Chaucer and Language: Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele 9780773569201

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Chaucer and Language Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele

Geoffrey Chaucer is increasingly recognized as a writer whose work is particularly congenial to modern tastes. The essays in Chaucer and Language are at the forefront of present-day interest in Chaucer as a highly self-conscious manipulator of language and theorist of signification in the broadest sense. Every poet arrives at some sense of how language works. Chaucer’s engagement, like that other great literary figures, goes beyond the brilliant, skilful use of language as a tool of expression, beyond what we usually call “talent.” He brings to the creative use of signification a sophisticated philosophical questioning of the very nature of language, of how we know and how we signify. Chaucer and Language argues that his work points to answers to these questions, emphasizing that in various ways he made language itself the subject of his writing. This collection discusses the polyvalent nature of signs and the ambiguity that this makes possible as one aspect of Chaucer’s use of language as subject, and it does the same for irony. It also treats Chaucer’s extension of the concept of language to include relics and the Eucharist, his exploitation of equivocation and the lie, and the semiotic dimensions of his poetic themes. These issues derive directly from the long tradition of medieval sign theory and anticipate the major issues of the modern theory of signs that is semiotics. robert myles is the author of Chaucerian Realism and the director of Humanistic Studies, McGill University. david williams is the author of Deformed Discourse: The Function of the Monster in Mediaeval Thought and Literature. He teaches English at McGill University.

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Douglas Wurtele In verbis verum amare non verba Saint Augustine, De Doctrina Christiana IV, xi, 26

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Chaucer and Language Essays in Honour of Douglas Wurtele Edited by robert myles and david williams

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca

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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001 isbn 0-7735-2182-8 Legal deposit second quarter 2001 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper This book has been published with the help of a grant from McGill University and Carleton University. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp ) for its activities. It also acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for its publishing program.

National Library of Canada Cataloguing in Publication Data Main entry under title: Chaucer and language: essays in honour of Douglas Wurtele Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-7735-2182-8 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 – Language. 2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 – Literary style. 3. English language – Middle English, 1100-1500 – Semantics. i. Williams, David, 1939- ii. Myles, Robert, 1947iii. Wurtele, Douglas J. (Douglas James) pr1940.c49 2001

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Typeset in Sabon 10.5/13 by Caractéra inc., Quebec City

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Contents

Preface: A Life in Progress / m.i. cameron Acknowledgments

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Introduction / david williams

xiii

Chaucer and Character: The Heresies of Douglas Wurtele / robert myles 3 “Withouten oother compaignye in youthe”: Verbal and Moral Ambiguity in the General Prologue Portrait of the Wife of Bath / beverly kennedy 11 The Wife of Bath and “Speche Daungerous” / chauncey wood 33 The Franklin, Epicurus, and the Play of Values / e.c. ronquist 44 Mapping a History of Sexuality in Melibee / glenn burger 61 Chaucer after the Linguistic Turn: Memory, History, and Fiction in the Link to Melibee / christine jones 71 Chaucer’s Clerk, on the Level? / victor yelverton haines 83

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Confusing Signs: The Semiotic Point of View in the Clerk’s Tale / robert myles 107 Sense, Reference, and Wisdom in the Merchant’s Tale / patrick j. gallacher 126 “Lo how I vanysshe”: The Pardoner’s War against Signs / david williams 143 Notes 175 Appendix: Published Writings of Douglas Wurtele 223 Works Cited 225 Index 247

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Preface: A Life in Progress m.i. cameron

Douglas Wurtele was born and bred in Montreal, and the imprint of that energetic and complicated city appears in everything that he has done. Having lost his father early, he had to leave school to support his family. During the lively Montreal years that William Weintraub and Mavis Gallant have chronicled, he was hard at work earning a living, at first as an office boy and later as the assistant to the president of a printing and publishing firm. At nights he was busy studying by correspondence, earning a degree in English (with collateral study in Greek and Latin) from the University of London. He spent his spare time – he is a man who has never known an idle moment – writing fiction, and he placed stories in The Montreal Standard, The New York Sunday News, and The Star Weekly. In 1958 he left Montreal for Ottawa as a manuscript archivist with the Public Archives of Canada, but he returned to Montreal four years later for graduate study in English at McGill. In 1963 he became master of arts and in 1968, under Professor Joyce Hemlow’s supervision, doctor of philosophy – McGill’s first in English literature. And McGill gave him another disinguished gift, a fellow student, Anna Yakovleva, who had trodden an even harder path to McGill, arriving in Montreal a Russian émigrée after years of Nazi internment during the Second World War. She and Wurtele married in 1965, and their union brought him, with its other gifts, the partnership of an active mind and complex sensibility that

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helped give his scholarship and teaching their edge and their depth. He has maintained a warm relationship with McGill not just through the alumni association, but directly with his friends and collaborators in the English Department, where he has often returned to examine doctoral candidates. While in Ottawa with the Public Archives, Wurtele arrived at Carleton University to speak to Munro Beattie, head of the English Department, about the possibility of part-time work. Beattie, liking what he saw, hired him as a marker and sessional lecturer. Liking his work, he urged Wurtele to undertake graduate study, holding out the promise of a full-time position in the department. Wurtele went to McGill to study, and his appointment as lecturer at Carleton came in 1965, as assistant professor in 1967, and as associate professor in 1969. Had he been in Ottawa as a young man, he would not have had to study for a degree by correspondence. Carleton had come into existence in 1942 to accommodate people who, like him, had to delay their university education. It had kept its part-time program intact as it grew into a full-time institution, and so its student body was more heterogeneous and correspondingly more interesting than many of those elsewhere. Its commitment had attracted instructors who were dedicated full-time to teaching and who warmed to the resulting collegiality. They also worked hard to guarantee their students a fair hearing after graduation, for the world was still sceptical of irregular patterns of education. Wurtele found in this setting a congenial home. Few of his colleagues have undertaken their work with greater zest. Few have had a wider and more affable circle of acquaintance throughout the university. Almost at once he became active in the management of graduate studies. He took over the supervision of the English Department’s new ma program from his friend Marston LaFrance, and he collaborated vigorously in the campaign of Dean John Ruptash, another friend, to develop Carleton’s graduate programs in the humanities. But administrative responsibility did not compromise his work in the classroom, which he carried out with something between a missionary’s and a dervish’s ardour. In 1976 he received an award for his teaching from the professional association of university teachers in Ontario. The next year Carleton’s Arts Faculty gave him an award for his scholarship, which he was pursuing as vigorously as he was his teaching. He was publishing articles regularly in the

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learned journals, not just on Chaucer, but on the Scottish Lancelot, on Spenser, on Milton, on Samuel Johnson, on several features of formal rhetoric. He founded the Ottawa–Carleton Renaissance– Medieval Club with his friend Raymond St-Jacques of Ottawa University, launching its operations with evening meetings for papers and discussion and continuing it with two decades of annual weekend symposia. With his friend Roger Blockley of Carleton’s Classics Department he founded and edited Florilegium, a periodical devoted to the study of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. It is now the official journal of the Canadian Society of Medievalists. In 1981 he was elected to the chair of Carleton’s English Department and promoted professor. After completing his term as department head, he remained a vital presence in the university. He was president of the faculty club. He was president of the academic staff association. He was acting clerk of the senate. He chaired the United Way campaign. He sat on dozens of important committees and, at Carleton and elsewhere, on boards of appeal in matters of tenure and promotion. He chaired doctoral exams in all departments. He edited the journal English Studies in Canada, which he brought to Carleton, where it still resides, and he sat on the executive committee of the journal’s sponsor, the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English. He chaired Carleton’s ecumenical chaplaincy committee and was active in two Ottawa parishes, St Barnabas Anglican Church and Annunciation–St Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral. And at the same time, he was as busy as ever with his scholarship. Now it was fourteenth-century literature, Chaucer especially, that engaged his attention. During this period he produced most of the essays that are treated below in “Chaucer and Character: The Heresies of Douglas Wurtele.” “I came to the profession late,” Wurtele says when anyone remarks on the vigour and manifest delight that mark his life as an academic. When the chance of retirement arose, he passed it by without a thought. There was too much to do. There were challenges to be met in the administration of the university. There were things to write about Chaucer and Langland. There were students to supervise and courses to teach. An admirable opportunity opened up when in 1994 he was asked to broadcast his course on Langland and Chaucer by television. Carleton has its own cable channel in Ottawa, and it provides part-time students with courses

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that they need in order to fulfil their degree requirements. Production is a matter not of careful pre-packaging, but simply of placing two cameras in a regular classroom and letting the lecturer, the students, and two gifted technicians make the most of whatever arises. From the moment that Wurtele first appeared on the screen, it was clear that his televised presence was going to be a great success. The image had a warmth, as did the full, deep voice and the conviction with which it always speaks, that was irresistible. It engaged part-time students much more brightly than stamped documents from London were able to do in the 1950s. And, what was just as important to Wurtele, he was able to communicate something of the “sentence and solaas” of fourteenth-century literature to the Ottawa community at large, for hundreds of people not registered as students tuned into his course. As this book goes to print, Wurtele is preparing a new course for Carleton’s undergraduates, he is putting the finishing touches to a couple of scholarly projects, and he is launching another two or three. When we colleagues pass his office door, we hear, as we have for three decades, the activity humming inside like a magneto, and we know that the world is unfolding as it should. We welcomed the session of papers that David Williams of McGill organized in Wurtele’s honour in 1996 for the Canadian Society of Medievalists and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English, and we salute Williams and his colleague Robert Myles (Wurtele’s former student at Carleton) for producing this book, which took root in the 1996 papers. We do not think of the book, however, as rounding out the honouree’s career. Rounding implies ending, and ending and Wurtele are contrapositive concepts. Rather, we see the book as an impetus for more. We know that it will generate fruitful new inquiries into Chaucer’s genius with language, and we know that Wurtele will be writing his way through all of them. As we await the results, we look forward to many an affable engagement with him in the faculty club, which continues to thrive because he and people like him were there when they were needed.

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Acknowledgments

The editors would like to acknowledge the very generous support at McGill University of Principal and Vice-Chancellor Bernard J. Shapiro, the McGill Alumni Association, Carman Miller, dean of the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of English. We thank Ivana Djordjevic and Richard Cooper for their editorial assistance and Brian Morel for his technical assistance. At Carleton University, from the Department of English, we appreciate the co-ordinating efforts of Professors I.C. Cameron. For their generosity we thank Richard Van Loon, president and vicechancellor; Vice-President (Academic) and University Registrar G. Stuart Adam; the Carleton University Academic Staff Association; Professor Aviva K. Freedman, dean of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences; Susan Doyle, executive director, Development and Alumni Services; and Professor Emeritus Bruce McFarlane, Department of Sociology. For her extraordinary personal generosity we reserve a special thanks for Patricia Finn, executive director, Carleton University Staff Association. At McGill-Queen’s University Press we were fortunate to have the skilful editing of John Parry and the assistance of coordinating editor Joan McGilvray. Early versions of several of the contributions to this book were read as papers in honour of Douglas Wurtele at a Special Joint Session of the Canadian Society of Medievalists and the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English at their meetings at the University of Ottawa, June 1998.

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Introduction david williams

Every poet engages language and in so doing brings to it some kind of theoretical sense of how language works. Chaucer’s engagement with language goes beyond the brilliant, skilful use of it as a tool of expression; he is unusual in making language the very subject of his work. In considering the very nature of language, Chaucer becomes, in his literary way, a practical philosopher of language; in the brilliant play with language and his demonstration of how signs act, he becomes a practical semiotician. Like all poets, Chaucer was interested in the internal relationships of words on the page, the beat, the sound, the metaphor, the effect, the play of senses and meaning. He also understood, and exploited on the page, “language” in the widest Augustinian and modern sense of “all signs,” verbal and non-verbal. His works also reveal a great understanding of and concern for the effects of signs: how they affect both the signmaker and the interpreter, as well as the world in general. He is particularly concerned with the moral effect of the use and abuse of signs. In brief, Chaucer knew that speech acts, and he revelled in exploring, experimenting with, and demonstrating such action. All the essays in the present collection reflect on these interests and concerns with language, concerns that have always been among those of Douglas Wurtele, to whom this book is dedicated. In the following, I summarize the essays in a thematic fashion.

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In “Chaucer and Character: The Heresies of Douglas Wurtele,” Robert Myles uses the substance and period of Wurtele’s output – spanning, so far, nearly forty years – to define his method in relation to critical fashions and fads. He sees in Wurtele a use of a combination of a thorough historical approach wedded to New Critical– style close reading with particular concern for Chaucer’s play with and interest in the function of language in revealing character. Wurtele, Myles claims, displays “a canny ability to benefit from various methods while avoiding their excesses.” Because of his lack of concern for maintaining any critical orthodoxy, Wurtele, though among the most careful and rigorous of critics, is, ironically, a “heretic,” one who might be dismissed or not even read by those who hew to narrow party lines or interests, but one who, Myles claims, will survive and have lasting influence on our understanding of Chaucer and language. I might add that the approach that Myles defines as Wurtele’s is indeed one that most of the essays in the present collection share. A case in point is the essay of Beverly Kennedy. As this book was going to press Beverly Kennedy died of cancer. We are honoured to present here her last essay, a demonstration of Chaucer’s intentional play with the ambiguity of language in the portrait of the Wife of Bath. This issue goes to the heart of the theme of the present book but gains force when seen in the context of her three previous essays (all referred to) that attempt to demonstrate the Wife’s mistreatment at the hands of scribes and scholars. As Kennedy has mined the manuscripts, readers may mine her copious notes, a deliberately formed legacy containing materials and observations that were to form the basis for future writings that would have further demonstrated two of Chaucer’s extraordinary sensitivities and preoccupations – one epistemological, the potential of all signs to be ambiguous, and one humanistic, the predicament of women. In her analysis of the depiction of the Wife of Bath, Kennedy sees Chaucer’s “conscious ambiguation” in certain key descriptions of this character as ultimately didactic, a warning to readers to suspend moral judgment because of the slipperiness of words. Chaucer exploits the polyvalent nature of signs, Kennedy believes, in order to reveal to the alert reader the inherent ambiguity of language itself and, because of it, the risk that claims of certainty pose for us. While, traditionally, many readers have read certain elements of Chaucer’s portrait of the Wife of Bath to interpret her

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unambiguously as wanton, Kennedy sees these same elements as ambiguous, consciously made so by Chaucer. More positive views of the Wife, favoured by some, including Kennedy, gain strength if Kennedy’s views are correct. According to her, modern editors of Chaucer’s works have “routinely disambiguated” Chaucer’s texts through their notes and manuscript choices, but the process, in her view, may have begun very early with five passages, “all of misogynous import,” that appear in only “a third of the extant Canterbury Tales manuscripts.” Kennedy sees here a more direct method of conscious disambiguation by Chaucer’s earliest editors. However, according to Kennedy, not only editors but also the audience participate in the process of disambiguation. It is the reader’s desire to know, the desire for certainty, that has encouraged editors to present Chaucer’s language as far more perspicuous than it really is, and it is when the reader perceives the contingent and elusive nature of language that Chaucer’s view of the equivocacy of moral truth (or any other truth, perhaps) emerges. In an interesting juxtaposition to Beverly Kennedy’s essay, Chauncey Wood attempts to demonstrate that the ambiguity of the Wife’s sexual vocabulary ultimately disambiguates her persona and reveals her as an impostor in philosophy, intellectually limited and ethically decrepit. This disambiguation, however, is fully accessible only to an audience that is familiar with the Roman de la rose. “While this may, for modern readers, seem a lot to ask, we should not forget that the argument about decorous speech is one of the defining moments of the Roman, while the poem itself was a favourite of Chaucer’s and perhaps of his audience as well.” The case of the Wife of Bath is but another example that indicates “that Chaucer sometimes uses speech not just to inform us about aspects of character but to demonstrate them.” Wood’s argument supports the old saw that we are judged by the way we speak and betokens the intimacy between self and language, between the essential inner person and the existential outer expression. Wood considers this a fundamental strategy of Chaucer’s rhetoric of description, and he elaborates this idea by concentrating on the asperity of what the Miller calls “speche daungerous,” and the decorous speech of the Wife of Bath, which Chaucer employs to create a rhetoric of meaningful impropriety. Examining the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, Wood discovers in Chaucer’s manipulation of language the deliberate creation of a tension between the discourse of reason, constituted by the ideas that the

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Wife propounds, and the discourse of decorum, constituted by the formal language that she uses to express those ideas. In this tension decorous speech undermines rational discourse, and the audience experiences the euphemistic nature of the former as inappropriate and inadequate to the frankly gametic nature of her subject. Thus the Wife fails as philosopher and as polemicist because she fails as rhetorician. The ambiguity of language and the values that it grounds are also the concern of E.C. Ronquist, who cites the concept of “mixed evidence” in his inquiry into Chaucer’s ethical positions and the place that he may accord to pleasure. Naturally, in such a discussion, it is the Franklin, “Epicurus owene sone,” who attracts the most attention. Chaucer’s narrative voice in the General Prologue exposes a gap between the hierarchical paradigms to which his personale subscribe and the equivocal values that their actions betray. While medieval people may have thought in hierarchical patterns, as D.W. Robertson, Jr, claimed, Ronquist points out that members of Chaucer’s audience had more than one hierarchy to turn to and, like the author, were sufficiently creative to develop individual ways of living. The elasticity of language allows such ethical creativity to represent its equivocations to itself in viable ways. Thus Chaucer’s invocation of Epicurus suggests classical (i.e., pagan) views and doctrines of ethics that emphasize pleasure as a philosophical principle and identify virtue with pleasure, insisting on the impossibility of the one without the other. Rhetorically manœuvred, this invocation suggests ethical options in the text, or “lifestyles,” as Ronquist puts it. As a “dialogic thinker,” Chaucer based his rhetorical method in investigation and inquiry into the values that people happen to hold and proceeded from there to judgment – a rhetorical procedure that may be called empirical. Such rhetoric adjusts to the situation, and thus Chaucer’s language appears to Ronquist indulgent and supportive of ethical “variety” rather than of philosophical positions. The relativism of values that Ronquist sees in Chaucer’s writing depends on a profoundly rhetorical form of language in which words mean both more and less than they seem to and in which Epicurus’s delight is, for instance, one thing for the Wife of Bath and another for her husbands, in which one man’s meat, as it were, is another man’s poison. The capacity of language to construct not only its narrator but its audience as well is the subject of Glenn Burger, who sees the Tale

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of Melibee as a “mapping” of the history of sexuality and, as such, a kind of transition between the medieval and the modern. Burger borrows the term “mapping” from Deleuze and Guattari, who posit a dichotomy of “tracing” and “mapping,” in which the former produces “impasses, blockages, incipient taproots,” while the latter is “detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant modification.” Creating a set of analogies between medieval and modern, hegemony and resistance, heterosexual and queer, Burger positions these analogies in relation to the controlling analogy of tracing and mapping, thus associating medieval, hegemony, and heterosexuality with tracing, and mapping with modern, resistance, and queer. Burger urges his audience to “orient” its reading of Chaucer so as to see, on one hand, the heterosexuality of Melibee and Prudence, which produces Wisdom (their daughter Sophie), as suggestive of tracing and, on the other hand, to see the progressive feminization of Melibee through submission to his wife as a mapping of sexuality making possible inferiority, genuine masculinity, and a socialized heterosexuality capable of “social reproduction.” The value of the study of Chaucer for an understanding of the full implications of the modern linguistic turn and the subsequent emphasis on language and signification in postmodern thought is evident in the essay by Christine Jones and in Robert Myles’s second contribution to this collection, “Confusing Signs.” Contrasting with Burger’s view, Christine Jones’s discussion of Chaucer’s role in what might be called the “medieval linguistic turn” points to a decidedly anti-nominalist position. Like Burger, she turns her attention to Melibee, more specifically to the so-called link between the Tale of Sir Thopas and that of Melibee, in which Chaucer, as he so often does, indulges in theoretical speculation about the nature of language, about historicity and fiction, and about objective truth – its intelligibility and its expression. While the postmodern version of the linguistic turn makes all uses of language the kind of lie for which Plato condemned the poet, Jones sees in poet Chaucer’s engagement of the problem of linguistic representation a possibility of redeeming this lugubrious fate. The postmodern conflation of history, philosophy, and literature under the term “text” sees the past as a more-or-less-fanciful reconstruction from memory and desire and presents philosophical systems as imaginative, subjective constructs – textualized opinion. Appropriately, Jones takes Richard Rorty as representative of this direction in post-linguistic-turn theory and examines his dismissal

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of “accurate representation” and his conflation of aesthetic and everyday language. Jones, like Myles, points out that, contrary to the assumptions of many contemporary thinkers, theoretical concern with the contrast between truth and fictionality and recognition of the basic linguistic nature of this question begin not with the moderns but with the medievals. While Chaucer regularly calls into question objectivist claims, says Jones, we discover in the Melibee link his basically realist understanding of both history and poetry. His realism took the historically situated condition of intellection and the embodied nature of language not as barriers to truth or to an understanding of the real, but as constituting their very possibility. Robert Myles “Confusing Signs” considers Chaucer not only a sophisticated poet who self-reflexively renders the poetic process the subject of his poetry, but also an important voice in the medieval development of Augustinian semiotics. Myles sees the Clerk’s Tale as in part a working out of the concepts of natural and given signs established by Augustine in De doctrina christiana, as well as a “problem” in medieval and modern semiotics. In the Clerk’s Tale the ability and inability to interpret signs properly provide the basic dynamic of the narrative: Walter tries to make the distinction between natural signs (for example, an involuntary grimace) and given signs (for example, words) so as to seize meaning, and he fails; Myles argues that Griselda, as the subject of her husband’s experiment, learns from her experience what Walter fails to learn. Myles discovers in his reading of the Clerk’s Tale that Chaucer seems to have perceived a crucial unity in the initial binarism of Augustine’s semantics – namely, that the dichotomy of natural and given signs is not an opposition, as it has often been mistakenly interpreted. Many scholars forget that Augustine views words as only one type of given sign, albeit the predominant one. Confusion occurs also because words are the only given signs that cannot also be natural, and it is easier to consider natural and given signs as being exclusively opposed, rather than, depending on the source of intentionality, as being either one or the other. Myles points out that signs that are considered natural require intentionality to be considered signs at all. He also indicates that many signs that may be natural may also be given and that this is the basis of Walter’s conundrum. Because of these dual possibilities,

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signs that may be natural are particularly useful for someone who wishes to lie or deceive, such as Walter and, perhaps, argues Myles, Griselda herself. Myles sees Chaucer, through Griselda’s developing “semiotic consciousness,” as correcting an error, medieval and modern, of equating given signs with conventional signs, and these in turn with words. Chaucer is not the only “semiotician” to correct this error, but he is among the first, medieval or modern. In another article on the Clerk’s Tale, Victor Yelverton Haines takes up the semiotics of Christian allegory. He argues that the Clerk, in full ironic flight, is sending up Griselda’s “vicious” patience. The Clerk, according to Haines, is reacting to a naïve “essentialist typology,” which leads to “silly repetition” – that Christ was nailed on a cross does not mean that each of us should seek the same fate. Even less should Griselda act like Abraham, Job, or Mary in her relationship with Walter. Haines proffers, as a point of view close to that of the Clerk, an “existentialist typology” – “existentialism” being understood as the Christian existentialism and episternological anti-essentialism that had developed in the thought of Aquinas and was particularly manifested in the lives and works of certain thirteenth- and fourteenth-century mystics. Haines reviews the disputes concerning the medieval doctrines of testing and of promise-keeping/promise-breaking. Moreover, he argues that the matter of promisesexercised the “ethical imagination” of the period because of matters as diverse as the making and breaking of clerical vows, the questioning of the chivalric concept of troth, and the development of commercial law of contract. Haines thus introduces another factor that contributed to the tale’s great popularity. Like Myles, Haines argues for a semiotically sophisticated Griselda, who exercises “control of irony” and who “desperately” uses sarcasm or “crabbed eloquence” in her exchanges with Walter and his agent. Griselda demonstrates, in Haines’s close reading of the text, a highly developed awareness of verbal ambiguity, which she can both detect and emit. In fact, Haines makes a striking case for conscious ambiguation in Griselda, the Clerk, and Chaucer, as Kennedy does for the Wife of Bath. The Clerk’s ironic treatment of naïve essentialist typology becomes a “test of rhetoric,” which, if passed, should lead to a negative evaluation of Griselda’s behaviour. She is excused only on the grounds of “misguided virtue.”

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David Williams argues that the Pardoner “launches an unlimited attack on signification itself” and that he has an “antisemiotic worldview.” The Pardoner abuses a whole gamut of signs: words, both literal and figurative; relics; and, finally, the Eucharist itself. Williams demonstrates that the tale provides a mini-treatise on the nature of signs as they were understood by Chaucer and the Middle Ages. He also sees the tale as an exposition of Chaucer’s realist approach to language, which considers “things” (not simply material things) preceding words and signs, and signs, properly used, as a means of experiencing reality. The opposite view – signs before things – is that of the “nominalist and relativist” Pardoner, who “wallows” in signs and who is doomed (if he does not mend his ways) never to discover reality, which is, ultimately, eternal life. It is not language per se that may be proper or improper; language is just a tool created for our use. What comes out of the mouth is governed by the will. The meaning of language is conventional; to abuse that communal meaning, to lie and mislead for selfish ends, is a serious sin. Even more serious is the abuse of relics, which objects, Williams argues, the Pardoner consciously and thoroughly perverts and inverts: yet another assault on the very concept of signification itself. Here, as elsewhere in his essay, Williams builds on and attempts to correct earlier critics, adding his own research and insights, providing a history of the use of relics and a thorough description of their semiotics. Similarly, the Pardoner inverts Augustine’s doctrine on the use of figural language in scripture, rendering literal and grossly material what Augustine taught should be considered figurative in order to lead the interpreter to the sublimely spiritual. Finally, in his most serious attack on signification, at least from a Christian perspective, the Pardoner, through his tale of the three revellers, inverts, perverts, and blasphemes that most sacred of signs, the Eucharist. In his inverse valorization of sign over signified, the Pardoner’s Tale, in Williams’s view, is intended to demonstrate the relativism, emptiness, nihilism, and necrophilia that such a view leads to and, implicitly, to point to the truth and value of the order of “things before words.” If Williams’s view of the Pardoner seems harsh, that of Douglas Wurtele is less so. As both Williams and Patrick J. Gallacher point out in their respective essays, Wurtele sees in the Pardoner someone on the verge of conversion, as salvageable. Gallacher turns to the

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Merchant and sees him as someone salvaging himself through his inquiry into language. According to Gallacher, the Merchant’s very tale represents an inquiry into and rejection (“at least partial”) of his own scepticism and nominalism. On the larger view of the position of Chaucer himself on how language functions, Gallacher here explicitly aligns himself with Williams and Myles by accepting the assertion that “Chaucer was by no means a nominalist.” Gallacher examines the radical deferring inherent in the Christian concept of truth and the language employed to represent it. Using the Aristotelian and medieval concept of inquiry and judgment associated with the Wisdom literature of the Middle Ages, as well as the modern concept of sense and reference, Gallacher analyses the Merchant’s Tale as an occasion for Chaucer to depict the contingent and incomplete nature of human understanding of truth, which truth, while objective and complete in and of itself, constantly partially eludes language. That is, argues Gallacher, using modern terminology for what was also understood in the Middle Ages, reference can never be actualized; the sign, we might say, cannot be signified, and, with one exception, the word cannot become flesh. The Merchant calls into question the validity of moral discourse and the meaning of the words “good” and “certain” through irony and his parodic use of the inexpressibility topos. In so doing, the Merchant seems to place himself on the side of Chaucer’s several nominalist characters, whose scepticism is always based on language. But in the process of telling his tale, the Merchant seems to acquire a different perspective. Gallacher sees in May’s sophistical argument what January did not see – an intentional manipulation of sense and reference. January, described by the Merchant as the conventional “old fool,” fulfils that role himself when he assents to May’s lie and rejects referential judgment. Finally, in a sweet irony typical of Chaucer, it is the pagan Prosperina who does indeed get the last word with her husband and uses it to articulate a fundamental principle of Christian philosophy – that perfect goodness, like perfect understanding, is found only in God. Adding weight to Gallacher’s argument is his extensive grounding of it in three recognized sources of Chaucer’s ideas – works by Nicolas Trivet, Robert Holcot, and Dante. Gallacher concludes with the provocative observation that one may see in Chaucer’s comic ironies a type of via negativa leading us towards the truth.

