means, Chaucer materializes Jankyn’s book, makes it an 17 For more on this practice, see Cole, “John Gower Copies Geoffrey Chaucer.”

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object, and imputes to it a certain force that seems never to end (3.788–​93). Jankyn first assaults Alice by his reading, citing stories at her again and again and again and again and again. And she defends herself. Representation can be abuse and abusive. It can be violence unto persons—​at least in the Middle Ages, and definitely now.

Bibliography Primary Sources Langland, William. Piers Plowman: An Alliterative Verse Translation. Translated by E. Talbot Donaldson and edited by Elizabeth D. Kirk and Judith H. Anderson. New York: Norton, 1990. ———. Piers Plowman: The B Version. Edited by George Kane and E. Talbot Donaldson. London: Athlone, 1975. The Sarum Missal. Edited by John Wickham Legg. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1916. Valerius Maximus. Memorable Deeds and Sayings: One Thousand Tales from Ancient Rome. Translated by Henry John Walker. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2004.

Secondary Sources

Bilfinger, Gustav. Die mittelalterlichen horen und die modernen stunden: Ein beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1892. Camille, Michael. Image on the Edge: The Margins of Medieval Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Cole, Andrew. “John Gower Copies Geoffrey Chaucer.” Chaucer Review 52 (2017): 46–​65. Cole, Andrew, and Andrew Galloway, eds. A Cambridge Companion to Piers Plowman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Desmond, Marilynn. Ovid’s Art and the Wife of Bath: The Ethics of Erotic Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. Frantzen, Allen J. Food, Eating, and Identity in Early Medieval England. Rochester: Boydell, 2014. Hanna, Ralph, and Traugott Lawler. “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” In Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2, edited by Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel. Cambridge: Brewer, 2005. Harris, Carissa M. “ ‘A Drunken Cunt Hath No Porter’: Medieval Histories of Intoxication and Consent.” Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality 54 (2019): 109–​34. Hiley, David. Western Plainchant: A Handbook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. McCulloch, Florence. “The Funeral of Renart the Fox in a Walters Book of Hours.” Journal of the Walters Art Gallery 25–​26 (1962–​63): 8–​27. Pratt, R. A. “Chaucer and the Hand That Fed Him.” Speculum 41 (1966): 621–​42. Sobin, Gustaf. “The Inaudible Aura of Bells.” In Aura: Last Essays, 27–​30. Denver: Counterpath, 2009. Toller, Thomas Northcote, ed. An Anglo-​Saxon Dictionary: Based on the Manuscript Collections of the Late Joseph Bosworth. Oxford: Clarendon, 1898.

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312 Andrew Cole Andrew Cole is Professor of English at Princeton University, where he directs the Gauss Seminars in Criticism. Among his books are Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer, The Birth of Theory, and forthcoming titles on the dialectic of space, and Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire.

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Appendix 1

SUMMARIES OF THE WORKS OF CHAUCER

Canterbury Tales General Prologue The General Prologue establishes the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales. It is narrated in the first person by “Chaucer,” who finds himself in a Southwark inn among a random collection of pilgrims preparing to travel to Canterbury, to venerate St. Thomas Becket. The innkeeper, or Host, proposes that the pilgrims travel together and pass the time by each telling four stories, two on the way to and two returning from Canterbury. The pilgrim who tells the best tales will win a meal. If Chaucer had rigidly adhered to this plan, the Canterbury Tales would include over one hundred tales instead of the extant twenty-​four. The genre of the General Prologue is estates satire, traditionally a satirical catalogue of the various “estates” or positions within medieval society (knight, friar, etc.). Accordingly, Chaucer describes each of his fellow pilgrims, identifying them by profession, clothing, and physical appearance, among other traits. Unlike in traditional estates satire, the narrator Chaucer does not overtly castigate his fellow pilgrims, and the degree of satire within each portrait and across the collection is a point of debate.

Knight’s Tale

The Knight, whose significant experience in various conflicts both inside and outside Europe is mentioned in the General Prologue, tells an adaptation of Boccaccio’s Teseida, which tells of Theseus’s conquest of the Amazons, Thebes, and then the contest between two of his Theban prisoners (cousins Arcite and Palamon) for Emelye (Emilia in Boccaccio), the sister of his new Amazonian wife, Hippolyta. The Knight’s Tale radically abbreviates the discussion of the conquest of the Amazons to focus mostly on Arcite and Palamon falling in love with Emelye from afar, getting out of Theseus’s prison (Arcite by pardon, Palamon by escape), and their conflict in a tournament overseen by Theseus, the winner of which will receive Emelye. Arcite prays to Mars for victory, Palamon prays to Venus for Emelye, and Emelye prays to Diana to remain a virgin. Only Emelye’s prayer is directly denied, and Saturn resolves the conflict by causing Arcite to fall from his horse after his victory. He dies from his wounds, and Palamon and Emelye eventually marry.

Miller’s Tale

The Miller’s Tale is a fabliau, a type of medieval verse narrative featuring middle-​to lower-​class characters, sexual escapades, and bawdy humour. This tale centres upon Alisoun, a beautiful young woman, and the three men who seek to possess her: John, a carpenter and Alisoun’s older husband; Nicholas, a clerk who lodges in John and Alisoun’s home; and Absolon, a local

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314 Summaries of the Works of ChauceR parish clerk. Nicholas convinces Alisoun to become his lover. To facilitate a tryst with Alisoun, Nicholas concocts a story of an impending flood and informs John that, to survive, he (John), Nicholas, and Alisoun must secure themselves in tubs hanging from the ceiling. When the flood arrives, they will cut free the tubs and safely sail forth. The three implement the plan; once John falls asleep, Nicholas and Alisoun sneak out of the tubs to cavort together. Absolon arrives outside the lovers’ window and requests a kiss from Alisoun. Alisoun sticks her ass out the window, which Absolon kisses. Upon discovering the ruse, Absolon is incensed; he procures a flaming hot plow blade, returns to the window, and requests a second kiss. In response, Nicholas sticks his ass out the window and farts in Absolon’s face; Absolon then burns Nicholas’s ass with the plow blade. Nicholas cries out for water. Believing the flood has arrived, John cuts loose his tub, falls from the ceiling, and breaks his arm. Nicholas and Alisoun tell his neighbours, who arrive to assist John, about his “mad” plot to escape the flood, and the neighbours mock John.

Reeve’s Tale

A fabliau (see Miller’s Tale above), the Reeve’s Tale features two Cambridge clerks, Aleyn and John, who bring their grain to the miller Symkyn to be ground. Knowing that Symkyn is a swindler, the clerks insist on watching the milling process. Symkyn, however, sets loose the clerks’ horses; while the clerks chase them down, Symkyn steals some grain and has his wife bake it into a cake. Aleyn and John eventually return and realize what has happened. They ask to spend the night; Symkyn consents, and the clerks sleep together in a room with Symkyn, his wife, and their two children, a twenty-​year-​old daughter, Malyne, and an infant. The infant’s cradle is located alongside the parents’ bed. After Symkyn falls asleep, Aleyn has sex with Malyne. John, also seeking a sexual escapade, moves the infant’s cradle from alongside Symkyn’s bed to alongside his own. Symkyn’s wife rises in the night; when she returns she believes, on account of the cradle’s location, that John’s bed is hers. She gets into John’s bed, and he has sex with her. Aleyn tries to return to the bed he was sharing with John; because of the cradle’s absence from Symkyn’s bedside, Aleyn believes that Symkyn’s bed is his; Aleyn crawls in bed with Symkyn and tells Symkyn, whom Aleyn believes to be John, that he has had sex with Symkyn’s daughter. Chaos ensues, but the clerks escape, with their grain and the cake.

Cook’s Tale

The Cook is described in the General Prologue as employed by the five guildsmen (Haberdasher, Carpenter, Weaver, Dyer, and Tapicer) on the pilgrimage; he is distinguished by a “mormal,” or ulcer, on his shin. His tale ends the first fragment of the Canterbury Tales, and is itself a fragment, written in couplets; the Cook announces that he will tell a story about a “hostileer” (i.e., the profession of the Host, Harry Bailly), and this is the only of Chaucer’s surviving works set in London. The main character is an apprentice to the victualling trade, Perkyn Revelour, whose “revelling” behaviour gets him expelled from his apprenticeship. He joins a fellow reveller, whose wife works as a prostitute out of a shopfront, and there the tale breaks off.

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Man of Law’s Tale Set roughly in the sixth century CE, the Man of Law’s Tale features Custance, the daughter of a Roman Christian emperor. A  Syrian sultan arranges to marry Custance, on the condition that he and his people convert to Christianity. The sultan’s mother, the sultaness, opposes the conversion; she murders her son and sets Custance adrift in a rudderless boat. Protected by God, Custance eventually washes up on the shores of Northumbria. A constable and his wife, Hermengyld, take pity on Custance and bring her into their home. The Northumbrians are pagan, but through Custance’s influence, first Hermengyld and then the constable secretly convert to Christianity. A Northumbrian knight whose advances Custance spurns murders Hermengyld and frames Custance for the deed. Through divine intervention, Custance is exonerated, the Northumbrians convert to Christianity, and the Northumbrian king Alla marries Custance. Alla’s mother, Donegild, disapproves of the marriage and plots against her daughter-​in-​law. When Alla is away and Custance gives birth to a son, Donegild forges a series of letters to make the Northumbrians believe that Alla has ordered the exile of his wife and child. Custance is again set adrift in a rudderless boat and arrives back at Rome. Eventually Custance is happily reunited with Alla. Custance and Alla return to Northumbria, but Alla dies shortly thereafter, and Custance returns to Rome to live with her father.

Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale

The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is divided into three parts:  1) a marriage sermon; 2)  the Wife’s account of her first three husbands; and 3) her account of her latter two husbands, particularly her fifth husband Jankyn. In the first part, the Wife claims that her extensive marital experience grants her authority to address marriage, and she pits her experience against the textual authority of clerks. The Wife nonetheless draws extensively from biblical, patristic, and classical authorities, often truncating them or shifting their context to support her opinions, which include a frank celebration of sexual desire. In the second part, the Wife describes her three husbands as old, wealthy men whom she could easily manipulate. The third part focuses largely on her marriage to the clerk Jankyn, a younger man whom she weds for his good looks. Jankyn beats and berates the Wife, reading to her nightly from a “Book of Wicked Wives,” but he pleases her sexually. The Wife eventually gets the upper hand in their relationship. The Wife of Bath’s Tale takes place in an Arthurian setting. It opens with a knight raping a maiden, for which crime he is brought before the royal court. The queen rules that the knight must discover what women truly desire; if he fails, his life is forfeit. The knight travels the land asking every woman he encounters what she desires, but he receives diverse responses. Close to his day of reckoning, the knight meets an ugly old woman who promises to divulge the correct answer in exchange for a favour. The knight agrees; the old woman reveals that all women desire sovereignty over their husbands; the answer is deemed correct and the knight’s life saved. The old woman demands that the knight marry her. On their wedding night, he refuses to consummate the marriage, and the old woman provides two options: she can either transform into a beautiful woman who will be unfaithful, or remain an ugly woman who will stay true. Too flummoxed to choose, the knight cedes the choice to the old woman, at which point she transforms into a beautiful, faithful wife.

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316 Summaries of the Works of ChauceR Friar’s Tale Because the Friar dislikes the Summoner, he tells a tale about a corrupt summoner who gets his comeuppance. The summoner is employed by the church to summon specified people to appear before an ecclesiastical court. This summoner finds out dirty secrets about people, or trumps up charges against them; the summoner then threatens to bring these people before the court unless they pay him off. One day, he sets off to summon a widow on a trumped-​up charge. Along the way, he encounters a yeoman. As the two talk, the yeoman reveals that he is actually a devil in the service of Satan. The summoner and the devil enter into an existential conversation about the nature of demons and the workings of God. They encounter a stuck cart whose angry driver curses his horses to Satan. The summoner tells the devil that he should take the horses, but the devil refuses, because it was not the driver’s actual intention to give his horses to Satan. They then arrive at the widow’s home; the summoner threatens her and tries to extort money. The angry widow curses the summoner; because her intention aligns with her words, the devil takes the summoner to hell.

Summoner’s Tale

Because the Summoner dislikes the Friar, and because the Summoner has just heard the Friar’s Tale (see above), the Summoner tells a tale about a corrupt friar who gets his comeuppance. The tale’s friar abuses his begging privileges to live a comfortable life (friars were supposed to beg only enough to maintain a humble existence). The friar arrives at the home of a wealthy acquaintance named Thomas, who is ill. The friar attributes Thomas’s illness to his failure to give the friars enough money. Thomas claims that he has given to friars, but the friar counters that Thomas hasn’t given enough to him specifically; as a rhetorical question, he asks what good a farthing (a coin) serves if split twelve ways. A windbag, the friar also talks about his ability to “glose” or interpret scripture and gives a lengthy disquisition on anger. Finally fed up, Thomas tells the friar that he has a gift for him, which he must split between himself and his fellow friars. The gift is hidden under Thomas’s buttocks; when the friar gropes there to find it, Thomas lets out a giant fart. The friar is furious and goes to the village lord, to whom he tells his story and asks how he is to divide a fart twelve ways. The lord’s squire proposes a solution: the friar should sit in the middle of a cartwheel, and the twelve friars should position themselves along its rim, each with his nose at a spoke. When the central friar farts, the fart will be disseminated via the spokes to each of the twelve friars.

Clerk’s Tale

The Clerk’s Tale is an adaptation of a popular late medieval story, which the Clerk claims to have derived from the Italian poet Petrarch. The tale features Walter, an Italian marquis whose people implore him to marry. Walter agrees so long as they accept his choice of bride. He then weds the peasant girl Griselda. Walter stipulates that Griselda must obey his every command, and she agrees. Although Griselda is a good and beloved marchioness, Walter decides to test her. He first demands that she surrender their daughter to be murdered and then makes the same demand regarding their son. Griselda agrees to both commands; unbeknownst to her, Walter does not murder the children but sends them away. In his third

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test, Walter renounces Griselda on the grounds that she is a peasant; she agrees to leave his palace and return to her humble home. Walter then summons Griselda, asking her to prepare his home for his wedding to a new bride; Griselda agrees. Walter sends for the couple’s now grown children, and presents their daughter to Griselda as his bride to be. When Griselda praises the girl, Walter reveals his tests, reclaims Griselda as his virtuous wife, and reunites Griselda with her children.

Merchant’s Tale

The Merchant’s Tale features the love triangle of January, an old knight; May, his young wife; and Damian, a household squire who also loves May. A marriage encomium, often interpreted satirically, precedes January’s decision to wed May, as does a counsel scene, in which January consults his two brothers Placebo and Justinus on marriage. After January and May wed, their sex life is described in terms unflattering to January. May reciprocates Damian’s desires, but sees no opportunity to act on them, since January keeps her under close guard, even after he goes blind. January constructs a beautiful garden on his estate to which he regularly takes May. May and Damian steal and copy the key to the garden; Damian conceals himself there in a pear tree, waiting for January and May to arrive. The king and queen of the fairies, Pluto and Proserpina, witness the adulterous couple’s machinations, which Pluto swears he will reveal to January. Proserpina counters that she will provide May with a response to acquit herself. When January and May enter the garden, May insists she has an appetite for pears and climbs the tree, where she and Damian have sex. At this moment, Pluto restores January’s sight; January witnesses May’s adultery and accuses her for it. May answers that struggling with a man in a tree is a cure for blindness, and that this is all she did with Damian. January appears to accept May’s explanation.

Squire’s Tale

The Squire is the son of the Knight, and tells a tale set in the court of Cambyuskan (Ghenghis Khan). A strange knight appears, bearing marvellous gifts to Cambyuskan, including a brass horse that can magically transport the rider; a mirror in which one can see future adversity, whether persons are friends or foes, and if lovers will be true; a magic ring by which the wearer can understand the speech of birds; and a sword that can heal as well as injure. The mirror and the ring are giving to Canacee, Cambyuskan’s daughter, and the second part of the tale involves Canacee hearing and comforting a falcon betrayed by her lover. The tale breaks off as the Squire moves the focus to Cambalo, Cambyuskan’s son. In some manuscripts, the breaking off appears to be the result of an interruption by the Franklin.

Franklin’s Tale

The Franklin’s Tale, a Breton lay, is set in ancient Brittany. At the tale’s opening, the lady Dorigen and the knight Arveragus are in love and decide to marry; their marriage instigates a discussion of marital spousal dynamics, with Arveragus promising to treat Dorigen as his equal, not his subordinate. After their marriage, Arveragus departs for England and is gone for two years, and Dorigen misses him terribly. She eventually joins her friends frolicking

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318 Summaries of the Works of ChauceR outdoors, but spies rocks off the Breton coast, which she fears might capsize Arveragus’s ship upon his return. A  squire, Aurelius, ardently loves Dorigen and attempts to woo her. She refuses him, stating that she will only acquiesce to his overtures if he removes the rocks from the Breton coast. Aurelius consults a clerk skilled in natural magic, who, for a fee, agrees to make the rocks disappear. The clerk fulfills his part of the deal, and Aurelius demands that Dorigen accept him as her lover. Greatly distressed, Dorigen contemplates suicide, but Arveragus returns, and she seeks his counsel. Arveragus tells Dorigen that since she gave Aurelius her word, she must keep it. When Aurelius learns that Arveragus allows the liaison, he is so impressed that he releases Dorigen from her pledge. And, when the clerk learns of Aurelius’s action, he releases Aurelius from paying the fee. The tale closes with the Franklin asking which of the three men, Arveragus, Aurelius, or the clerk, was most “fre” [free, noble, generous].

Physician’s Tale

The Physician’s Tale is set in ancient Rome and ultimately derives from the Roman historian Livy. Virginius, whom the Physician anachronistically calls a Roman knight, has a beautiful, virtuous daughter named Virginia. A  false Roman judge, Apius, sees Virginia and desires her. To procure the girl, Apius enlists Claudius, who is to bring a false suit against Virginius claiming that Virginia is actually Claudius’s slave. Claudius does this, and Apius rules in Claudius’s favour, meaning that Virginius will have to turn Virginia over to Claudius and Apius. Virginius informs Virginia that she must die to avoid shame. After an initial complaint, Virginia agrees, and Virginius cuts off her head, which he presents to Apius. Apius orders Virginius to be hung, but the people rise up to defend Virginius. They throw Apius in prison, where he commits suicide; Claudius is exiled. The Physician provides a closing moral to his tale: a person who does not forsake sin will be brought low by it.

Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale

The Pardoner claims that he always preaches upon the verse “Greed is the root of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10) and then describes how he uses stories and false relics to swindle people. He states that he can tell a good moral tale, despite his motives. He begins his tale, which is set in Flanders and features three young rioters partying at a tavern. The Pardoner intersperses criticism of drunkenness, gambling, and oath-​swearing. The rioters learn that one of their friends has been taken by “Death”; they swear an oath to find Death and kill him. The rioters encounter an old man and ask where to find Death. The old man tells them to look under a certain tree. They do so, and discover a hoard of gold. They decide to keep the treasure and, to avoid rousing suspicion, transport it back to the village at night. Two rioters stay with the treasure; one returns to the town for provisions. The two plot to kill the third upon his return and keep the treasure for themselves. The third rioter has a similar plan and poisons the wine that he brings back to his companions. Upon his return, the third rioter is murdered by his companions, who then drink the wine and die. Upon concluding his tale, the Pardoner attempts to sell his false pardons and relics to his fellow pilgrims; he singles out the Host, who is enraged, but the Knight restores the peace between them.