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Chaucer and Language

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Chaucer and Character: The Heresies of Douglas Wurtele robert myles

Examining Douglas Wurtele’s output over the last four decades allows us not only to relate his work to the theme of this volume but also to connect his scholarly method to some of the general methodological fashions that held, or have held, sway over this period, as well as to make some suggestions on possible future directions for Chaucer criticism in the new century. Douglas Wurtele is representative of the best of twentieth-century Chaucer criticism, displaying a canny ability to benefit from various methodologies while avoiding their excesses. His method – a historical approach to the hermeneutic circle combined with close reading – is simple to understand but takes great learning and assiduous effort to practise at a consistently high level, particularly during a period of shifting theoretical orthodoxies and fads. Wurtele usually begins his Chaucer criticism with a broad issue found in a text.1 Such issues range from the use of classical and medieval traditions of rhetoric, through the Christian doctrine of penance, and through physiognomy, to the misogynist tradition from Aristotle to Chaucer. He studies every text available to him on a particular subject, concentrating on primary texts of all origins – sacred, theological, secular, literary, philosophical, and scientific, both classical and medieval – while also considering existing secondary studies. The results are rich and solid essays such as “Proprietas in the Merchant’s Tale,” “The ‘Double Sorwe’ of the Wife

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of Bath: Chaucer and the Misogynist Tradition,” and “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer.” From such articles Chaucer students and scholars receive an enriched view both of Chaucer’s texts and of the wider issue under examnation. Such subjects, however, have a practical function in the attainment of a more consuming goal. Wurtele pursues these studies so that he and we can improve his and our reading of the text, while vis-à-vis the text itself he has one constant aim: the delineation of character. Perusing his titles one can see a constant thread, namely the analysis of the character of the tale tellers: the Man of Laws, the Clerk, the Prioress, the Merchant, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner, the Parson; in certain cases he returns to the same character three times (the Merchant) and even four times (the Wife). Through all these studies runs a fascination with what makes us human and what makes us better or worse human beings. Judging from his criticism, the aesthetic criterion to literature (and in literature) that seems to influence his own approach the most is the ancient rhetorical and literary aesthetic voiced in Horace’s injunction to instruct and entertain, the Chaucerian “sentence and solaas,” which still animates much of the best of modern literature. In his interpretation of character, Wurtele sees many of Chaucer’s creations both as types of human beings and as individuals. This brings him into conflict with certain dogmas of mainstream twentieth-century criticism: the intentional fallacy of New Criticism; the allegorical types of Robertsonian criticism; New Historicism’s elimination of the subject; deconstruction’s theory of the impossibility of truth claims and its belief that language cannot refer to anything outside itself; Barthe’s “death of the author” – one could go on. Many critics tied to such formalist modes may perceive Wurtele’s assumptions as simply false. But Wurtele knows something about the wheat and the chaff and has always been consciously “theoretically incorrect.” While maintaining his historicism plus close reading approach, he does not hew to the line on other aspects of the wider theories from which his approach is derived. This eclectic, critical, and obviously fruitful approach to “theory” is one that may have to become more general if the field of literary studies is to recover from its current “decline and fall.”2 As an undergraduate student in Douglas Wurtele’s Chaucer seminar, I recall his using my enthusiastic description of the Knight’s

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“unique voice” as a springboard into a cautionary and startling discussion-lecture on decorum and proprietas (a favourite theme) – how people in certain estates would be expected to speak and conduct themselves in certain situations. While insisting on considering characters as types, he would also passionately and convincingly argue that many characters (including the Knight to some degree) may be considered individuals. The Wife of Bath, for example, while a type, is for Wurtele also a “real woman,” and one of astonishing complexity. Wurtele’s method of teaching was the same as his method of research and writing. He would profess, in his rich bass voice, clearly illustrating his arguments with vast, striking references, beginning with Chaucer’s own deliberate intertextual reference and moving from these to other classical, sacred, and medieval texts. The discourse would lead to general discussions on classical and medieval aesthetics, science, and history. In arguing for individual characterization, Wurtele’s students were aware that their professor, always decorous himself in dealing with his critical peers as with his students, was challenging the dogma of D.W. Robertson, Jr, whose A Preface to Chaucer he insisted that they read and apply to their own readings of Chaucer’s texts.3 From the beginning of his career, Wurtele rejected Robertson’s anti-psychologism and dogmatic insistence on exclusively typological and explicitly anti-individualistic readings of Chaucerian character. Wurtele now occupies a position that may, over the long term, form the consensus view on Chaucer’s characterization. It is one that has seen consistent development since it was first articulated by John M. Manly in 1926, when he wrote that we should see Chaucer’s characters not simply as types but as “typical individual[s].”4 Manly’s position is difficult to dismiss despite the widespread opposition of those who dispute “the notion of consistent impersonation [i.e., characterization] in Chaucer’s work.”5 Both orthodox Robertsonians and postmodernists – on opposite sides of the ideological fence in many ways – see Wurtele’s position as heretical. The former insist that individual characterization is an anachronistic projection of those accustomed to modern fiction, while the latter often extend this view (for different reasons, of course) to all fictional representations of character.6 In order to interpret the personality of a particular character both as type and as individual, one must make inferences from what

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they say and do and what others say about them. One must assume that language and all other signs, including actions, non-actions, and silences, are object-directed or intentional. When it comes to attempting to define Chaucer’s principal characters, what they say and do includes, pre-eminently, telling tales, and one is inevitably led to attempt to envision who they are from their tales. As Chaucer knew, and as phenomenology of language has rearticulated in our own time, all signs are simultaneously world-directed and minddirected (“three-level semantics”).7 All of us, when speaking (including telling stories), reveal or say something, from the trivial to the profound, about the “world,” about ourselves, and about how we see the world. For Chaucer, given his aesthetic, life may imitate art, but art should also imitate life. The Wife of Bath’s words say something about the Wife of Bath, a fictional person, even if it is not her intention to reveal this “something.” Again one confronts the hermeneutic circle: interpreting the character of the Wife from her tale may cause us to reread the tale with a new perspective on her character in mind – and around it goes. A presupposition here is that one can consider authorial intentionality as contributing to both the meaning of the text and the “meaning” or his or her spiritual/psychological “condicioun.” Indeed in literature that is replete with individualized character-authors, of which the Canterbury Tales is the outstanding example, one is left with little choice but to consider authorial intentionality. In the abstract to his doctoral dissertation in 1968 (which focused on the individualistic and atypical use of rhetoric by the Man of Law and the Clerk in their respective tales), Wurtele describes his objective as being a demonstration that “Stylistically and psychologically, the prologues and tales fit the characters and the intentions of the tellers.” Elsewhere in the thesis he quotes with approval Paul Ruggiers’s assertion that each tale is the “utterance of a human being.”8 Twenty-five years later, in Florilegium 11 (1993), this belief remains. In this, his fourth article on the Wife of Bath, Wurtele states that his “intention … is to present Alisoun of Bath … as a complex character portrayal by Chaucer, who employs techniques … to create the illusion of a ‘real’ human being.” On this occasion, he recommends that those who might believe that “Chaucer was not interested in realistic characterization” consider a “seminal article” on the subject by Beryl Rowland, citing her statement that

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“The overt artistic intention, as well as the effect [of the Canterbury Tales], is to persuade us that he [Chaucer] was writing from life.”9 According to H. Marshall Leicester, Robert M. Jordan is “the most thoroughgoing and principled opponent of the notion of consistent impersonation in Chaucer’s work.”10 One of the most thoroughgoing proponents of consistent impersonation is Douglas Wurtele. Both Wurtele and Jordan have written on the Merchant’s Tale. In his first article on the tale (1977), Wurtele argues that the Merchant uses the figure of Solomon in his tale in ways that “reveal further subtleties in Chaucer’s method of characterization”;11 in the second, he concludes that “the tale … affords another example of his [Chaucer’s] sophisticated technique of fitting tale to teller”;12 in the third, he demonstrates the implications for the Merchant’s character in his use of blasphemy in the tale.13 Three times Wurtele listens to the Merchant’s voice, discovering new aspects of a complex but unified character. Rather than hearing a complex but single human voice, Robert M. Jordan hears a cacophony of voices. Writing in 1967, ten years before Wurtele began publishing on the Merchant, Jordan, no doubt alluding to the criticism in the style of Manly, Rowland, and Ruggiers, attacks those interpretations of the Merchant that “are pursued on the assumption that there is consistency [of character] which must be revealed.”14 “Structural and stylistic evidence seems to indicate conclusively that there is no single viewpoint governing the narrative. The [Merchant’s] tale is less a unified presentation than a composite of several narrative attitudes and positions, often mutually contradictory.”15 Because Jordan wrote this in the mid-1960s, his strong emphasis on textual indeterminacy has seemed to many to be prescient of deconstruction. However, given the reigning New Critical dogma of the “intentional fallacy,” the New Critical emphasis on the ambiguity of language,16 and the Robertsonian denial of the possibility of individual characterization in medieval texts, it is not surprising that a critic would take the approach that Jordan did.17 Do we have in the Merchant a complex but unified narrative voice or a composite narrative voice belonging to no one in particular? As advocate of the former view, Wurtele seems to stand on more solid ground. First, his historical research of primary and secondary

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sources is thorough, and his understanding of these comprehensive. Second, he has a strong theoretical base on which to make many of his arguments, developed from his in-depth study of classical and medieval rhetoric in all its manifestations. The study of rhetoric is at the heart of his ma thesis in 1963 and his doctoral dissertation in 1968. Robertson had used the medieval rhetorical conventions of decorum and proprietas to argue for the typological sense of character in medieval literature. Wurtele employs the same conventions to argue for individual characterization. In his doctoral dissertation, Wurtele argues that Chaucer’s Man of Law demonstrates extremely high and unusual rhetorical skills, which set him sharply off from the “type” of lawyer the Man of Law is supposed to be. Using primary sources, Wurtele documents simultaneously both the Man of Law’s originality as a character and Chaucer’s originality in characterizing him as he did. In a later article, Wurtele argues that Chaucer adds a “new dimension” to the whole concept of decorum through his characterization of the Man of Law.18 Chaucer’s characters are types, even exaggerated types. But this is true to life as well: we are all types, even a variety of types, based on our occupations and interests. It is in the deviation and (dare we say?) difference from the norm that the individuality of a character (as with our own individuality) lies. It is this aspect of Chaucer’s art to which Wurtele is alluding when he claims that “Chaucer establishes himself as master of the art of proprietas” in his characterization of another character-author, the Monk.19 Wurtele’s use of and discussions of proprietas both resemble and dovetail with A.J. Minnis’s discussion of the late-fourteenth-century use of the ironic personae to create individuals rather than types in the commentary tradition of the Querelle de la Rose. If one accepts Minnis’s demonstration, Chaucer, while certainly an anomaly in his extensive and masterly practice of individual characterization, was not alone in the practice.20 Moreover, this practice is arguably well-rooted in the same philosophical realism that grounds exegetical readings of Chaucer’s texts.21 In seeking to characterize Chaucer’s pilgrim-authors through their tales, Wurtele is pursuing the concept of authorial intentionality, which is an aspect of the intentional nature of all language and of all signs.22 And there is certainly one fact that remains true for all of us, whether we believe that the universe is intentional or nonintentional – namely, that language is intentional.23 John Searle calls

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our attention to “the distinction between ontology and epistemology … [distinguishing] between questions of what exists (ontology) from questions of how we know what exists (epistemology).” 24 As Searle puts it: “If we are having difficulty in interpreting a text because of lack of evidence, say about the author’s intention, we are in an epistemic quandary and can reasonably look for more evidence. If we are having difficulty with a text because there is simply no fact of the matter about what the author meant we are dealing with an ontological problem of indeterminacy, and it is fruitless to look for more evidence. The standard mistake is to suppose that lack of evidence (i.e., our ignorance) shows indeterminacy or undecideabilty in principle.”25 In the happy case of the Canterbury Tales, which is full of authors and audiences, which is replete with a staggering variety of source texts and of inter-texts, for which a huge number of sources and analogues exists, there has never been a shortage of new evidence with which to investigate “authorial” intentionality and “authorial” character and with which to re-evaluate, develop, and revise evidence and arguments put forth in earlier readings. In his criticism, Douglas Wurtele gets around to the historical author as well. In the Retraction at the end of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer apparently states his “entencioun.” Not surprisingly, Chaucer is met here by his student, Douglas Wurtele, attempting, in an article called “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer,” to evaluate the author’s intention behind this controversial text. Whether one agrees with Wurtele’s conclusion or not, on its scholarship the article will remain a classic, one which anyone who wishes to write on this text will have to take into account. Wurtele first covers all the interpretations and controversy that have swirled around the retraction for centuries. He then goes to work applying his own research. He points out that Chaucer’s near-contemporary, Thomas Gascoigne, writing about twenty-five years after Chaucer’s death, did not doubt the sincerity of the Retraction’s author. Neither does Wurtele. But Wurtele takes issue with Gascoigne’s harsh judgment of Chaucer’s moral state before he wrote the piece. Wurtele gives us the entire Latin text that Gascoigne composed and shows, through a meticulous analysis of it and the Retraction, and by using his thorough knowledge of Chaucer’s corpus and of the Retraction genre, that Gascoigne was a poor reader of Chaucer. Thomas Gascoigne does not know

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Geoffrey Chaucer; Douglas Wurtele does, for he has found him in his texts. There are those who might argue that criticism such as Wurtele’s that continues to attempt to define character, be it of Chaucer or his creations, is passé. Such definition, they would argue, is “essentialist,” and, they believe, Chaucer is fundamentally anti-essentialist. I have recently argued that the concept of the anti-essentialist Chaucer needs much refining. Chaucer’s anti-essentialism and the anti-essentialist aspects of medieval literary texts are rooted more generally in fundamental aspects of Judaeo-Christian semiological metaphysics and in the epistemology that are a function of such a metaphysics than in the “nominalism” or the so-called literary nominalism that has been proposed to account for Chaucer’s play with verbal and epistemological ambiguity and uncertainty. While many of Chaucer’s texts are indeed open, the concept of “open texts” and elements of epistemological anti-essentialism constitute but a flimsy basis on which to build a “literary nominalism.”26 One may be an essentialist and epistemologically an anti-essentialist or perhaps better, a fallibilist, aware of the human limitations that inhibit the pursuit of absolute truth.27 This is a particularly coherent position for someone such as Chaucer who understands how signs work.28 Moreover, recent criticism, written from the same historical approach plus close reading, such as that practised by Douglas Wurtele, has revealed that “open texts” were fully established in the literary and rhetorical genres and traditions before Chaucer created his own, although, of course, as with other genres, Chaucer used them in an extraordinarily original and consummate fashion. Moreover, as Beverly Kennedy attempts to demonstrate in her essay in the present collection, “conscious ambiguation” (a term first applied to Chaucer by John Fleming) was a classical rhetorical device that may have been used intentionally by Chaucer. While one would be foolish to dismiss totally the influence of nominalism or “Ockhamism” on medieval texts, “shared interest” is a more apt connection.29 The approach to literary criticism employed by Douglas Wurtele and others remains richly productive.

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“Withouten oother compaignye in youthe”: Verbal and Moral Ambiguity in the General Prologue Portrait of the Wife of Bath beverly kennedy

Ambiguity is so common at every level of language that readers and listeners must often disambiguate what they read and hear simply in order to achieve meaning.1 The need to disambiguate is even greater, of course, for when one is reading the work of a poet such as Geoffrey Chaucer, whose use of ambiguity is so witty and pervasive as to suggest that it is a conscious element of his craft. One of the best examples is the prepositional phrase “Withouten oother compaignye in youthe” (GP 461), in his General Prologue portrait of the Wife of Bath, where the two possible meanings of withouten permit morally contradictory interpretations of the line: either the Wife is a respectable married woman and/or widow who has had no companions in her youth other than her five husbands; or she is little better than a harlot, having had many companions in her youth in addition to her five husbands. Both of these interpretations cannot be true, but how is a reader to decide which one is false? And why would Chaucer choose to be so irresolvably ambiguous on such an important moral topic as a rich woman’s chastity? In his study of Chaucer’s use of “conscious ambiguation” in Troilus and Criseyde, John V. Fleming has argued that the poet’s pervasive use of ambiguity in that work makes him atypical of medieval poets, most of whom accepted the view of classical and medieval rhetoricians that ambiguitas was either “a vice or an obstacle to be overcome” by a serious writer or else a “mistake,” which the

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writer would have corrected had he been aware of it.2 Now Chaucer’s use of withouten in line 461 of the General Prologue is not likely to be a mistake, but is its use then because it is morally evasive necessarily a vice? Fleming explains Chaucer’s use of ambiguitas in the Troilus in terms of his “deep classicism,” his intimate knowledge and imitation of those classical writers such as Ovid who employed “conscious ambiguation” as a poetic “elegance.”3 He also suggests that textual ambiguity was integral to Chaucer’s project of recreating as well as criticizing the antique world. But such an explanation cannot account for his use of conscious ambiguation in the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where he is recreating not the “antique world,” with its “grandeur” and also its “falseness in religion, falseness in love, and falseness in language,”4 but his own world of late-fourteenth-century England. Why would he consciously ambiguate this project? The first reason to suggest itself is that, as in the Troilus, he intended to criticize the world that he was recreating, a reason supported by his drawing on the clerical genre of estates satire.5 But if this is the case, then we are at a loss to explain why his use of ambiguity in representing the pilgrims should work so consistently to “remov[e] … the possibility of moral judgement.”6 A second possible reason is that he wished to render the Canterbury pilgrims more true to life than the stereotypes commonly found in estates satire. Jill Mann suggests as much when she observes that Chaucer’s consistent use of concretizing descriptive details, many of which are ambiguous in the sense that they can be interpreted in more than one way, makes his pilgrims seem more like individuals than mere types and also helps to create a relationship between characters and readers more like that between people in real life.7 Modern readers continue to be attracted to Chaucer’s pilgrims, and this “continuing appeal” may result in large part not only from his use of individualizing details but also from his apparently “intentional ambiguity,” which “teases [and] inveigles the reader into the creative process.”8 In this essay I argue that the most fundamental reason for Chaucer’s use of conscious ambiguity in the Wife of Bath’s portrait was to inveigle his readers into the creative process in a very particular way – namely, to experience the difficulty, if not the outright impossibility, of making moral judgments on the basis of evidence that is partial or contradictory.9 With his highly developed awareness

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of the reader’s power to create the meaning of texts, Chaucer must have given some thought to the effect that the deliberate ambiguity of his text would have on his readers.10 My hypothesis is that he hoped that it would cause them to disagree among themselves about the moral character of his pilgrims, as modern readers and critics still do about many of the pilgrims, the Prioress in particular,11 and that this disagreement would make them more aware of the difficulties involved in forming moral judgments on the basis of appearances, whether linguistic or material. There is good evidence that medieval readers did disagree about the moral character of the Wife of Bath, but thus far she has generated no such disagreement among modern critics, despite Jill Mann’s influential study of the General Prologue portraits, in which she concludes that the Wife is one of those pilgrims whose moral character is represented “ambiguously.”12 This critical anomaly probably results from certain other anomalies in both the medieval and the modern receptions of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, which I discuss below. But first I want to demonstrate that Chaucer’s portrayal of the Wife in the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales is irresolvably ambiguous regarding her social and marital status, her physical appearance, and most important of all, her chastity.

i The moral ambiguity of the portrait as a whole becomes apparent in the very first line: “A good Wif was ther of biside Bathe” (445).13 In Chaucer’s time, the primary meaning of the phrase god wif, like the phrase god man, was a morally good person, and this is clearly what it means in the opening line of the Parson’s portrait: “A good man was ther of religioun” (478). Thus the medieval reader’s first impression of the Wife would have been that she is “a virtuous wife” (MED a).14 Chaucer’s readers would have known, however, that god wif, again like god man, had a social meaning as well. It could also refer to a person of rank and property – in the case of a woman, the sort of person who would be the “mistress of a household” (MED b).15 This second meaning Chaucer immediately rules out in the Parson’s case with his ensuing observation that he was “povre,” whereas in the Wife’s case he rather reinforces it by observing that she claimed the right to be first in making the

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offering in her parish. As Chaucer’s readers would have known, the right to be first in the procession on offering days (when parochial dues were paid) belonged to the parishioner of first consequence.16 That the Wife was not the only person in her parish to believe that she had this right is suggested by the further revelation that if anyone went before her, she was “so wrooth” as to be “out of alle charitee” (452), which suggests competition for this honour.17 Ideally, of course, a god wif should never be proud or angry; however, in the real world of bourgeois society a woman might on occasion exhibit both pride and anger and yet be regarded as “virtuous,” so long as she was chaste. In fourteenth-century moral treatises, the “Good Wife” teaches her daughter that she should avoid all mortal sin for the sake of her salvation as well as her worldly prosperity (“Wele thryueth at God loueth”) but that she should avoid even the appearance of unchastity in order to avoid slander.18 Thus we may infer that Chaucer chose to introduce the Wife of Bath as a “good wif,” knowing that he was giving his readers a difficult interpretive choice: are we to take this phrase as an affirmation of her virtue as a woman, i.e. her chastity, or of her social status, or both? The Wife’s social status is represented by means of descriptive details that are themselves open to differing interpretations, and therefore ambiguous. Nevertheless, however they are interpreted, the details all work together to make one clear affirmation: she is an extremely wealthy woman. Her expertise in “clooth-making” excels that of the great cloth manufacturers of Ypres and Gaunt (modern Ghent),19 and so her place of residence, “of biside Bathe,” may mean that, like the most prosperous of her Flemish counterparts, she has a private abode outside the city walls, away from the crowded urban tenements and the stench of the cloth-making process (the dyeing process being particularly malodorous). Or it may mean that she comes from any village near Bath, in which case she could be a successful entrepreneur in the rural clothmaking industry. Either way, she must be deemed wealthy.20 The clothes that she wears to church on a Sunday also indicate great wealth;21 and, as we saw above, her insistence on the right to be first in the procession “to the offrynge” means that she is one of the wealthiest persons in her parish, if not the wealthiest. What Chaucer does leave in doubt is whether the Wife’s wealth is due primarily to her ability as a businesswoman (which would

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suggest a diligent, capable, and strong-willed woman of aboveaverage intelligence) or to her ability to attract rich men as husbands and inherit their wealth (which would suggest just the opposite – a schemer who displays her wealth and beauty as bait).22 This doubt arises at the point at which Chaucer informs us that she has had five husbands “at chirche door,” which means that she married them all in the proper manner, before witnesses and with the blessing of the church; therefore, given the difficulty and rarity of annulment, we may infer that she has been widowed at least four times. Thus it is possible that she acquired some or all of her wealth primarily by inheritance from her husbands. In Chaucer’s England, according to the common law, a widow was entitled to one-third of her husband’s estate, but in certain cases, if there were no other heirs, for example, she might inherit much more. However, as with the two possible meanings of the phrase god wif, the two possible conclusions regarding the source of her wealth are not mutually exclusive. The Wife may have inherited her clothier’s business from one of her husbands and continued running it after remarriage, quite independent of her new husband(s). The custom of London and, presumably, of many other large boroughs allowed a woman to operate a business as feme sole, i.e., as though she were single, even though she was married.23 The object of this custom was to protect husbands from financial liability for their wives’ business debts, but it had the inevitable side effect of protecting successful businesswomen from any claim that their husbands would otherwise have had on their profits. Chaucer gives his readers no help at all in deciding how the Wife came by her extraordinary wealth, allowing different readers to come to different conclusions, according to their prior knowledge and experience. Chaucer even leaves the Wife’s present marital status in doubt. He describes her as being “ywympled wel,” that is to say, as wearing a wimple, which covers her forehead, the sides of her face, and her neck. That detail has often been taken as proof of her widowhood; however, Laura Hodges has recently shown that in the late fourteenth century older married women often wore the then-unfashionable wimple as appropriate to their age. Therefore we cannot infer from this detail whether her fifth husband is still alive or not.24 It is also possible that the Wife’s being so well “ywympled” on pilgrimage is a practical measure, part of the garb of an experienced traveller, which, like her “foot mantel,” protects her from the dust

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of the road, just as her broad-brimmed hat shields her from the heat and glare of the sun.25 The ambiguity regarding her marital status is irresolvable: she cannot be both wife and widow. She must be one or the other. However, as for the further ambiguity regarding her motives for being “ywympled wel,” if she is a wife and not a widow, the two possibilities are not mutually contradictory. Her wimple may be an honest and appropriate recognition of her age and also provide protection against the dust and glare of travel.26 Other details of her physical description with potential moral significance prove to be irresolvably ambiguous, however, because their potential meanings are contradictory. The first is her being “gattothed” (or, as in some manuscripts, “gap tothed”), i.e., having teeth that are widely spaced. This means quite different things depending on the size of her teeth (which Chaucer does not specify) and the expert in physiognomy one chooses to consult. If her teeth are small, slender, and short, then she will be good-natured, delicate, gentle, faithful, secretive, timid, and agreeable. If, in contrast, her teeth are strong, long, and sharp, according to one expert she will be envious, irreverent, gluttonous, bold, and faithless, while according to another she will be vain, lascivious, lying, and deceitful. Walter Curry concludes that we may “safely” reject the first possibility and accept either the second or the third, since the Wife has “come under the strengthening influence of Mars,”27 but there is no hint of such Martian influence in the General Prologue portrait of the Wife.28 Moreover, details of the Wife’s portrait offer some support for each of the three possibilities. The many pilgrimages that she has undertaken suggest that she is far from weak, and her love of fellowship suggests that she is not timid either and perhaps that she is goodnatured and agreeable. There is nothing in the portrait to suggest that she is envious, irreverent, gluttonous, or faithless, but we are told that her face is “boold.” Nor is there anything in the portrait to suggest that she is deceitful or lascivious, unless one thinks that five marriages bespeak a lascivious nature. Her lavish Sunday garments may suggest that she is vain, but the practicality of her pilgrim garb suggests the opposite. In short, Chaucer’s first readers would have been free to interpret this particular detail of the Wife’s physiognomy pretty much as they pleased, according to their prior notions and experience of women and the degree of their acquaintance with the medieval science of physiognomy.29

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The description of her face as “Boold … and fair, and reed of hewe” (458) is also irresolvably ambiguous. To judge by the array of examples offered in the MED , the adjective “boold” was almost never used to describe the human countenance in Chaucer’s day. For persons it could mean “brave, courageous, daring, fearless” (1a); “confident, assured” (2); “overconfident, forward, rash, brazen, presumptuous, shameless, impudent” (4a); or “excellent, noble, fair” (6). The only two citations in which “boold” qualifies “face” both come from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: in the example from the Merchant’s Tale, context makes it clear that “bold” means “brazen” or “shameless” (“Thogh they be in any gilt ytake, / With face bold they shul hem self excuse” [MED 4b]); but the General Prologue description of the Wife is not so helpful. Given that the line goes on to describe her face as “fair,” we might conclude that “boold” here means “fine, handsome” (6b), since the editors of the MED tell us that it means “well-spoken” (6a) in the very similar line describing Harry Bailly’s speech: “Boold of his speche, and wys and wel ytaught” (755). Indeed, the parallel structure of the two lines is striking, “boold” in each case being qualified by subsequent adjectives with a positive valence; however, in the Wife’s case the MED editors were not so highly influenced by the subsequent adjectives, “fair and reed of hewe,” and took “boold” to mean “strong, powerful” or “sturdy” (5b) rather than “fine” or “handsome” (6b).30 I think that Chaucer chose to use the adjective “boold” here, precisely because it had so many possible meanings and did not usually qualify the human face, as a way of suggesting the Wife’s habit of looking people, both men and women, straight in the eye. This is a quality that Christian moralists might well denounce in the case of women looking at men, as a sign of unseemly or “brazen” interest in the opposite sex, but that business men and women might appreciate in both sexes, no matter who is looking at whom, as a sign of confidence and honest dealing. In other words, what the Wife’s “boold” face means depends completely on the reader’s prior experience and/or expectation of female behaviour: what is “brazen” to one may be “strong” or even “confident” and “assured” to another.31 It is the same with the colour of her complexion: if, in Curry’s words, we take “reed of hewe” to mean that her face is “suspiciously red or florid,” then, according to the science of physiognomy, we must conclude that she is “immodest, loquacious, and

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given to drunkenness”32 – all qualities commonly attributed to women in anti-feminist literature. However, since Chaucer also describes her face as “fair,” we might equally well take “reede of hewe” to mean that she has rosy cheeks, a conventional mark of feminine beauty.33 Once again the meaning of Chaucer’s descriptive detail, “reed of hewe,” whether positive or negative, depends completely on the reader. Finally, it is almost certain that by describing her complexion in this way, Chaucer meant to refer obliquely to her “complexioun” as determined by her dominant humour: a ruddy complexion suggesting a sanguine temperament, like that of the Franklin, who is also fond of fellowship, food and drink, generous, and outgoing. Moreover, this further inference may be taken to support either of the two possible interpretations of “reede of hewe” mentioned above and is itself supported by the line, “In felaweshipe wel koude she laughe and carpe” (474). Chaucer’s description of the Wife reaches the acme of moral ambiguity when he raises the question of her chastity, the most important moral issue to be raised regarding a woman in his day. The clerical authors of estates satire did not often include women in their works, but when they did, they classified them not as they classified men, i.e. according to their work or social status, but rather according to their “marital status.”34 Moreover, the focus of their satire was women’s typical lack of chastity in each of the three degrees: virginity, celibacy, and marriage. Nuns were stereotypically represented as “wayward”; widows as aggressively lascivious; and wives as unfaithful to their husbands. In his General Prologue portraits of both the Wife of Bath and the Prioress Chaucer uses textual ambiguity to subvert these clerical stereotypes. His Prioress represents virginity, the first and highest degree of chastity, while his Wife of Bath is able to represent both widowhood and marriage – the second and third degrees of chastity, respectively – thanks to his ambiguous representation of her marital status. Critics have long appreciated Chaucer’s use of ambiguity in portraying the Prioress and responded to it with contradictory assessments of her virtue. Some have inferred that her chastity is compromised by the pleasure she takes in dressing fashionably and practising courtly manners at table,35 while others have pointed out that these practices might be done in imitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, frequently represented in Gothic art as the

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Queen of Heaven.36 Likewise, they have disagreed as to the meaning of the witty and apparently deliberate ambiguity of “Amor vincit omnia” in the final line of her portrait. What is the meaning of this engraving on a shiny gold brooch, apparently a love token, which the Prioress has attached to her rosary? Is it a token of profane love, the gift of a lover, or is it a token of Amor dei, given its attachment to her rosary? Chaucer’s text makes it literally impossible to know which of these two possibilities is true, but that has not prevented modern critics from considering and even adopting one or the other of them, and we may assume that Chaucer’s first readers responded in a similar fashion.37 The irresolvable ambiguity of “Amor vincit omnia” is wittily matched when Chaucer first raises the issue of the Wife of Bath’s chastity: “She was a worthy womman al hir lyve: / Husbondes at chirche dore she hadde fyve, / Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe – / But thereof nedeth noght to speke as nowthe” (459– 62). The ambiguous parts of this passage are the adjective “worthy” and the prepositional phrase “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe.” Like the adjective “god,” “worthy” has both a moral and a social meaning when referring to persons. It can mean either “distinguished by good qualities” (OED 2) or “holding a prominent place in the community” (OED 3) or both, since the two meanings are not mutually exclusive. “Withouten” also has two possible meanings in this context – its common negating sense (OED 7–9) and two other less common and now obsolete meanings, “in addition to” (OED 5) or “not including” (OED 6). If we take withouten in its usual negating sense, then the Wife of Bath has married five times and has been “a worthy womman al hir lyve” in the moral as well as the social sense because she has had no friends or lovers in her “yowthe” apart from her husbands. If, in contrast, we choose one of the less common meanings, then the Wife of Bath has been sexually promiscuous in her “yowthe,” and so Chaucer’s use of “worthy,” while retaining its social sense, loses its moral sense. Chaucer’s use of “withouten” here raises ambiguity to the level of paradox, the seventh type of ambiguity discerned by William Empson, because “the two meanings of the word” as defined by the context are “opposite meanings.”38 This allows Chaucer simultaneously to affirm contraries: (1) that the Wife is chaste, according to the third degree of chastity, and (2) that she is promiscuous and adulterous. As with two possible meanings of the phrase “Amor

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vincit omnia” inscribed on the gold brooch attached to the Prioress’s rosary Chaucer cannot have been unaware that the two possible meanings of withouten in this context create morally contradictory meanings. He chose this mode of description perhaps because he was not sure in his own mind whether the Wife of Bath was chaste or not, but far more probably because, as with the Prioress, he wanted to make it literally impossible for his readers to know whether she was chaste or not and thus to prompt them to consider both possibilities.39 The unlearned among Chaucer’s early readers – those who lacked familiarity with the anti-feminist literary tradition, particularly the clerical genre of estates satire – would probably have read “withouten” initially in its common negating sense, if only because Chaucer had given them no reason at this point to think that the wealthy woman from Bath might be promiscuous. That she has wedded five husbands properly “at chirche door” would not in itself have been enough to make bourgeois or aristocratic readers suspect promiscuity, since it was not uncommon for women, especially wealthy women, to have married a number of times.40 However, clerical readers, educated in the anti-feminist literary tradition, would almost certainly have interpreted the Wife’s five marriages as the sign of a lecherous nature, at the very least the sign of a lack of desire to achieve the higher degree of chastity exemplified by widowhood. They would also have recognized in Chaucer’s witty ambiguity an attempt to subvert the familiar stereotypes of lascivious widow and unfaithful wife and might not have approved, even if they appreciated, the poet’s wit. At the same time, they could have justified interpreting “withouten” to mean “in addition to,” even in an initial reading, for this uncommon sense of “withouten” (OED 5) was reserved almost exclusively to contexts involving very large numbers, and to such readers the Wife’s five husbands would have seemed a very large number.41 However, when Chaucer concludes the portrait by crediting the Wife with expertise in “remedies of love,” even some lay readers might, in retrospect, suspect that withouten in line 461 could have another meaning, either “besides” or “in addition to” (OED 5) or “exclusive of” or “not including” (OED 6).42 In this case, line 461 would exemplify what the classicist D.N. Levin has called “psychological ambiguity,” which “depends for its effect on the reader’s first making an understandable error of interpretation, then correcting

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it as his [or her] knowledge is increased through further perusal of the passage.”43 Not all readers would have made this interpretive adjustment in retrospect, however, and certainly not those who interpreted the Wife’s many pilgrimages, like the many crusades undertaken by the Knight, as evidence of piety. The couplet that completes Chaucer’s portrait of the Wife also allows two contradictory interpretations of her sexual morality, thus neatly rounding out and summing up the moral ambiguity of the portrait as a whole. Indeed, close examination reveals this final couplet to be every bit as artfully ambiguous as the quatrain in which Chaucer first raised the issue of the Wife’s chastity: “Of remedies of love she knew par chaunce, / For she koude of that art the olde daunce” (GP 475–6). Here the ambiguity is a matter not so much of choosing between contradictory referents for the phrases “remedies of love” and “the olde daunce” as it is of choosing between multiple referents and contradictory contexts in which to interpret the meaning of each phrase. “Remedies of love” refers to cures for the suffering caused by love and may be an allusion to Ovid’s treatise Remedia amoris. But as there are many different kinds of cures for love-sickness, so there are many possible meanings for this phrase.44 Ovid himself illustrates one range of possible meanings in the variety of cures that he recommends. The vast majority of them (I count sixteen out of a total of twenty) are either fairly puritanical (for example, suppress your passion as soon as you are aware of its first stirrings; avoid idleness by working, travelling, engaging in sport; avoid aphrodisiac foods) or else fairly innocuous (for example, think of the loved one’s bad qualities; think of your own problems; avoid solitude). Needless to say, the remaining four meanings are both immoral and explicitly sexual.45 The “olde daunce” or “loves daunce” (cf. T 2.1106) is open to interpretation within two morally contradictory contexts, even though its referent is clear: the series of moves or sequence of behaviours leading up to sexual union.46 The moral ambiguity arises from the fact that we may think of these as either seduction or courtship. In other words, we may regard this “dance” either as the seductive moves leading to fornication or adultery or as the rituals of courtship leading to marriage. To rephrase this dichotomy in terms of the Canterbury Tales, we may regard “the olde daunce” as Nicholas does in his courtship of the carpenter’s wife; or we may regard it as Arveragus does in his courtship of Dorigen, or even

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January in his courtship of May. Which context should we invoke in the case of the Wife of Bath? She is not likely ever to have been the object of a romantic courtship such as that experienced by the great lady Dorigen, but we may assume that, like May, another bourgeois bride, she would have been courted to some extent by her first four husbands (we know that she herself courted the fifth, Jankyn, with the promise of wealth and pleasure). Surely, like January, they would have performed some kind of “dance” before marriage, even if it was no more than the giving of a few gifts and the taking of a few kisses. Medieval readers’ interpretation of this final couplet will doubtless have been influenced by their earlier interpretation of the line “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe.” If they took “withouten” in its normal negating sense, creating a Wife who has had no friends or lovers other than her husbands, then they will have taken this final couplet to mean that the Wife knew how to remedy all the suffering caused by love because she could recognize or ‘see through’ – taking “coude” to be the past tense of “connen” in the sense of having “knowledge or understanding” (MED 4b) – not only the signs of love in herself but also the ploys of would-be seducers; consequently, she was able both to cure herself in one of the sixteen innocent ways recommended by Ovid and/or to outwit her wouldbe seducers. If, in contrast, they read “withouten” in one of its less common senses, either “in addition to” or “aside from,” thus creating a Wife who has had many lovers besides her husbands, they will have taken this final couplet to mean that the Wife knew how to remedy all the suffering caused by love because she was so expert in the “tricks of the trade” – in this case, taking “coude” to be the past tense of “connen” in the sense of having “ability, capability, or skill” (MED 1) – that she was able to seduce all the men she desired or else cure herself in one or more of the four outrageous ways recommended by Ovid.

ii Obviously both of these interpretations of the Wife’s sexual morality cannot be true. But it would be a rare reader, indeed, whether medieval or modern, who could so relish ambiguitas as to entertain both possibilities – that the Wife is promiscuous and that she is chaste – right to the end of a private reading of the General

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Prologue portrait of the Wife. Chaucer’s contemporaries would have recognized that the poet had deliberately raised the question of the Wife’s chastity, there being no other reason for mentioning the possibility of “oother compaignye in yowthe,” and most of them would probably have been inveigled by Chaucer’s ambiguous text into judging the Wife as they did their neighbours, on the basis of appearances, however deceptive and open to interpretation. There is clear evidence that they did not all judge her negatively, however. A survey of scribal marginalia, additions, and alterations to Chaucer’s text in the extant manuscripts of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue indicates that some early readers judged the Wife to be a respectable matron, while others found her coarse and sexually promiscuous. As it happens, this division in scribal attitudes corresponds very nearly to that between ‘published’ and ‘unpublished’ among extant manuscripts – i.e., between those copied by professional scribes for a varied clientele and those copied by learned amateurs, most likely clerics, for their own use.47 This suggests that while lay readers were able to see the Wife as a conventionally pious woman who chose to maintain her chastity by remarrying rather than attempting the higher degree of chastity exemplified by widowhood, celibate clerics were more likely to see her as an example of one of the familiar anti-feminist stereotypes, either unfaithful wife or lascivious widow. Another factor that would have influenced textual interpretation for Chaucer’s contemporaries was their mode of receiving the text. Those who read privately would naturally have chosen the tone of voice appropriate to their moral judgment. If they took “withouten oother compaignye” to mean other lovers “in addition” to her five husbands, as many clerics would have done, they would have heard a significant pause before the next line, “But thereof nedeth nat to speke as nowthe” (a pause suggested by most modern editors through their choice of punctuation – a long dash), and the line itself spoken in a particular tone of voice: the sort of “nudge-nudge, wink-wink, say-no-more” tone expressive of sexual innuendo. In other words, they would have heard this next line in reference to the alleged “oother compaignye in yowthe”48 and understood it to be a suggestive instance of occupatio, drawing attention to the Wife’s sins by means of refusing to speak of them. Those who took “withouten” in its common negating sense, however, would have heard the next line spoken in a matter-of-fact tone of voice, without

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any significant pause preceding it, and in reference to her husbands rather than the non-existent “oother compaignye in yowthe.” In other words, they would have understood that the narrator did not find it necessary to say more about the husbands at this time, presumably because he will have more to say about them later in the work. Of course, those who first encountered this text as part of an audience gathered to hear a prelector read it aloud, as was common in Chaucer’s day, would most likely have had this initial choice made for them.49 It is unfortunate that all modern readers find themselves in the same position as this latter group (whether or not they have ever heard Chaucer’s text read aloud by a teacher in the classroom)50 because modern editors routinely disambiguate the General Prologue portrait of the Wife by means of glosses on the page. Thus, they inform their readers that “good Wyf” means “mistress of a house or other establishment”;51 that “Withouten” means “besides,”52 or “not to mention,”53 or “not counting”;54 that “remedies of love” are “probably … love-potions or aphrodisiacs”;55 and that “olde daunce” means “tricks of the trade”56 or the “game of love.”57 Moreover, editors have done this despite the fact that, over the past seventy-five years, several prominent Chaucerian critics have noted the deliberate ambiguity of the preposition “withouten” in the phrase “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe.”58 It is not surprising that critics such as J.S.P. Tatlock, Paul Baum, and Donald Howard should have detected this deliberate ambiguity in the Wife’s portrait, for it is equal both in artistry and wit to the deliberate ambiguity of “Amor vincit omnia” in the portrait of the Prioress. What is surprising is that Chaucer editors should have taken so little notice of their observations.59 They have likewise ignored the opinions of experts in Chaucer’s use of bawdy language, in particular Thomas Ross’s opinion that the General Prologue portrays the Wife as “remarkably chaste,” at least until the final couplet, and Haldeen Braddy’s opinion that Chaucer’s use of “Withouten” is “more likely” to mean “‘without’ than ‘not excepting.’”60 Indeed, the editorially disambiguated reading of this line has so completely dominated literary criticism for the past three generations that Jill Mann does not even mention “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe” in her discussion of ambiguous words and phrases used to describe the Wife’s sexual activity.61

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Why have modern editors (and translators) so overwhelmingly favoured disambiguating Chaucer’s text in this way? The main reason seems to be that the text of the Wife’s own Prologue appears to portray her as unequivocally unchaste. This portrayal is the result largely of two of the five variant passages in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue – namely, those that frame the “chambre of Venus” couplet (609–12, 619–26) – for these are the only passages in the entire Prologue to describe her unambiguously as sexually aggressive and promiscuous. I quote from Cambridge University Library MS Dd.4.24, the earliest extant manuscript in which these variant passages appear: For certes I am al Venerien In feelyng and myn hert is marcien Venus me 3af my lust my likerousnesse And Mars 3af me my sturdy hardynesse … 3et have I Mars merk vp on my face And also in a nother pryue place For god so wysely be my sauacioun I louede neuere by no discrecioun But euere folwed myn appetit Al were he short long blak or whi3t I toke no kepe so that he liked me How poore he was ne eke of what degree. (609–12, 619–26)

These two variant passages, along with three others (44a-f, 575–84, and 717–20), appear in less than a third of the extant Canterbury Tales manuscripts. All five are misogynous in import (for example, 44a–f makes the Wife appear coarse, and 575–84 makes her appear deceitful in her dealings with men), but these two have an additional, disambiguating function: they direct the reader to interpret the Wife’s reference to her “chambre of Venus” (WBP 618) in only one of its two possible senses. In other words, they function within Chaucer’s text of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue just as modern editorial glosses of “Withouten” do in the margins of his General Prologue portrait of the Wife: to disambiguate a double entendre regarding the Wife’s chastity.62 Recent research has thrown serious doubt on the authenticity of all five variant passages, concluding that they are either scribal interpolations63 or authorial cancellations.64 And

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in the forthcoming Variorum edition of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale John Fisher will place all five within brackets, since they are absent from Hengwrt.65 So long as the authenticity of these passages was unquestioned, one could argue that it made sense to gloss any prior textual ambiguities regarding the Wife’s chastity in the light of them. That argument is no longer tenable. Whether the variant passages are authorial cancellations or, as I believe them to be, scribal interpolations, they can no longer be invoked to justify disambiguating the General Prologue portrait of the Wife. Future editors should eliminate those glosses, which at present erase the deliberate moral ambiguity of Chaucer’s initial portrait of her. In so doing, they will allow modern readers to have something like the reading experience of medieval readers – a possibility that depends on their being aware that Chaucer’s conscious ambiguities not only raise the question of the Wife’s chastity but also prevent them from knowing the answer to that question with any certainty. Such an awareness could open modern readers’ eyes to a range of interpretive possibilities that at present appear impossible to them. Of course, some of these possibilities will require elucidation by means of scholarly glosses. For example, editors will have to inform their readers that Curry’s interpretations of the Wife’s being “gat-tothed” and having a face that is “reed of hewe” are not the only possible understandings to be derived from the medieval science of physiognomy. However, other possibilities may emerge without such help – for example, the two possible meanings of the line that immediately precedes “Gat-tothed was she, soothly for to seye” (468), and immediately follows the list of the Wife’s many pilgrimages, “She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye” (467). In the present, editorially disambiguated, state of Chaucer’s text it seems impossible that this line could mean simply that “she knew a lot about travelling,” even though such a meaning is linguistically possible, taking “wander” to mean “walk” or “go” (OED 1f), “by” to mean “over” or “along” (MED 1c), and “weye” to mean a “road” or “path” (OED 1).66 Indeed, even though some editors have been willing to acknowledge that this is the literal sense of the line, most have chosen to emphasize its figurative sense as an oblique reference to the Wife’s promiscuity (taking wander to mean “fall into error,” OED 3b), part of their justification for doing so being the rhymed

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couplet (“seye / weye”) link between “wandrynge” and their univocal interpretation of “gat-tothed.”67 Indeed, the most dramatic consequence of modern editors’ disambiguation of the General Prologue portrait of the Wife is that it prevents modern readers from seeing the possibility that she goes on pilgrimage for reasons of piety rather than illicit love. The logical inference to be drawn from the disambiguated view of her as a “loose woman” is that she goes on pilgrimage to meet and enjoy men. In fact, among modern Chaucer critics this view has attained the status of a “broad consensus.”68 In Chaucer’s day, too, there was a good deal of anti-feminist sentiment, popular as well as clerical, which implied that a woman who travelled alone, even on pilgrimage, was likely to become immoral if she was not so already. Indeed, one of the “olde sawe(s)” – not worth “an hawe” in the Wife’s opinion – which her fifth husband, Jankyn, liked to repeat was that a man who allowed his wife to go on pilgrimage was criminally negligent, “worthy to been hanged on the galwes” (WBP 657–60), presumably because such negligence endangered both her chastity and his honour. Such popular wisdom says more about men’s fears than it does about women’s actual behaviour on pilgrimage, however. The historical record suggests that there was a “marked increase in the number of female pilgrims visiting Jerusalem and other shrines” during the fourteenth century.69 Unlike men, these women did not leave individual written records of their journeys, but Luttrell prints a papal document confirming that one wealthy West Country woman, Isolda Parewastell, was in Jerusalem in 1365 and then in Rome, requesting permission to establish a church in her village. No doubt there were many virtuous women who could afford the considerable time and expense involved in long pilgrimages, who undertook them at least partly, if not wholly, for reasons of piety and travelled in groups for the sake of safety and companionship. The point is that Chaucer’s morally ambiguous portrait of the Wife of Bath leaves open the possibility that she is one of them.70 Moreover, considered in the context of the Wife’s alleged childlessness, children being a noticeable and therefore possibly significant absence in her own Prologue, her three pilgrimages to Jerusalem – certainly an excessive number, given the risk, duration, hardship, and cost involved – might be interpreted quite differently.

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In the light of her own Prologue, they might be interpreted as extraordinary efforts to merit the blessing of conceiving a child.71 In the end, however, it must be acknowledged that, even if the five variant passages had never been added to the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, modern editors probably would not have appreciated Chaucer’s deliberate ambiguity in the General Prologue portrayal of the Wife as readily as they appreciated it in the portrayal of the Prioress. This is because modern traditions of editing and commenting on the Canterbury Tales developed during the nineteenth century, a time when Victorian views of love, marriage, and female sexuality combined to condemn the much-married woman as unchaste, even sexually “promiscuous.”72 In such a cultural environment, Chaucer editors might naturally have attributed a lascivious nature to the much-married Wife and interpreted the line “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe” accordingly. That she was first married at the canonical age of twelve apparently gave some of them pause to wonder exactly when “in yowthe” she would have had time for other lovers. Before the age of twelve? Unlikely.73 In between marriages? Possible, but still unlikely, since she admits to courting her fifth husband while her fourth husband was alive and boasts in that context that “was I nevere withouten purveiance / Of mariage” (WBP 570–1).74 Given the Wife’s allegedly lascivious nature, however, it was possible to overcome these difficulties by inferring that she must have enjoyed the “oother compaignye in yowthe” while she was married – i.e., she must have committed adultery, an inference supported by the fourth variant passage in the Wife’s own Prologue (619–26) and now taken for granted by most critics.75 By the same token, even if modern editors had not disambiguated the General Prologue portrait of the Wife, modern readers still would not be able to have the same reading experience that Chaucer’s medieval readers had. Like modern Chaucer editors, translators, and critics, modern readers have also, at least until very recent times, been immersed in a culture so imbued with romantic and puritanical views of love and marriage that most of them still cannot see a much-married woman as in any way a “proper” woman. Moreover, modern readers feel that they already “know” the Wife of Bath, since in their culture, academic or popular, she has become an icon of aggressive female sexuality.76

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To find that modern readers cannot experience an “innocent” reading of the Wife is not, however, to say that modern editors cannot or should not do anything to offset the cultural biases of their readers, and among these we must now include the relatively recent bias of the sexually liberated, whose celebration of the Wife’s alleged promiscuity is just as anachronistic as the Victorian condemnation of her five marriages. Editing is a profoundly historicist project, the editor’s goal being to give modern readers access to a text as close to the author’s original as possible. Editors must therefore also give their readers enough information about the culture in which the text was produced to enable them to understand it as its author and his contemporaries might have done. In the case of Chaucer’s General Prologue portrait of the Wife of Bath this means, first of all, removing those scholarly notes and glosses that disambiguate Chaucer’s text and replacing them with apparatus that calls attention to his frequent ambiguities. In other words, it means glossing “complex terms … complexly”77 and informing readers of both possible meanings of ambiguous terms, particularly if they support contradictory interpretations of the Wife’s moral character.78 In addition to this linguistic glossing, modern editors must also inform their readers of those medieval cultural attitudes that differ radically from modern attitudes and are fundamental to a historical understanding of the text. The medievalist Hans Robert Jauss thinks of this process as reconstructing the medieval reader’s “horizon of expectation” and deems it a necessary scholarly exercise, even though it can yield only partial results, because it can at least prevent modern readers from reading anachronistically and at best provide them a form of communication with the past that both measures and broadens their own horizon of expectation.79 The crucial and certainly the most radically different feature of late medieval culture that informs Chaucer’s portrait of the Wife of Bath is the three-tiered concept of chastity. To Chaucer’s contemporaries, chastity existed in three degrees: virginity, widowhood, and marriage. Each degree was complete and perfect in itself, but the three degrees were also ranked hierarchically, with virginity higher than celibacy, and celibacy higher than faithful marriage. If celibate clerics quite understandably admonished widows to adopt a life of celibacy rather than remarry, the frequency of remarriage in Chaucer’s

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day suggests that ordinary lay men and women regarded it as an acceptable alternative means for maintaining the virtue of chastity. Of course, even with this historical awareness, the modern reader’s interpretation of Chaucer’s text, like the medieval reader’s, may still be largely a matter of disambiguation, “privileging one context at the expense of others,”80 unless he or she chooses rather to relish Chaucer’s witty and irresolvable ambiguities and refrain from moral judgment. In other words, the modern reader may still choose to privilege a religious and puritanical context similar to that of medieval clerics and interpret Chaucer’s text accordingly. The point of reambiguating and historicizing the General Prologue portrait of the Wife of Bath for modern readers is not to privilege any particular context, but rather to make available to them the interpretive choices open to Chaucer’s contemporaries.

iii As a medieval poet Chaucer was unusual in several ways. He was more than usually concerned with the integrity of his text, as he demonstrates at the end of the Troilus (v. 1793–96) as well as in the oft-quoted poem “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn.” And he was more than typically aware of the reader’s power to recreate the meaning of his text, either by literal rewriting or by creative interpretation.81 Why then would he go out of his way to employ ambiguitas in his text, thus offering the reader even more power over its meaning? The answer lies, I believe, in Chaucer’s even greater concern for the ethical dimension of language use. Robert Myles has demonstrated Chaucer’s awareness of the moral obligation to use language “properly” – that is, with an intention to convey truth – as well as his awareness of the problematic relationship between “the object which language intends and how that object is intended.”82 Moreover, Myles has shown how Chaucer explicitly addresses both issues in the Friar’s Tale.83 In what way, then, could Chaucer have intended such conscious ambiguation as we have seen in his representation of the Wife of Bath to represent the truth? One possible answer is that, concerned for the integrity of his text and aware of the likelihood that it would be misunderstood, Chaucer decided to work with, rather than against, the inherent ambiguity of language. In other words, he decided to ambiguate

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the text of his General Prologue portrait of the Wife (and other Canterbury pilgrims as well) to such an extent that the reader must become aware not only of the textual ambiguity per se but also of the difficulties that it raises in the reader’s arriving at the truth. What good would such an awareness do? A great deal, if Chaucer’s readers made a connection between the poet’s consciously ambiguated text and the ambiguous appearances of “real life” – in other words, if they saw in his ambiguous text a linguistic counterpart to the partial, shifting, confusing, and sometimes downright contradictory evidence furnished by their five senses. Chaucer’s use of concrete, individualizing details in describing the Canterbury pilgrims certainly invites his readers to make that connection, and it is arguable that they would have been even more likely to make it if they initially received Chaucer’s text in the socially preferred mode – that is, as part of a small group gathered together to hear his text read aloud, particularly if the hearers happened to disagree among themselves as to the correct interpretation of the text.84 Such disagreement might well have led them to an awareness that the ambiguity of language is much like the ambiguity of appearances in “real life.” So it is not unreasonable to think that Chaucer hoped to inveigle at least some of his readers into seeing the truth that he intended to convey by means of his consciously ambiguous text. Neither our language nor our fallible human senses can provide trustworthy evidence regarding another person’s moral character. Chaucer must have realized, however, that the ambiguity of his text would not prevent some of his readers from rushing to judgment, just as they did in “real life,” particularly when it came to judging the chastity of a woman. There was a good deal of antifeminist sentiment in Chaucer’s day, fed by anti-feminist literature, which typically represented nuns as wayward, widows as sexually aggressive, and wives as unfaithful to their husbands. Those among Chaucer’s readers who may have been more inclined to believe these anti-feminist stereotypes by virtue of their vow of celibacy – i.e., clerics – may also have been more likely than lay readers to find the Wife unchaste, despite the deliberate ambiguity of Chaucer’s text. But the chief motivating factor for all medieval readers who judged the Wife despite the ambiguity of the evidence – whether they judged her to be chaste or unchaste – was most probably an inability to tolerate not-knowing. It is one thing not to know exactly how the Wife gained her wealth or whether the

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“reed … hewe” of her complexion suggests beauty or an overfondness for drink, but it is quite another not to know whether she is chaste or promiscuous. The price of “knowing” for such readers, of course, would have been to miss what I take to have been Chaucer’s moral intention. Additional warrant for inferring a moral intention from Chaucer’s consciously ambiguous texts is to be found in his “retracciouns” (RET 1085): “For oure book seith, ‘Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine,’ and that is myn entente” (RET 1083).85 John Fleming has suggested that Chaucer’s conscious ambiguation in the Troilus was his way of confronting “the difficulties faced by an artist who must use ambiguous words in the paradoxical pursuit of truth through fiction.”86 I believe that in the General Prologue portraits in the Canterbury Tales it was rather his way of urging his readers to confront the difficulty of making moral judgments on the basis of “ambiguous words” and appearances. To borrow a phrase from Douglas Wurtele, this was to engage in a “dangerous experiment.”87 “Dangerous” because many of his readers no doubt failed to see the truth that he hoped to convey by means of his poetic of ambiguity, even when, as in the case of the Wife of Bath’s portrait, he had raised ambiguity to the level of paradox, creating a text that supports two contradictory interpretations of her moral character.88 Certainly in the case of the portrait of the Wife of Bath all modern readers have failed to see this truth, but that is not their fault so much as it is that of the disambiguating scholarly glosses so common in modern editions. Since the prime justification for this disambiguating editorial activity has been the misogynous content of five variant passages in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, passages whose authenticity is now seen to be extremely dubious, we may hope that future editors of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales will gloss the Wife of Bath’s portrait in the General Prologue rather differently, with a view to helping modern readers not only to appreciate Chaucer’s poetic of ambiguity but also to perceive in it the possibility of a profoundly moral intention.

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The Wife of Bath and “Speche Daungerous” chauncey wood

One of Chaucer’s favourite devices for evoking character is to tell the reader how the character speaks. In the General Prologue he tells us that the Knight “nevere yet no vileynye ne sayde” and that the Prioress’s greatest oath is “but by Seinte Loy.”1 In his portrait of the Friar Chaucer prompts our responses to a degree. The Friar’s “fair langage” is directly associated with his knowledge of “daliaunce,” while he is said to lisp “for his wantownesse” (GP 211, 264). Characters’ words, whether villainous or not, and how they are spoken, for example whether lisped or not, are always important elements in Chaucer’s portraiture. The devices, of course, are not always as simple as that. Sometimes Chaucer shows rather than tells. When Harry Bailly upbraids the Clerk for being overly quiet (“This day ne herde I of youre tonge a word” [ClT 4]) and teases him that he is like a bashful bride (“Ye ryde as coy and stille as dooth a mayde / Were newe spoused, sittynge at the bord” [ClT 2–3]), Chaucer lets the reader contrast Harry’s judgment with that of the narrator, who had described the Clerk in the General Prologue as speaking “Noght o word … moore than was neede, / And that was seyd in forme and reverence, / And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence” (GP 304– 6). Chaucer lets us see that Harry mistakes the wise and reverent control of speech for bashful embarrassment.

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Harry himself is very outspoken. Whether he is displaying his knowledge of the specialized vocabularies of clerks, who he thinks study sophisms (“som sophyme” [ClT 5]), or of physicians, who he knows use both “urynals” and “jurdones” (PhyT 305), and which he links indiscriminately together, Harry is very aware of the niceties of language, though not always exact in his understanding of them. In his own speech he invariably addresses people in what he thinks the appropriate fashion, using polite if bantering language for the Clerk but presumably “vileins,” or rude, vulgar language to respond to the Pardoner’s taunt. The precise degree of “vileins” speech in Harry’s outraged response to the Pardoner is difficult for the modern reader to estimate. When he threatens the Pardoner with the cutting off of his testicles, in Middle English “coillons” (PardT 952), and the enshrinement of them in “an hogges toord” (PardT 955), it is as much the blasphemy of the inversion of the saint’s reliquary as the words themselves that we notice, since we do not know what other word choices for “coillons” and “toord” were available to Harry. While most readers will assume that such language constitutes the very “speche daungerous” (MilT 3338) that made Absolom squeamish in the Miller’s Tale, there is not enough context for us to be sure. In what I take to be Chaucer’s fullest exploitation of a character’s speech – the portrait of the Wife of Bath that emerges from her rambling “long preamble of a tale”(WBP 831) – the reader is almost overwhelmed with context, much of it supplied by Alys herself but some of it available only through some knowledge of key arguments in St Jerome’s Jerome against Jovinian and in the Roman de la rose. The Wife of Bath’s whole revealing Prologue is an elaborate, drawnout game, in which her arguments, examples, interpretations, and speech reveal her inner self through her outward expressions. In spite of the Wife’s “boold” (GP 458) face in the General Prologue, her speech is anything but bold – indeed it is remarkably decorous. In fact, Chaucer is at some pains to have Alys avoid “vileynye” and “speche daungerous,” and this elegant touch enhances her portrait. To discuss the Wife’s entire character would require a book; the various facets of her speech, a very long essay. Here I wish to discuss one small but hitherto-unnoticed aspect of her speech – her consistent avoidance of the kind of blunt talk that we might expect from a woman who knew “muchel of wandrynge by the weye” (GP 467). Because this aspect of her speech has not been described previously,

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I draw less on general criticism of the Wife’s character than the reader might otherwise expect, while the speech’s role in the alienation of the Lover from reason in the Roman de la rose will necessitate extensive citation from the poem. It is easy for us to see that the Monk, who is seldom if ever in his cell according to his description in the General Prologue, retreats into his dignity to tell us tragedies, of which, he boasts, he has “an hundred in my celle” (MkT 1972). It is harder to see that the Wife of Bath also tries to stand on her dignity, but in so doing she inadvertently falls while attempting to stand. To discern how this all comes about we must look closely both at the Wife herself and at the essence of the argument between Reason and the Lover in the Roman, and later we consider the role of euphemisms. In fact, Alys’s avoidance of “vileynye” and “speche daungerous” contributes to her portrait.

i It is well-known that the reader can better understand the inner and the outer aspects of the Wife of Bath by reference to the characters of La Vieille and Le Jaloux in the Roman de la rose. Chaucer loved the Roman and delighted in borrowing and reworking its details. As I have noted elsewhere, he so enjoyed the Lover’s mock confession to the God of Love – the one in which the Lover’s penance precedes rather than follows his confession – that he used it not once but twice in Troilus and Criseyde.2 What has been overlooked in the relationship between Chaucer’s characters and the French poem is that, in addition to his direct quotations, close imitation of detail, and modified borrowings of characterization, Chaucer also imports ideas. The idea of most importance for an understanding of the Wife of Bath has to do with decorum of speech – a concept in the Roman that leads to the Lover’s failure in reason, which in turn leads him into hypocrisy. Not long after Reason descends from her tower in Jean de Meun’s section of the poem, she remonstrates with the Lover by lecturing him on the differences between fol amour and bon amour, which leads her to distinguish between real and imagined happiness, necessitating a clarification of the nature of both wealth and justice. In this part of her discourse she recounts the story of the reign of Justice, when Saturn ruled, which came to an end when

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Jupiter cut off the testicles (coilles) of his father, Saturn. These Jupiter flung into the sea, whence arose Venus, a goddess who can inspire many forms of love. Reason then offers her own love to the Lover and continues to recount exemplary stories. The Lover’s extraordinary reaction to this extended philosophical and decorously amorous discourse is to accuse Reason, daughter of the King of Heaven, of lewdness in her speech because of her reference to testicles. The key word is coilles in Old French, a version of which Harry Bailly uses (“coillons”), as I noted above. The Old French coilles becomes couilles in modern French slang, while coillons became cullions in England in the Renaissance but has not survived to the present: “Si ne vos tiegn pas a cortaise / quant ci m’avez coilles nomees, / qui ne sunt pas bien renomees / en bouche a cortaise pucele.3 (Besides, I hold you were not courteous / When you referred to cullions, for no maid / In good society would use that word.)4 Reason retorts that God himself made the members of generation with the intention “to perpetuate the race” (143),5 which leads the Lover to another outburst about rude language: – Or vaut pis, dis je, que devant, car bien vois ore apercevant par vostre parleüre baude que vos estes fole ribaude, car tout ait Dex les choses fetes que ci devant m’avez retretes, les moz au mains ne fist il mie, qu’il sunt tuit plein de vilenie. (6949–56) (Said I, “You’re worse than ever; I perceive, By your lewd speech, you are a foolish bawd ; For though God may have made the things you name He ne’er made words so full of ribaldry.”) (143)

This leads Reason to comment about the correct uses of speech, which are for learning and teaching – a passage that Chaucer did not neglect when he coupled the Clerk’s speech, which was, as we recall, “sownynge in moral vertu” (GP 307) with learning and teaching: “gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche” (GP 308). Reason insists that “Coilles est biaus” (7086) and then returns to

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the Lover’s original objection that her speech was unladylike, commenting at length on the speech of the women of France: Se fames nes noment en France, ce n’est fors desacoutumance, car li propres nons leur pleüst, qui acoutumé leur eüst ; et se proprement les nomassent, ja certes de riens n’i pechassent. Acoutumance est trop poissanz, et se bien le sui connoissanz, mainte chose desplest novele, qui par acoustumance est bele. Chascune qui les va nomant les apele ne sai commant, borses, harnais, riens, piches, pines, ausint con ce fussent espines; mes quant les sentent bien joignanz, els nes les tienent pas a poignanz. Or les noment si conme el suelent, quant proprement nomer nes vuelent : je ne leur en feré ja force ; mes a riens nule ne m’efforce, quant riens veill dire apertement, tant conme a parler proprement. (7101–22) (If women never say such words in France, It is through lack of custom; were they used, The proper names would be acceptable, And certainly their use would be no sin. Custom is all powerful, if I Am any judge; new things often displease Though they’re found fair when custom sanctions them. How many paraphrases women use, In speaking of such parts, I do not know. They call them purses, harness, torches, things, And even pricks, as if they were like thorns; But after they have been well introduced They find them not so painful after all.

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38 Chaucer and Language They call them what they like; it’s naught to me That they will not employ the proper names, And ‘tis not their example I’ll observe When I wish openly to nominate.) (146, emphasis added)

The position of Reason, then, is that euphemisms such as “purses, harness, torches, things, and pricks” are not sinful – any more than her correct language is sinful – but she, Reason, chooses not to follow the women of France, from which we can conclude that the regular employment of euphemisms is not consistent with Reason or, more bluntly, is unreasonable.

ii Throughout the Wife of Bath’s Prologue Chaucer causes Alys to be decorous in her language, so her consistent and elaborate use of euphemisms for sexual matters is not particularly noticeable. Not only does she employ figures of speech: those figures are consistent with her almost-academic dryness of discourse. Indeed, the formality of her speech is most clear when she momentarily abandons it, as we see from the example of urine. She uses the formal phrase “purgacioun / Of uryne” (120–1) to describe the function of the politely described “membres … of generacion” (116) in the most abstract part of her meditation, but she employs the much more colloquial word for the same substance later in her narrative when she recounts Jankyn’s reading to her the story of Socrates’ difficulty in marriage and “How Xantippa caste pisse upon his heed” (729) and in her reference to her husband’s pissing on a wall (534). Her six or more circumlocutions for sexual intercourse in themselves provide enough material for an essay. They range from the theological (“the actes and fruyt of mariage” [114] and paying the marriage “dette” [130]), though the homely (“swynke” [202], “sette so a-werke” [215]), to the occasional envious remarks, such as her comment on Salomon’s many a “myrie fit” (42) and her wish that she could be “refresshed half so ofte as he!” (38). In looking at the Wife of Bath’s speech, what we find is a woman of England who attempts to put together a very reasonable argument about the nature of her own and others’ marriages but whose care for delicacy of speech undercuts the rational discourse for which she strives. Three of the five euphemisms for parts of the

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male genitalia that Reason ascribes to women of France find their way into this English Wife’s Prologue (purse, harness, and thing) – indeed three of the four if we follow Dahlberg and do not include “torches.”6 Chaucer then adds to the almost Victorian delicacy of Alys’s speech by having her resort once to Latin and twice to French (among five euphemisms) to name female genitalia, thereby besting in propriety the women of France scorned by Reason. If it is unreasonable for women to use euphemisms for male genitalia, Chaucer will create a character who is twice as scrupulous, using circumlocutions for the genitals of her own sex as well as the opposite sex. Some closer study of the Wife’s specific vocabulary is in order. Her first reference to genitalia is fascinating because it combines two kinds of wordplay, the pun and a kind of contextual wordplay: “Of whiche I have pyked out the beste, / Bothe of here nether purs and of here cheste” (44a–44b). The purse is simultaneously humorous because of its unreasonably euphemistic nature and because of the monetary connection it has with her “chest” or “treasure chest” that equally attracts her to her husbands. Alys next resorts to “oure bothe thynges smale” (121), thereby being doubly discreet in using one euphemism for two kinds of genitalia. Her next usage is one for the male member that does not occur in the Roman de la rose – “instrument” – which she qualifies with what must be one of the most equivocal uses of the highly variable adjective “sely” to be found in Middle English. Moreover, the “sely instrument” may also have an additional bit of wordplay in its relation to St Paul’s concept of marriage debt that it will, like a financial instrument, pay. The “sely instrument” (132) is no sooner named than the euphemism “swich harneys” (136) rounds out the group. The similarity of the wife’s vocabulary to that of the women of France is striking. Chaucer, however, is seldom content with simple imitation. If French women pass over female genitalia in silence, Chaucer creates a character who deals in these matters, creates euphemisms for the subject, and employs that most delicate of languages, French, to do so. We have already noted that the Wife’s first, euphemistic reference to female genitalia is the remark about “oure thynges smale” (121). Consistently, since her next euphemism for male genitals is “instrument,” the following euphemism for the female equivalent is also

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“instrument” – appropriate enough, given the almost scholastic nature of this part of her narrative. However, Alys particularizes this and many subsequent euphemisms. She is interested not just in genitalia, but in her own genitalia. Thus she says, “In wyfhod I wol use myn instrument” (149), adding that she will use it “frely” and assuring us that her husband will have “it” both “eve and morwe” (152). Alys’s third, perhaps euphemistic reference to this important part of female anatomy employs directly a word that Chaucer puns on elsewhere, “queynt”: “For, certeyn, olde dotard, by youre leve, / Ye shul have queynte right ynogh at eve” (331–2). Since the Wife is in general reserved in her speech, we may assume that this word was more acceptable in medieval speech than is its modern homophone. Such an interpretation is consistent with the Wife’s other choices of words and also with Chaucer’s apparent fondness for puns based on the word, with which he seems to intend to amuse rather than to shock the reader. Douglas Gray and Christine Ryan Hilary, editors of the notes for the Riverside Chaucer Miller’s Tale and Wife of Bath’s Tale, respectively, both refer to “queynt” as a “euphemism.” However, Ralph W.V. Elliott has argued that as a noun it is a “vulgarism,” and he sees the Wife of Bath typically vacillating “between coarseness and euphemism,” with “queynt” in the former category.7 While we cannot reconcile the differing points of view in the space available here, some support for supposing “queynt” to be euphemistic comes from a comparison of Alys’s speech with that of Harry Bailly. Elliott’s study notes that Harry is “Boold of his speche” (755), which is alleged to be the same boldness found in Alys, although Elliott concedes that she is bold of “face” (458), not specificially of speech.8 In fact, neither kind of boldness necessarily implies any vulgarity of speech. A bold face means a brazen one, as when Proserpina grants all women the power of unblushing self-exculpation: “though they be in any gilt ytake, / With face boold they shulle hemself excuse” (MerchT 2268–9). Such brazenness need not involve crude speech, and May’s speech in the Merchant’s Tale is very decorous. Harry Bailly’s bold speech in the General Prologue need not by itself mean that his speech is obscene. When his speech is later described as “rude,” and “bold” in the headlink to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, it is Harry’s discourtesy in interrupting rather than the crudeness of what he says that elicits