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Shipman’s Tale The Shipman’s Tale, a fabliau set in the French town of Saint-​Denis, features a rich merchant, his beautiful wife, and the monk Daun John, a friend of the merchant (“daun,” a title, means “sir” or “master”). Daun John visits the home of the merchant and encounters his wife alone. The wife complains to Daun John that her husband is miserly and that she needs one hundred francs to pay a debt. She begs Daun John to lend her the money, which the monk promises to do. Daun John then borrows the hundred francs from the merchant. The merchant leaves on business to Flanders. Daun John gives the wife the hundred francs in exchange for a night of sex. When the merchant returns to Saint-​Denis, Daun John tells him that he has repaid the hundred francs the merchant lent him to the merchant’s wife. The merchant goes home and passes a mirthful night with his wife. The next day, he tells her that he is annoyed that she didn’t inform him that the monk repaid the hundred francs. The wife claims that she thought the money was a gift for her, and she has therefore already spent it. The wife promises to pay the merchant back in bed, and the merchant forgives her.

Prioress’s Tale

Before beginning her tale, the Prioress offers a prayer to the Virgin Mary. Her tale is set in Asia, in a Christian community that also includes a Jewish quarter. A  seven-​year-​old schoolboy walks through the Jewish quarter to get to his school. He is especially devoted to the Virgin Mary and learns a hymn in her praise, the Alma redemptoris, which he sings as he walks. Satan stirs the Jews to murder the boy; they cut his throat and deposit his body in a privy. The boy’s mother, a widow, searches for her son; she calls out to him near the privy; miraculously, the dead boy sings his hymn and is thereby discovered. The Christians arrest the Jews and bring them before a provost, who has them drawn and quartered. The Christians also collect the still-​singing boy’s body and bring it to an abbey. The abbot asks the child why he sings; the child responds that the Virgin Mary came to him as he died and bid him to sing; as he did so she laid a grain upon his tongue. The boy will sing the song until the grain is removed. The abbot removes the grain, and the boy fully expires. The Prioress praises the boy as a martyr and compares his murder to that of Hugh of Lincoln, an English boy who was allegedly murdered by Jews (no historical evidence supports this claim).

Tale of Sir Thopas

Sir Thopas is an unfinished tale told by the pilgrim Chaucer. Its content and form are drawn from popular romance: the tale is written in tail-​rhyme stanzas and features the knight Sir Thopas, who sets out in pursuit of a beautiful fairy queen. Sir Thopas encounters Olifaunt, a three-​headed giant, whom Thopas vows to fight. Olifaunt casts stones at Thopas, who retreats to a town to prepare for battle. His armour, weapons, horse, and gear are all described before he once again sets out. At this point the Host interrupts Chaucer, complaining about the tale’s “drasty” (crappy) rhyme (7.930). The Host demands that Chaucer discontinue Sir Thopas and tell a new and better tale. Chaucer complies by telling the Tale of Melibee. Sir Thopas is often viewed as a burlesque of the popular romance genre, both because it is the only instance where Chaucer writes popular romance and because the romance conventions of Sir Thopas

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320 Summaries of the Works of ChauceR seem ridiculously exaggerated. The Host’s interruption is likewise taken as a belittlement of the genre.

Tale of Melibee

This second tale of Chaucer, in prose, is a translation of the Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence by Renaud de Louens, which itself is a translation of Albert of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii. It is a long allegory, mostly advice from Dame Prudence to her husband Melibee (glossed as “a man that drynketh hony” [7.1410]). He had gone out of his house, leaving his wife and daughter Sophie (Wisdom) behind; three of his foes attacked his house, beat Prudence, and wounded Sophie with five mortal wounds (in the hands, feet, ears, nose, and mouth). While Melibee desires revenge, Prudence, through extensive quotation from various authorities, suggests gathering others for counsel, deciding against open conflict, and, finally, forgiving his enemies.

Monk’s Tale

The Monk, whose portrait in the General Prologue is drawn from satires of the monastic orders, tells not one but seventeen brief “tragedies” in the same eight-​line verse form used by Chaucer in “An ABC.” By tragedy, the Monk means the fall of someone from a high status to a low one, and his tales include biblical figures (like Satan, Adam, and Nebuchadnezzar), classical figures both mythical and historical (like Hercules, Alexander, Zenobia, and Julius Caesar), and modern political figures (such as Pedro the Cruel of Castile, Bernabò Visconti, and Ugelino della Gherardesca—​the last of whom Chaucer adapts from Dante’s Inferno XXXII). His tale is interrupted by the Knight.

Nun’s Priest’s Tale

The Nun’s Priest’s Tale is a beast fable featuring animal characters: Chaunticleer, a beautiful rooster; his wife Pertelote, a chicken; and Russell, a trickster fox. Chaunticleer confides to Pertelote that he is frightened by a dream in which he was attacked by a fox. Pertelote dismisses Chaunticleer’s concerns as cowardly and suggests that his dream is not prophetic but the result of a humoral imbalance. Her comments initiate an extensive discussion about dreams. Eventually Chaunticleer agrees to ignore his dream and descends from the safety of his perch to the farmyard. He is frightened, however, when he spies a fox. The fox soothes Chaunticleer by claiming that he has only come to hear the cock’s beautiful singing. When the flattered Chaunticleer begins to sing, the fox grabs him by the throat and makes away with him. A mad chase results. When the fox arrives at the safety of the woods, Chaunticleer advises him to turn around and mock his pursuers. The fox follows this advice and, upon him opening his mouth, Chaunticleer escapes.

Second Nun’s Tale

The Second Nun, a companion to the Prioress, gets no description in the General Prologue. Her tale is an adaptation in rhyme royal of the life of St. Cecilia, adapted from Jacobus de Voragine’s Legenda aurea and other sources. After an invocation to the Virgin Mary and a

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translation of Jacobus’ etymology of Cecilia’s name, she begins the narrative:  Cecilia, a Christian virgin in Rome, is intended to marry Valerian, a pagan. She tells Valerian that an angel watches over her and protects her chastity. Asking to see the angel, Valerian is instead directed to Pope Urban, who is in hiding because of Christianity being illegal. He converts to Christianity, sees the angel, and asks that his brother, Tiburce, also be saved. All three are eventually brought before Almachius, the Roman prefect, and condemned to death. After some conversions of executioners, Valerian and Tiburce are eventually executed, but Cecilia’s death proves more complicated. A  boiling bath fails to harm her, and after she is partially decapitated, she continues to preach for three days. After her eventual death, Pope Urban buries her, and her house becomes a church (her shrine in the Trastevere section of Rome). Due to a mention of the work in the Legend of Good Women, it is generally assumed that Chaucer wrote the life before starting the Canterbury Tales.

Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale

As the pilgrims approach the outskirts of Canterbury, they are overtaken by two new travellers, a Canon and his servant, a Yeoman. The Canon claims to be an alchemist, and even though the Yeoman is willing to tell the pilgrims of his master’s success, the Canon abruptly departs, wary of what the Yeoman might reveal. Once his master is gone, the Yeoman proceeds to confess that the Canon never actually succeeded in finding the Philosopher’s Stone, or in transforming metals into gold. In the second part of the tale, the Yeoman tells the story of another alchemist who swindles a priest out of a significant sum of money before disappearing as well. Throughout the tale, Chaucer employs large amounts of technical, alchemical language and descriptions of laboratory apparatuses, so much so that later readers counted him as a master of the art himself. Much of the discussion of alchemy, however, laments the way in which its secrets are obscured by its complex vocabulary, and notes that if alchemical transformations are not possible for those using it, it is because God does not will it so for the unelect.

Manciple’s Tale

The Manciple’s Tale is a retelling of the classical myth of Apollo and Coronis from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In the Manciple’s version of the story, Phoebus is married to a woman who commits adultery. When Phoebus’s caged crow informs the god of his wife’s transgression, he kills her, then immediately regrets doing so. The god blames the crow for his wife’s death, claiming that the crow’s report was false and his wife faithful. As punishment, Phoebus transforms the crow, who is white and sings beautifully, to a black bird bereft of speech and song. According to the Manciple, the moral of the story is to hold one’s tongue, and particularly to avoid speech that might offend others. The Manciple claims to have learned his story and its moral from his mother.

Parson’s Tale

The Parson’s Tale, which usually is the last tale in manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, is a prose treatise on the sacrament of penance. Though asked to tell a “fable” by the Host, the Parson, whose description in the General Prologue identifies him as a model of the proper

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322 Summaries of the Works of ChauceR pastor, refuses and provides instead what he calls “a myrie tale in prose” (10.46). The tale is derived from several penitential manuals, works written to provide guidance to priests offering confession. It explicates the meaning and process of penance and confession, and then describes the seven deadly sins (Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth, Avarice, Gluttony, and Lust) and their remedies.

Retraction

The Retraction appears in almost all manuscripts of Chaucer’s works that contain the Parson’s Tale. While Chaucer’s authorship of the Retraction has been contested, most critics consider it authorial. It is a short prose piece (Chaucer calls it a “litel tretys” [10.81]), modeled after other literary “last testaments,” which includes a revocation of any works that could qualify as “worldly vanitees” (10.85). and a listing of those works, and thanks to Jesus and Mary for works profitable to spirit, listing those works as well. It thus serves as both a catalogue of Chaucer’s writings and a penitent appeal to readers for prayers for his soul.