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the adjectives in question. Nevertheless, there is a very signal difference between Harry and the Wife of Bath: Harry uses the English equivalent of coilles, the word that so upset the Lover when Reason used it, while Alys, as we saw above, studiously avoids any such thing. One cannot imagine Alys’s crying to the Pardoner, “I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond,” much less Harry’s further wish to have them “shryned in an hogges toord!” (PardT 952–5). If we agree that “queynt” need not be perceived as an obscenity or vulgarism, the Wife’s usage in this passage is an example of somewhat blunter speech than is her wont. Even so, against this possible interpretation we must place her next usage of the word, in conjunction with one of her most arresting euphemisms, “bele chose.” This fourth euphemism is particularly striking, since it resorts to French for what one would assume to be an even greater radius of circumlocution; yet what Alys is talking about doing with this object so delicately named is the most indelicate activity that a woman can engage in, prostitution. “What eyleth yow to grucche thus and grone? / Is it for ye wolde have my queynte allone? / Wy, taak it al! lo, have it every deel! / Peter! I shrewe yow, but ye love it weel; / For if I wolde selle my bele chose, / I koude walke as fresshe as is a rose; / But I wole kepe it for youre owene tooth.” (443–9) That speech is addressed to husbands in general. When Alys next uses “bele chose” (510) it is to describe the irresistibility of her fifth husband, who was so skilled in interpreting or “glosing” (509) her inclinations that she could not deny him access to that which she names so politely. These two French euphemisms give way to nothing less than Latin, the language of diplomacy and academic argument: “And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me, / I hadde the beste quoniam myghte be” (607–8). One presumes that it was “joly” Jankyn (628), “oure clerk” (595), from whom Alys learned this fine technical term. It occurs elsewhere in the Middle Ages in the Lamentationes of Matheolus, who uses quoniam for the female and quippe for the male member of generation.9 Along with Benedicite, the word quoniam appears to complete the Wife’s Latin vocabulary. The Wife of Bath’s fifth and final euphemism for the organ so praised by her husbands returns us from Latin and French to English, but, as has been acknowledged for some time, the phrase itself comes directly from the Roman de la rose. La Vieille, in many ways a literary ancestor of the Wife of Bath, is instructing women in how to be attractive and advises them: “Et comme bonne

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baisselete, / Tiengne la chambre Venus nete. (13,335–6) (A maid should keep her Venus’ chamber clean; / If she would be considered well brought up)” (278). Not surprisingly, Alys personalizes the phrase; she is more interested in her chamber of Venus than in someone else’s, and we read, instead of an instruction on maintenance anticipating use, a lament on natural inclinations that have led to multiple usages: “Allas! allas! that evere love was synne! / I folwed ay myn inclinacioun / By vertu of my constellacioun; / That made me I koude noght withdrawe / My chambre of Venus from a good felawe” (614–18). That the Wife of Bath uses euphemisms for the sexual organs has long been known, but not that most of her euphemisms for male genitalia are derived from the Roman de la rose, and so the significance of her euphemisms for male and female genitalia has consequently been missed. Through a pattern of euphemisms, set forth against the Roman de la rose, Chaucer undercuts the Wife’s tacit claim to reasonable argument by the simple expedient of playing games with her words. Like the Lover in the Roman, Alys confuses words with deeds. Whereas the Lover in the Roman easily persuades himself that pursuing rosebuds is an acceptable diversion so long as he does not use blunt language in so doing, the Wife of Bath tries to persuade her auditors that her views on sex and marriage are reasonable, and she uses euphemistic language to do so. In the Roman it is Reason herself who opposes the Lover, so the satire is obvious. In Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, however, only the reader who knows the Roman can see that the English woman has French failings. In her striving for a reasonable tone of argument, Alys overreaches, and the decorum of her speech, instead of aiding her, becomes a device to show how weak her argument really is. Here Chaucer’s satire is at its most subtle – as far as it can be from the broad strokes used to satirize the Monk’s newfound penchant for the tragedies in his cell. Superficially, the Wife of Bath’s quotations from scripture appear to support the thrust of her arguments about marriage. However, when analysed closely, her citations are truncated, wrenched from context, misquoted, or misinterpreted.10 This is satire that depends on the reader’s knowledge of other texts for its own success.

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Without a clear understanding of the Wife’s scriptural sources the reader could miss the satire altogether. What Chaucer does with the Wife’s euphemisms for sexual organs is similar. On the surface the Wife’s verbal restraint appears to contribute to the reasonableness of her discourse, but for those readers who recognize that a certain directness of speech about parts of the body is not only defended by Reason in the Roman de la rose, but that her defence is the decisive event causing the lover to reject her, an elegant, learned satire becomes apparent. At the beginning of this essay I argued that Chaucer sometimes uses speech not just to inform us about aspects of character but to demonstrate them. My example was Harry Bailly’s rebuke of the Clerk’s taciturnity, which Chaucer invites the reader to contrast with the praise of the Clerk’s measured speech in the General Prologue. In the case of the Wife of Bath, Chaucer asks the reader to compare and contrast her use of euphemisms for sexual organs with usages by “women of France” on the one hand, and Reason herself on the other hand, in a poem lying completely outside the frame story for the Canterbury Tales. While this task may, for modern readers, seem a lot to ask, we should not forget that the argument about decorous speech is one of the defining moments of the Roman, while the poem itself was one of Chaucer’s favourites and perhaps a favourite of his audience as well. The Wife of Bath’s long apologia pro vita sua has enamoured many modern critics, but to a medieval audience its seeming restraint is simply unreasonableness. There is no “speche daungerous” in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue, but her avoidance of it, her resort to euphemism and circumlocution, shows the reader that too much decorum is dangerous speech in quite another way.

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The Franklin, Epicurus, and the Play of Values1 e.c. ronquist

As participant narrator of the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer declares, in performing a portrait of the Franklin: “To lyven in delit was evere his wone, / For he was Epicurus owene sone, / That heeld opinioun that pleyn delit / Was verray felicitee parfit” (GP 335–8). The dramatized statement of principle shifts register here from the initial image of this beautiful man with a sanguine complexion, balancing characteristics of youth and age. We get what we would call his “lifestyle,” Chaucer’s word wone carrying with it a sense of a fixed dwelling where one wones and comfortably abides, linked in the Indo-European languages to (lower-case) venus, i.e., “love” and “charm.”2 “Delight,” a word that took on a glowing nimbus in its early modern spelling, is one of Chaucer’s reinforced words for pleasure (“gladness” is another). Up into our own day “instruction and delight” may be used to translate prodesse et delectare, Horace’s formulation of an audiencecentred poetics, Chaucer’s “sentence and solaas.”3 Next, assuming familiarity with the state of living in delight, Chaucer grounds it in a philosophy. Chaucer is interested in the ways in which people in the midst of life seek background information, make assertions, justify their practices, and hunt down narrative analogues, so he finds for the Franklin both a philosophy and a respectful way of holding it, calling him the true son of Epicurus. It seems worthwhile to continue to open out this description, if only because Murray

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has suggested that in the fourteenth century it might be claimed that Epicureans were everywhere, perhaps not admitting it. “Son” is a strong term for discipleship and sitting at school, although people in some positions of intellectual authority are regularly called “Father” or “Mother.”4 If middle age, as has been remarked, is for Chaucer the acme of personal development, it is all the more remarkable that this already white-bearded Franklin should hold an opinion of his youth, hold it perhaps with a new scrupulosity, as his tale concerns the maturation of young people. The historical Epicurus imagined not offspring, but a circle of friends. The Franklin’s Epicureanism too, and particularly his open table, is supportive of social bonds and suggests Epicurus’s Principal Doctrine 37 (148), “Of all the things which wisdom acquires to produce the blessedness of the complete life, far the greatest is the possession of friendship.”5 This Epicurean (and Ciceronian) value informs a picture of marriage in the Franklin’s Tale and continued in the open discussions between Chaucer and his friends, as Strohm has envisaged the original audience of the Tales. The Franklin in his gracious hospitality is not a distanced observer like Pater’s Marius.6 His own good health indicates that his permanently set table is a sign not of gluttony but of generosity. He is thus not only a “son of Epicurus” but is “in his region the St. Julian” – the hospitaller, “patron saint of hospitality”7 – though having only a single cook, so that he did not demonstrate the enormous “extravagance and hospitality” of Richard II.8 Nothing is said about care of the sick.9 It would thus seem that we need not suppose, as a critical tradition would have it, that the Franklin is a “voluptuary.”10 And yet even the Franklin’s filial discipleship to Epicurus could have been taken as a bad example to his own son. Epicurus had bad press even in classical antiquity, and “voluptuous hedonism” was a term used by the Stoics.11 In Christian surveys of cosmology, the atomism of Epicurus, so well advocated by Lucretius, failed the criterion of single divine creation.12 Such atomism, pagans and Christians observed, allowed the soul to dissolve, mortally, after death. Isidore of Seville’s early-medieval encyclopaedia, which “gives the dirt” on a comic variety of philosophical schools, is often cited: “Epicureans are named from a certain Epicurus, a philosopher who loved vanity rather than wisdom, whom these very philosophers called ‘Piggy’ as if rolling in carnal swill, asserting

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corporeal pleasures to be the highest good. He also said that no divine providence set up or ruled the world, but rather he assigned the origin of things to atoms, that is, solid and indivisible bodies from whose chance collisions all things have arisen and still do. They say God does nothing: everything consists in bodies; the soul is just a body. So he said, ‘When I shall have died, I shall not be.’”13 Yiddish uses the derived term apikoyres for a “heretic” or any unbeliever, including a Christian convert.14 Consequently, the problem that Chaucer criticism has to face is that there is an attractive Franklin on whose invitation list one would love to be, but characterized by a philosophy of which condemnations existed. Chaucer as usual did not tell us what to conclude.15 If he thus has set us a problem, it sits within others. What are the values that we hold, and how do we hold them? What goods do we seek? What common good might guide our choice? Where do we get our formulations of the common good? Like sagacious dogs, we may continue to circle the Chaucer passage in question and perhaps come to see why the uncertainty was set up, and indeed its necessity. Discussion will involve finding what case could be made for Epicurus in medieval doxography and initiating an argument for plurality in human affairs.

dialectic of delight Chaucer’s descriptive voice holds the doctrine that he attributes to Epicurus in subordinate, hypothetical status in respect to truth and judgment, calling it an opinion. Opinion, in the thinking of both Plato and Aristotle, is an unexamined position; in rhetoric, opinion is manifested in the commonplaces that people happen to hold, rather than in what they might more securely know as experts and persons of practical wisdom, which would be true on principle or a virtue, as Aristotle suggested.16 Opinion is, however, also where the dialectical inquiries of classical philosophy and the sentences of scholastic theology begin their debates. Chaucer pays his Franklin a compliment in the free indirect discourse that represents his thinking by using an opinion that can be verified in philosophical doxography to be a teaching actually attributed to Epicurus. Thus a narrower investigation of the characterization of the Franklin’s Epicureanism does not take one directly to Isidore or to Paul, who had preached against both Stoics and Epicureans in

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Athens (Acts 17:18). Rather, it can be found immediately in Chaucer’s own translation of Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, and thus in a discussion that had carefully avoided Christian revealed theology in its dialectical review of classical doctrines. We find ourselves with Philosophia’s mid-course summary of values: “Now hastow thanne byforn thyne eien almest al the purposede forme of the welefulnesse of mankynde: that is to seyn rychesses, honours, power, glorie, and delitz. The whiche delit oonly considered Epicurus, and juggid and establissyde that delyt is the soverayn good, for as moche as alle othere thynges, as hym thoughte, byrefte awey joye and myrthe from the herte.”17 Readers put onto this passage, if only by Helen Cooper (45–6) or Benson’s edition,18 are thus privileged to invoke the figure of irony, where the shared information of speaker and audience is richer than the utterance, linking us to the whole of De consolatione. Yet this is a particularly subtle ironic turn, for the narrator has not perpetrated a misreading of the doctrine that he himself had translated but is reporting it directly.19 Boethius’s historicizing marker for Epicurus, “as hym thoughte” (“as it seemed to him”), reminds us that Boethius eventually distanced his own position from Epicureanism, as indeed from the other wealful goods that the passage mentions. But Chaucer did not act on the irony to send his Franklin through the dramatic austerity of, for example, Everyman. The Franklin is portrayed in the midst of a present time of long-enduring prosperity, with no threat of the loss of his soul after death.20 Nor in the portrait did Chaucer display a trace of the dreadful early deeds of St Julian.21 Chaucer thus achieves what Booth would call “unstable irony,” in which the audience may sense itself to be the eiron; the irony wheels back on readerly complacency.22 Thus also in the simpler ironic case of the Monk we can, with the proper footnotes, find the error in the proffered reading of The Benedictine Rule, but we still have to face the great question, “How shall the world be served?”; there is more than one answer, and contextual responses – “Be a good monk!” or “Eschew Epicureanism!” – are not for everyone or maybe anyone.23 Furthermore, Boethius’s Philosophia did not so easily write off the good of Delight: Semeth it thanne that folk foleyen and erren, that enforcen hem to have nede of nothyng? Certes ther nys noon other thyng that mai so wel

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48 Chaucer and Language performe blisfulnesse, as an estat plentevous of alle godes, that it ne hath nede of noon other thyng, but that it is suffisant of hymself unto hymself … For certes it nedeth nat to saie that blisfulnesse be n’angwyssous ne drery, ne subgit to grevaunces ne to sorwes; syn that in ryght litele thynges fold seken to haven and to usen that may delyten hem. Certes thise ben the thinges that men wolen and desiren to geten, and for this cause desiren they rychesses, dignytes, reignes, glorie, and delices; for therby wenen they to han suffysaunce, honour, power, renoun, and gladnesse. Thanne is it good that men seken thus, by so manye diverse studies; in which desir it mai lyghtly be shewyd how greet is the strengthe of nature. For how so that men han diverse sentences and discordynge, algates men accorden alle in lovynge the eende of good.24

So Chaucer’s portrait goes on to describe the plentiful estate of the Franklin, filling out with ecphrasis Boethius’s picture of sufficiency, with attractive details about “alle deyntees that men koude thynke” (GP 346), engaging a reader’s recognition of delight with “a sop in wyn,” partridge, bream, pike, the relative austerity of fish tempered by “poynaunt and sharp” sauces.25 The Franklin’s admonishments of his cook follow the “precise and discriminating … directions for season and colouring” of contemporary English recipes.26 The Franklin is being built up to match Boethius’s picture of the hopes of humankind. “How great is the strength of nature!” Yet the rest of Boethius’s treatise was a stripping away of the goods that he had mentioned, reconceiving them as external goods and temporary loans of Fortune. As Boethius went on to tell the story, Orpheus dare not recover Eurydice in his gaze, even if such loss retained a pathos.27 The initiating Platonic move had been a dialectical division of values of delight. In his attack in the Gorgias on a rhetoric appealing to pleasures, Socrates shamed Callicles by recalling shameful scratching (and yet down to the Philebus Plato’s discussion of pleasure became increasingly complex).28 Historically, of the Hellenic philosophical sects Stoicism pulled ahead, and asceticism splintered the aesthetic images of what we can then name as worldly pleasures. Petrarch helps place Chaucer’s experimental overture to unaristocratic pilgrims with the remark of Franciscus to his interlocutor Augustinus that “you bring me back to the precepts of the Stoics, set against the opinions of the populace and closer to truth than practice.”29 Specifically calling for dialectical negation, there is Middle English usage of “foul delight” for sexual humiliation.30 While the

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Wife of Bath does not use the adjective “foul” in speaking of sexual delight (even about her adulterous fourth husband), Dorigen of the Franklin’s Tale does, recalling some grisly instances of rape (FranT 1372, 1395). Praising the asceticism of his order, the Friar of the Summoner’s Tale claims: “We lyve in poverte and in abstinence, / And burell folk in richesse and despence / Of mete and drynke, and in her foul delit” (SumT 1873–5). This is not without a mark of irony, since it is the friars who are supposed to be identified by their “burel” or coarse-cloth garments, but the passage draws some of the other worldly goods that Boethius listed into the circle of possibly still sexual Foul Delight, along with the Franklin’s pleasures of the table, which otherwise one could suppose Chaucer listed precisely to distinguish a respectable, a cooked rather than raw, delight. But Chaucer also allowed the Franklin the complex irony of describing himself too as a “burel man” to excuse the “rude speech” of his rhetoric, with a preference for “swiche colours as growen in the mede” (FranP 716–27). There was also condemnation of “Epicureanism” in Dante’s Inferno 5. It is there the one instance of heresy, perhaps for its place in a dialectical examination of love but expressly for denying the immortality of the soul. Yet Murray has suggested that Dante deliberately chose a heretical position that was not on the books (Chaucer among Lollards and Lollard-hunters would have appreciated the merit of such an evasion).31 Denial of immortality of course would seriously collapse the framework of Dante’s discussions, whereas the issue can be evaded in Chaucer’s this-worldly structure, and no more than Boethius did Chaucer say that the Franklin subscribes to the notion that the soul perishes with the body. When summoned like Everyman, he presumably will be deserted by his “external goods,” and admonitory “Ubi Sunt?” verses would tell him the same, but he is not so summoned in the General Prologue. Neither is he necessarily caught in a mortal sin;32 and elements of his disposition show the debonairetee, if not the mansuetude, that the Parson’s Tale holds is a remedy to the sin of Wrath.33

a good life There is no need to make a longer rehearsal of the dialectical case against some pleasures, or pleasure in general, that alerted readers of Chaucer already know from neo-Augustinian criticism.34 The harder engagement is to make a more complex case for Chaucer’s

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work with the Franklin, retaining the problematizing that his attractive representation makes of such attempts to condemn him. A historically possible way of doing this is to make a bifurcation between two sorts of discussion of the Highest Good. Suppose that we move from an Augustinian discourse of sin and divine dependence to one of human nature and the good life.35 Such a shift of attention to a secular good life appears in a range of medieval thinking that returned to consideration of the Epicureans and Stoics whom Paul had opposed. It is then possible to use again the Hellenistic “therapeutic” philosophies that developed rival methods for the “care of oneself” and to find secular benefits for what came to be called common profit (thus Nussbaum and Burnley).36 In this sort of thinking, there is interventionist concern for self-cultivation and individuation. The Franklin in the Prologue to his Tale proposes nature as a criterion for the arts and philosophy, and this homme moyen sensuel we might call a “natural man,” following Boethius’s Philosophia. If we allow ourselves the consideration, there are diverse features in the pilgrims by which we could be persuaded that “That’s a happy life, and such a happy life is a good life.” The Franklin’s particular challenge is to urge that goodness be considered through present manifest eudaimonia – that the good life be tested through the felicitousness of its delight. We return from the afterlife, and into the range of Dante’s Convivio 4.22 considering the riposo of “l’umana felicitade, [e] la sua dolcezza,” on the basis of Cicero and Aristotle’s Ethics.37 Cicero’s De finibus bonorum et malorum remained a source of discussion for this more secular ethics. Cicero favoured honestas and held less to the side of Epicurus, but he dramatized Epicurean teachings through the discourse of Lucius Torquatus in Book One and a question period in Book Two. This dialogism arose out of a practical pluralism, since “‘quot homines, tot sententiae’: falli igitur possumus” (There are as many leading principles as there are people; we can always be wrong) (1.5.15). Cicero, rhetorically and socially alert to the placement of argument within all the opinions that people do hold and their shiftiness, thus continued to observe and use debates among schools of thought. Rhetorical attention to topical inquiry freed Cicero from allegiance to one single guru, such as Epicurus and other Hellenic thinkers seem to have presented themselves.38 Abelard, also a dialogic thinker with a sic et non method of mooting opinions, took up again from Cicero a less scornful assessment of Epicurus. In the Dialogue of the Philosopher, the Jew, and the

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Christian, the Philosopher compares theories of the summum bonum based on pleasures and on virtues39. Pleasure is there an “interior tranquillity of the soul.” Abelard distinguished the more carnal lesser “Epicureans” and praised, as Seneca had, the sobriety and honourableness of Epicurus himself.40 The Epicurean and Stoic camps draw closer, if tranquil freedom from pain is associated with possession of the virtues, so that Abelard’s Christian observes that there seems to be one sententia involved, with differing terminology (nuncupatio). Luscombe says of Abelard’s Dialogue, “The three interlocutors have in common the worship of one God, but each has a different faith and life,” and he cites the poem to Astralabe on the variety of religious traditions.41 Cicero’s use of beatus for the state of secular human happiness posed a problem for a Latin Christian, but Abelard allowed it to his Philosopher. Continuing in a modification of Epicureanism such as Abelard’s, the Aristotelian Thomas Aquinas, although he held that properly the summum bonum was God, acceded for human affairs to the conflation of pleasure with the exercise of a virtue: “Now the repose of the will (or of any orectic power) in some good object is, precisely, pleasure. A person is therefore judged good or evil chiefly in terms of what his will finds pleasurable; that person is good and virtuous who takes pleasure in good deeds, that person is evil whose pleasure lies in evil deeds.”42 Modifying the notion of “foul delight,” Thomas allowed for sexual pleasure, at least in legitimate marriage.43 “No one can live entirely without sensual or physical pleasure,” and experience is a strong basis of persuasion.44 In the Policraticus and his earlier Entheticus, John of Salisbury set as his field courtly secular and ecclesiastical society. His attention went to the nugae (comic “trifles” or satiric “follies”) of courtiers, which he finds appropriate to discuss through the vestigia, the fragmentary opinions of pre-Christian philosophy. Although the subject and manner of attention are rather like Chaucer’s in the General Prologue, John of Salisbury’s style was to reintroduce biblical doctrine, so for John it was an error of the ancients to think that instead of eternal life it was the enjoyment of virtue that constituted the highest good. Nevertheless, the old positions are worth considering: When virtue alone makes for blessedness, … taking their beginning from the various traditions of the more learned, people tried to ascend to the throne of God by various paths. The Stoics thus, as they taught to despise

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52 Chaucer and Language human affairs, turned to the meditation of death; the Peripatetics to enquiry into the truth; Epicurus ranged in pleasures; and, though these schools were moving to the same point, they disclosed to their hearers varied sententious findings as various paths of happiness. Concerning them one is free to hesitate and enquire, and truth may arise from the juxtaposition of statements as if from the collision of their claims.45

John could thus in the Entheticus give an attractive formulation of Epicureanism, emphasizing mental delight: Another [Epicurus, evidently] thinks that joys of the mind are the supreme good, / and he teaches that everything is subordinate to pleasure. / He teaches this well, indeed, but only if the pleasure is pure, / if the reason of his statement aims at true joys, / if a state is sought so that what a soul striving after pious wishes wants / is present, and what it does not want is absent, / if the toil aspires to confer true rest, / if the mind calmly possesses the joys of peace. / Dutiful toil fights for peace and struggles to gain / that which can perpetuate gladness for itself; / toil founded in virtue grows sweet and that mind / inwardly conscious of deeds well done is happy and strong.46

Not differently, though finally with firmer refutation than in Cicero, John of Salisbury used consideration of certain teachings of Epicurus as a possible starting point of discussion. John contrasted the sober pleasure of Epicurus in the absence of sadness and disturbance to the foul pleasures of the Epicurean plebs, which also lead to insatiable acquisition of riches.47

experiencing values The continuing accessibility of a Ciceronian mode of ethical thinking allowed Chaucer the possibility of entertaining eudaimonistic and secular ethics, a therapeutic cura sui that allows each person an individual starting point and characteristic way of thinking. Using an interesting approach that still needs more following through, John M. Hill has found that “for Chaucer’s bookish persona, belief involves such provisional attitudes as credence toward or delight in a number of notions or things, given an effort to relate those notions to each other.” Thus: “Humor, wryness, even friendly irony – these give Chaucer a way of confronting the

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anomalous or the discordant, of entertaining truths that would force gaps within his own beliefs … Moreover, reverence and delight are feelings, not conclusions – feelings that deeply affect our ability to remain open and therefore to perceive.48 We may consider some instances of Chancer’s exploratory work with delight as possible happiness. In the Wife of Bath’s Tale, for instance, the marriage-bed discussion of the Old Woman and the Knight arrives at a synthesis of Epicurean and Stoic principles, when the Knight responds to the dilemma posed by his new wife: “I put me in youre wise governance; / Cheseth youreself which may be moost plesance / And moost honour to yow and me also” (WBT 1231–3), leading to an outcome in which the narrating Wife of Bath gives emphasis to “pleasance, and liking.” There are several matters here: the association of the satisfaction of an act of will with the reward of pleasure, which is good Thomistic Aristotelianism; the abandonment of “honourable” self-respect to an apparent subaltern and of the manly to the womanly (whatever those qualities are); and the hope for common profit. The active-passive sanguine physicality that the Wife’s alliterative narration promises – “His herte bathed in a bath of blisse” (WBT 1253) – is something that Chaucer can permit himself, whereas it would have caused Dante to faint dead away, as he did with Francesca and Paolo’s remembered kiss. Further on the question of sexual delight, Chaucer afforded instances to suggest the undesirability of the act of generation without pleasure, notably the “sickness, woe, and pain” that the Clerk’s Griselda finds in childbearing even as she continues to assert her willingness to serve the “lust,” i.e. pleasure, of her tyrannical husband, Walter (ClT 651, 501, 658–65). The sergeant who is Walter’s agent in “bad things” also says almost more strongly than she that he may “bewail” doing a lord’s pleasure. Although the Clerk concludes with a doctrine of “virtuous suffrance,” we may conclude from his examples that the more proper goal of lordship and marriage is pleasure for all parties, an increasingly universal felicity, and Ciceronian amity.49 For the task of ranking values, the professionally conservative medievalist, having noted that Chaucer used a formulation of Boethius to categorize the Franklin, may be tempted to substitute for the portrait a transcendent abandonment of mixed values, becoming an immortal Troilus laughing at this world of woe. I

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would urge caution in such a project and suggest that Chaucer’s attention in his Boccaccian narratives of the shifts of Fortune continued to go to the earlier books of De consolatione rather than to the exaltation of Providence of the fifth and last. John of Salisbury too had been chiefly stimulated by the transitional concept of Fortune.50 Even in Boethius the mix of values brought to examination by Philosophia and consolidated into the list of 3, prosa 2, will tend to range in “the longe moevynges of his thoughtes.” And similarly we can read Chaucer’s translation and his gloss on 3, metrum 11, in two directions, whether towards a belief and “natural” feeling or towards what Platonistic thinking might hold is an “innate” idea:51 “For certeynli the seed of soth haldeth and clyveth within yowr corage, and it is awaked and excited by the wynde and by the blastes of doctrine. For wherfore elles demen ye of your owene wil the ryghtes, whan ye ben axid, but if so were that the norysschynges of resoun ne lyvede yplounged in the depe of your herte? (This to seyn, how shulde men deme the sothe of any thing that were axid, yif ther nere a rote of sothfastnesse that were yploungid and hyd in the naturel principles, the whiche sothfastnesse lyvede within the depnesse of the thought?)”

mixed evidence I am interested here in presenting mixed evidence, proposing that the way to work with Chaucer’s material is to exploit the texture of his own mixing of evidence, the loose assemblage of Canterbury Tales juxtaposing opinions, equivocations, choices, circumstances, special cases, and sheer diversity, which appear, like the Franklin’s fish, in varied sauces. The narratorial voice uses unmediated propositions that are like the minutes of a debate or the record of a Socratic dialogue. How would late-fourteenth-century individuals lead their lives? They had a taste, for instance, for the hierarchy of degre, but also more than one hierarchy (as Chaucer had to concede, GP 744). They had arguments for the prestige of certain roles and philosophies, but I would argue, on Chaucer’s evidence, that they also had sufficient ingenuity to apply sententious precepts warily to their own quite different lives. They might even have thoughts of their own about the way in which ecclesiastical control extended to theology. One may compare the hectic attempt to regulate such varied practice in the opening passus of Piers Plowman,

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with its mêlée of merchants, hot pies, impetuous charity, Lady Meed in her self-serving bounty, and a cat that escapes belling. Chaucer’s exposition is of a web of personal choices that are exposed to be variously partial, interactive, pragmatic, and at best mutually supportive. He ran his characters progressively and regressively through choices and values from where they happen to be to where they might go, as, famously, with the Monk, wittily in process of refiguration as “a manly man to ben an abbot able.” Thus, for his exposition of choices, Chaucer needed the characterization of the Franklin to mark not so much a stage as a possibility in the discussion. When a generous and active latefourteenth-century franklin holds to a classical doctrine, it cannot simply be dismissed as ancient error. Chaucer’s description of the Franklin reaches a philosophical sententia in the contexts of his physiology, domestic economy, political practice, and reputation. This Franklin is not a knight (as Huppé moralistically observed), not a monk or a parson. He is not his travelling companion, the Man of Law, although it is tempting to see in them together a sociological picture of how the adminstration of justice ran. As it happens, they also balance and exchange the Stoic and the Epicurean, the one modestly dressed, the other more richly, a law-reciting justice of assize against a discretionary justice of the peace who modified legalism through the bestowing of dinners and favours. It would seem that the Man of Law had already internalized the two capacities – judge in a court concerned with land tenure but also a great acquirer of property, and perhaps touching both senses of what Langland called Meed. In this juxtaposition of a Stoic and an Epicurean, the text suggests the eclectic doctrine that we have seen developing, in which virtue is not chosen without pleasure. Chaucer sometimes called for admiration of the austere virtue of patience, but it too was balanced with a physical sense of sufficiency and with social reciprocity. The Nun’s Priest – who, though chaffed for his poor horse, assures the Host, “But I be myrie, ywis I wol be blamed” (NPT 2817) – describes a Poor Widow who “In pacience ladde a ful simple lyf / … / Of poynaunt sauce hir neded never a deel. / … / Attempree diete was al hir phisik, / And exercise, and hertes suffisaunce. / The goute lette hire nothyng for to daunce” (NPT 2826–40). This seems plausibly like authentic Epicurean practice, arising for Pater in “an actual rectitude, a cleanness and probity of life.”52 Or, as Horace put it in

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his poignant survey of wealth, Ode 3.16: “multa petentibus / desunt multa; bene est, cui deus obtulit / parca quod satis est manu.” (To those who seek for much, much is ever lacking; blest is he to whom the god with chary hand has given just enough.) Since Common Profit requires recognition by all parties, its achievement is justified by rhetoric, the Aristotelian method for which is to appeal to whatever values people happen to hold. Persuasive discussion to revise a hierarchy of values must do the same, unless it is coercive indoctrination. The rhetorical method thus entails inquiry into the opinions that people happen to hold and a review and assessment of evidence in the deliberation that precedes decision. Usefully, then, Chaucer’s way of delineating social complexity withholds judgment and resolution until a moment later in time than the experimental text in progress – sometimes a resolution that we have not yet reached. Given the real complexity of the interaction of goods, we have continually to tinker to achieve what is properly humane, adjusting a panoply of goods to varying physical circumstances and social intrications. I would like further to imagine that Chaucer allowed himself to worry about how ethical conceptions are arrived at, and how to awaken his readers to reflective consciousness. Like other dialogic thinkers – for instance, the genial twelfth-century poet Laurence of Durham – Chaucer turned abstractive Platonic dialectic back around to pragmatic experience involving social and political life more than spiritual aspiration.53 In such a world the figure of authority is a Socrates, just as the sceptical New Academy showed Cicero how to interrogate a network of affairs. Chaucer’s temporary, rearrangeable, delible structure models historiographical and epistemological uncertainty and revision. Chaucer recognized change as a feature of his vernacular language – “so gret diversite / In Englissh” – despite its capacity to form blocks of “the forme of olde clerkis speche / In poetrie, if ye hire bokes seche” (Tr 5.1793–4, 1854–5).54 Similarly, then, his auditors can be thought of as holding their commonplaces as if in dialects more or less mutually intelligible – that is, in a pluralism of possible philosophies. Chaucer’s less-than-scripture presents textual data rather than the resolution of their discussion. Or it is a Book of Sentences affording topics for contentious discussion by anyone who claims to be an expert? “Old clerks” – Boethius and more vehemently

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Augustine – did argue for closure of philosophical variety, and Chaucer made Boethius available for consideration by his immediate audience, as he said he had Innocent III’s position paper against worldly pleasures (LGW G 414–15, but not “Retractions”). His project of working out Canterbury Tales softens these positions to possibilities. I have claimed elsewhere that Chaucer’s project works well with a method of constructive pragmatism that delays resolution to the future, remaining in trials of experience (or what modern natural science would call experiment). Change is voluntary, gradual, not apocalyptic; the narrative reaches the time only slightly later than their ordinary living in an outward-bound pilgrimage, as the characters improvise and make some commitment to telling tales. One can think of the Wife of Bath’s welcome to a sixth husband, who acknowledges the changes that she has undergone, or the narrative pentimenti of the Canon’s Yeoman. The results remain personal, and not exemplary in a mythic, iconic sense. The Parson is more confident than others in envisaging a general audience without, for himself, going through the phase of a preparatory confession of personal difficulties, although we can say from a position of literate irony that his work and thinking also show a personal limit, being pastoral and oral and not yet theological and textual.55 And thus, for instance, the Franklin’s exploratory thinking and mustering of cases about young people, rhetoric, natural perfection, and acts of promising reveal a more subtle character than his portrait in the General Prologue would suggest, but the range of interests is continuous. As this essay has avoided an abstractive judgment of the Franklin’s portrait, it should also stay clear of his Tale, but we may recall Mann on its precept “Lerneth to suffre”:56 “This sort of ‘suffering’ is not simply a matter of enduring pain or vexation; it is a matter of ‘allowing,’ of standing back to make room for, the operations of ‘aventure,’ and thus of contributing to the creation of something new by allowing the natural process of change to work. It is the generous in spirit who do this.”57 Acknowledgment of a multiplicity of values thus helps us to interpret the General Prologue’s picture of varied human potential moving forward in time with loosely forming opinions and goals of what shall be done. For these tasks of interpretation we have new tools in present-day ways of doing philosophy that revert to narrative and to loosely assembled commonplaces. Instead of the

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sublimely moving wind and blasts of doctrine, the “sweete breeth” of Zephirus blew on the General Prologue with more of what Italians are calling filosofia debole and with the paper-lifting drafts of rhetorical Fame and Rumour.58 We have, for instance, Isaiah Berlin’s proposal of an inextricable plurality of values,59 such that what works for a franklin would not work for a knight; they can only learn to assess one another’s set of values. The well-born pilgrims, observed Chaucer pilgrim-narrator, were more inclined to praise the Knight’s Tale than were the other pilgrims, and since that tale itself shows social transformations of partisan desire, it would seem to suggest that gentlefolk too have things to learn in refining their experience.60 Similar to Berlin’s Herderian notion of cultural diversity, there is Chaucer’s observation that, unlike the singular natural prompting felt by birds, human groups disperse their attention “to ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes” (GP 14). I would also suggest that further research into the patterns of thinking stimulated by Chaucer’s writing might want to work with the simultaneous phenomenology and yet conservative philosophical realism of C.S. Peirce.61 There is a reason for emphasizing delight, if “conceptual meaning,” as it did for Peirce, “must include within itself the emotional, enegetic, and logical interpretants or, in other terms, the elements of Firstness, Secondness, and Thirdness found, in some form, in all analyses; in this case: Firstness as feeling core or sensuous content; Secondness as response or set of acts; and Thirdness as structure or resultant image.”62 Peirce suggested a politics in his remark that “The court cannot be imagined without a sheriff; final causality cannot be imagined without efficient causality”63 – a figure recalling again the relation of the Franklin to his travelling companion, the Sergeant of the Law. To return to historical inquiry, here are a few instances to suggest how late-medieval “Chaucerian” thinking might handle the detached teaching of Epicurus, working with it and not rejecting it out of hand. One mode is the sense of “conflation” that Beverly Kennedy discovered in late-medieval treatments of a Venus who cannot so easily be dialectically divided into “celestial” and “terrestrial” conceptions, as in an early-fifteenth-century Franco-Burgundian drawing now in Dresden showing Cupid aiming an eros-arousing arrow at the goddess enthroned in the sky.64 Thus also Chaucer’s “Complaint of Mars” and “Complaint of Venus.” Another instance comes from

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John Lydgate (who, though a monk, imagined himself entering into the fictional Canterbury pilgrimage to tell the Tale of Thebes and was so depicted in the illumination in British Library ms Roy. D11, f. 148, that graces the cover of Benson’s paperbound edition of The Riverside Chaucer). Lydgate used many specifics from the portrait of the Franklin directly and without irony in a 1417 poem for Thomas Chaucer, wishing him “pleasaunce, helthe, prosparytee” and bemoaning the lack of “recomfort” caused by his temporary absence.65 He praises the “abundance” of Thomas’s householding, and Thomas, like the Franklin, is a regular St Julian for hospitality, although Lydgate did not take the more thought-provoking step of invoking Epicurus directly, as Geoffrey Chaucer had done.66 In 1431 there first appeared a more pugnacious rearranging of values in what has sometimes been called the “Christian Epicureanism” (for example, by Reinhardt) of Lorenzo Valla’s Ciceronian dialogue De voluptate (with later revised titles, including De vero falsoque bono).67 However, Valla’s recastings over several years up to 1444 suggest his uncertainty about giving substantial space to a speaker espousing Epicureanism to knock out Stoicism (Prol. 7) in a debate that thus finds a quite new route to steer towards orthodoxy, methodologically using the oratorical skills and liberty of his clerkly circle. Valla’s dialogue continues to arouse varied responses, with Vickers, for instance, finding a satiric scorn of Epicureanism, Joy a redefinition of good and evil.68 As for Valla, in the small world of Chaucer’s friends there would have been discussions of alternative institutions and the philosophies of felicity, of personal and common profit. There was clearly new thinking about gender relations.69 Ecclesiastical reform, political change, and social experiment might have to take different routes in England than they had in Italy even earlier than Albertanus of Brescia, the thirteenth-century source of the Tale of Melibee.70 But the conviviality that the Franklin (and Chaucer) provided for friends afforded a space for discussion and the development of independent public opinion and “associational forms” that are an important development of the later fourteenth century.71

living with delight Our interpretive work with a passage of the General Prologue should find a pause – not repose, if the General Prologue works

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with the distinctively Chaucerian formal method of possibility and inconclusiveness.72 The hypotheses of reading open out to an ethics by immersion, where active social participants pose issues for discussion. In the narrative the participants, though frequently subalterns, have experience and skill in interpreting and modifying rules for their practices, which we may imagine they are trying to justify to one another.73 There is an optional bibliography (Jesus, Plato, Aristotle, Boethius) within the pragmatic work of an imperfectly grounded and inquiring society. The purposeful spirit would be what concluded the Parliament of Fowls – the “hope, ywis, to rede so som day / That I shal mete som thyng for to fare / The bet” (697–9). We have seen that classical and medieval thinkers could use Epicurus as a stimulus and a starting point or as a provocation. Chaucer is unusual in allowing the Franklin sensuously imagined Epicureanism into his later years. What the Franklin would think or retract were he to reach the stage of Ivan Ilyich we are not told, because Chaucer was too busy in the General Prologue unfolding the multiplicity of social values.74 In working with the link to Boethius, unstable irony discovers a plurality of philosophical opinions, description of which Cicero had already begun, and a place for Epicurus in the discussion. Delight is a good, however we deal with the proposition. Felicitate valete, Douglas et omnes!

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Mapping a History of Sexuality in Melibee glenn burger

A continuing problem for medievalists attempting to queer the Middle Ages arises out of the desire expressed through such approaches to bring the pre-modern and postmodern together in unpredictable and mobilizing ways – despite our inevitable implication in the discourses of modern regimes of sexuality and power – and thus to think history differently by resisting the stultifying pressure of modern identity positions. For in choosing to write the history of heterosexuality back onto the pre-modern, however resistantly, we are always already teetering on the brink of a reductive tracing of modernity on the map of the history of sexuality. Thus a stabilizing modernity can inhere even in the shock of a queer touch, at least to the extent that it reiterates a “carefully controlled and managed” pre-modern past as the necessary point of origin for a “mapping of heterosexuality’s long and varied history” and for the privileged difference of the present-day queer subject.1 Here I think it useful to turn to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s attempt in A Thousand Plateaus to distinguish between the twin impulses of “mapping” and “tracing,” not as a simple dualism of right and wrong, but as inter-implicated methods of describing our encounters with the world and culture: “What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real … The map is open and connectable in all of its dimensions; it is detachable,

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reversible, susceptible to constant modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of mounting, reworked by an individual, group, or social formation … The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’ … and when it thinks it is reproducing something else it is in fact only reproducing itself … What the tracing reproduces of the map … are only the impasses, blockages, incipient taproots, or points of structuration.”2 If we are to avoid reproducing a stabilizing dualism between medieval and modern, hegemony and resistance, heterosexual and queer, in our historicism, how do we go about putting the tracing that is heterosexuality back on the map of the history of sexuality? How do we go about viewing heterosexuality not as inevitable fulfilment of the march of history, but rather as its narrowing modernization, its impasse, blockage, and point of structuration? And can Chaucerian fictions contribute in less carefully controlled and managed ways to such a mapping? Can we orient our readings of Chaucer’s fictions and Chaucer’s author function towards an experimentation in contact with the real, a queer mapping of the history of sexuality open and connectable in all of its dimensions? In considering these questions further, I want to turn to a moment in the Canterbury Tales that is often read as quintessentially “straight” – the narrator’s prose Tale of Melibee. The story of Melibee is a simple one. As Daniel Rubey has recently summarized it, Melibee is a young man, rich and powerful. While he is away, three old enemies break into his house, beat his wife Prudence, and wound his daughter Sophie with five mortal wounds in five places (corresponding to the five senses). Melibee’s followers, friends, and advisors urge war on his enemies; Prudence advises patience and peace. Through the course of a long debate buttressed on both sides by references to authority, Prudence tries to persuade her husband to turn from vengeance to mercy. At midpoint the debate turns overtly allegorical: the house becomes Melibee’s body made vulnerable by sin and entered by his old enemies – the World, the Flesh, and the Devil – through the windows of his body, his five senses. In the end, Melibee accepts the guidance of his wife and forgives his enemies. A settlement is negotiated with her help, and harmony is restored.3

But as a result of Prudence’s extensive citation of learned and proverbial authority, the tale takes up nearly twenty-three pages of double-columned text in Benson’s Riverside Chaucer. And despite

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its being one of two tales told in the narrator’s own voice, Chaucer’s Melibee is an almost word-for-word translation of Renaud de Louens’s Livre de Melibee et Prudence (c. 1336), itself a freer translation of Albertano of Brescia’s Liber consolationis et consilii, written a century earlier.4 Because of this overt didacticism and apparent lack of originality, modern critics and editors have often had a hard time knowing what to do with Chaucer’s Melibee. Some have ignored the tale altogether. Baugh and Donaldson, for example, omit the tale from their editions and thus define the essential Chaucer as his poetic works.5 Others have viewed the tale’s explicit moralizing as the key to an underlying structure of the Canterbury Tales that is similarly both “medieval” and sententious.6 And some, while acknowledging the moral earnestness of the Melibee itself, have sought to justify Chaucer’s version as properly “literary” and “Chaucerian” by ironizing its relationship to its context in the Tales – either by seeing it as an elaborate “quiting” of the Host’s demand for something from the narrator that will not waste his time or as an undercutting of the very didactic tradition that it exemplifies.7 Despite the radically different conclusions such approaches reach concerning the tale, however, they begin with a common assumption of its exemplary medievalness. What often gets lost when we constitute the tale thus as purely medieval, however, are the literal specificities of its story and the complexity of its relationship with its medieval and early-modern audiences. For Melibee was one of the most frequently anthologized of the Canterbury Tales during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and Albertano’s Latin text – from which Chaucer’s tale derives – enjoyed an equal vogue in the literate laity of the later Middle Ages.8 The most striking feature of Melibee as a story, then, may not be its supposedly stable reproduction of some high medieval sentence, but rather its continued accessibility to and serviceability for a large and varied late-medieval and earlymodern audience that crossed a variety of class, linguistic, and national lines. To that end I look at Melibee’s character, the role of his wife, the form of the story, and its significance vis-à-vis the new social groups emerging in Chaucer’s time.

melibee’s character What stands out in the specific contours of the Melibee story itself is its success in outlining a newly sexualized and gendered individual

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identity. Although the tale is often placed within the “advice to princes” genre, Melibee as a character is marked far more as youthful husband and householder than as high aristocrat or prince.9 Equally, the tale’s didacticism is dominated by Prudence rather than by Wisdom, delivered by an allegorical wife rather than by a heavenly grande dame, and clearly does not require distinctively clerical learning or expertise. The tale emphasizes that Melibee and his household are alone in the world, without extended family. The violence committed by his enemies consists in breaking into his house and wounding his daughter rather than in the occupation of territory or usurpation or disinheritance. The story thus conspires to turn Melibee’s and our attention inward – to his household, to his marriage relationship, to his own sense of interiority. At the beginning of the tale, Melibee is singled out as simply “a yong man … myghty and riche” who “bigat upon his wyf, that called was Prudence, a doghter which that called was Sophie” (967). And his enemies break into his “hous” by using ladders to enter through its windows while Melibee has gone “into the feeldes” for “his desport” (968–70). In response to the crimes committed on him and his household, Prudence advises Melibee to call on his “trewe freendes alle and thy lynage which that been wise.” This “greet congregacion of folk” is made up of “surgiens, phisiciens, olde folk and yonge,” “somme of his olde enemys reconsiled as by hir semblaunt,” and “somme of his neighebores that diden hym reverence moore for drede than for love” (1002–5). What is emphasized here are the general ties of affinity constituted by economics and influence rather than by blood that “bind” Melibee and his advisers. Only near the end of the tale does the narrative “ennoble” Melibee by shifting registers to describe his “hous” as “the court of Melibee” and him as “so greet a lord” (1805, 1816). And this shift depends on Melibee’s proper socialization at the hands of his wife, Prudence, and on his retreat from public disputation and public activity to private reading, personal discernment, and household secrecy. Thus the trajectory of the narrative and its learning process is not towards “traditional” guarantors of power such as an inherent right to rule because of noble blood or knightly prowess. Instead Melibee’s ultimate power and success come more from his discovery and rearticulation of a set of textual effects establishing his own depth of character.

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the role of prudence The primary “producer” of such textual effects is Melibee’s wife, Prudence, and her private advice. Although reminiscent of a long line of female givers of advice, Prudence is notably different from Dame Nature or Philosophy in that her authority derives from her essentialized and embodied position as woman, wife, and husbanded femininity. Herself incapable of knightly action or clerical disputation, Prudence instead works to mirror Melibee’s essential self back to himself by highlighting her difference as woman. For example, near the beginning of the tale (1054–1113), Melibee lists four reasons why he must refuse to work by Prudence’s counsel: because it would be an essential folly to choose a woman’s counsel over men’s, because women are essentially wicked, because it would give a wife mastery over her husband, and because she advises keeping his counsel secret until the proper time to implement it. Prudence first asks “licence for to speke” from Melibee and then goes on to refute his charges by proving that the “trouthe of thynges and the profit been rather founden in fewe folk that been wise and ful of resoun than by greet multitude of folk ther every man crieth and clatereth what that hym liketh” (1068). Moreover, her own past behaviour proves that women too can be such “fewe folk” and that such anti-feminist views are at odds with individual experience. In speaking thus, the formerly resistant Melibee now realizes, Prudence embodies Solomon’s truth that “‘words that been spoken discreetly by ordinaunce been honycombes, for they yeven swetnesse to the soule and hoolsomnesse to the body.’ / And, wyf, by cause of thy sweete wordes, and eek for I have assayed and preved thy grete sapience and thy grete trouthe, I wol governe me by thy conseil in all thyng” (1112–13). In accepting the value of his wife’s discursive strategies of containment and reflection, Melibee, whose name we are later told means “a man that drynketh hony,” learns how to drink a different honeyed truth about his essential nature than that occasioned by his past drunkenness with “so muchel hony of sweete temporeel richesses, and delices and honours of this world” (1407–8). This trajectory reaches its logical conclusion near the end of the tale, when Melibee announces to Prudence: “Dame … dooth youre wil and youre likynge; / for I putte me hoolly in youre disposicioun and ordinaunce” (1724–5). It is only at this moment, when Melibee

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has accepted his true nature as the bounded self mirrored back to him by Prudence’s discursive strategies, that he is able to be reconciled with his enemies and to discern his true friends and family. By means of her womanly advice and, crucially, the new form of masculine activity on Melibee’s part that her advice provokes, the tale constitutes a positive valence for secrecy, interiority, personal experience, patience, the body – all categories that were rendered suspect earlier in the Tales by the unhusbanded claim to autonomous feminine subjectivity on the part of the Wife of Bath. Melibee will succeed, the tale maintains, to the extent that he can recognize, establish, and care for the boundaries defining his essential self. The Tale of Melibee, then, as its title suggests, is at bottom about the ability of an interiorized, autonomous self (autonomous because properly masculine and heterosexual) both to constitute itself and to assert that self in the world. As Prudence mirrors the truth about Melibee to Melibee, she lets his true self come into representable form. And the self-discipline and care of the self that follow ensure Melibee’s social reproduction – both in the discovery of other true selves like Melibee (such as the good advisers who make up his true household and the enemies who are won over to his side) and in the restored (re-productive) body of Sophia. Moreover, this is a lesson eminently translatable onto a variety of linguistic and social terrains. While a king could learn from this allegory, one certainly need not be noble by birth in order to become a Melibee. Nor does one need a clerical class to mediate this message; after all, a woman serves as the truest adviser here.

the form of the tale The form of Melibee – a narrative dialogue framework into which one can add or subtract layers of citation of learned and proverbial authorities – lends itself to a lay reader’s personal intervention in the story. Readers can and did add to the sententious material, abstract the story from the other tales, reduce the narrative portion to its “core” of “sentence,” all in order to adapt it to their own household needs.10 This is an active interaction between lay reader and tale that mirrors its representation of Melibee’s marriage to Prudence as a private, interactive dialogue crucial to identity formation. David Wallace’s recent provocative reading of the tale provides an especially rich account both of the urban politics

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informing Albertano’s work and of the openness of his work to later appropriation for quite different political and social agendas. Renaud de Louens’s French translation, Wallace maintains, marks a moment when Albertano’s urban tale, written in aid of “the survival of a struggling, emergent city-state culture,” is assimilated to the northern European “mirror for princes” tradition, a genre more suited “to the particular circumstances of Louens’s war-torn Burgundy in the 1330s.” But such changes “cannot obscure the residual otherness of Albertano’s invention. Renaud’s Livre de Melibee et de Prudence reads like a palimpsest; Albertano’s text and Albertano’s Brescia continue to peer through.” And Albertano’s Melibeus “seems peculiarly the product of urban culture [enduring] the social isolation of the nouveau riche … [He] and his kind need, in short, Albertano, ‘a sociologist of the medieval urban experience,’ a ‘new man’ of the early Duecento.”11 What I am thus suggesting is that Chaucer finds in the story of Melibee a complex medium in which to identify a new class of reader, one moving beyond the contract forming the high-medieval ruling class of lay aristocracy and literate clerisy.12 Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, though often ignored by many modern readers as simple “medieval” didacticism, can be seen instead as precisely in the vanguard of Foucault’s modern disciplinary regime of sexuality. For it is serviceable in constructing a new identity, and with it a new sense of an English nation for an as-yet-to-be represented audience. It constructs its “modern” audience even as it insists on an unbroken line of reproduction of authority from the past to the present.

the new middle groups But to read Melibee’s place in history only in this antecedent way would be the work of tracing, seeing only the incipient taproot of modern heterosexuality rather than the rhizomatic possibilities of a rich pre-modern mapping of sexuality. The Canterbury Tales’ attempts at social organization necessarily work within traditional categories such as “cleric” and “noble,” each delineating an established and hegemonic discursive and social terrain. But the “subject” matter of the Canterbury Tales is the identification of those emerging “middle” groups beginning to coalesce around a new set of differences and (to use Partha Chatterjee’s formulation) their own “vital zone of belief and practice that straddles the domains of the

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individual and the collective, the private and the public, the home and the world, where the new disciplinary culture of a modernizing elite has to turn itself into an exercise in self-discipline.”13 This project of identity formation must deal with the anxieties that such a departure from the past and its attendant misidentifications necessarily bring as this new social group comes up against the transcendent inherited identities shoring up the high-medieval clerical/ aristocratic compact. The value of the Canterbury project in fantasizing as “the real” a new symbolic order of modernity coming into being therefore lies precisely in its lack of foundation and its mapping of a dis-organizing, un-defining middle ground. As Paul Strohm has pointed out, in Chaucer’s pilgrimage audience, one knight stands in for the traditionally influential group of landholding aristocrats and knights; a single ploughman, for the ninety to ninety-five per cent of the population who were free or bonded agricultural labourers. “Present in vast disproportion [instead] are people from the ‘middle strata.’” Equally important, the pilgrims represented in the Tales come from different parts of these middle strata than those probably occupied by Chaucer’s actual audience: “The pilgrims’ tilt away from Chaucer’s circle is most vividly revealed in the four categories of the 1379 poll tax, the first of which consists entirely of gentils down through the rank of esquires ‘en service’ and the other three of which include sergeants at law, attorneys, aldermen, merchants, sergeants, franklins, pardoners, summoners, and others. Chaucer’s actual audience would have been concentrated largely in the first of these four groups; the pilgrims are drawn mainly from social and occupational groups described in the other three.”14 Melibee’s staging of the anxieties of the middle ground is foregrounded by its reworking of the narrator’s author function and by the tale’s placement within Fragment VII. The tale answers and expands in unexpected ways the context for Harry Bailey’s earlier questioning of the narrator’s identity at the end of the Prioress’s Tale (VII.691–7). As Lee Patterson points out, “what is striking about this occasion is the comprehensiveness of his opening question, its utter lack of specificity: ‘What man artow?’ … Recognizable as a knight, a miller, a reeve, and so forth, the pilgrims are identified by their social functions … But what work does the narrator perform? What is his social function? ‘What man artow?’”15 And, more recently, David Wallace has noted that “this

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is a different Chaucer from the figure who, in the General Prologue, boldly talked himself into the pilgrim felaweshipe through the art of conversation … This Chaucer is a person who cannot hold a level gaze … whose passivity is said to invite physical handling, whose body is read as his social being. And this, too, is an author portrait: a portrait, specifically, of an author about to speak for himself. Such emphases upon physical vulnerability and social isolation suggest the impress of political pressures requiring a new explanatory framework.”16 Melibee’s place within Fragment VII also works to foreground the absence of a stabilizing authenticity for the structures of identity that it proposes. Think, for example, of the fragment’s emphasis on “little things” rather than on wholes; on children, unhusbanded women, and henpecked men, rather than on masculinity fully formed; on ludic proliferation of incident rather than on meaningful reproduction of authority.17 To this extent, the Tale of Melibee (placed in the context of Fragment VII) brings to representation not just the cultural fantasy of hegemonic identity for a new “middle class,” but also the full range of anxious and mobile identifications necessitated by its uncertain position, simultaneously placed in a position of subordination in one relation and a position of dominance in another. Such hybridity is present at every point in the Fragment: in the Prioress’s performance (so often resolved as irony or self-destructive satire), which uses an older form of absolute difference (a miracle of the Virgin) to represent the complexities of subordination/domination that constitute her gender, class, and estate situation in the present; in the currency of exchange that dominates the Shipman’s Tale and that circulates outside of traditional “medieval” gender and class hierarchies; or in the thoroughgoing category confusion of the Nun’s Priest’s Tale’s becoming animal.18 Such a deterritorialization, even as it makes possible the ground for a new hegemony – in the organized body of Melibee’s newly disciplined subjectivity – also brings into view – in the pilgrimage representation of an English nation yet to be – a body without organs that is continually dismantling the organism. Only in this way can “things as they are” be deterritorialized to an extent sufficient to begin to represent “things that might be.” Fragment VII thus intensifies “things as they are” to the point that the usual patterns of differentiation dissolve, constituting a desiring machine

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whose multiplicity opposes the notion of unity or One.19 Rather than seeing Chaucer’s Melibee as a stable marker of something either purely medieval or purely modern and thus capable of constituting a point of origin for a modernist history of heterosexuality – a reiteration of history as ascetic renunciation – I am proposing a mapping of sexuality in the Melibee that will proliferate the pleasures of history as an “erogenous zone” (to adapt Fradenburg and Freccero’s recent formulation)20 by helping us to understand its function for pre-modern and postmodern audiences as a mobilizing point of entry into a mapping of the multiple relations of the possible.

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Chaucer after the Linguistic Turn: Memory, History, and Fiction in the Link to Melibee christine jones

Plato thought that poets lie and that fiction is a falsehood to be hated by the gods and by men since it presents as true an imitation of a physical world that is itself a copy of the world of perfect forms. An updated, postmodern version of Plato’s complaint would have us believe that lying is not peculiar to poets. Philosophers and historians should now perhaps be banished from the ideal Republic as well, for it seems that they delude us when they aspire to write of the real world as though it were there, or about the past as though it had actually happened. In the wake of “the linguistic turn,” language is no longer considered to be a medium for the transparent representation of a reality existing outside of it; instead, it is seen to mould reality and even to constitute it. What we refer to as “the world” comes into being only in and through language, in and through interpretations. And, just as the world cannot be said to exist as a thing-in-itself independent of the human mind, nor to come into being before it is interpreted, so too history, as one of a variety of linguistic utterances, cannot transparently represent the external world talked about in its putative references to past events. If language cannot refer in a meaningful way to any extra-linguistic dimension, it is certainly unable to perform with any success the task of “double mediation” by presenting information about reality as it existed in something that we refer to as the past. The past, or what we

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conceive of as a past event, is expressed verbally and as history through texts, and thus the only history that we know, so the argument goes, is a verbal construct. In this essay, after sketching the twentieth-century concern with the way in which language constitutes our understanding of reality, I contest the increasingly influential brand of Chaucer criticism that asserts that Chaucer thoroughly distrusts language’s ability to represent the world adequately. This distrust supposedly leads him first to deny the existence of any mind-independent reality and then to support a number of positions that logically proceed from this denial. One such position to which Chaucer is said to subscribe is that “there is no such thing as history or experience prior to its textualization” in some rhetorically organized fictional form.1 The link to the Tale of Melibee provides me with the opportunity to present what I take to be Chaucer’s actual concern with the problematics of historical – textual relations and also gives me the occasion to critique the hypothesis that history is merely something textualized.

the twentieth century on language The belief that language constitutes the human consciousness of reality received its primary impetus in the twentieth century from structural linguistics. Ferdinand de Saussure, the founder of modern linguistics, made a distinction between langue (the synchronic or internal relational properties of a language system) and parole (the diachronic or historically contingent aspects of language-using activity) and insisted that langue in isolation from parole was the only suitable object of linguistic study. Saussure argued that while “some people regard language … as a naming process only – a list of words, each corresponding to the thing that it names,” the truth is that the linguistic sign unites “not a thing and a name, but a concept and a sound image.”2 Saussure viewed language as a selfcontained system of signs whose meanings are determined by their relation to other signs in the system rather than by their one-toone correspondence with items in reality. On this view, the truth of a belief or statement is holistic, or a matter of the internal relations within a self-enclosed linguistic system, and not a matter of a given statement’s relation to something extra-linguistic.

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For many of Saussure’s epigones and their interpreters, if not for Saussure himself, language, no longer considered to be a naming process, does not in any meaningful way relate to reality at all. Language is instead understood to be anterior to the world, so that what we call reality is but a linguistically constructed artifact, a result of what a text itself posits as real. Jacques Derrida’s oftquoted phrase “il n’y a pas de hors-texte” reflects his belief that language cannot adequately represent anything outside of itself;3 and the meaning communicated by language is always deferred, because signs of necessity form “an infinite chain, ineluctably multiplying the supplementary mediations that produce the sense of the very thing itself, of immediate presence, of original perception.”4 The idea that linguistic meanings are determined independent of ontology (i.e., that cognition is essentially linguistic) is one that enables its proponents to express an indefinitely large number of alternative conceptualizations of reality; furthermore, no one conceptualization of reality can be said to be more correct or true than any other, because there is no extra-linguistic reality that can be referred to in order to settle claims between rival interpretations of it. As Nelson Goodman posits, since we have “access to the world only through some description or depiction of it,” and since “we can only know the world as conceptualized in one way or another … what counts as ‘the facts’ and what counts as ‘correspondence with the facts’ can vary from version to version.”5 A systematic and influential exposition of this position is provided by the philosopher Richard Rorty. Rorty rejects the notion of knowledge as “accurate representation” where the subject is defined against an independent world of objects that it can faithfully represent. For Rorty there is no linguistically naked “given” waiting to be interpreted, there is no mind-independent reality; language itself constructs reality. Thus it is a mistake to hold that “certain expressions, certain processes are ‘basic,’ ‘privileged,’ and ‘foundational’”; the problem of justification is such that “our choice of elements will be dictated by our understanding of the practice, rather than the practice’s being ‘legitimated’ by a rational reconstruction out of elements.”6 Indeed, the whole epistemological tradition since Descartes has, suggests Rorty, mistakenly led us to believe that “the procedure for attaining accurate representations in the Mirror of Nature differs in certain deep ways from the procedure for attaining agreement about ‘practical’ or ‘aesthetic’

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matters,” when in fact there is no difference between what happens in “normal” and in “abnormal” discourse.7 So, for example, in 1550 a certain set of considerations was relevant to “rational” views on astronomy, and after Galileo a largely different set of considerations was relevant. This change is characterized by many people retrospectively “as drawing the proper distinctions about what was really there in the world” or as “a shift in cultural climate.” It does not matter how we characterize such debates, insists Rorty, as long as we do not operate under the assumption that the change had anything to do with increased insight into the salient facts of the matter. Galileo’s success was rather a rhetorical feat – he merely “won the argument.” On this view, since vocabularies are merely sets of metaphors adopted or discarded according to their usefulness, truth becomes what our peers will “let us get away with saying.”8 This “postmodern” emphasis on the generative rather than the mimetic properties of language has thus problematized the word “history” for intellectual and literary historians alike. Where formerly historical criticism was inspired with the confidence that context provided the evidence that could serve to support the interpretation, now context and the evidence that it putatively provides – as Rorty’s exposition of this position makes clear – are themselves both implicated in a textuality alienated from reality; moreover, history itself is taken to be a mere reconstruction of “facts” that are of necessity themselves constituted by the act of interpretation. Historian Nancy Partner suggests that there has until recently been a veritable conspiracy among historians to talk about the past as though it were really there, when in fact all the historian is doing in writing about the past is accomplishing a rhetorical feat when he or she persuades the reader to believe in the possible reality constructed. Partner claims that all historical discourse “is calculated to induce a sense of referential reality in a conceptual field with no external reference at all.”9 Once the primacy of anything pre-linguistic is denied, what was formerly perceived to be a greater constraint on history than fiction – the aspiration to a higher degree of verisimilitude – is dispensed with, and the enterprise of history is conflated with that of fiction. More important, not only are the mimetic properties of history seen to be akin to those of fiction, but mimesis itself is considered to be

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mere assertion, a rhetorical construct, and the “evidence” provided by “reality” is hailed as mere “metaphor.”10

chaucer’s distrust of language But the concern with truth and fictionality, far from being peculiar to the twentieth century, was very much an issue in medieval literary theory as well. This fact, and the increasing impetus over the last few years to make the Middle Ages more interesting to contemporary readers, have inspired a number of critics to examine medieval debates about realism and nominalism in the light of contemporary semiotic theory. A significant part of the recent scholarship regards the pre-modern treatment of signs as anticipating the strategies of signifying that have gained common currency in the wake of structuralism and particularly deconstruction. St Augustine’s sign theory, for example, is said to prefigure Derrida’s.11 Some have gone so far as to claim Chaucer as well as something of a proto-postmodernist and to see in The Canterbury Tales a world-view akin to that of those operating after the linguistic turn.12 Typically, Chaucer’s poetry is said to be “designed to lay to rest the notion that human discourse can represent the world.”13 It is correct of course to suggest that Chaucer is concerned more often with exploring the workings of art than with making assertions about what art purportedly reflects – life – and that his poetry continually tests objectivist claims by questioning how much we can trust even the most reliable realms of medieval authority, the realms of history and experience.14 But with particular reference to the link to Melibee, which directly addresses the problematics of historical – textual relations, I would like to suggest that Chaucer’s emphasis on the limitations of human knowledge, far from being evidence of a thoroughgoing scepticism about the possibility that any text can adequately represent a mind-independent reality, is instead itself evidence of a realism that emphasizes the necessarily situated or embodied nature of language. Clearly, I am using “realism” here not in the Platonic sense, where universals are considered to have a real existence ante rem, but in the sense in which it was understood in the Middle Ages as moderate realism. On this view, universals have a real, substantial existence independent of being thought, even though what we apprehend by our ideas as universal exists only in reality as something individuated. The moderate