Book of the Duchess

The Book of the Duchess is an early dream vision written in the tradition of French dits (long, narrative poems, often focused on love) believed to have been composed to commemorate the death of Blanche, Duchess of Lancaster, the first wife of John of Gaunt. Written from a first-​ person perspective, the poem opens with its narrator suffering from insomnia. As a remedy, he reads the story of Ceyx and Alcyone; the story ultimately derives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Alcyone does not realize that her husband Ceyx has died in a shipwreck until the goddess Juno reveals his death in a dream. After this revelation, Alcyone dies. Upon concluding his reading, the narrator falls asleep; he dreams that he awakens and hears a hunt taking place outside his chamber. He searches for the hunting party, but finds only a puppy. He follows the puppy into a verdant forest, where he discovers a knight dressed in black who appears to be grieving. The narrator pities the knight and invites him to speak of his sorrow. The knight recounts how Fortune played a game of chess with him and captured his queen through false play. The knight then proceeds to describe his lost love, named White; he lists her perfections and the great joy he experienced with her. The narrator inquires what has happened to the lady and the knight responds that she has died. At this point the narrator awakens.

House of Fame

One of Chaucer’s dream-​visions, the House of Fame is an extended meditation on the nature of fame, poetic authority, and the truth of public and historical regard. The poem spans three books, and appears unfinished. The first book opens with a proem, which contemplates the nature of dreams, and an invocation to the god of sleep. The dream then begins with the dreamer, who identifies himself as Geoffrey Chaucer, falling asleep before finding himself in a temple of glass. Around him are images of Venus, Cupid, and Vulcan, along with writings telling the story of the fall of Troy that focus especially on the story of Aeneas and Dido. Exiting the temple, which he deduces is dedicated to Venus, he finds himself in a terrifying, silent field. He prays to heaven, and is immediately seized in the talons of an enormous eagle.

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This marks the opening of the second book, in which the eagle informs him that he has been sent to reward the dreamer for his dedicated service to Venus, and that he is bearing him to the House of Fame. What follows is an extended discussion between the eagle and dreamer over the nature of sound and of how news of what people say is collected in the House of Fame. Chaucer draws heavily on classical authorities for his explanations in this section of the poem. The eagle offers to teach the dreamer about the stars and the heavens, but is refused by the dreamer, who claims his is too old for such instruction. In the third book, the dreamer arrives at the House of Fame itself, which sits atop a rock covered in ice. In the ice are inscribed the names of famous men, some of which are preserved and some of which are melting away into obscurity. Inside, the House is also supported by a series of columns, representing authorities of the past: Josephus, Statius, Homer, Dares, Titus, Lollius, Guido delle Colonne, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Vergil, Ovid, Lucan, and Claudian. Fame herself is covered in wings, tongues, eyes, and ears, allowing her to collect tidings from across the globe. She dispenses judgement over individuals who come before her, declaring them famous or not as she pleases (without regard for their individual merits). At this point, the dreamer exits the house and sees at a distance another structure, made of spinning wicker twigs. Inside this unnamed building, the dreamer encounters a host of people, all speaking loudly various truths, rumors, and hearsay. At last, a mysterious figure appears, a “man of gret auctorite” (2158), but at his appearance the poem abruptly ends.

Anelida and Arcite

This unfinished 357-​line poem is concerned with the love affair of Anelida, the Queen of Armenia, and a Theban knight, Arcite, in the immediate aftermath of the war of the Seven Against Thebes (a devastating conflict between the sons of Oedipus that involves many Greek heroes). In their affair, Arcite proves false, and Anelida pens a long complaint. The poem contains a number of rhyme schemes in addition to rhyme royal, and Arcite appears to be the same figure who appears (without mention of his false love for Anelida) as one of the two lovers in the Knight’s Tale.

Parliament of Fowls

Ostensibly written to celebrate St. Valentine’s Day, the Parliament of Fowls is a rhyme-​royal poem which details an assembly of birds, ruled over by the goddess Nature, which attempts to decide the birds’ proper mates. The majority of the birds’ deliberations concern a formel (female) eagle and her three tercel (male) suitors. Chaucer observes this conference in a dream vision, his dream inspired by his bedtime reading of the Dream of Scipio, a first-​ century-​BCE text written by Roman rhetorician and philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero, and passed down to the Middle Ages with a long commentary on dreams written by the early fifth-​century CE Roman writer Macrobius. In the dream, Chaucer is led by Scipio (the Roman statesman of Cicero’s work) through an allegorical garden and into the assembly of the birds. Despite the protests of some of the less noble birds, the assembly ends without a decision, and the formel eagle is given a year to choose a mate. The poem concludes with a roundel, a poetic form well known in French verse.

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324 Summaries of the Works of ChauceR

Boece The Boece is Chaucer’s prose translation of the Consolation of Philosophy, a Latin dialogue which combines both poetry and prose by the Roman philosopher, theologian, and statesman Boethius (d. 524 CE). The Consolation was one of the most popular texts of the late Middle Ages, and Chaucer includes elements from other translations and commentaries. The work is in five books:  in the first, the imprisoned Boethius is visited by the allegorical figure of Philosophy, and Philosophy seeks to return Boethius from his emotionally troubled state to a philosophical way of thinking. In the second book, Philosophy discusses Fortune and her gifts (like wealth, power, and rank). In the third book, they discuss the true good, and how each of the gifts of Fortune fails to be the true good, which is the oneness of God. In the fourth book, Philosophy, at Boethius’ prompting, discusses the nature of evil, specifically, that evil has no being. Finally, in the fifth book, they discuss free will and predestination. The book ends with Philosophy explaining God’s knowledge as being outside of time, and the ways in which human knowledge can imitate its unity and eternity.

Troilus and Criseyde

Troilus and Criseyde is a tragic love story set in the Trojan War, although the story itself developed during the Middle Ages. Chaucer tells his version in a five-​book poem; the poem’s narrator makes frequent interjections and claims to follow a nonexistent author, Lollius, as his source (in actuality, Chaucer’s principal source is Boccaccio’s Filostrato). Troilus and Criseyde are both Trojans, Troilus a Trojan prince and Criseyde a widow and daughter of Calchas, a priest of Apollo. Through prophecy, Calchas learns that Troy will fall; he abandons the city and joins the Greeks, leaving his daughter in a precarious position in Troy. Troilus falls in love with Criseyde and confides his feelings to Pandarus, Troilus’s friend and Criseyde’s uncle. Pandarus guides and manipulates Troilus and Criseyde to bring them together as lovers; his treatment of Criseyde is especially coercive. Troilus and Criseyde keep their love a secret. The Trojans have an opportunity to trade Criseyde to the Greeks in exchange for Antenor, a captured Trojan leader. Despite Hector’s opposition, the Trojans make the trade. Criseyde promises that she will stay true to Troilus and find a way to return to Troy. Once in the Greek camp, however, she meets the Greek leader Diomedes and eventually becomes his lover. Troilus is distraught when he discovers Criseyde’s infidelity and turns all his energy to battle. He is eventually killed by Achilles and ascends to the eighth sphere of the heavens. The narrator closes the poem renouncing pagan antiquity.

Legend of Good Women

The Legend of Good Women consists of two Prologues, the F and G Prologues, and nine legends. The G Prologue is a later revision of the earlier F Prologue. This work is unfinished. The prologue is narrated from the first-​person perspective of the poet Chaucer. The narrator rises early one May morning to pay homage to the daisy. He later returns home, falls asleep, and dreams that he encounters the God of Love and a queen, Alceste, whose dress resembles the daisy. The God of Love is angry at the narrator for having written poems that present women and love unfavourably. Alceste intervenes and orders the narrator to pay penance

325

Summaries of the Works of ChauceR

325

by writing about faithful women lovers and the men who betray them. The legends that follow represent the narrator’s fulfillment of his task. The women addressed in the legends are taken from classical legend and history; they include Cleopatra, Thisbe, Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucretia, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra. The Middle English term “legend” usually refers to a saint’s life, and the narrator adapts his classical stories to this Christian genre.

An ABC (Le priere de Nostre Dame)

This poem is a translation of a prayer found in fourteenth-​century French poet Guillaume de Deguilleville’s long poem, Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (“Pilgrimage of Human Life”). Each eight-​line stanza (the same stanza form that Chaucer uses in the Monk’s Tale) begins with an ascending letter of the alphabet and addresses the Virgin Mary.

Treatise on the Astrolabe

Addressed to “Lyte Lowys my sone” (1), the Treatise on the Astrolabe is a manual detailing the use and operation of the astrolabe, a piece of scientific equipment designed to allow a user to measure how far a celestial object sits above the horizon. As such, it assists with identifying heavenly bodies, calculating latitude, and triangulation. In his work, which is written in prose, Chaucer describes the instrument, and gives basic instructions for its use. The work is unfinished, as Chaucer seems to have intended to continue the treatise with a theoretical explanation of astronomical motion, but never did so.

Romaunt of the Rose

There is some critical debate whether this fragmented poetic translation of the French poem Le Roman de la Rose is indeed by Chaucer; Chaucer indicates in the Legend of Good Women that he did translate this poem, and the Romaunt was printed as Chaucer’s in the 1532 edition of his works. The French Roman was one of the most popular poems of the later Middle Ages; is it properly a poem of a little over 4,000 lines, written by Guillaume de Lorris in the 1230s, with a continuation of almost 18,000 more lines written around 1275 by Jean de Meun. The poem, which especially in its continuation is extremely complex, is a dream vision in which a lover enters the Garden of Deduit (Idleness), where he is struck by the God of Love’s arrows and falls in love with a rose. Guillaume’s original text leaves the lover longing for the rose after a failed attempt to approach it; Jean produces a much more complex allegory, involving numerous debates and conversations with allegorical characters, and finally, with the help of Venus, the sexual conquest of the rose. The Middle English Romaunt translates all of Guillaume’s original poem, and some parts of Jean’s continuation, most importantly the lover’s argument with Reason and the entrance of Faussemblant (False-​Seeming) into the attempt to capture the rose. The poem is in couplets.