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realist’s recognition of the dialogic or historically situated nature (and therefore of the fallibility and revisability) of our reasoning does not deprive that reasoning of the claim to universality. In Chaucerian Realism, Robert Myles demonstrates that the tendency of many critics to make Chaucer a proto-constructivist (or deconstructivist) arises from a misunderstanding of the varieties of medieval realism. Specifically, Chaucer is hailed as proto-postmodernist because he is clearly not a Cratylic realist. Cratylic realism asserts a “natural, real relationship between a word and a thing – that somehow the essence of a chair is reflected or contained in the sound of the word ‘chair.’” Since Chaucer clearly does not subscribe to this position he becomes, tout court, a nominalist; but Chaucer is actually an “intentionalist realist” who, while acknowledging the conventional nature of language, stresses the importance of the will or intention of the director of language.15 That Chaucer emphasizes the human will in the production of meaning – that he stresses what I have referred to as the “situated” or “embodied” nature of language and the finite nature of human reasoning – does not mean that he denies that there is any mind-independent reality. In the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales the narrator describes his interest in historical reporting. A report, he believes, somehow validates the story that it records – authorizes it – through its claims to accuracy and objectivity. The narrator’s guiding principle is that “wordes moote be cosyn to the dede” (GP 742), and so he begins by assuring us that he is the recorder of a true event, that he was indeed an eyewitness to this past event and hence even more reliable because of his actual presence during the pilgrimage to Canterbury. The pilgrim narrator promises to report the details of this pilgrimage as transparently as possible and to make no conscious changes of his own; he is determined to record “pleynly” everything that he can remember and will “reherce as ny as evere he kan / everich a word” (GP 727–33). As “ny as evere he can” means as close, as accurately, as he can. But the pilgrim also admits from the outset his own subjectivity – he is recording from memory, and while he wants to assure us of his intention to remember and record accurately, he is aware of the fallibility of the process. He will record the events of the pilgrimage according to how they “semed” (GP 39) to him. The pilgrim narrator readily admits that his own subjectivity influences the way in which he presents his material, yet he is the

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pilgrim about whom we know the least. When he does appear in the link to The Tale of Sir Thopas we are told almost nothing about him. The host remarks on his shyness and his physical form and refers to the fact that “unto no wight dooth he daliaunce” (704). But this is all we are to learn about him. His portrait is strikingly different from the way in which the other pilgrim characters are represented – many of them in such colourful detail that we see quite clearly how their particular characters and personal histories are implicated in the way in which they tell their stories. It is as though Chaucer the pilgrim narrator has deliberately removed himself from the picture as much as possible in order to heighten our belief in the objectivity of what he is reporting; but even though he does so, he still lets us know that he is fully aware that his subjectivity is none the less implicated in his report. When the Host calls on the pilgrim narrator to tell his own tale he chooses a “rym lerned longe agoon” (709) (The Tale of Sir Thopas). He does so because, as he insists, he is not familiar with fictional discourse – “For oother tale certes kan I noon” (709) – and so, rather than acting like an artist and fashioning his own tale, he will simply retell something from memory to which he has made no changes. But the pilgrim narrator proves to be a bit of a bore. He tells a very uninspiring tale, and the Host, unable to constrain himself, interrupts his dismal tale – “Thy drasty rymyng is nat woorth a toord!” (930) – and instructs him to tell something in prose. The pilgrim agrees to recount an old tale from history. The pilgrim introduces Melibee by commenting on his intention to retell a story artlessly and accurately. He insists that his task is mimetic rather than generative, that he is a scribe rather than a shaper of events. He intends to tell a virtuous moral tale in prose, “Al be it told somtyme in sondry wyse / Of sondry folk” (2130–2). He then refers to the “Evaungelists,” all of whom tell a different version of the life of Christ, but all of whom none the less agree in their “sentence” or meaning, despite the discrepancies in their accounts. The pilgrim narrator understands that all writers, even the most trusted and trustworthy – even prose writers and writers of history – include or omit details and arrange their material according to specific purposes and interests: “somme of hem seyn moore, and somme seyn lesse” (949). He is aware that the tale he will tell has been told in a variety of ways by “sondry folk” (942),

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but he remarks on this truth about the textualized nature of historical data not to relativize his project by asserting that history is a mere rhetorical construct, but to reassure his audience that he remains a transcriber before he is an artist and that any changes introduced, just like any differences in the accounts that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John give of the life of Christ, are not intended to alter in any way the original author’s “sentence” or meaning. So while it is not possible to be thoroughly detached from one’s material even if repeating someone else’s words, writing can still convey the truth. And this is because signification is ultimately guaranteed not by any power of semiosis, but because there is some sort of reliable relationship between language and what it represents, or between the epistemological and the ontological realms. On this view, the fact that different words may represent a single thing does not mean that it is impossible to represent the truth or to arrive at a true knowledge of a thing. Although the pilgrim Chaucer will “nat the same wordes seye” (959), his sentence agrees with that of the original “tretys.” A refutation of Cratylus is not a refutation of linguistic realism. Variation in signs (words), the presence or absence of certain biographical information in the accounts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, is irrelevant to the truth (in the larger sense) of their accounts, because truth does not inhere in words but in Being itself. Thus the signification of the truth is an ontological reality before it is semiotic or epistemological. It is also an ethical reality, depending on the right intention of the speaker and right disposition of the hearer. Scepticism arises when language is understood as though it were univocally expressing what the Middle Ages called “sense” – the literal level of signification, where one sign (sensus) represents one thing (res). When language is understood in this way, the manifest variation in the ways in which words represent things (or misrepresent them), in which “wordes cosyn deeds” (or do not, as the case may be), introduces a doubt that words can signify truly or can adequately convey “sentence.” Metaphor and other ways of representing that disrupt the simple one-to-one correspondence between words and things are as a consequence considered to belong to the realm of fiction understood as falsehood; the fact that history, which normally pretends to a higher degree of verisimilitude than fiction, is also seen to use language in similar ways implicates it too in the charge.

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chaucer and melibee The teller of Melibee puts this doubt about the suppositive value of words to rest. Like the Evangelists, he assures us of his intention to record truly, but he makes it clear that the truth he seeks to communicate has only partially to do with accurately recording the details of the narrative. The narrator of Melibee will vary his speech somewhat from the original versions of the tale, specifically by increasing the number of proverbs contained therein, but these additions, he asserts, these metaphorical embellishments, will not detract from, but will actually heighten, the original meaning, “enforce th’effect of [the] mateere.” Any metaphoric embellishment, as a way of representing that belongs to the realm of fiction, is therefore not a falsehood or the falsifying of matter, but rather an integumentum, or level of meaning, which, when it is peeled away, reveals the true meaning behind the literal level or appearance of things. Thus the elements of the poem that are frequently taken to circumscribe or deny its referentiality altogether, and which have led some Chaucerians to go so far as to suggest that Chaucer is denying the existence of a mind-independent reality, suggest instead that he was aware that language users are socially embodied beings who are necessarily implicated in the way in which they transmit their reports or tell their stories. Throughout the tales, Chaucer is interested in exploring the dialectic that obtains between this “positional” nature of human knowledge and the aspiration to accuracy and truth; indeed, we can recognize persistent failure and fallibility in the attempt to represent because of this dialectic. Instead of testing the hypothesis that writing can convey historical truth – or while testing this hypothesis – Chaucer affirms that language is a living process. Therefore linguistic values alter or change according to a variety of contingent circumstances, including such things as an author’s intentions and an audience’s expectations. Yet this fact does not put the whole interpretive process in question but demands instead an awareness that the task of uncovering true meaning is a difficult one, subject to fallibility and revisability because it is dependent on the right intention of the teller and the right disposition of the reader or listener. The historical situatedness of our reasoning does not obliterate the claim to truth or normative rightness.

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Chaucer’s presentation throughout his tales of varying degrees of reliability and unreliability in narration, tales told by a host of narrators with diverse subjective responses to the material they set forth – his fictionalized self included – recognizes that temporality is an irreducible aspect of all our experiencing and use of language. We are reminded continually of this fact and of the social and institutional bases of hermeneutic activity throughout the tales. Some tellers of tales, with an eye to literary reception, tailor their material to the demands and expectations of the members of their audience; the particular social and personal expectations of those audience members in turn govern their interpretations. The pilgrim narrator, in telling the Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of Melibee, is himself constrained by Harry Bailey’s expectations about how art should function, and therefore about what constitutes a valid contribution to the Canterbury game. The pilgrim’s “drasty rymying” in Thopas has nothing of the “murthe” the self-interested Harry insists that good art should have. Melibee, in contrast, appeals to the Host much more easily, even though it is the truly mirthless tale. He readily includes it for acceptance in the competition because he is able to see how the moral contained therein concerning Prudence’s patient handling of Melibee relates significantly to his own life. If only his wife were like Dame Prudence, if only she could be instructed by the moral, and if only all art had such relevance to life, all would be well in his world. And even when an author tries to inform us of his intention and therefore of the correct interpretation of his tale before the telling of it, as Chaucer does with Melibee, there is no absolute guarantee that the meaning that the teller intends his tale to have will necessarily be the one that the reader or listener will extract from it. Harry’s self-interested interpretations make this fact abundantly clear. So while language users are socially embodied beings who are necessarily implicated in the way in which they give their reports or tell their stories, and while these reports may be constrained by a number of factors, including the kind of audience expectation that a character such as Harry Bailey brings to them, in giving up the notion of an uninterpreted reality we do not have to abandon the idea of the historically real or of truth. Sceptical accounts of knowledge or of our experiencing and use of language demand that we begin from unassailably evident truths. As far as the enterprise of history goes, the sceptic, on recognizing that history presents

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truths that are unprovable by any rigorous scientific standard, ends by suggesting that all beliefs proposed for acceptance are therefore unjustifiable. But while knowledge claims begin from the contingency and positivity of some set of established beliefs, it does not follow that we have to abandon the idea of the historically real. Chaucer seems to be saying that words can refer to items in reality and can say true things about them, even though they frequently fail to do so. Yet it is this very fact that enables us to recognize when what we are being presented with is fiction – fiction understood both as falsification (false signs: fake relics, blasphemy, and so on) and as a way of representing reality differently than does history. Thus Chaucer attempts to retain the traditional distinction between history and fiction, even though we are of course cognizant of the fictionality of what is being presented to us as an account of an actual historical event. Whenever his fictionalized self appears he employs stylistic features that tend to increase transparency and to signal a type of writing with hermeneutic constraints more strict than fiction. He stresses memory, and the aspiration to record from memory accurately, but is aware that even this act of reproducing something according to how it appeared originally necessitates acts of interpretation. The pilgrim Chaucer, who has determined to remove himself from the picture as much as possible, is none the less ready to admit to the way in which, even in the simple retelling of an “old tale from history,” the teller is involved in the tale.

conclusion A thoroughgoing critique of the trend to conflate history and fiction and of the assertion that history is merely something “textualized” would have to do what space cannot afford here – examine the taxonomic principles that have traditionally been used to distinguish between history and fiction, including such things as author’s intentions, audience’s expectations and reception, causality, and agency. But in conclusion we can gesture in this direction with an example from the “causality” category. As Lee Patterson remarks, if we “adopt an interpretive method that assumes that history is not merely known through but constituted by language,” we act as if there are no acts other than speech acts. But while language cannot be prised off from the world, and while the non-verbal,

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non-symbolic reality that exists can be known only by means of linguistic mediation, these constraints do not allow us “to abandon the category of the historically real entirely.” History, as Patterson reminds us, is “impelled by consequential and determinative acts of material production: building cities, making wars, collecting wealth, imposing discipline, seizing and denying freedom” – material processes that, “while enacted in and made known by symbolic forms, possess a palpable force and an intentional purposiveness” of their own.16 Varieties of structuralism give these non-linguistic, material processes and the situated nature of the human use of language short shrift and, concentrating on the internal relational properties of language, ignore our actual language-using activity in concrete cultural and historical contexts. Chaucer theorizes a more dynamic relation between the material domain and the various symbolic representations of it than that which is privileged by these contemporary methods of interpretation, showing that while it is true that knowledge claims are advanced from a point of contingency, in so far as we are people who are embodied in the world, we do not thereby relinquish the idea of truth. And the fact that the enterprise of history has features in common with fiction does not mean that it is impossible to assess the adequacy of competing accounts or the claim to normative rightness. The link to Melibee attests to this fact. There we have an account of the way in which history and fiction are related to each other and distinguished from each other, and there we see that while Chaucer recognizes that there can be no unproblematic distinction between literature and history, text and context, he subscribes to a view of language that, unlike varieties of structuralism that deny language’s contract with reality, reflects the embodied nature of the human meaning-maker, language, and the distinct ways in which meaning can be represented.

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Chaucer’s Clerk, on the Level? victor yelverton haines

nominalist–realist banter As a send-up of modes of analogy inappropriately applied in the typology of biblical exegesis, the Clerk’s tale is not exactly on the level. The level that it is on is the level of the level. The Clerk’s “sownynge in moral virtue” teaches an existential lesson on the various levels of our interpretive acts. The ideal practice of typological allegory in the four levels of biblical exegesis is summarized in the well-known couplet attributed to Nicholas of Lyra. Your own intentionality and how you should act in the existential practice of such exegesis follows on subjunctives in the second person singular: “Littera gesta docet, quid credas allegoria / Moralis quid agas, quo tendas anagogia.”1 The literal level teaches us what action took place; the allegorical level, what you should believe about it in terms of its subsequent, self-exemplary fulfilment (by Jesus of Nazareth); the moral level, how you should act in relation to it so that you may even act it out; and the anagogical, whither you should direct your action for the complete fulfilment of history in the future, when it is all over.2 In the existential anticipation of a retrospective view from the afterlife, you act socially in a relationship of intentional realism with the God of history, the one who always shall have been who will be.

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In the authentic tradition of prophetic religion, typological analogy comes not by way of different occasions and things but by way of action – not just the res but the res gesta. In the existential modes of analogy of applied typology, intentionality of the will is personally committed to a pragmatic relevance of action in the interpretation of history, rather than to the objective investigation of an essential repetition. As the Cloud author argues in developing the Neoplatonic and Thomist insight into this distinction between esse and ens, to understand the individual’s own role in history on the anagogical level the contemplative should concentrate on existence, “that himself is,” not on essence, “what himself is.”3 By focusing on the pragmatic relevance of historical fulfilment instead of on different essences manifested in a variety of particular situations, typology points to the way of God in history and the prophetic imperative to conform to it in the existential analogies of action. Instead of fitting their experience to the fixed templates of myth or stable archetypes of the pantheon, the faithful venture into the unknown particularities of history and their own responsibility for freedom: the new and different constitute an essential part of their experience within the integral order of the whole universe. In the late-medieval period of interminable war, pestilence, and technological innovation, the terror of this existential difference could not easily be escaped, and medieval scholasticism developed responses to it in the debates of the clerks, both in Scotist elaborations of Neoplatonic realism and in Ockham’s nominalism. Chaucer’s Clerk would have been familiar with the silly correspondences resulting time and again in patristic tradition from an essentialist typology. As Alan C. Charity points out, sundry irrelevant aspects of a situation in which someone acts “typical” of Christ are themselves frequently taken as also typical.4 The temptation of a realist and essentialist way of thinking is to take too much of an allegorical action as essentially the same as what is allegorized. Thus Gregory I gets King David mixed up as a type of Christ the King by considering how Uriah fits in and wonders how action that in fact is a cause of damnation may in scripture elsewhere be a prophecy of virtue: “res gesta, in facto cause damnationis est, in scripto autem prophetia virtutis.”5 A similar explanation of the incident appears in Augustine, and the same false presupposition at the basis of it. Augustine takes proper names, not the action, to show what the narrative prefigures: “‘David’ means ‘strong of hand’ or ‘desirable’;

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and who can be stronger than the Lion of Judah?”6 Here, David himself, not what he does, is considered figural. Such misapplication of naïve realist and essentialist thought on the allegorical level leads to confusion on the moral level. To have faith like Abraham’s, for example, is no longer to be prepared for human sacrifice. In the progress of salvific history, mighty acts are supposed to take place once and for all, not to be repeated again and again in an endless cycle according to an essential myth, template, or pattern to which existence conforms. As Robert Myles argues, the Cloud author’s “light lesson” in distinguishing “what you are” from “that you are” certainly has consequences that are “not light.”7 Neoplatonic and Thomist reduction of essence to existence may even be seen to anticipate the nominalist denial of essence altogether.8 In the existential emphasis of the four-fold levels of biblical exegesis, how the faithful lead their own lives becomes a form of interpretation in prophetic fulfilment that is not merely an essential repetition but a particular existence. Nominalist emphasis on the particularity of things takes the faithful back to history, even though nominalism itself is worthless as a guide to faith. The Clerk’s interest in the hermeneutical implications of the fourteenth-century nominalist–realist debate appears in the problematic of our interpretive acts when his Tale is understood in a naive realist and essentialist tradition. If we take Griselda to be an allegorical figure of realist ideals such as patience or duty or obedience or troth, Walter wrecks the allegory with his monstrous demands. As Ruth Waterhouse and Gwen Griffiths find in Melibee, between realist allegory and narrative discourse “there is an irreconcilable gap,”9 resulting in an anti-essentialist hermeneutic. Conspicuous dislocation is not a flaw in the Clerk’s Tale but rather, as Elizabeth Kirk has argued, “its essential mechanism.”10 Robert Stepsis accordingly takes the story as an example of the nominalist understanding of potentia dei absoluta.11 But, as David C. Steinmetz points out, the nominalists did not believe that there could be an example of God’s potentia absoluta in a world created in the domain of God’s potentia ordonata. God could never behave in our world in Walter’s arbitrary fashion. So the solution to the allegory is not potentia absoluta, Steinmetz says, but divine demands on the will according to the nominalist doctrine of election and justification. This is correct. But this doctrine also happens

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to be a realist doctrine. As Robert Myles points out, the primacy of the will over the intellect is not an “exclusively nominalist issue.”12 Steinmetz naïvely concludes: “If Griselda obeyed Walter, who was short-sighted and willful, how much more should we obey God, whose will is fixed de potentia ordinata and whose covenant is utterly reliable.”13 And so, if someone has obeyed the devil, this is a lesson in how much more they should obey God?! Biblical typology does permit figural allegory of two actions on the basis of only one point of comparison, such as kingship or blind obedience. So Griselda could be seen as a figure of Abraham, Job, or Mary as long as fulfilment is focused on the intentionality of their action and not on themselves. Voluntarist concerns would not justify Delasanta’s supposedly nominalist conclusion (pace Steinmetz) that Walter is a figure of God’s potentia absoluta: “will is prior to … reason in Walter (God), so will is prior to and more noble than reason in Griselda (humankind).”14 Ironically, this is just the conclusion that would make the Clerk a realist, extending the repetition of a pattern that is essentially the same. To draw a “Petrarchan” moral out of kilter with the story harks back to the incipient satire of Petrarch with which the Clerk began. Walter cannot be compared as a personal agent, whom Griselda wilfully obeys, with the impersonal misfortunes of natural evil permitted by God in a fallen world. Natural evil, in disease and in disaster, is not something that we could refuse to obey. The pestilence that Job endures patiently is not the command of a personal will that he can refuse to obey. He can, however, resist the wilful advice to give up faith in God; Job does not patiently obey his friends. Although we should be patient and loyal to the will of God “in adversitee” (1146), God’s will itself in the Christian tradition is never adversity. Human wickedness is adversity permitted by God as the corollary of human freedom. Natural evil is adversity permitted by God as part of the disorder of fallen nature resulting either from that human freedom or from the original freedom of fallen angels. The innocent suffer. And God “suffreth” (1156) us to be beaten; God is not doing the beating. Walter himself does not understand this distinction in his own life, as he pretends to be constrained by the unjust will of the people. Griselda is encouraged to repeat his mistake at a moment of dark satire when he tells her that she should endure the divorce order that he himself is giving as if it were Fortune: “With evene herte I rede yow t’endure / The

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strook of Fortune or of aventure” (811–12). Walter foolishly presumes that his own free will is not free and that its effect on others is fortune or the adversity of natural evil. So is the Clerk also naïve, like the narrator of Sir Thopas and of Melibee – the naïve narrator of the whole Canterbury Tales? In fact, is that narrator naïve? The audience for ironic naïveté has a choice: to foist the naïveté off on another narrator the narrator is pretending to be and who in that pretend world is naïve or to take the narrator as actually naïve: that is, to take the narrative either with verbal or with dramatic irony. As the object of dramatic irony, the narrator of The Canterbury Tales would have to miss so much of the significance of what he says that to be interpreted consistently this way he would have to be very stupid indeed; so I prefer to see him like Chaucer himself, consciously intending the irony. Likewise, the Clerk cannot be ignorant of his own wit unless, as Joseph Grossi concludes, he is “baffled.” The Clerk’s “inability to comprehend the meaning of his own tale” would make him the realist butt of a nominalist Chaucer, as Grossi indeed argues.15 But how much more subtle the rhetoric is when both Chaucer and the Clerk are understood to be aware of subtleties in the realist–nominalist debate! To make the Clerk “baffled” would make him so baffled, as I argue below, that he could hardly be coherent. As this essay seeks to show, both the Clerk and Chaucer, in the light of witty games that they play with the medieval Christian concepts of testing and of promise-keeping, “ben ful subtile and ful queynte,” as revealed especially in the context of Griselda’s enigmatic “for my sake,” in the significance of the portentous line 666, and in their encouragement of ethical criticism in the presentation of the Tale.

testing In her later trials, Griselda may be letting on that she is keeping a promise when she says that she always has said that “I wol no thyng, ne nyl no thyng, certayn, / But as yow list” (646–7). But she has not promised this: it just is in fact what she has always done. At their first interview, Griselda is not making a promise to Walter when she says, “as ye wole yourself, right so wol I” (361): these words refer back to Walter’s choice of such an “undigne” woman for wife. This reference enforces a present aspect on the tense of “wol.” To say that I want what you want is not a promise

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that in the future I shall want whatever you want. What Griselda does promise is that “nevere willingly, / In werk ne thoght I nyl yow disobeye” (362–3). Her promise is not one that she should never have made; given her initial faith in Walter, her promise at the time was not rash – it passes both tests of judicium and of justicia advocated by Thomas Aquinas in his discussion of vows and oaths.16 Griselda has no reason to expect that she will not be able virtuously to obey Walter in thought and deed always, given his own apparent virtue. We need not conclude with Robert Emmett Finnegan “that Griselda ought not have given her unconditional promise of obedience to Walter,” for it was not unconditional if made in a Christian context. We need merely conclude either that, as Finnegan also argues, she should rescind the vow when it “apparently required her consent to murder” or that she could instead keep it except when she should not.17 In a particular crisis, any promise may turn out to have been rash or, more precisely, a promise that would be now rash to keep. Freedom of action in the pragmatics of the new and different is not comprehended within the order of some previously determined essence. A closer analogue than Job to Griselda’s patient obedience might seem to be Abraham in his faithful obedience to God’s clear command to sacrifice his son Isaac. But Griselda is not justified in blindly obeying Walter exactly the way Abraham obeyed God, for the sacrifice of Isaac was once and for all; its lesson has been learned: the loving God of history does not require the sacrifice of others or of one’s children, unless it is God’s own child, and that also has been done now once and for all. Walter and Griselda’s behaviour is still incongruent in terms of these analogues. Could the incoherence of Walter’s behaviour be seen as his own intentional hint to Griselda that she should learn a lesson from its absurdity? May he be, like God, testing Griselda to see whether she will break a promise when it becomes rash to keep it? Or can Walter be identified with the satiric “entente” of the Clerk? The answer is no. The Clerk’s narrative is so tight that even this interpretation is anticipated and refuted: Walter cannot be understood to be testing her in this way, for the Clerk gives us the important ‘omniscient’ or retrospective information that Griselda’s acquiescence in the murder of their second child “to his here it was ful greet plesance” (672), despite his outward “drery contenance” (671). Griselda’s acquiescence could not be “plesance” to an enlightened Walter.

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Does Walter’s “plesance” then make Walter devilish, gleeful in the extinction of his wife’s virtue? Not necessarily. Although he might be devilish, conscious that he is tempting her to a wickedness for which he hopes, more probably he does not understand Christian doctrine fully, or he believes in a heroic code of promisekeeping: troth is the highest thing that a man may keep, and no nominalist particulars can let him wheedle out of it. A promise is a promise is a promise. Vows are never to be broken. A man’s word in his bond absolutely. The narrator Clerk dares to suggest that, in the particularities of human culture, others may believe in alternatives to the Christian ethos such as the heroic commitment to troth and promises no matter what the consequences, and although we may judge them wicked, by their own beliefs they are not. Or if Walter intends to be orthodox Christian and is merely ignorant of Christian doctrine on promise-keeping, he sins involuntarily, or in some sloppy, semi-involuntary way, typical of sin. Walter puts the value of proving his wife’s virtue in keeping her promise to obey him ahead of her virtue in not being an accomplice to the murder of her children, whereas the precedence should go the other way. Walter proves self-centred both in the approval of her loyalty to him before her loyalty to God and in a failure of imagination to realize the perilous state of her soul, given her perspective, even though he himself knows that the children are safe. Walter’s testing has gone wrong – a possibility in a test with which Chaucer was intensely concerned, having tested and proved readers throughout his career, even though, as he points out in his “retracciouns,” he had through irony always retracted the suggestion of any bad “entente” that readers themselves may have had.18 By distinguishing between tempting and proving, the Clerk subtly draws attention to the difference between Walter’s and God’s relation to Griselda: God proves us in good works but never tempts us to do evil. “For greet skile is he preeve that he wroghte. / But he ne tempteth no man that he boghte / As seith Seint Jame, if ye his pistel rede; / He preeveth folk al day, it is no drede” (1152–5). The Clerk never says that Walter wishes to prove his wife: he wishes “To tempte his wyf” (452); frequently, the Clerk uses a more neutral verb, “his wyf t’assaye” (454), but the verb “preeve” is never used for what Walter does. Its Latin origin in probus, good, reinforces the presumption of goodness in what is tested. To prove yourself cannot be to prove yourself false. Likewise, in the archaic

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sense of proving someone else, unless the failure is made explicit, success is implied, whereas tempting and assaying do not imply the discovery of what is good. Variables in this semantic field include an action to be performed (or refrained from), a tester who sets the test, and the person who takes the test. The person being tested may or may not know that they are being tested, but the tester must be aware of the test. The action to be performed may be specified beforehand or recognized only afterwards, like a quest that has been achieved. The action to be performed may be morally charged or relatively neutral. It may be a test of strength, faith, intelligence, will, knowledge, or any virtue with a manifest outcome that the tester can judge. Virtue can be tested; vice cannot; hence, the semantic field of testing is not morally symmetrical. The action may be an intentional construct of the tester or just a situation in the world: behaviour in this latter situation is taken to be a test of character. The tester and the person being tested may consider each other good or evil. The tester may be vicious by hoping that the person being tested will fail. If this failure for which the tester hopes is a failure to resist evil, the tester is a special type, for which modern English reserves the term “tempter.” The word “tempt” is cognate with “intent” as the object of attention and until recently could mean to test, with two senses, either as a virtuous or as a vicious tester. In this semantic field of testing, proving, assaying, and tempting, the Clerk’s distinction between proving and tempting would give “tempting” its sense as a test with a vicious tester. God may prove or test us but does not tempt as a vicious tester. In his study of “Chaucer’s Use of the Epistle of Saint James in the Clerk’s Tale,” John McNamara concludes that Walter is wrong to tempt but does not explicate the other half of the conclusion – namely, that this sense of “tempt” implies that what he is tempting her to do must also be wrong. The sin that she is tempted to commit would be either to break her promise by speaking out against Walter or to acquiesce in the murder of her children. McNamara’s praise of Griselda presumes the former, in contradiction to what the Clerk himself says later, that women should let no humility “youre tonge naille” (1184). So the latter is the grisly alternative to which the Clerk implies she is tempted – to become a partner with her husband in the murder of their children. And this temptation Griselda gives in to without realizing that she should have chosen the former as the lesser of two evils. Walter hopes that she will choose the latter, although he probably does not think it evil,

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perhaps believing in a superficial or heroic code of justice, according to which, if the children are not really killed, she is not guilty. St James’s remarks on temptation (1:13–15) do not contradict the tradition that God tests and challenges us in a providential history. In seventeenth-century English, God “did tempt Abraham” (Gen. 22:1), clearly in the other (now-obsolete) sense of “tempt”: to test virtuously. St Paul assures us, moreover, that no test will be too hard for us (I Cor. 10:13), even if set by the devil, for God keeps faith. St James defines “temptation” as our own intentionality, not God’s: the desire for the wrong choice is ours alone, although the goodness of what is desired is grounded in God’s creation. God hopes that we pass the test when we face an ethical challenge, as God, according to the Clerk, “preeveth folk al day” (1155). God, however, does not make Walter test Griselda as a test that God sets for her; rather, by not interfering with Walter’s freedom, God suffers or permits Griselda to be tested: God “suffreth us … to be bete” (1156–8). Such tests are not initiated by God.

promise-keeping Could Griselda be excused because she was never really free? She had no choice but to obey her father, accept the offer of marriage to the great Lord Walter, and then keep following orders. Could we say that patient suffering was the only viable option for a woman in the politics of a feudal marriage and that her story exemplifies women’s disempowered lot in patriarchal society? She cannot be blamed for what she did except in terms of involuntary sin, like the victim of rape in the Parson’s Tale, who loses her maidenhead and must do “penitence” (ParsT 872) to receive mercy. William McClellan concludes typically in this vein that all we have is “the discourse of an abject pathos”19 – the story of a girl with bad karma, a dialogic embolism, or mind-totalling compulsion. We could feel sorry for her in her feckless state but not much human sympathy for the obedience machine that she has become. An involuntary Griselda could not be praised, moreover, for, in the absence of freedom, patience makes no sense, nor does a promise: Griselda’s patience would become an illusion, along with any other virtues that she may be imagined to have. If the story is not to be about a woman who is entirely dehumanized by social forces, we must understand Griselda as free in making her promise and later in keeping it. She is free both in the purity

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of her humble origins and in the influence of her palace life. In fact, if she were not free in making her promise, she could not make it. No freedom, no promise. As canon and Roman law recognized, marrying requires consent. Our first intuition that Griselda should act in some way comes closer to recognizing her human dignity and responsibility. Any subsequent impulse to excuse Griselda as a powerless victim goes too far but derives from a valid point: we must not underestimate how hard it would have been for her to break her promise to Walter in that society. She is almost faced with an extreme choice: to be partner in a murder or to lose her own life. But even this choice is not permitted in the Judaeo–Christian tradition: the Talmud determines that killing the innocent to save one’s own life is not justified,20 and Jesus’ own example was not to lay down the lives of other people in order to save one’s own. In the face of sad Griselda’s grisly acquiescence, the Clerk errs perhaps by being satirically light-hearted with the moral of his own story. In the guise of a satiric opposite to the ostensive moral of silent patience, he exhorts noble wives “ful of heigh prudence, / Lat noon humylitee youre tonge naille, / Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence / To write of yow a storie of swich mervaille / As of Grisildis pacient and kynde” (1183–7). Otherwise, he says, Chichevache, the starving cow that feeds on patient wives, might eat you up. Elizabeth Salter interprets the madcap exuberance of the envoy as satiric reduction of the Wife of Bath’s view to allow space retrospectively, as Barry Windeatt says, “to the value of Griselda’s provoking example.”21 But the provocation of the example destabilizes even this satire, allowing space for and encouraging the reader’s own take on the action and presumption of views shared with the Clerk. We might take his moral here sarcastically so that the moral for haughty wives is exactly the opposite of what he says: a wife should indeed nail down her tongue and behave so that clerks could write a Griselda-story about her, as if she were one of these Griseldas patient and kind. And if “Grisildis” is genitive, not plural, a similar rhetoric develops, but with the peculiarity that “pacient” modifies “storie.” We might take his facetious advice that wives should bind their husbands in “jalousie” (1205) as evidence that he has been fooling all along. But I would argue that, like the Wife of Bath, the Clerk here covers himself by playing, in case anyone disagrees vehemently with what he is actually saying. His exhortation to the “archewyves”