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Appendix 2

ADDITIONAL TERMS

Here is a selection of words from Chaucer’s corpus which were potential choices for our contributors; they may be useful for inspiring papers, generating assignments, or starting research. als/​also contenaunce mede amenden corage meten/​sweven arrai/​arraien counseil nat artow courteis/​courteisie nice as seem coveitise/​coveiten/​ nones assai/​assaien coveitous parde astoned/​astonen coi parfit avarice creature pleine aventure cunnen povre avisen/​avisement delit prive/privelie axe demen quiten bisi/​bisinesse dout red/reden bitwixen dreden sechen blod durren seli blive ech sentence brennen feith shreue brid fere/compaignie solas brother foryeven soth cas fre stinten catel game techen certes gise thrift/​thrifti/​unthrift/​ chaste/​chastite gost soul/​spirit unthrifti chere hende treue/treuth chesen hewe trouen cherl ilke vileinie chevalrie jape wenden child kepen whilom clene/​clenli/​clennesse kinde wod clepen/hoten lef beloved/dear wroghte cler letten yifte clerk listen compleinen/​compleint lite confessen/​confessioun lust connen/conninge manere

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Appendix 3

COVERAGE BY TERM

Here are listed the texts of Chaucer discussed, organized by the author and term chosen.

Barr: Swiven

Miller’s Tale Reeve’s Tale Cook’s Tale Merchant’s Tale Manciple’s Tale

Barrington: Entente Friar’s Tale Retraction Troilus and Criseyde Legend of Good Women

Burger: Pite Knight’s Tale Man of Law’s Tale Merchant’s Tale Squire’s Tale

Crocker: Vertu Knight’s Tale Tale of Melibee

Evans: Memorie Retraction Anelida and Arcite Troilus and Criseyde

Godden: Flesh

General Prologue Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale Merchant’s Tale Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale Parson’s Tale

Holsinger: Craft General Prologue Man of Law’s Tale Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale House of Fame Anelida and Arcite Parliament of Fowls Troilus and Criseyde Treatise on the Astrolabe

Nowlin: Thing Legend of Good Women Shorter Poems (“Truth”)

Perry: Auctorite/Auctor Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale House of Fame Troilus and Criseyde Shorter Poems (“Womanly Noblesse”)

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330

Coverage by TerM

Raybin: Slider Knight’s Tale Clerk’s Tale Franklin’s Tale Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale Boece

Salih: Virginite Knight’s Tale Physician’s Tale Prioress’s Tale Second Nun’s Tale Shorter Poems (“An ABC”)

Sanok: Seculere Merchant’s Tale Nun’s Priest’s Tale

Somerset: Consent/Assent General Prologue Man of Law’s Tale Clerk’s Tale Physician’s Tale Parson’s Tale Troilus and Criseyde

Turner: Wal Manciple’s Tale Book of the Duchess House of Fame Boece Troilus and Criseyde

Whitaker: Blak Miller’s Tale

Williams: Merveille Clerk’s Tale Squire’s Tale Franklin’s Tale

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Appendix 4

COVERAGE BY WORK

Here we have organized the contents by the work of Chaucer, and which essays touch upon it.

Canterbury Tales General Prologue

Godden: flesh Holsinger: craft Somerset: consent/assent

Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale Godden: flesh Perry: auctorite/auctor

Friar’s Tale

Knight’s Tale

Burger: pite Crocker: vertu Raybin: slider Salih: virginite Somerset: consent/assent

Miller’s Tale

Barrington: entente

Clerk’s Tale

Raybin: slider Somerset: consent/assent Williams: merveille

Merchant’s Tale Barr: swiven Whitaker: blak

Reeve’s Tale

Barr: swiven

Barr: swiven Burger: pite Godden: flesh Sanok: seculere

Squire’s Tale

Cook’s Tale

Barr: swiven

Man of Law’s Tale Burger: pite Holsinger: craft Somerset: consent/assent

Burger: pite Williams: merveille

Franklin’s Tale

Raybin: slider Williams: merveille

332

332

Coverage by WorK

Physician’s Tale Salih: virginite Somerset: consent/assent

Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale Godden: flesh

Prioress’s Tale

Salih: virginite

Tale of Melibee

Crocker: vertu

Nun’s Priest’s Tale Sanok: seculere

Second Nun’s Tale Salih: virginite

Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale Holsinger: craft Raybin: slider

Manciple’s Tale

Book of the Duchess Turner: wal

House of Fame Holsinger: craft Perry: auctorite/auctor Turner: wal

Anelida and Arcite Evans: memorie Holsinger: craft

Parliament of Fowls Holsinger: craft

Boece

Raybin: slider Turner: wal

Troilus and Criseyde Barrington: entente Evans: memorie Holsinger: craft Perry: auctorite/auctor Somerset: consent/assent Turner: wal

Barr: swiven Turner: wal

Legend of Good Women

Godden: flesh Somerset: consent/assent

Shorter Poems

Parson’s Tale

Retraction

Barrington: entente Evans: memorie

Barrington: entente Nowlin: thing Nowlin: thing (“Truth”) Perry: auctorite/auctor Noblesse”) Salih: virginite (“An ABC”)

(“Womanly

333



Coverage by WorK

Treatise on the Astrolabe Holsinger: craft

No Extended Readings Summoner’s Tale Shipman’s Tale Tale of Sir Thopas Monk’s Tale Romaunt of the Rose

333

334

335

INDEX

abegged, xviii academic writing, purpose, 1 aesthetics, 8–9, 33 affect, 8, 9, 59, 60n3, 62, 63, 64, 65, 67, 71, 72, 104, 114, 117, 205, 207, 218, 266, 267, 277 see emotion affective processes, 9, 63–64, 67, 205 alchemy, 150–51 Alcock, John, 115 Alfred the Great, 147 altitude, xvi, xvii Ancrene Wisse, virginity in, 116 anger, 60, 69 Anglo-​Norman language, 4, 46, 94–6, 159 animals, xvi, 11, 49, 51–52, 69–71, 73, 110, 190, 280, 301, 303 see birds; falcons; roosters Anne, Queen of Bohemia, 12 anti-​Semitism, 121, 122–23, 262n12 see Judaism Apollo, 16, 130, 144, 153 Appellant Lords, takeover of government, 5 Aquinas, Thomas, Saint, 11, 173 Arendt, Hannah, 244 Aristotle medieval reception, 12 Metaphysics, 221–22 Nicomachean Ethics, 179 Physics, 221 Arnold, Matthew, 123, 129 art, 155, 157, 165–66 Asad, Talal, 262n13 assent see consent/​assent Auchinleck romances, 159–60

auctorite/​auctour, 10 clerical, 244 etymologies and distinctions, 243–44 vs experience, 304–5 feminine, 251 House of Fame, 250 Legend of Good Women, 250, 252 literary valence, 242 Manciple’s Tale, 251 politics, 242, 244–45, 247, 251–53 Tale of Melibee, 245, 252, 304 Troilus and Criseyde, 249–50, 251 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, 241–42, 251, 309–11 Womanly Noblesse, 245–49 Audelay, John, 161 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 11, 264, 287n9, 297 De Trinitate, 288 Ayenbite of Inwyt, 161 Bacon, Roger, 222, 224 Bale, Anthony, 120, 121 Barr, Helen, 162–63, 166, 281 Barrington, Candace, 90 Baugh, Albert, 257n3 bearded lady figure, 232n8 becoming, virtue as, 181 Bennett, Jane, 204 Bernau, Anke, 292 Bibbesworth, Walter, Tretiz, 95–96 Bible, 56, 62, 135, 241, 244, 265, 289 Genesis, 258 Song of Songs, 190 Matthew, 304

336

336

Index

Mark, 302 Romans, 56 1 Corinthians, 274–75 Galatians, 305–6 Ephesians, 277 biography, 3–8, 43–44 biopolitics, 270, 276–77 birds, xvi, xvii, 69–71, 104, 191, 194, 260–68, 302–304 see falcons; roosters bisily, 103 bitraisinge, xvi Black Death (1347–1351), effects, 4–5 blackness connotations, 217 Miller’s Tale, 14 in Secreta Secretorum, 220–21, 222–23, 223n15 blak, 217 black-​and-​white pairing, 220, 221–22, 224–25 Miller’s Tale, 218–25 optimal temperance, 222–23 physiognomy, 219–25 Troilus and Criseyde, 218 see blackness Boccaccio Amoroso Visione, 196 Il Filostrato, 7, 290 Teseida, 64, 180, 249 bodies, xv, 10, 14, 48, 50, 71, 77, 83, 135–36, 176, 192, 205, 234–5, 258–59, 270, 273–75, 280–81, 293, 304, 305–6 faces, 49, 51, 63–64, 66–67, 77, 84, 107, 191, 221, 223, 232, 270, 309 and medicine, 173–74, 180–81, 190, 275 and physiognomy, 219–23, 224–25 transgender, 232–33, 234 women’s, 71, 83, 114–17, 119–20, 124, 159, 176, 177, 180, 189–90, 219–23, 223–25, 274–78 see disabled bodies; thing; women Book of Hours, 302

book production, 166 Breen, Katharine, 179 Brétigny, Treaty of (1360), 4, 6 Brown, Bill, 204–5 Brown, N.C.M., 145–46 Burger, Glenn D., 90, 91, 232 Burnley, David, 162 Burrow, John, 91 buxomly, xv Bynum, Caroline Walker, 101, 273

Cannon, Christopher, 129n3, 178–79 canon law, 31, 44–45, 47–48 canon law courts, and entente, 44–45, 47–48 Canterbury pilgrims, as compagnie, xiv Carruthers, Mary, 144, 285, 285–86, 289, 293 Caunterburyward, xvi Cecilia, Saint Second Nun’s Tale, 8, 118 virgin martyr, 113, 114, 118, 119 censorship, 129, 138–39, 140, 164–65 Charles V, King of France, 5–6 chasthede Ayenbite of Inwyt, 161 Genesis and Exodus, 161 Chaucer, Alice, Duchess of Suffolk, 7 Chaucer, Geoffrey anti-​fraternalism, 43–44, 56 authorial stance, 55–56 career, 6 Clerk of the King’s Works, 6 Comptroller of Customs (London), 6 connections, 6 covert political commentary, 12 family, 6–7 father of English poetry, 9 foundational language, xix in Italy, 6 knowledge of languages, 3–4, 9–10 language, 129 lexical choices, 15 marriage, 6 Member of Parliament from Kent, 6

337



philosophical issues, 11–12 poetic phases, 9 as prefiguration of Protestant Reformation, 56 psychoanalytic approaches, 13 Reims, captured at, 6 see Works (Chaucer) Chaucer, Thomas, 6–7 Chauliac, Guy de, 190 Chaumpaigne, Cecily, 10 Christina of Markyate, 121 chukken, xvi class, 108–9, 131–32, 134–36 classical antiquity, 14n33, 15–16, 32–33, 135, 194, 195, 244, 249–50, 259n9, 285, 286, 306–7 philosophy, 11, 12 see Aristotle Roman law, 31 see Latin language; Ovid; rhetoric; Vergil Clement VII, Pope, 5 clerics, 5, 43–44, 46–9, 55, 114–15, 165, 241–42, 247, 256–57, 260 friars, 43–44, 56 and anti-​fraternalism, 43–44, 56, 163 monks, 256, 303n9 nuns, 114–18, 256, 260 Pope, 30 secular clergy, 115, 255–56, 261 summoners, 46–9 cliket, xv clothing, 117–18, 219–20, 313 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 180 Colchester, Oath Book, 147–48 colour theory, 221–22, 224 common law, 44–45, 49–50, 255 common-​law courts, and entente, 45 compagnie Canterbury pilgrims as, xiv as a craft guild, xiv keyword, xiv Man of Law’s Tale, xiv meanings, xiv

Index

337

as a “professional group”, xiv consent/​assent, 12, 89 Canticus Troili, 38 Clerk’s Tale, 30 General Prologue, 28–29, 30 Knight’s Tale, 35, 36 Man of Law’s Tale, 29–30 Merchant’s Tale, 35 metaphor, 27–28 Parson’s Tale, 28, 34 pervasiveness, 27 Physician’s Tale, 32, 33 sexuality, 33–34, 37–38 Troilus and Criseyde, 36–40, 93 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, 34 women, 33–35, 36–38 Constance, Council of (1414–1418), 6 Constantinus Africanus, De Coitu, 135 Coole, Diana and Frost, Samantha, on materiality, 204, 272–73 Cooling Castle, Kent, 187 Cooper, Lisa, 145 courtly love (fin’amor), 59, 66, 67, 68, 72, 193, 247 courts see canon-​law courts; common-​ law courts craft, 13 as art, 155, 165–66 Cook’s Tale, 148 craft guild connotation, 147 Crawford on, 146 General Prologue, 149 House of Fame, 143–44, 156 Le Guin on, 155 literature as, 156 Man of Law’s Tale, 155–56 meanings, 144, 154–55 Miller’s Tale, 148 Modern and Middle English uses, 165 and modernity, 145–46 The Owl and the Nightingale, 147, 160 Parliament of Fowls, 157 pervasiveness of, 144

338

338

Index

as professional proficiency, 148–49 semantic breadth, 147 and social cohesion, 146 subordination to art, 146 Treatise on the Astrolabe, 148 Troilus and Criseyde, 152–54 words for, 162 writing as, 166 see alchemy; love-​craft; witchcraft craft guild compagnie as, xiv craft connotation, 147 craftsperson, 145 Crawford, Matthew, 146 creaucen, xv Critical Race Theory, 14 Crocker, Holly A., 230–31 cry, xvii Cursor Mundi, 220

Dahood, Roger, 122 Dante Alighieri, La Vita Nuova, 294–95 Daston, Lorraine and Park, Katharine, 104 Deguilleville, Guillaume de, Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (Pilgrimage of Human Life), 325 destinal, Boece, xvi, xvii destinee, Troilus and Criseyde, xvii dictionary, and pleasures of browsing, 89 disability studies, 271–73, 275, 281 disabled bodies, 269–72 flesh, 273–78, 278–81 Pardoner’s Tale, 273–74, 280–81 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, 274–76, 278–80 Discenza, Nicole Guenther, 147 dits, 16 Donaldson, E. Talbot, 162 dreams, xvii, 37, 189, 193, 202, 262–64, 266–67 Edelman, Lee, 256, 258 Edward the Black Prince, 4, 5

Edward III, King of England, French speaker, 4 ekphrasis, 195–96 elevacioun, xvi Elias, Norbert, 261 embodied difference see disabled bodies embodiment, 61, 62–63, 65, 66–69, 72 emotion, 9, 10, 32, 37–39, 48, 50, 59–73, 74, 77, 83, 90, 91, 93–4, 104, 117, 121, 176–77, 192, 202, 205, 207, 217–18, 229, 268, 279, 309 see affect; emotional community; emotives emotional community, 66 emotional processes see affective processes emotives, 60–61 Empson, William, xiii, xix, 91 England, 3–5, 9–10, 13, 45, 115, 121, 122, 161 Cooling Castle, 187 London, xiv, 6, 43–44, 118, 160, 187–88, 292, 301 Norwich, 121–22 York, 115 entente (intention), 10, 12 attention, meaning, 46 and canon-​law courts, 44–45, 47–48 and common-​law courts, 45, 49–50 etymology, 45 exculpatory force, 44 Friar’s Tale, 46–49, 90 and GC’s authorial stance, 55–56 identifying, 44 Man of Law’s Tale, 29–30 Retraction, 55–56 Troilus and Criseyde, 49–54, 93 uncertainties, 45–46, 48–49, 50 and words, 48 erotic remembrance, 286, 288, 290–92, 295 eternite, xvi ethics, 12–13, 107–10, 172–75, 179 see morality Evans, Ruth, 308 experience, 304–8

339



falcons, 69–72, 104 Fanon, Frantz, 225 Federico, Sylvia, 292 feminism subjectivity, 181–82, 231 theory, 10, 176, 181–82, 231–32, 232n10, 292–93 ferting, xv fin’amor see courtly love flesh, 269–71 disability studies, 271–73, 281 Merchant’s Tale, 276–77 Pardoner’s Tale, 273–74, 280–81 prosthetic flesh, 273–78 rebel flesh, 278–81 Tale of Melibee, 274 types of, 276 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, 274–76 278–80 see bodies form and matter, intersection, 8 Fortune, 76, 78, 82, 264–65 Fourth Lateran Council (1215), 173 France, 4, 5–6, 7, 187, 217 see French language Frank, Jr., Robert Worth, 208 fre, xiii freedom, 209, 243, 245, 250–53 French language, xiv, xvii, 4, 7, 9–10, 16, 45, 95–6, 132, 139, 159, 175, 193, 222–23, 247–48, 302 Friedman, John Block, 232 Froissart, Jean, Prison amoureuse, 193 Gaddi, Taddeo, 196 Galloway, Andrew, 90 gentility, 59–61, 72–73 Knight’s Tale, 64–66 Merchant’s Tale, 66–69 and pity, 66 Squire’s Tale, 69–72 Genesis and Exodus, 161 Gilbert, Elizabeth, 155

Index

339

Geoffrey de Vinsauf, Poetria nova, 291 Giotto, and House of Fame, 16 Godden, Rick, 305 Gower, John Confessio Amantis, 133, 189, 292 Vox Clamantis, 188 Grosseteste, Robert, 157 Guillaume de Lorris, xvii, 7, 16

hagiography, 8, 15, 59, 62, 120, 269, 281 Hanawalt, Barbara, 115 Hansen, Elaine Tuttle, 219 Harman, Graham, 205 Heidegger, Martin, 204 Heng, Geraldine, 220 Henry IV, King of England, 4, 5, 6 Henry VIII, King of England, 56 Henryson, Robert, Testament of Cresseid, 54 heresies, 13 highte, xvii Hodges, Laura, 117 Holsinger, Bruce, 160, 165–66, 211 How the Good Wife Taught Her Daughter, 176 Hugh of St. Victor, 145 Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453), 4 Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae sive origines (Etymologies or Origins), 89, 285–86 Islam, 6, 13, 14n33, 61–62, 120, 230n2 Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend, 269, 281 Jean de Meun, 32 Jews and Judaism, 13–14, 262n12 Prioress’s Tale, 121–123 John of Gaunt, 5, 6, 217 Jones, Catherine Ann, 154–55 justice, 5, 32–33, 53, 60, 62, 64–65, 218, 234

Kelly, Kathleen Coyne, on virginity, 116, 120 Kempe, Margery, 116, 117, 177

340

340

Index

keywords nonce words as, xiv–xv Raymond Williams, xiv, xv, xix words as, xiv, 28 Kieckhefer, Richard, 101 kirtle, xviii knowledge production, 262–63

Langland, William, Piers Plowman, 303n9 Langmuir, Thomas Gavin, 121 Latin language, 2, 45–46, 59n1, 85, 94–96, 115, 132, 133, 139, 159, 166, 194, 211, 243, 255, 265, 289, 294, 302, 306, 307 law see canon law; common law Le Guin, Ursula K., 155 Legend of Ariadne, 208–9 lesynges, xvii Lewis, Katherine J., 117 literature, craft as, 156 Lollardy, 13–14 London Scriveners’ Guild, 166 Louen, Renaud de, 175–76 Love, Nicholas, The Mirror of the Blessed Life of Jesus Christ, 63 love-​craft Anelida and Arcite, 152 characteristics, 153–54 Troilus and Criseyde, 152–53, 154 Lydgate, John, 122, 181n41 Troy Book, 292