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(1195) and to “sklendre wyves” to use their “crabbed eloquence” (1203) is the real lesson that the Clerk teaches in the story. Whether the stanza containing this exhortation is placed third or last (where the antecedent of “hem” (1201) is lost), the Clerk’s real meaning, in all manuscripts, may be taken to be the moral advice that he gives to the archewyves: “Ne suffreth nat that men yow doon offense” (1197). You have weapons that you may use against your husbands in the cause of justice. So use them! The Wife of Bath here could indeed take him seriously and understand how he is getting this serious moral across in play. To behave like Griselda is “inportable” (1144). Griselda is dead, the Clerk says in a comic zeugma, “and eek hire pacience, / And bothe atones buryed in Ytaille” (1177–8). Patience literally cannot be buried, so figuratively her kind of patience should be “buried” as something that we should get rid of, as either an impractical or a vicious ideal. Griselda and her patience, like Petrarch and his “rethorike” (32), are dead and buried in Italy. That the ideal of Griselda’s sort of patience is vicious in a Christian context is soon confirmed by the “offense” (1197) to which it leads when Griselda acts as if she can leave behind her “wyl” and all her “libertee” (656). Promise-keeping requires exertion of the will to align it with what the promise is. One cannot meaningfully promise to obey the law of gravity. If Griselda thinks that will and freedom are left behind in a promise, she has got it wrong, as the Clerk implies. In the continual exertion of the will to keep a promise freely, the intentionality of that will must be governed by the law of interpretive charity to determine when a higher obligation requires that the promise be broken. In the fourteenth century – when the covenant of Magna Carta was twice used as a justification for regicide, when chivalric authorities were examining the parameters of troth, when Wyclif was questioning the authority of clergy who made vows that they could not keep, and when the bourgeoisie was developing the commercial law of contract – the nature of the obligation to keep or to break a promise exercised the ethical imagination. Such questioning of contract law and covenants is the incipient polemic of Protestant reformation, as Anne Hudson shows in her study of Wycliffite texts and Lollard history as part of the reaction to late-medieval clergy who urged the laity “to remain in humble ignorance and unquestioning obedience to any and every ecclesiast.”22

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But unquestioning obedience was never all that catholic. The Judaeo–Christian tradition recognizes a hierarchy in the covenant of God’s law. The Talmud says that there are only three laws that still apply even when it is a question of saving a life: these are the injunctions against idolatry, adultery, and murder.23 Aquinas argues that it is not a sin not to avoid evil that is less to be avoided in order to avoid an evil that, according to reason, is more to be avoided: “non refugit mala quae sunt minus fugienda, non est peccatum.”24 Criseyde assumes the same principle in her response to Pandarus: “Of harmes two, the lesse is for to chese” (Tr II, 470) – although its application may be difficult. Medieval Christian doctrine on the making and breaking of promises has been extensively reviewed by Alan T. Gaylord to illuminate the Franklin’s Tale and more recently, and it would seem independently, by Robert Emmett Finnegan with respect to the Clerk’s Tale. The tradition is this: some promises sometimes (when circumstances warrant) should be broken; some promises (to commit sin) should never be kept; and some promises (such as a promise to have faith in God) should never be broken.25

“for my sake” But in the context of a vicious contingency, the moral of the Clerk’s Tale is that Griselda’s patience not only is buried but should be. And the theme of burial drives another nail into the coffin of Petrarch’s burial and the moral of the story as the Clerk says Petrarch preached it – and pulls a nail out of the tongues of wives. The moral of Griselda’s failure to break her promise heightens the misfit of the allegorical levels in the story. Not only does Walter not fit; neither does Griselda. Jumping to the cockeyed conclusion from Griselda’s extreme patience that Walter is like God makes Griselda seem like the Virgin, who patiently accepts the will of God in the Annunciation. As Utley indicates, there are clues to Griselda’s figural role as the Virgin, who was often pictured both as a shepherdess and as a spinner: “A fewe sheep spynnynge, on feeld she kepte” (223).26 The Virgin patiently accepts the Annunciation and looks after her little child, who will be crucified for her sake and all mankind’s. But these are false clues in a subtle send-up by the Clerk. When the sergeant comes to take Griseldsa’s little daughter, she feigns an appeal to his non-existent gentleness and takes the child in her arms, kisses her,

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and marks her with the cross of a father better than Walter, “Of thilke Fader – blessed moote he be! – / That for us deyde upon a croys of tree, / Thy soule, litel child, I hym bitake, / For this nyght shaltow dyen for my sake” (557–60). “Sake” here has two meanings in an intricate pun. In the early Teutonic languages, the word developed in a semantic field for an affair or strife, and it came in Middle English to mean either sinful guilt or the consideration and regard for a person or cause. The former sense was often coupled with sin: “And so shild fro synne & sake” (c. 1400 oed), but it is now obsolete in Modern English, so Griselda’s pun has been missed. On the allegorical level, the child as the child of the Virgin dies for the sake, in both senses, of all mankind, including the Virgin herself, since Griselda is talking before any clear doctrine of the immaculate conception emerged. The “sake of all Mankind” means both our collective sins and our benefit. But on the literal level of the Clerk’s narrative, why does Griselda say that the child will die for Griselda’s own sake? If Griselda means on account of her own sin or fault, that may mean only her low birth: “it’s on account of my low birth that this is happening; you, child, are not to blame.” If that is all that she intends, she may still be blamed for believing that her own low birth is a fault for which her child must die: Griselda has no right to be patient with the conclusion that it is on account of her that her child must die. The allegorical level is already out of joint here: it was not through any specific fault in the Virgin that her child had to die. If by “sake” Griselda means not only the fault of her low birth but also actual sin or guilt, then what is it? It cannot be the original sin of mankind in this case; Griselda’s child is not Christ. Since an allusion to the Redemption has just been made, “upon a croys of tree,” an audience will take “for my sake” also to mean “for the benefit of,” whether Griselda intended it or not. What benefit can Griselda be conceived to get? She gets to keep on keeping her promise not to resist Walter, even to allow him to save or spill the life of her children. But in the wild wit of a punning self-reference, this very “sake” as benefit is the same “sake” as guilt in accepting the benefit of her child’s death “for her sake.” We might presume when Griselda tells her daughter “shaltow dyen for my sake” that the “sake” as guilt would be something anteriorly committed; but no, in a double-take of black comedy, the child’s death becomes the “sake,” and what Griselda says has a logic worthy of the sottie:

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“You shall be murdered on account of my sin in murdering you” – which the Christian Clerk could appreciate here, since the same wit applies to Christ, who was also killed on account of our sins, especially the sin of executing him in his innocence. Unless Griselda is like a devil in a morality play and would persist in being wicked while fully aware that her love for Walter should not come before saving the life of her children, she cannot be understood to be fully aware that she should break the promise. For an audience that is fully aware of her obligation (and that she is not), her use of the phrase “for my sake” involves dramatic irony. She does not realize just how guilty she is, while the dramatic irony confirms her guilt for the Clerk’s audience and suggests an unconscious dimension to her intentionality. The pun reveals her inkling of moral guilt. Griselda could not be excused, moreover, because she doubts that Walter will really have the children killed: the Clerk says omnisciently or with the benefit of historical hindsight, “She wende he [the sergeant] wolde han slawen it right tho” (544); she tells her baby girl “this nyght shaltow dyen” (560). Griselda may not have had much power, but since she believed that Walter was going to murder their children, she must have considered following advice like the Clerk’s with her crabbed eloquence to “perce his brest and eek his aventaille” (1204). The Clerk understands that at least she could have tried, instead of keeping a vain promise that at this point should be broken. As Walter’s wife, she should try to influence him to ensure the probity of what he does, since as her husband he acts on her behalf. In sacrificing her children to the holy terror of what she mistakenly thinks is right, “sad,” grisly Griselda resembles Medea more than Mary. From a Christian perspective, Griselda in her wilful patience does not seem to know, or at least lacks the courage to put into practise, what she should know about breaking a promise.

line 666 That keeping her promise is an effort is indicated by Griselda’s subtly sarcastic confirmation of her vows to Walter when he comes to murder their second child. In her mastery of rhetoric, she finds an outlet for the overwhelming pressure to express herself without breaking her promise never to quarrel with Walter – “in werk ne thoght” (363) or, at least, never by “frownyng contenance” (356)

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to let Walter know that she disapproves. Defined this way, by the context of external observation, her thought becomes, she may argue, what he thinks she thinks. “‘I have,’” quod she, “‘seyd thus, and evere shal: / I wol no thyng, ne nyl no thyng, certayn, / But as yow list. Naught greveth me at al, / Though that my doughter and my sone be slayn – / At youre comandement, this is to sayn. / I have noght had no part of children tweyne / But first siknesse, and after, wo and peyne’” (645–51). Her subtle equivocation turns on the ambiguity in “greve,” with its two senses: to oppress with bodily harm or to affect with deep sorrow. In its first, now obsolete sense, Griselda is simply stating the fact that although her children have suffered great bodily harm, she herself is oppressed with none, for which she may be grateful to Walter that his commandment has not included her own death and, furthermore, that she has been relieved of what caused her pain in pregnancy, childbirth, and care. The woe of this child care for a loving mother would, however, be minimal, except for Walter’s commandment; and this touch of sarcasm leads into the second sense of “greveth,” to affect with deep sorrow. But even if Walter takes this sense to be dominant, he has no grounds to accuse her of domestic sedition, for all she is saying is that nothing is causing her deep sorrow and that, in a transferred sense, she grieves not and is not sorry. But given the context of horror, her rhetoric becomes savage with sarcasm: “What, me be sorry! I’ve only lost both my children, and my husband was the one who was good enough to have them killed for me. Of course a mother should be glad to get rid of children who cause her woe and pain; never mind that for me it’s their absence that causes the woe and pain.” Dimly aware of this sarcastic direction, Walter gets stuck, however, at the first step, figuring that she could have kept her “sad visage” (693) for “crueel corage” (692) except that he knows “parfitly her children loved she” (690). So Walter, so? Although Griselda herself has not yet got the Clerk’s Christian moral of the story that sarcasm is not enough, we sympathize in a Christian perspective with her misguided endeavour to be good. In the next stanza, she incriminates herself more explicitly for those who listen with an understanding of Christian doctrine on promisekeeping, which emphasizes the importance in any covenant of continuing on with a good heart and will. The keeping of promises requires the continued exertion of free will. Yet Griselda believes

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that keeping her promise involves leaving behind her will and liberty, as if one could promise to obey the law of gravity by jumping off a cliff. “‘Ye been oure lord; dooth with youre owene thyng / Right as yow list; axeth no reed at me. / For as I lefte at hoom al my clothyng, / Whan I first cam to yow, right so,’ quod she, / ‘Lefte I my wyl and al my libertee, / And took youre clothyng; wherfore I yow preye, / Dooth youre plesaunce; I wol youre lust obeye’” (652–8). Such obedience is the obedience of “lust” – not only Walter’s, but Griselda’s too, since she is giving in to his “plesaunce” in sharing his bed for the pleasure of keeping a promise that she ought to break. The Clerk, “[t]hat unto logyc hadde longe ygo” (gp 285), is surely not going to miss the incoherence of her position – that she wills to leave her will behind. Griselda seems to have persuaded herself that she has no way out of this incoherent volitional stance. She says, “I wol no thyng, ne nyl no thyng certayn, / But as yow list” (646–7). She then says that just as she left her clothing behind, “Lefte I my wyl and al my libertee” (656). To get out of her responsibility to resist Walter, she rashly applies what she said just before her marriage vow: “Lord, undigne and unworthy / Am I to thilke honour that ye me beede, / But as ye wole youreself, right so wol I” (359–61). These words need mean no more than that she assents to his desire to honour her now at the time of his proposal: she need not be understood to will in general and always what he wills and certainly not to will that she leave her will behind. To do so indeed makes her a “thyng,” along with her children, that she tells Walter to do with as he “list.” In the third stanza she sets Walter up for her devastating sarcasm by talking of her own death as the supreme sacrifice, which she would be willing to make for him. The maudlin pathos of that sacrifice is converted into the dramatic irony of her own wilful suicide for the sake of leaving behind her own “wyl” and “libertee.” “‘And certes, if I hadde prescience / Youre wyl to know, er ye youre lust me tolde, / I wolde it doon withouten necligence; / But now I woot youre lust, and what ye wolde, / Al youre plesance ferme and stable I holde; / For wist I that my deeth wolde do yow ese, / Right gladly wolde I dyen, yow to plese. / Deth may noght make no comparisoun / Unto youre love.’” (659–67). Griselda has been contemplating her own death as the extremity of obedience to Walter, so “Deth” (666) at first refers to just her “deeth” (664): “my death” she says, “would be nothing compared to the greatness

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of your love.” But “Deth” in line 666 is not restricted by a possessive adjective or any determiner and so must be death in general. Still her words may be taken as a passionate declaration in the context of her obedience to Walter: the value of avoiding death cannot be compared to the value of his love: “I would die for you.” And in the terror of the tragedy, she must also be taken to mean this. But what precisely is to be compared, according to her exact words, is not avoidance of death but death itself, which is a pretty grim recommendation that his love is better than death. As Lars Engle points out, the line may mean either “my life is not as important to me as your love” or “your ‘love’ for me is incomparably more terrible than death.”27 This way of putting the ambiguity may still lose Griselda’s ringing indictment in the positive spin of an allusion to Canticles (8.6): “love is strong as death; passion cruel as the grave.”28 She affirms that the awesome terror of his love is worth dying for; she wants to have it; it is thus reciprocated as her love for his love. If Griselda had said “oure love” rather than “youre love,” only this positive spin would remain. The line then could hardly be read sarcastically: if sarcastic, Griselda would be consciously aware that her own love is a horror and love that she does not love: “Not even death can compare with [the moral horror of] our love.” Such a conscious intentionality to incoherence and wickedness would be inconsistent with the sympathy that we do feel for Griselda. But Griselda did not say “our.” Both Chaucer’s presumed sources have “our” instead of “your” love. Petrarch wrote “nostro … amori,” which is repeated in the French “nostre amour.”29 Chaucer deliberately changes the pronoun to make the sarcasm possible. The negative spin of the sarcasm appears more clearly if we reverse Engle’s direction of comparison so that Griselda is understood to be saying, “on a scale of hateful revulsion, death itself cannot compare with the horror of your love. Not even death can be compared to the horror of your love!” She means this too in her passion. In this ringing indictment, the present subject of their own children’s death is subsumed by the abstract term “Deth” (666). Their deaths also do not weigh in the balance against his love and lust. But their children’s deaths should outweigh his love, and yet Griselda remains compelled by this sick love and her promise, which she continues to keep rashly – although she cannot be fully aware of this wickedness and still retain our sympathy. Her

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sarcastic remark to Walter is nevertheless overlaid by the dramatic irony of the untenured Clerk’s censure of her and his own undercover rhetoric. That Griselda has the terrifying capacity for such judgment and wit is indicated by her admired wit and wisdom in settling quarrels “with juggementz of so greet equitee” (439) and by her intelligence in setting protocol among the aristocratic wedding guests so that they all “preisen her prudence” (1022). That she has the rhetorical capacity for indirection and figurative language is indicated by her feigning a presumption of gentleness in the sergeant, by her use of the word “Fader” (557) rather than Son for the one who dies on the cross to emphasize contrast in the two fathers, by her pun on “sake” (560), and by her play on the ambiguity of “greveth” (647). Her control of irony is also demonstrated at the dénouement in the lack of it, when she expresses a similar sentiment about death and Walter’s love, without irony: “Now rekke I nevere to been deed right heere; / Sith I stonde in youre love and in youre grace, / No fors of deeth, ne whan my spirit pace!” (1090–2). But at the height of the tragi-comedy just after proposing her own martyrdom, when Griselda does want to be sarcastic, she can be – and with a vengeance. She comes as close as she can to criticizing Walter openly without breaking her vow not to. Her devastating wit reveals moreover just how easily she could have pierced Walter’s “aventaille” with her words if she had wished. She would have had to adjust her rhetorical skill down a few notches to his level of comprehension, however, for at the moment he does not detect her sarcasm: within his heart, after this speech was “ful greet plesance” (672), although he “caste adoun / His eyen two” (668–9) to fool Griselda into thinking that he was sorry about the whole situation. The reader who perceives Griselda’s sarcasm nevertheless at first thinks that Walter is reacting to her taunt, so the impression of sarcasm is momentarily reinforced. Chaucer signals Griselda’s sarcastic remark by putting it at line 666, the number of the Beast (Rev. 13:18). The Gawain-poet counts lines to feature pentangle fives; Dante counts for threes; and Chaucer here has Chaucer the pilgrim scriptor narrator count lines from the beginning of “The Clerk’s Prologue” to the devastating line 666. The pilgrim scriptor narrator could easily adjust the number of lines in the prologue so that line 666 at the demonic number of

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the Beast would come out where it does. Inclusion of the prologue in the line count makes the numerology an irony intended by the pilgrim scriptor narrator, not the Clerk, and hence the second thought of critical reception: we can imagine that the pilgrim scriptor narrator would probably tell his friend the Clerk how he was setting the tale to point out the Clerk’s masterful phrasing, as he writes it down exactly “[e]verich a word” (GP 733). Although in our world, where Chaucer wrote the General Prologue, this transcription is a joke, in the world where the pilgrims go to Canterbury and tell these tales, the pilgrim scriptor narrator has promised that he is setting down “hir wordes” (728) properly; otherwise, he might as well say “o word as another” (738). Indeed, in a witty reversal, in order not to spare telling the truth, he might as well say the one, exact “word as another.” The pilgrim scriptor narrator cannot be facetious about telling the tales that the pilgrims told in their own words without collapsing the drama into mere words that he is making up that would not be what anybody else said in any world. Therefore, the pilgrim scriptor narrator is not being facetious about being a truthful recorder, and in their world the pilgrims did say what he says they said. Although they may be morally naïve, they speak in poetry with enough verbal sophistication to appreciate irony and the irony of a numerological supplement. If the pilgrim scriptor narrator is morally naive and not the actual Chaucer’s counterpart, then, in the world where the pilgrimage is recounted as fact, Chaucer’s own sophisticated counterpart is a member of the reading public like our own counterparts in the fiction, and the line count may be in that world a mere coincidence. In our actual world where the pilgrimage is fiction, Chaucer might also have done it by accident or unconsciously have been keeping count. But more likely, the line count is the highly intelligent Chaucer’s doing and conscious intent. If Chaucer’s genius for irony is to be taken seriously as conscious art, he would have recognized the importance of this line; and having an easy count already in the rhyme royal stanzas, he could easily adjust the line length of the “Clerk’s Prologue” to reinforce Griselda’s covert sarcasm at line 666. Her sarcasm or “crabbed eloquence” (1203) would not be lost on Chaucer’s courtly audience, so used to legal niceties and the equivocation of romance heroines and the verbal subtlety of women generally, even though it does seem to be lost on her benighted husband. As Gail Ashton observes, ambiguous discourse in the

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“patient mimesis” of her behaviour discovers the gap between “embodied ideal and resistant practice.”30 The “pryvetee” of her “feminine mystique” was present in a masculine world, but that domineering world comprehended it not. Griselda’s wit, however, would not be lost on the Clerk – that master of one-up-manship – who is so able to put down the domineering Host, who has teased him for riding “coy and stille as dooth a mayde / Were newe spoused” (2–3). When the Clerk replies, “I am under youre yerde” (22), with the bawdy wit common among clerks, as Christina Coleman points out, the Clerk demonstrates his own covert authority to be an author.31 The untenured Clerk uses the same undercover rhetoric as the Wife of Bath and Griselda and Chaucer the pilgrim scriptor narrator and indeed Chaucer the courtier and poet himself. The Clerk, indeed like a “mayde,” would appreciate the rhetoric of subversion in Griselda’s address to powerful Lord Walter. The equivocation in Griselda’s sarcasm prevents her from being convicted of breaking her promise never to say nay to Walter. The witty Clerk, who jokes about Chichevache, buried patience, and the Host’s rod, and who plays so evasively with the allegorical sense, is not going to miss the wit along with the pathos of Griselda’s rhetoric leading to the terrifying ambiguity of her declaration to Lord Walter. The Clerk’s very character is constituted by his consummate rhetoric with a “scholar’s firmness of outline, logical clarity, and freedom from digression,” as Douglas Wurtele himself has demonstrated in his magisterial study of Chaucer’s use of all the colours of rhetoric for “dramatic characterization.”32 The Clerk cannot be the naïve realist that Grossi makes him out to be as the dupe of a nominalist Chaucer amused at the troubles that the Clerk gets into with realist allegory while trying to refute the Wife of Bath. Some clerks were no doubt unsubtle, but to see the teller of this tale so unsubtle as to be stupid enough to miss his own wit, you either have to miss most of it yourself or strain the narrative out of all coherence.

ethical criticism Griselda’s desperate sarcasm is, however, itself subject to the dramatic irony of a Christian audience; she does not realize what she is saying, given that she is wrong to keep her vow to the extent of acquiescing in murder. She can be taken to be saying that the death

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of her children as well as her own death can be weighed in the balance against Walter’s love: his love even outweighs killing their children. The tone of her hidden sarcasm would be intended to make the sarcastic meaning come out as, “Even the horror of killing our own children cannot compare with the horror of your love.” But the dramatic irony of our censure turns this sarcasm against herself: she does not see the horror of her own acquiescence in killing the children. The irony of which she is conscious may be explicated as a resistance possible only, as Lars Engle says, “within the narrow bounds of expression allowed by her vow,” a Bakhtinian dialogic serving “the expressive needs of those oppressed by the (self-)imposed obligation to agree to their oppression.”33 But this obligation does not entail keeping her vow to the extent of consenting to murder. Engle’s analysis in terms of Bakhtinian “voice” may moreover obscure our discernment of character if we take the synecdoche of “voice” literally. Griselda and Walter are people to be judged, not mere voices or ink on a manuscript. The Canterbury pilgrims themselves are not mere players in a roadside drama, but people like us in the actual drama of their own life; they must be understood as such if they are to be understood at all; if they are not people in the world where they are, there is no they there in any world that we can imagine. The participation of our make-believe in their world version requires that we understand and judge them as complete persons, who have hearts and minds as well as voices and who act subject to judgment. True, as Engle says, the Clerk’s Tale “celebrates the survival of dialogic under unreal conditions of discursive conformity.”34 But, even so, the dialogic of dialogue is between persons. If people are taken out of the dialogic, nothing remains except the occasional “sound byte” of a disembodied “voice.” In our actual world, Chaucer the poet writes in dialogue with Petrarch the poet. In the make-believe world of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer the pilgrim scriptor narrator recounts the history of events in the world in which he believes. We make-believe in that world where, accordingly, we have counterparts, who take the pilgrim scriptor narrator’s account to be history. If those counterparts believe that the tale that the Clerk tells is fiction, then our counterparts have counterparts (as in a play within a play) listening to the Clerk’s counterpart recount the history of Griselda. Since belief in our own existence grounds the identity of our self, we

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cannot coherently believe that we occur in other worlds. Things that are not people (and do not have the power of belief) may occur in other worlds, but we do not believe that we do so ourselves, since we would not be ourselves without belief in our own existence. In a fictional world that we make-believe in, we have a counterpart, who imagines what we imagine except for imagining that we exist: our counterpart cannot coherently imagine that anything exists outside the world in which our counterpart believes. If we are to retain the integrity of that imagination that we share with our counterparts when we make-believe, the hierarchy of ethical intentionality must be coherent: we and our fictional counterparts must have the same moral code. In the existential rhetoric of our reading, as I have argued elsewhere, language interpreted as narrative becomes part of the life that we lead on the moral level.35 Different members of a narrative audience may have different moral codes, and so may the characters in the narrative. The resulting matrix of judgment sets the parameters for ethical criticism. The ethical irony of conflicting moral codes was obvious to Malory in the next century, as Beverly Kennedy has shown,36 and perhaps the Clerk would have considered how Griselda could be ethically constituted with integrity according to different moral codes. By telling a story that fits so easily into place within the heroic code and the heroic virtue of absolute and essential constancy, the Clerk might be suggesting that an alien ethos may have its own integrity, even though you yourself do not believe in it. Griselda in this case does not believe that she sins, nor does she fail to understand Christian doctrine: she just does not believe it. She believes in heroic promise-keeping despite orthodox Christian doctrine on the breaking of promises. She believes that a promise is forever. She lives by a different code than the Christian Clerk or the Christian audience. She is willing to take the test of Abraham again and again (without learning the lesson that we think God intended). Her will is committed to her vow as an absolute act of faith, like a heroic mystic’s commitment to fate or a romantic’s to the numinous sublime.37 The sarcasm of line 666 is not intended by Griselda and so becomes only a point of dramatic irony: our heroine does not realize what she is saying at the line of the Beast. We and our counterparts in a Christian audience may praise Griselda for doing what she thinks is right but condemn her for

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doing it. By permitting us to consider alternative constructions of a non-Christian moral universe, the Clerk exercises our own ethos existentially in the particularities of our interpretive acts. If a Christian audience takes Griselda not as a Stoic heroine but as an aspiring Christian, she deserves not the charity of Christian love for an enemy but the charity of pity. She had the Christian idea of promise-keeping all wrong, but then so did her husband, not to mention plenty of us Chaucerians. Her misguided virtue in keeping her promise, perhaps with the suppression of any conscious recognition that what she really wants is the palace life, may all be forgiven, for she knows not, or not very well, what she does. The power of her virtue to keep her promise is still a virtue but in being misguided is being corrupted. Like Bess in Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves, she makes a supreme sacrifice for what she thinks is right, which overcomes corruption. In the tragi-comedy of her foolishness, she surpasses the wisdom of “men” and cannot accordingly be an example for human imitation even in the radical freedom of her will. Pure freedom cannot be copied. But we can love her in the tear-blurred vision of our pity for the strength of her compassionate commitment and the purity of her freedom. Except for heroic or Manichean hate for an enemy, every ethical matrix discloses pity at the centre of the Tale, an important affect for Chaucer generally.38 The temptation of the realist is to be hardhearted, lacking pity for people and things that are what they are independent of any observer’s emotion or interest. Walter tries to exhaust the object of his totalitarian and totalizing inquiry, leaving the other no freedom to be an other, leaving her, finally, as Finnegan points out, with her virtue “extinct”39 – except, as I would argue, for the “sake” of her ignorance. Griselda’s test thus becomes our test. Are we true to ourselves in the judgments that we make? Do we have pity for misguided virtue? Do we have compassionate understanding of an alien ethos even though we must set ourselves against it? In our own age, when boys are tempted to play at shooting and blowing up images as if it were destruction of people in a virutual present, in an age when cinema audiences are encouraged to pretend that they are present at the scene of horrific action but not to imagine ever doing anything about it (because they are not really there), I can imagine Chaucer making his retraction, holding his forehead in his hand: “I’m sorry, I may have made the tests too hard.” Unless we account

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for the particulars of our own values in an audience and the particulars of Griselda’s situation in her own culture and ethos, the narrative cannot be constituted with any coherent allegoresis. In an essentialist framework, the seemingly obvious levels of allegory are so close and yet so out of joint that we must conclude that the Clerk’s intentions are satirical. The moral of the story is that Griselda is not a model of patience, not unless we pay attention to the particularities of her situation in praise and blame. We have failed the test of the Clerk’s rhetoric if in reading we become guilty of approving a moral principle in judging Griselda’s behaviour that we do not actually believe in. In the existentialist rhetoric of our response on the level of allegoria, we must interpret our lives and the story, as Chaucer frequently asks us, with a good entente. The lives that we lead in response to narrative become the language of its interpretation. They tell what history is to be on the moral level and speak to what will be interpreted on the anagogical level as the final word.40

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Confusing Signs: The Semiotic Point of View in the Clerk’s Tale robert myles

The semiotic point of view is the perspective that results from the sustained attempt to live reflectively with and follow out the consequences of one simple realization: the whole of our experience, from its most primitive origin in sensation to its most refined achievements of understanding, is a network or web of sign relations. (John Deely)1

Chaucer’s semiotic sophistication makes him an unusual and important figure both in the history of literature and in the development of semiotics. In his work, he illustrates and exploits artfully and practically the fact that we act on and develop and change ourselves, others, and the world in general through sign relations. Elsewhere, I attempt to demonstrate Chaucer’s understanding and exploitation of semiotics; in particular, I consider the Friar’s Tale as an object lesson in three-level semantics – the fact that signs are simultaneously world-directed and mind-directed.2 Here I build on this work by turning to the Clerk’s Tale, which provides another object lesson, this time in an ongoing problem of semiotics: the differences between and similarities of two categories of signs – natural and given. One character, Walter, consciously attempts to solve this problem and fails. The other major character, Griselda, on whom Walter performs his perverse semiotic experiments, is unaware of the problem at the beginning of the tale, but by the end she is not only aware of it but has solved it. Griselda learns

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from experience; Walter does not. The Griselda character in Chaucer’s sources, direct (Petrarch and a French version) or indirect (Boccaccio), does not develop such semiotic awareness. In this essay, I look first at the “fundamental dichotomy” between natural and given signs – a semiotic problem – initially “established in medieval semiotics” and still being addressed in semiotics today;3 it links the medieval and modern science of signs. Second, I show how the underlying tension created by this dichotomy provides the major source of irony in all the versions of the “Tale of Griselda” and, at the level of plot action, accounts to a considerable degree for the tale’s popular success. Chaucer’s innovation is to recognize fully the source of this tension, to develop it, and expand on it. A consequence, unique to Chaucer’s version, is that the reader, medieval or modern, can, like Chaucer’s Griselda, learn the nature of natural and given signs. Third, I reconsider Augustine and Chaucer in the light of my proposed semiotic reading of the Tale. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale may serve, as it has for me, as a source of practical education for anyone interested in semiotics.

the semiotic problem: natural or given? Modern semiotics begins with Augustine of Hippo, who was the first to realize that every object in the world, in addition to being what it is in itself, is also potentially a sign. This is still the first premise about the nature of signs in a recent primer on semiotics: “Every object, event or behavior is … a potential sign. Even silence can have the semiotic function of a zero sign … This does not mean that every phenomenon of the world is semiotic. It only means that under conditions of semiosis every object can become a sign to a given interpreter.”4 With a similar understanding, Augustine saw that two different categories of things previously considered apart were in fact two categories of signs, differing in species, not genus.5 Augustine called these two species signa naturalia, natural signs (for example, an involuntary facial expression, smoke for fire), and signa data, given signs (words and any other voluntarily made signs, such as a voluntary facial expression, a smoke signal created by a human agent). We make frequent use of both types of signs every day in acts such as anticipating the weather by listening to reports on the

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radio (voluntary given signs, words) while looking at the sky outside our window (the clouds are not voluntarily made; in interpreting them to predict the weather we make them signs) or by watching people’s facial expressions (both voluntary and involuntary) while listening to them talk (again, voluntary signs). Because the truth of natural signs depends only on the validity of a signreader’s interpretation, natural signs are more reliable indicators of truth than given signs, the truth value of which depends in part on the intention of a sign-maker to tell the truth, to deceive, or to lie. It is because of their differing functions in relation to truth values that the issue of natural versus given signs is of importance and interest to Walter and Chaucer, for Chaucer is a practical semiotician, while Walter attempts to become one. Lying (like telling the truth) requires an active agent intentionally using signs. Both elements are present in Augustine’s definition of lying: “that man lies who has one thing in his mind and utters another in words, or by signs of whatever kind” (emphasis added).6 According to Umberto Eco, semiotics “is the discipline studying everything which can be used in order to lie. If something cannot be used to tell a lie, conversely it cannot be used to tell the truth: it cannot be used ‘to tell’ at all.”7 Similarly, John Deely says of semiosis: “Semiosis is a process of revelation, and every process of revelation involves in its very nature the possibility of deceit or betrayal.”8 Deely and Eco, in these definitions, do not consider the agency of natural signs, and their definitions are good only of given signs. Although natural signs may be misinterpreted and so may not “tell the truth,” they do not lie because, by definition, such signs are not given deliberately by an agent, they are only made into signs by an interpreter. By examining agency in the Clerk’s Tale, we may discover essential facts and truths about signs (discussed in more detail in the final section of this essay): namely, that some signs may be only natural, some only given, some natural and given simultaneously, and some natural and/or given. There is no simple opposition between natural and given. This is a confusing situation: one may easily confuse categories of signs when one investigates their operation, as does Walter with his practical experiments. Walter’s initial error, from which he never recovers, is that he reduces the complexity of the natural/given sign question to one of opposition; he always asks himself: “Is the sign natural or given?” He does not realize that sometimes, but not always, the same

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perceived sign may be either natural or given and sometimes both natural and given. Ironically, he stupidly considers the question only from Griselda’s perspective, while actually using this complex potential of signs for his own purposes. When he secretly sends his and Griselda’s daughter off “to his suster deere” (589), Griselda is led to believe through a flurry of given signs – both words, which are necessarily given signs, and natural-seeming signs that are really given signs – that their daughter has been murdered. Walter then “gooth he ful faste ymaginyng / If by his wyves cheere [facial expressions] he myghte se, / Or by hire word aperceyve, that she / Were chaunged; but he nevere hire koude fynde / But evere in oon ylike sad [sober] and kynde” (598–602). Imagine that you, like Walter, are observing another person’s facial expression and interpret it as a sign of anger; if the sign is involuntary, it becomes, when read by an observer, a natural sign (the example is Augustine’s).9 In such a case, if your interpretation is correct, whether or not the person wishes to communicate the fact, the existence of that mental state or thought has been revealed to you, or, as Augustine would say, the true, the pre-linguistic “word” that “belongs to no tongue … the word we speak in the heart,” has been revealed by an involuntary action, which you, the interpreter, have made into a natural sign.10 In Augustine’s epistemology and sign theory such “words,” felt or thought, are indubitable, they are true for the “speaker.” If I think that someone has betrayed me, be it true or not, the thought itself is “true.” I might attempt to hide this thought from the betrayer (not showing signs is a sign), I might reveal it voluntarily by telling the offender the “truth” with words or physical expressions (for example, a voluntary sigh or grimace), or I might reveal it involuntarily (for example, by sighing or grimacing “without thinking”). These last, involuntary things remain things, until they are made into natural signs through the interpreting mind of another person.11 But both of these natural signs, the sigh and the grimace, could be given signs – I could give them voluntarily to tell the truth – or to lie. Is Griselda’s sober demeanour or Walter’s frown a natural or a given sign? If the latter is the case, the sign may be used to deceive or lie; if the former is the case, it may not be used to lie or deceive. Determining whether another person is “oon in herte and in visage” (711) may be equivalent to determining whether another person’s “true word” – the pre-linguistic “word of the heart” – is at one