Manuscripts Bodleian Library, MS Bodley 686: 164 British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian E.16: 221, 222–23 British Library, MS Harley 3362: 163 British Library, MS Harley 7333: 164 Cambridge, MS Dd 4.64: 306 Cambridge, MS Royal 18.A.7: 222–23 Christ Church Oxford, MS 152: 164 Ellesmere manuscript, 105, 111, 164, 307 Hengwrt manuscript, Canterbury Tales, 111, 163

Takamiya 32 (The Delamere Chaucer), 164 Wellcome, MS 564: 173 McInerney, Maud Burnett, 115 McNamer, Sarah, 61, 63 Maidstone, Richard, 174 Mandeville, John, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, 103, 125 Mann, Jill, 28, 81n13, 90–92, 117–18, 136, 137, 149 The Canterbury Tales (ed), 132 Manne, Kate, 175 marriage, 35–36, 257–58, 305–7 Martianus (Marcian), The Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 134 materiality, Coole and Frost on, 272–73 matter studies, 201, 203–5, 212 maydenhede/​maidehede, 116, 161 see virginite mediocritas, 221, 222, 224 memorie Anelida and Arcite, 285–88 and Christianity, 289, 292, 294 cognate terms, 288 Dante on, 294–95 Isidore of Seville on, 285 material forms, 289 metaphors for, 289 and mnemonics, 289–90 Retraction, 295–97 temporality of recollection, 292, 294 and texts, 289 Troilus and Criseyde, 290–95, 308–9 variant meanings, 288–90 and writing, 285 memory, 9, 16, 134, 192, 250, 264, 285–99 see memorie Merciless Parliament (1388), 5 meridian, xvi merveille Auchinleck romances, 159–60 Clerk’s Tale, 101, 107–10, 108, 165 Franklin’s Tale, 101, 102, 105–7

341



medieval, 104–5 and morality, 101, 111 response to difference, 102–3 Squire’s Tale, 101, 102–5 words for, 165 see visual marvels #MeToo movement, 10 Mills, Robert, 120 Minnis, Alastair, 242, 249 misogyny, 174–75 Mitchell, David and Snyder, Sharon, 270, 272 mnemonics, and memorie, 289–90 see memory modernity Chaucerian, 150 and craft, 145–46 morality and merveille, 101, 111 see ethics Moretti, Franco, 288 Moten, Fred, 225 mourning, 217–18 Muscatine, Charles, 218–19 mysgovernaunce, xv namo (nomore), xviii narrative phenomena, 308–11 prosthesis, 272 and subjectivity, 309 and time, 265–66, 267–68, 304 new materialism, 11, 180–81, 203–4, 272–73 Newhauser, Richard, 173 Nicholas Bembre, mayor of London, 5 nonce words, as keywords, xiv–xv nonhuman entities, 11, 70–71, 175, 204, 234, 264, 274, 276–77 Nora, Pierre, 293 normalcy constructs, 271–72, 281 Norton Chaucer, 132, 136, 137, 138 Norwich, anti-​Semitism, 121 Nowlin, Steele, 233

Index

341

Old English, 147, 160 Orlemanski, Julie, 180 Osbern Bokenham, Legendys of Hooly Wummen, 118 Ovid, 16n41, 179, 195, 208, 245, 251 Metamorphoses, 130–33 Ars Amatoria/​Remedia amoris, 242, 291 Owl and the Nightingale craft, 147, 160 slider, 76 Papal Schism (1378), 5–6 paths see slider Patterson, Lee, 79n8, 91, 150, 178, 181 Paul, Saint, 56, 274–75, 277, 305–6 Pearl, 123 Pearman, Tory, 275, 278–79 Peasants’ Revolt (1381), 5, 188 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 12 performativity, 60, 63, 92, 117 virginite, 116 Perrers, Alice, 5 Petrarch, Francesco, 7, 16, 38–39, 251 Philip VI, King of France claim to Aquitaine, 4 Salic Law, invocation of, 4 physiognomy, 219–25 pilgrimage, motives for, 269 Pinkhurst, Adam, 166 pirie, xv pite, 9, 90 and affect, 71, 72 and Christianity, 61–64 Chaucer studies, 15 clusters, 59 demonstrations of, 64 and emotional community, 66 as emotive, 60–61 as feminized emotion, 10, 66 and fin’amor (courtly love), 59, 66, 67, 68, 72 and gentility, 66 Knight’s Tale, 60, 64–66

342

342

Index

Man of Law’s Tale, 61–64 Merchant’s Tale, 66–69 performing, 64 sexuality, 66–67 Squire’s Tale, 69–72 transformative effects, 62 Troilus and Criseyde, 93 as universal emotion, 61, 62, 65 see emotion Plato, 11 plum-​rule, xvi politics, 4–8, 12–13, 27, 31, 35–6, 65–6, 68–9, 80, 108, 172–3, 209, 242–249 auctorite/​auctour, 242, 244–45, 247, 251–53 of gender, 68, 138–39 rulers, 31–33, 65–66, 69, 244–45, 247 post-​historicism, Chaucer studies, 13 postcolonial theory, 14 predestyne, xvii proces identities, 96 meanings, 93, 95 Troilus and Criseyde, 92–94 see processus processus meanings, 94–95 see proces proverbs, 178–79

queer theory, 10, 13, 232–33, 258, 273n23 queken, xvi racial difference, 13–14, 219n6 Raising of Lazarus, mystery play, 177 rape Chaumpaigne, Cecily, 10 Merchant’s Tale, 259–60 Miller’s Tale, 231 and Philomela story, 51, 113 Physician’s Tale, 119 threat to virginity, 113 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 34

Raybin, David, 90, 123 Read, Allen Walker, 163 Reddy, William M., on emotives, 60 religious identities, and the physical body, 14 remembrance see memorie Renaud de Louens, Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence, 175–76 Revard, Carter, 163 rhetoric, xvi, 71, 118, 131, 134, 136, 177–79, 180n37, 181, 189, 262, 276n31, 287n8, 293, 305 classical rhetoric, 243, 289 Rhetorica ad Herennium, 289–90 Rhetorica novisssima, 291 Richard II, King of England, 5, 6, 12 Richardson, Janette, 219 Ricoeur, Paul, 266 Riddy, Felicity, 117 righte Boece, 85 in opposition to slider, 76 Riverside Chaucer, 132, 136, 137, 138, 154 Robert of Bury, 121, 122 Robertson, D.J, Jr, 15 Robertson, Kellie, 207–8 Roman de la Rose, xvii, 7, 16, 32–33, 162, 189, 193, 194, 233, 305, 325 see Guillaume de Lorris see Jean de Meun romances, 7 roosters automaton, Strasbourg Cathedral, image, 262 embodiment of time, 302 and liturgical hours, 302, 303–4 symbolism, 261–62, 302 Ross, Thomas, 166 Rousseau, Jean-​Jacques, on writing, 95 Sacks, Peter, 286 sad, xv Salic Law, invocation by Philip VI, 4 Sanok, Catherine, 302

343



Sayers, Edna, 279 Scattergood, V. J., 209 Secreta Secretorum, blackness in, 220–21, 222–23, 223n15 seculere, 2 Merchant’s Tale, 257–60 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 260–68 sexuality, 256–57 as time category, 255 self-​rule, 66, 68 selfhood, 172–73, 175 in women, 176–78, 181–82, 231–32 sentence, 144, 146 sex workers, 138–39 sexual consent, Parson’s Tale, 33–34 sexual behaviour, of clergy Shipman’s Tale, 114 Wife of Bath’s Tale, 114 sexuality consent/​assent, 33–34, 37–38 erotic remembrance, 286, 288, 290–92 Merchant’s Tale, 257, 259–60 Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 260–61 pite, 66–67 and seculere, 256–57 see swiven; virginite Shakespeare, William, 272 Simon of Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, 5 sin, 28, 31–33, 34, 39, 45, 47–8, 54, 279, 296, 303n9, 307 Singer, Julie, 271–72 slider, 9 Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, 84–85 Clerk’s Tale, 81–82 definitions, 76 Franklin’s Tale, 82–84 Knight’s Tale, 76–81, 90 Legend of Good Women, 75 in opposition to righte, 76 The Owl and the Nightingale, 76 Troilus and Criseyde, 93–94 variants, 75–76

Index

343

Smith, Terry, 145 Smith, Vance, 286, 288, 293, 297 Snyder, Sharon, 270, 272–73, 281 Sobin, Gustaf, 301 social class, 108–9, 131–32, 134–36 social cohesion, and craft, 146 sociality, women’s, 71–72 Somerset, Fiona, 89, 93 Speght, Thomas, GC’s biographer, 43 Spenser, Edmund, 160 Faerie Queene, 129 Steiner, Emily, 243 Storm, Melvin, 278 Strohm, Paul, 91, 134, 181n41 Strasbourg Cathedral, 261–62, 302 subjectivity and narrative, 309 shaping of, by virtue, 172–73, 174, 179 and vulnerability, 181–82 see feminist subjectivity Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, 173–74 supernatural, 47–48, 70–71, 101–2, 105–6 sweveninges, xvii swiven, 10, 129, 162–65 British Library, MS Harley 7333: 164 Cook’s Tale, 137–39 etymology, 160–61 Manciple’s Tale, 130–33, 163 meanings, 132 Merchant’s Tale, 134–36 Miller’s Tale, 136 occurrences, 129 rarity in Middle English, 160 Reeve’s Tale, 136–37 scribal rewritings, 164–65 Taine, Hippolyte, 152 Tatlock, J.S.P., 178 Taylor, Charles, 172 temporality, 255–57 Merchant’s Tale, 257–60

344

344

Index

Nun’s Priest’s Tale, 261–68 of recollection, 292, 294 see time thing affective engagement with, 205 agency, 204 definitions, 203 and invention, 206–9 Legend of Ariadne, 208–9 Legend of Good Women, 202–9 matter studies, 201, 203–5, 212 Miller’s Tale, 233–34 Parliament of Fowls, 206 “thingness of objects”, 204–5 Truth, 209–12 Thomas Becket, Saint, 269 Thynne, Francis, 44 Thynne, William, 43–44 time biblical, 265 human, and animals, 11 marked by bells, 301 and narrative, 265–66, 267–68, 304 rooster as embodiment of, 302 see temporality transgender approaches, Chaucer studies, 10 transgender theory, 232–33 Travis, Peter, 296 Trevisa, John, 190 troubadour poetry, 7, 152 Troy, 36–37, 61, 188, 193–95, 249n23, 285, 290, 292–94, 308 Turner, Marion, 230 twynnyng, xix, xx unhorsed, xvi Urban VI, Pope, 5

Valerius Maximus, 307 Vergil, 15, 130n5 Aeneid, 79n7, 188, 195

vertu Clerk’s Tale, 82, 107–10 female agency, 174–75 heroic subjectivity, 172–73 Knight’s Tale, 172–73, 180 meanings in Middle English, 173 Tale of Melibee, 171–72, 175–80, 181–82 vernacular ethics, 173–74 see virtue; virtus Virgin Mary, 59n1, 63, 114, 116, 119–20, 177, 190, 265, 296 virginite, 10–11 in Ancrene Wisse, 116 Chaucer studies, 15, 113–14, 115–16, 124 child virginity, 119–20, 121–23 and Christianity, 114, 120–21 Clerk’s Tale, 123 and the female body, 115 General Prologue, 117 Kelly on, 116 Knight’s Tale, 114, 124–25 Man of Law’s Tale, 124 near synonyms, 116 Parliament of Fowls, 124 Parson’s Tale, 115–16 performativity, 116 Prioress’s Tale, 14, 113, 114, 119–23 recoupable, 116 religious, 115–21 Second Nun’s Tale, 118–19 synonyms, 161–62 virgin brides, 123–25 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, 114, 159, 189 see chasthede; maydenhede virtue as becoming, 181 shaping of subjectivity, 172–73, 174, 179 virtue ethics, 173 women’s, 175 see vertu; virtus

345



virtus, Knight’s Tale, 172 see vertu visual marvels, 105–7, 109 vulnerability, and subjectivity, 181–82

wal Boece, 191–92 Book of the Duchess, 189–90, 193–97 Confessio Amantis (Gower), 189 Cooling Castle, 187 House of Fame, 193–97 idealizing, of fin’amor (courtly love), 193 as identity marker, 187 inefficacy of, 187–88, 197 Knight’s Tale, 187–88, 195 Legend of Good Women, 189 Manciple’s Tale, 190–91 Merchant’s Tale, 189 Miller’s Tale, 230 Parliament of Fowls, 188 Reeve’s Tale, 188 and story-​telling, 193 Tale of Melibee, 189 Troilus and Criseyde, 188, 189, 192–93 walled body, 189–91 walled mind, 191–93 walls of wonder, 193–97 Wallace, David, 91, 177–78, 206n15 Walter, Katie L., 276 Warren, Michelle R., 217 Wheatley, Edward, 271 Whitaker, Cord J., 229–30, 231 Whitney, Elspeth, 280–81 Wilburn, Reginald, 217 William of Norwich, 121–22 Williams, Raymond, keywords, xiv, xv, xix Williams, Tara, 160, 165 Windeatt, B.A., 164 witchcraft, 149–50 women auctorite/​auctor, 251

Index

345

bodies, social construction of, 275, 279 consent/​assent, 33–35, 36–38 female sociality, 71–72 religious virginity, 115–21 selfhood, 176–78, 181–82, 231–32 sexually active, 138–39 vertu, 174–75 virgin brides, 123–25 womanly pity, 64–66, 69–72 wonder, see merveille words “complex word” (Empson), xiii, xix English/​Romance division, 2 and intentions, 48 as keywords, xiv 28 multiple meanings, 3 reserved vocabulary, xviii–xix singular vocabulary, xiv–xv, xvi–xvii, xix stylistic switching, 159 Works (Chaucer) An ABC (Le priere de Nostre Dame), 114, 119, 320 Anelida and Arcite, 7, 246 love-​craft, 152 memorie, 285–88 Boece, 7, 11, 12, 86 destinal, xvi, xvii eternite, xvi wal, 191–92 Book of the Duchess, 189–90, 193–97 French echoes, 7 wal, 189–90, 193–97 Canterbury Tales, 7 Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale alchemy, 150–51 slider, 84–85 Clerk’s Tale buxomli, xv consent/​assent, 30 merveille, 101, 107–10, 165 sad, xv slider, 81–82

346

346

Index

unique words, xix vertu, 82, 107–10 virginite, 123 Cook’s Tale craft, 148 swiven, 137–39 Franklin’s Tale, 308–9 abegged, xviii kirtle, xviii merveille, 101, 102, 105–7 slider, 82–84 Friar’s Tale entente, 46–49, 90 witchcraft, 149–50 General Prologue Caunterburyward, xvi consent/​assent, 28–29, 30 craft, 149 namo (nomore), xviii unique words, xix virginite, 117 Knight’s Tale authority vs experience, 304 blak, 217 career virgin, 124–25 classical antiquity, 14 consent/​assent, 35–36 gentility, 64–66 pite, 60, 64–66 slider, 76–81, 90 unhorsed, xvi vertu, 172–73, 180, 180–81 virginite, 114, 124–25 wal, 187–88, 195 wonder, 102 Man of Law’s Tale compagnie, xiv consent/​assent, 29–30 craft, 155–56 entente, 29–30 highte, xvii Islam, 13 Lollardy, 13–14

pite, 61–64 postcolonial theory, 14 virginite, 124 Manciple’s Tale auctorite/​auctour, 251 swiven, 130–33, 163 wal, 190–91 Merchant’s Tale cliket, xv consent/​assent, 35–36 gentility, 66–69 pirie, xv pite, 66–69 seculere, 257–60 sexuality, 257, 259–60 swiven, 134–36 temporality, 257–60 wal, 189 Miller’s Tale blackness, 14, 219–20 blak, 218–24 craft, 148 entente, 55 ferting, xv and rape, 231 swiven, 136 thing, 233–34 wal, 230 Monk’s Tale, 264–65, 266 mysgovernaunce, xv Nun’s Priest’s Tale, xvii 190, 302–4 chukken, xvi cry, xvii Peasants’ Revolt (1381) in, 12 seculere, 260–68 sexuality, 260–61 temporality, 261–68 Pardoner’s Tale and Prologue disabled bodies, 273–74, 280–81 flesh, 81 Parson’s Tale, 85–86, 115–16, 296 consent/​assent, 28, 34 sexual consent, 33–34

347



Index

virginite, 115–16 Physician’s Tale, 119, 150 consent/​assent, 32, 33 Plowman’s Tale (attrib), 43–44, 56 Prioress’s Tale anti-​Semitism, 121, 122–23 Judaism, 13 male virgin, 113, 119–20 virginite, 14, 113, 114, 119–23 Reeve’s Tale, 34, 136–37 swiven, 136–37 wal, 188 Retraction entente, 55–56 memorie, 295–97 Second Nun’s Tale Saint Cecilia, 8, 83, 114, 115, 118–20, 122n48 virginite, 118–19 Shipman’s Tale creaucen, xv sexual behaviour, of clergy, 114 see Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale Squire’s Tale flacons, 69–71 gentility, 69–72 merveille, 101, 102–5 pite, 69–72 Summoner’s Tale, 43 swiven, 137–39 Tale of Melibee auctorite/​auctour, 245, 252, 304 flesh, 274 vertu, 171–72, 175–80 wal, 189 Tale of Sir Thopas, 123, 162, 206, 180n37 Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale auctorite/​auctour, 241–42, 251 309–10 consent/​assent, 34 disabled bodies, 274–76, 278–80 experience, 304–8 flesh, 274–76, 278–80

rape, 34 sexual behaviour, of clergy, 114 virginite, 114, 159, 189 The Envoy to Scogan, xix House of Fame, 7, 193–97 auctorite/​auctour, 250 craft, 143–44, 156 and Giotto, 16 wal, 193–97 Legend of Good Women, 7, 53, 71 auctorite/​auctour, 250, 252 bitraisinge, xvi classical antiquity, 14 Legend of Ariadne, 208–9 memorie, 289 slider, 75 thing, 202–9 wal, 189 Parliament of Fowls, 7 craft, 157 queken, xvi thing, 206 virginite, 124 wal, 188 Romaunt of the Rose, 16, 162, 289n12 lesynges, xvii sweveninges, xvii Treatise on the Astrolabe, xvi, 8 altitude, xvi, xvii craft, 148 elevacioun, xvi meridian, xvi plum–rule, xvi zodiak, xvi Troilus and Criseyde, 7 auctorite/​auctour, 249–50, 251 blak, 218 Canticus Troili, 16 adaptation of Petrarch’s S’amor non è, 38–39 consent/​assent, 38 classical antiquity, 14 consent/​assent, 36–40, 93

347

348

348

Index

craft, 152–54 entente, 49–54, 93 memorie, 290–95, 308–9 pite, 93 predestination, xvii proces, 92–94 slider, 93–94 twynnyng, xix, xx wal, 188, 189, 192–93 Truth, 209–12

Womanly Noblesse, 245–49 writing and memory, 285 Rousseau on, 95 Wuest, Charles, 206 Wyclif, John, 31 wys, 29, 35

Ziegler, Joseph, 219n6, 221 zodiak, xvi