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with the “spoken word,” understood in its widest sense as any sign, given or natural. A particularly rich example of this widest sense of signs is the four signs (among others) associated in a single incident with the sergeant that cause Griselda to believe or suspect (“wende”) that her daughter was to be “slawen” (544): “Suspecious was the diffame of this man [the ‘sergeant’ who was taking away her daughter], / Suspect his face, suspect his word also; / Suspect the tyme in which he this bigan” (540–3). Of these four signs – poor reputation (“difamme”), facial expression, words, time of arrival – only words are uniquely given signs. The poor reputation may be a natural sign, in that the agent (the sergeant) need not have deliberately considered using it as a sign (although Walter, another agent in this business, may have); the facial expressions in this case are definitely given signs: the sergeant has no intention of harming the child but wishes to indicate through his facial expression that he does have such intentions. The time of the sergeant’s arrival, late at night, is certainly not coincidental and is a given sign but will be interpreted by Griselda as a natural sign. The fact, however, that three of the four signs are potentially natural (and, if they be so, must tell the truth) makes the lie or deception all the more convincing. Because of his interest in Griselda’s inner state, her “herte,” Walter is not only exploring the traditional two species of the genus “sign,” natural and given, but concentrating on one of the two semantic functions of signs. Signs are simultaneously world-directed and mind-directed, they indicate not only that which they signify, but how the sign-maker views the object of signification. The expression “Look at the dog” is world-directed (indicating a particular creature) and is also mind-directed; the speaker reveals that he or she understands and agrees that a certain animal belongs to a certain species of animals, conventionally called “dog,” and that he or she wishes or commands someone to look at the creature. When a speaker says, “Look at that vicious dog,” the mind-directed content increases; he or she communicates feelings (fear? caution?) plus an intepretation of the appearance of the dog (which the person has made into signs and invites another to look for) – an interpretation that others may not see or share. In trying to know absolutely his wife’s true mental states, in particular, how she truly thinks and feels about him, by focusing on how she expresses her thoughts and feelings, Walter is concentrating on the functioning

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of the mind-directed aspect of semiosis, on how signs by their very nature, regardless of the “speaker’s” intention, reveal psychological states, psychological realities. Using the terms of modern semiotics,12 one can say that Walter, like Chaucer, is deliberately considering the distinction between “sense” and “reference” and the meaning of “meaning.” One may say even that the Walter of Chaucer’s sources caused the English poet to reflect on the issue – and to develop it. Before turning to the tale, we should look at another aspect of the dichotomy between natural and given signs: is there any natural sign that is not potentially a given sign? From classical times until today, examples of natural signs, in addition to smoke’s being the natural sign of fire, have included such events in nature as dawn’s being the natural sign of the coming day, or clouds as indicating weather (“red sky in the morning sailors take warning, red sky at night, sailors’ delight”), or natural physical phenomena such as milk from the breast as a natural sign of having given birth, tracks as the signs of animals, a scar as the sign of a previous wound, in addition to the various natural physical symptoms, such as groans as signs of illness, health, pain, and pleasure. But, as I suggested above, many such signs can also be deliberate or faked; they may be given. Also, signs of personal reputation, good and bad, as Chaucer himself demonstrates in the House of Fame, may be simulated, or misinterpreted. The “magyk natureel” (1125) in the Franklin’s Tale is based on the given – natural sign dichotomy used either to deceive or to create the impression that a character has supernatural powers; one may also approach the Friar’s Tale as a play on the same dichotomy. Technology and trickery, medieval or modern, allow many given signs to be made seemingly natural. This fact forms the premise of the 1998 film The Truman Show, in which a twenty-four-hour-a-day, “lifetime” television program, broadcast live, follows every minute of the life of the principal “character,” Truman. Unknown to Truman, the “character’s” life takes place in a pseudo-city constructed under a dome. Everyone but Truman is an actor. He alone is the only “true man” in his drama. He alone does not realize that every natural-seeming event, including every dawn and dusk and rainfall, every human contact and relationship, is scripted and simulated. His gradual realization that all of these are given rather than natural signs and his reaction to this awakening

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motivate the plot of the film. The Clerk’s Tale and The Truman Show are analogues; in both, given signs are seemingly natural; they both demonstrate Augustine’s point that not just words but “signs of whatever kind” can be used to lie. Like the writers of The Truman Show, but unlike the authors of the direct and indirect sources of the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer makes the solution of the natural–given sign dichotomy a central issue of his work.

the CLERK’S TALE: chaucer the semiotician Thanks to the rigorous scholarship of J. Burke Severs, anyone today can read the Clerk’s Tale in tandem with the tales of patient Griselda in the manuscript sources that Chaucer worked from as he wrote his own version of Griselda’s Tale; Chaucer’s developments and modifications may be clearly evident to anyone.13 Severs observes that Chaucer relies more on the anonymous French text, itself a fairly close translation of the Latin of Petrarch, making “frequent expansions” on and “infrequent omissions” from his sources, while remaining very faithful to the sequence of events in the originals.14 It is in the frequent expansions that “significant changes in characterization” occur. “Walter, for instance, emerges … as more obstinately willful, more heartlessly cruel than he had been in either the Latin or the French … Chaucer also sympathizes with Griselda more”15 and makes her characterization much more complex. Walter, in all three versions, spies (“espye,” 235) on Griselda before deciding to marry her. His decision to marry her rests solely on his interpretation of two natural signs, her virtuous actions (and so her “fame” [418] or reputation) and her “chiere.” This last word is crucial to the tale’s exploration of signs: “noght with wantown lookyng of folye” does Walter “His eyen caste on hire, but in sad wyse / Upon hir chiere he wolde hym ofte avyse” (236–8). The phrase “upon hir chiere” is Chaucer’s expansion, as is the statement, a few lines on, that Walter sees Griselda’s virtue as much in her “chiere as dede” (241). While the word “la chiere” occurs only a few times in the French source, Chaucer uses this key word (and its synonyms) very often. After Walter and Griselda meet, “chiere” is combined frequently with “worde” (499, 575, 600) as well as with the synonyms “face” (465, 920), “contenance” (356, 499,

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708), and “lookyng” (514). These latter words, plus “visage” (693, 793, 853, 949), also appear on their own. The expansion of the number and frequency of potentially natural signs is the major common element in Chaucer’s additions. In this regard, the narrator’s assertion that “[s]he [Griselda] was ay oon in herte and in visage” (711) is also Chaucer’s. However, here the narrator’s interpretation (or even his truthfulness) may be suspect. As a condition of their marriage Walter demands that Griselda always obey his will and never show signs of dissent, “Neither by word ne frownyng contenance” (356). This demand requires only that she not show a “nay” to his “ye” by any kind of sign. She in turn swears that she will do just this, and this is exactly what she does throughout her trials. But what of the “words,” or thoughts and feelings, in her heart? She promises only to do what is humanly possible, not to “wyllyngly” “disobeye” Walter’s demands “[i]n werk ne thoght” (362–3). But is grief, for example, something that can be willed away or something that can always be controlled by will? Is feeling grief disobedience? Walter is demanding only that Griselda be conscious of and control her use of certain signs, words (which are given signs), and facial expressions (which could be natural or given). Ironically, in demanding that she be conscious of such “natural” signs before emitting them, Walter is only testing Griselda’s ability to make potential natural signs into given signs, increasing her ability to lie or deceive. In using Griselda as an experimental object for discerning the truth of signs, Walter actually creates the opportunity for the “object” to educate herself in the nature of signs; Griselda exploits these opportunities to develop her own semiotic consciousness. Walter creates three exceptionally difficult trials for Griselda, the effects of which he attempts to determine by the signs that she expresses: sending away one child, and then another, possibly to their deaths, and then sending Griselda back to her father so that apparently he, Walter, may marry a younger women of proper birth. In the last, as in the two previous situations, the narrator tells us that she was “noght ameved / Neither in word, or chiere, or contenaunce / For as it semed she was nat agreved” (498–500, emphasis added). Here is Chaucer the semiotician; these lines are his expansion of his sources. While “it semed she was nat agreved,” the reality, the truth, is left open. Chaucer’s awareness of the natural – given ambiguity of certain signs appears again in a similar way

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in another expansion on the sources, in which Griselda is, in so many words, consciously considering the dichotomy of natural and given signs: “O goode God! How gentil and how kynde Ye semed by youre speche and youre visage The day that maked was oure mariage! “But soothe is seyd – algate I fynde it trewe, For in effect it preeved is on me – Love is noght oold as whane that it is newe. But certes lord, for noon adversitee, To dyen in the cas, it shal nat bee That evere in word or werk I shal repente That I yow yaf myn herte in hool entente.” (852–61, emphasis added)

Here Griselda has become fully aware that signs, both words and natural-seeming signs (“visage,” “werk”), may be given to lie or deceive and that Walter may not always have been one in word and thought or “oon in herte and visage.” Griselda may also imply that the initial love has changed between her and Walter: but is it the love of one or both that has changed? We can interpret either way: the truth of mind-directed signs cannot be known absolutely (which is quite different from saying that the truth, the word in the heart, does not exist or is relative). Griselda’s assertion that she will never “repente” “in word or werk” is also ambiguous, possibly deliberately so. She states literally that she will not indicate by any sign that she regrets giving Walter her heart “in hool entente.” Also, she does not assert in this statement that her heart is still wholly given. There are other ambiguous statements, new to Chaucer’s version of the tale. A very important example occurs when Griselda tells Walter: “Deth may noght make no comparisoun / Unto youre love” (666–7) – the potential here for irony is not in the sources. Whether Griselda’s words are intended ironically or not we can never be sure. We can only construct arguments, some better than others, within the context of the various issues of the poem. This is the nature of signs; this is the truth about how signs work: Chaucer the semiotician. The audience must participate in the natural–given sign-game. Before her daughter is taken away, apparently to her death, Griselda

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“lulled it, and after gan it kiss” (553). Are these additions of Chaucer’s natural signs, or are they given signs (telling the truth, nevertheless), intended in part to create pity in the sergeant? In either case, this is not a Griselda without feeling or concern for her daughter. When Walter sends Griselda back to her father so that he may remarry, we are told that the “folk hire folwe, wepynge in hir weye” (897); here are certainly spontaneous natural signs of the regard and feelings of the “folk” (even though they prove fickle). “But she [Griselda] fro wepyng kepte hire eyen dreye, / Ne in this tyme word ne spak she noon” (899–900). Here Griselda is wilfully controlling herself from making either sign – tears or words. The voice is active: she wilfully “kept hire eyen drye”; a potential natural sign is here a given sign. Her “chiere” may not reveal her true inner state. Does Griselda lie verbally? There is evidence of this possibility. When Walter warns her that her son, too, may be taken from her, she says, “[Do as you will.] I have noght had no part of childrene tweyne / But first sikeness, and after wo and peyne” (650–1). Here Griselda seems to be at her most heartless; similar lines are in the sources. However, Chaucer magnifies her heartlessness by adding just before these lines her assertion: “Naught greveth me at al, / Though that my doughter and my sone be slayn” (647–8). There are indications, some mentioned above, that this statement is not true. However, there are many more.16 The strongest evidence that Griselda is either lying or equivocating may be found in the reliability of those strongest signs of the truth, natural signs, which come in profusion at the tale’s climax. When Griselda’s children are returned to her, first she swoons with joy, and then she weeps over them. She then embraces them and kisses them tenderly, while continuing to bathe them in tears. These are all natural signs (1079–85) – or so it would seem. For, as we now know, they could be all simulated or performed deliberately, becoming given signs, less reliable indices of truth. All these signs are in Chaucer’s direct sources. However, at this point Chaucer launches into his longest sustained expansion of the poem, 120 lines (1093–1113). What he first adds are given signs – spoken words, in which Griselda thanks God for saving “my children deere!” (1089). He then has her swoon a second time and hold the children so tightly that they are pried from her arms with difficulty, and he next has her weep a second time – all of these are potential

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natural signs. Everyone about her also weeps – more natural signs. What then follows should clinch the argument that the potential natural signs here are real natural signs. Chaucer has Griselda rise “abaysed” (1108), or disconcerted, out of what he calls a “traunce” (1108) – disconcerted, at least in part, because for once she has revealed without deliberation the “word” in her heart during a period beyond wilful control. This reading is sustained by what Chaucer then introduces; she is disconcerted “Til she hath caught agayn hire contenaunce” (1110), that is, until she has regained control of her “chiere,” her “face,” her “lookyng,” her “visage,” until she is again capable of making what are potential natural signs into actual given signs. Finally, in this, Chaucer’s expansion, the court now sees the new “cheere / Betwixe hem two” (1112). But what kind of “cheere” do we now see? It is not qualified. What is the true feeling in their hearts? We can offer our interpretations, our beliefs based on argument. We will have better or worse interpretations, but we will never know with absolute certainty that our interpretations are correct. Walter and Griselda are performing actions that may be interpreted as either revealing or masking the true “word” in their hearts. The possibilities of interpreting Griselda in different ways, with some interpretations being better than others, but with absolute certainty being impossible, is a phenomenon of semiosis that, I believe, Chaucer is consciously demonstrating. Some would stretch this to argue that Chaucer is a kind of “nominalist.” Elsewhere, I have called into question the usefulness of the term “nominalist” to explicate occurrences of indeterminacy of meaning in Chaucer’s works (including the Clerk’s Tale).17 However, I have also taken issue with the many critics who, over the years, have insisted on consistent, unambiguous, allegorical or exemplary readings of Chaucer’s works; the Clerk’s Tale has been a particularly popular choice for such readings.18 Certainly one of Chaucer’s source authors, Petrarch, left no doubt that he viewed the tale primarily as an exemplum. He writes to Boccaccio: “Where, I ask, is such great conjugal love, equal fidelity, such signal patience and constancy?”19 The author of the French translation of Petrarch writes explicitly that the tale is an exemplum for wives and all women: “l’examplaire des femmes marriees et toutes autres.”20 Chaucer’s allegorical and exemplary intention seems to be supported by his

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new references both to Christ (Griselda as a Christ-like figure) and to the Book of Job (Griselda as a Job-like figure). However, there is also the Clerk’s Tale of the Griselda of developing semiotic consciousness, the Griselda who may keep her word literally, but who also, at the very least, equivocates and who questions the correspondence between Walter’s use of signs and the “word” in his heart: the truth functions of signs. Through his Clerk, Chaucer gives us his self-conscious response to and development of a tale by another “worthy clerk” (27), “Fraunceys Petrak”(31), “now deed and nayled in his cheste”(29). Chaucer’s response mirrors Petrarch’s own exercise as “translator”21 of Boccaccio’s tale of patient Griselda. Petrarch dedicates his version to Boccaccio, stating: “Whether I have deformed it [Boccaccio’s original], or, perhaps, beautified it by changing its garment, you [Boccaccio] be the judge.”22 In his expansions, and to a lesser degree in his omissions,23 Chaucer’s Clerk deliberately “changes the garment” of the tale. The new threads consciously accentuate, extend, and develop the theme of semiotic inquiry in the tale and implicate the reader in “Walter’s game” – that is, determining the difference between natural and given signs. One could elaborate here on Chaucer’s expansions on the natural– given sign dichotomy in his characterization of Walter, of Griselda’s father, Janicula, and of the ominous sergeant. However, I believe that this would only belabour the point.

the CLERK’S TALE: rethinking augustine and chaucer At the outset I suggested that the Clerk’s Tale would make educational reading for students of semiotics. My own experience with this learning exercise leads me to make a plea for a return to Augustine’s terms natural and given, for the two categories of signs that he unites for the first time while differentiating them in new ways. Other possible terms include the pairs natural–conventional and natural–intentional. The use of these dyads, particularly natural– conventional, is common to modern translators of Augustine and to commentators on his sign theory, as well as to sign theorists in general.24 Sometimes, both dyads are used by the same author (Nöth and Todorov).25 At the same time those who prefer “intentional”

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(Manetti, Nöth, Todorov) urge the dropping of the term “conventional.” In adopting terminology different from Augustine’s, modern commentators are following the example of scholastic teachers of the doctrina signorum, who in turn routinely followed Aristotle rather than Augustine in using the term “conventional signs” (signa ad placitum or ex institutione) rather then “given signs” (signa data). At the same time they used, like Augustine, the term “natural signs” and accepted Augustine’s synthesis of the two into a single sign theory. Even so, they differed widely on which signs went in which category.26 To my knowledge, the complex history of the reasons for this terminological confusion remains to be thoroughly told. Nevertheless, I believe that much of the problem can be distilled to two points already partially discussed: first, all signs, natural and given, have intentionality, an intentionality conferred by a sign-making agent or agents; second, there is a dichotomy between natural and given signs, not an opposition (Walter’s error). Being aware of these two facts, we can now refine the lesson about signs that may be demonstrated by examining the Clerk’s Tale and its play with natural and given signs. The lesson (mentioned at the outset) is: some signs may be only natural, some only given, some natural and given simultaneously, and some natural and/or given. A useful, though limited and negative definition of natural signs, used in one modern theory of natural signs (Clarke), sees them “as objects or events in the environment of their interpreter which are not produced by some agent with the intent to communicate.”27 This is very close to Augustine’s definition of signa naturalia as signs “which have the effect of making something else known, without there being any desire or intention of signifying, as for example smoke signifying fire” (emphasis added).28 What distinguishes natural from given signs, but what is actually not clearly articulated, is the source of intentionality. By eliminating the negative from Clarke’s definition of natural signs we may arrive at this definition of given signs: “given signs are things used by some agent with the intent to communicate.” The key terms in both definitions are “intent” and “agent,” or intentionality and agency. As all signs have intentionality, the key injunction for success in the game of distinguishing natural from given signs is: “Consider the source of the intentionality.” Before one has a sign, one must have a thing, the thing smoke, for example, or the sound represented

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by the letters s-m-o-k-e.29 A given sign is a thing intentionally given or made as a sign by an agent with the intention to communicate (or deliberately miscommunicate) a meaning. That such a thing is intentionally emitted or given by some agent with the intention to communicate is what distinguishes a given sign from a natural sign, not whether, for example, the sign is the physical, visible, thing smoke or the physical, audible sound “smoke.” The smoke signal is a visible word emitted with the intention to communicate a given sign. But it may simultaneously be a natural sign for some observer who sees it only as a sign of fire, which indeed it is, for it is always, potentially, a natural sign of combustion. Or the smoke may be both a natural and a given sign for an interpreter who first considers it as a sign of fire and then realizes that it is a signal. Or the smoke may have been caused by lightning and an observer may interpret it correctly as only a natural sign of fire, or the same smoke may be misinterpreted as a given sign created by an agent intending to communicate. So too the word “smoke” shouted as “Smoke!” will usually be interpreted solely as a given sign emitted by someone with the intention of communicating something (the presence of smoke, or fire, or danger). Although it is not always potentially a natural sign in the same way in which smoke is, it is not always physically connected with a particular thing for which it is a sign;30 it may simultaneously be a natural sign for the hearer who reflects that the person emitting the sound has an exceptionally strong larnyx. We can even, if we set our mind to it, imagine a situation where a sound is emitted without intention to communicate that simply sounds like the word “smoke.” A hearer may misinterpret this to mean what the word “smoke” means, or it may be a thing that may be interpreted only as some kind of natural sign. One thing is certain: in the intentional world of human beings the thing smoke will always be a sign (even if it is only a sign of itself, something that we know as smoke), as will the sound of the word “smoke,” as long as that sound is attended to (conscious note made of it); that sound will be for us the sign of something, even if at first this is only the “the sound of something.” Augustine hints at this complexity of considering natural and given signs but does not tidy the matter up. For example, while using smoke as an example of a natural sign, he does not get around to considering the smoke signal as an example of a given sign, even though such signals would clearly fall in the category of flag and

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horn signals, which he does include under given signs. So too with physical expressions as both natural and given signs: “the expression [vultus] of an angry or a sad person,” he writes, “signifies his emotion, even without the angry or sad person wishing [voluntate] it to do so. And any other stirring of the spirit can be betrayed, even if we are not deliberately revealing it.”31 There is confusion here that Augustine recognizes but fails to work out: implicitly if we are deliberately making a sad or angry expression we are no longer in the realm of natural signs. What Augustine, Chaucer, the Clerk and Walter are all consciously involved in is attempting to develop a phenomenology of signs – not a theory of signs, but a factual description of what signs are and how they work. The phenomenology of mind distinguishes between the object that it seen (or thought of, heard, felt, smelled, or tasted) and the object as it is seen (or thought of, heard, and so on). When one deliberately considers the distinction between smoke as the object that is observed (smoke) and smoke as it is observed (as pollution, as a sign of a forest, as a coal fire, and so on), one is involved in considering the phenomenology of mind, or, when one concentrates on signs, the phenomenology of signs. In both cases one is manifesting a shift from what phenomenology calls the “natural attitude,” which is the unreflective way in which we usually view things to the “reflective phenomenological attitude.”32 What Augustine is doing in De doctrina christiana, Walter, Griselda, the Clerk, and, ultimately, Chaucer the semiotician are doing in the Clerk’s Tale. Augustine and Chaucer are all manifesting a phenomenological attitude towards signs, an attitude that leads to what John Deely calls in the epigraph to the present essay “the semiotic point of view.” With caution, one might apply the term “paradigm shift” to what one sees here, a shift that began with Augustine. The much-used and -abused term “paradigm shift” was coined, of course, by Thomas S. Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. There he argues that a paradigm is a period of normal science in which there is a consensus among people in a particular field. When questions arise that cannot be answered by the current theory, a new theory arises to explain those questions. Kuhn’s prime example is the shift from Aristotelian to Newtonian physics. The matter that concerned Augustine involves not the laws of motion but the laws of signs. For Augustine, a crisis arose when the established Graeco–Roman paradigm of sign theory could not

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answer a question that may be formulated as follows: “How do I know through signs the creative God of Judaism and Christianity, who (unlike the gods of the eternal cyclic universes of the Greek systems) created everything ex nihilo, from nothing?” Augustine’s answer was that capital-B “Being” (God) could be understood to some degree through everything that God created, “beings”: in addition to being what they are in themselves, all things are also signs of their Creator. To expand on this, earlier I cited Nöth, “every object, event, or behavior is … a potential sign.”33 Potential signs become signs when an agent’s intention leads to their creation and/or interpretation as signs. For Augustine, everything that in any way is – i.e., every being – is charged with the intentionality of Being, the Agent. Therefore everything is not just potentially a sign, everything, in addition to what it is in itself, is also a sign. This is a form of pansemiotism, a commonplace view in the Middle Ages (St Bonaventure: “the world is like a book reflecting, representing, and describing its Maker),”34 in the early modern period (George Berkeley: “we do at all times in all places perceive manifest tokens of Divinity – everything we see, hear, feel, or anywise perceive being a sign or effect of the power of God),”35 and in modern semiotics (C.S. Peirce: “The entire universe … is perfused with signs, if it is not composed entirely of signs).”36 Variants of pansemiotism penetrate many fields from information theory to molecular biology.37 There is no doubt that a fully articulated pansemiotism begins with Augustine. As I stated above in other ways, in Augustine “we reach for the first time an explicit fusion of the theory of the sign with the theory of language,”38 and so we find in him “the first figure absolutely to enunciate a pure semiotic standpoint,” one who introduced into the history of semiotic consciousness the “semiotic point of view – the treatment of things purely in terms of their signifying function.”39 In fact, in the form of one of Peter of Spain’s “Sentences,” Augustine’s “aliquid pro aliquo” formula of the sign enters all scholastic discussions of the sign, which, despite or because of their variety, eventually lead to more accurate understandings of signs.40 Augustine not only uses stunning and memorable language (“visible words”) to indicate that non-verbal signs are indeed language but also articulates a premise of Saussurian linguistics41 and

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structuralism42 – the epistemological primacy of human language for the understanding of signs in general: “And I could express the meaning of all signs [banners, trumpets, flutes, harps, odours, touch, gestures, animal noises, non-voluntary human signs such as physical expressions of pain or anger] of the type here touched upon in words, but I would be unable to make the meanings of words clear by these signs” (emphasis added).43 Augustine was the first to realize fully what Chaucer realized and demonstrated practically: signs communicate not only thoughts about the exterior world but also mental or psychological states and how a person sees the world. Augustine’s theory of signs is a theory at once of psychology and of communication.44 As Todorov puts it, while Aristotle introduced psychological matters into the theory of signs, this becomes a preoccupation with Augustine, who, unlike the Stoics, “is guided by a tendency to inscribe the semiotic problem within the framework of a psychological theory of communication.”45 While the classical interlinking of psychology and sign theory may have begun with Aristotle, the modern interlinking of the phenomenology of mind (phenomenological psychology) and the phenomenology of language is a process that begins with Augustine. Although some critics see many serious problems in major aspects of Kuhn’s theory of paradigm shift,46 the central concept is very useful for the consideration of developments in the science of signs. Steven Weinberg points out that it is not easy for those living through a paradigm shift because they are “in a sense, living in two worlds.”47 In the early period of a paradigm shift, the theory, because it is innovative and in search of vocabulary, is difficult to understand, while later the “mature” theory, refined and articulated, is (usually) more accessible. So, for example, while Newton is very difficult to understand in the original, the “mature” theory of nineteenth-century Newtonian physics is entirely accessible to modern physicists, and, indeed, all young physicists must learn it.48 The semiotics of Augustine is in some ways analogous to Newton’s situation. Augustine’s semiotics is in effect modern semiotics, but the theory is in an immature form. Augustine’s insights into the functioning of signs represent a shift, but many who follow him also experience interference from the earlier paradigm – for example, the importation of Aristotelian terminology. While in our understanding of time and space we are currently in the Einsteinian

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paradigm – a recent shift from the Newtonian view – in semiotics we are still, and may remain, in the Augustinian paradigm. Chaucer too worked firmly within the Augustinian paradigm – more so, I believe, than many scholastic philosophers who focused their sign theory on logic and grammar. Less like these scholars, and more like Augustine, Chaucer was interested in sign theory for its practical psychological and metaphysical implications. As Chaucer’s works demonstrate, all our willed acts and deliberate non-acts (“wylling” and “nylling” in fourteenth-century parlance) affect and change our own being and the beings of others. Yet Chaucer also realized that, intentionally and unintentionally, acts of communication could be ambiguous and that interpretations of signs, natural and given, could be wrong and right or simply different. Epistemologically, Chaucer was an anti-essentialist – or better, a fallibilist.49 According to Deely, semiotics is “the study of the possibility of being mistaken.”50 In examining the basis of the possibility that he is mistaken about Griselda’s love and faithfulness, Walter is a tragicomic–absurdist semiotician, one who does not learn much. What Walter seems to doubt, unlike Griselda, but like the nominalists of his century and later, is that relations that go beyond an individual – for example, those “things” that the words “faithfulness” and “love” and their contraries signify – can have real intersubjective existence and effects, which we cannot touch but can experience. At the same time Walter “abuses” (according to medieval Christian doctrine) signs, constantly lying, both in words and in physical expression (visible words) about his true intentions and thoughts. Chaucer, in his expansions of his sources, makes the tale (as so much of his work) about the nature of and the use and abuse of signs. Harold Bloom claims: “In Homer and the Bible and Dante, we do not find sea changes in particular persons brought about by those persons’ own language … But the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath are well along the mimetic way that leads to Hamlet and Falstaff.”51 The degree and type of the “sea changes” experienced by the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath will always be subject to lively debate. However, I believe that Bloom is essentially correct about Chaucer and language, but “language” in its widest sense of “signs.” And the changes effected occur not just “by those persons’ own language,” but by others’ use of signs as well. Chaucer’s great insight, as I stated at the outset, is that, through our use of signs,

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we develop and change not only ourselves but others. Speech acts. This is why Chaucer is so concerned about the ethical use of signs, including his own writings. And this, perhaps, is a kernel of “semiotic consciousness” that can be derived from reading Chaucer. One of Chaucer’s characters who is changed by both her own and others’ use of signs is Griselda. There is indeed a sea change in her character – one caused by her experience with “language” in the widest sense and forced on her, which causes her to realize how signs work; she develops a semiotic consciousness. It is, I believe, the development of a semiotic point of view that is a precondition for the deliberate creation of such major literary effects, be it in the Wife of Bath, in Hamlet, or in Stephen Dedalus. Augustine united classical views of the intentionality of being with human psychology, or the intention of the will (intentio voluntatis), and intentionality became a permanent criterion of semiotics. Chaucer, too, realized the relationship among thought, will, and signs. His semiotics operated within the Augustinian paradigm. Chaucer, like most other moderns – “modern” in at least the semiotic sense – subscribed to the “thesis of intentionality.” In its restricted recent version, this thesis reveals the object-directedness of thought and mental acts; in its pansemiotic, Augustinian, and Chaucerian version it considers the object-directedness of all being.52 This latter thesis, a matter of belief, was a prerequisite for construction of the former, narrower thesis, now widely accepted as fact, as describing reality. The thesis of intentionality is the basic assumption that underlies the semiotic point of view in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale.53

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Sense, Reference, and Wisdom in the Merchant’s Tale patrick j. gallacher

In his elegant and ample exposition of the controversy about realism and nominalism in Chaucer’s work, Robert Myles concludes very persuasively that Chaucer was by no means a nominalist, someone who holds that words are just arbitrary names having no real connection with reality.1 A host of critics have assumed that the only medieval realism available maintained that the word is essentially related to the thing, that particular combinations of sounds are virtually echoic and necessarily related to a referent – an extreme realist view held by the eponymous character of Plato’s Cratylus.2 Myles points out that in the Middle Ages one could easily hold the view that words are conventional signs of things, but that at the same time, within the conventions, words “belong” to things – an Aristotelian expression that denotes a real but nonCratylic relationship. Not only can words refer to things existing outside of language, but, given the medieval belief in creation, a significant use of language affirms that God is existence, while all creatures merely have existence. Yet within this context of realism – foundational, epistemological, ethical, and linguistic – Chaucer has created and satirized characters who, in fact, behave like extreme nominalists, according to P.B. Taylor, David Williams, and John Gardner.3 Such improper linguistic behaviour results from intentional choices made by the characters. Or one could say that people are led, through ignorance or moral failure,

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to false definitions of ideas such as “good” and “certain” and then to a denial that such words have any sense at all. In fact, Boethius’s Lady Philosophy expands on such verbal behaviour. My contention is that the Merchant’s Tale offers a use of language that has an extraordinary depth and reach, touching on many of the issues discussed in Myles’s book. To provide a convenient framework for my documentation and a basis for reading the tale, I make use of Frege’s well-known distinction between sense and reference, without going into the philosophy or history of the distinction. For my purposes, sense and reference can be briefly illustrated by the memorable example of the unicorn, of which word we grasp the sense, or meaning, while recognizing that the word has no reference. That is, “unicorn” does not refer to anything in reality. Furthermore, two expressions can have a different sense but the same referent, as in “Plato’s pupil” and “Alexander’s teacher,” both of which expressions refer to Aristotle.4 Sense and reference exhibit a suggestive parallel to the two acts of inquiry and judgment that encompass the medieval definition of wisdom. From one perspective, the tale is the Merchant’s extended inquiry into whether particular uses of the words “good” and “certain” have, so to speak, a nominalist sense only or a realist reference as well, whether they are merely curiosities of the lexicon or whether they can refer to actual human contexts and transcendental realities. This process is complicated when the Merchant’s ironic employment of the inexpressibility topos actually serves to give the act of reference an oblique but greater dynamism. I argue that the Merchant narrator goes through a sceptical phase – one might call it the kind of nominalism satirized according to the above-mentioned critics – in which he suggests that the language of theology and ethics has sense but no reference, that such language games never receive the full actualization that only a connection with reality can bestow. Focusing on the most extreme radical disparity between sense and reference in the Merchant’s language, Douglas Wurtele explores, in three studies, the blasphemy in the use of the Song of Songs.5 He enriches our understanding of sense by citing the pervasive allegorical readings of this biblical poem and demonstrating the disparities of reference, without employing Frege’s terms. Acknowledging the culpability of the Merchant, I would, however, say of him what Wurtele says elsewhere of the Pardoner – that when, at the end of his tale, he prays

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that Jesus Christ, our “soules leche,” grant the pilgrims His pardon, Chaucer is depicting the beginning of a conversion.6 I believe that a similar movement is present in the Merchant. He never fully succumbs to his scepticism, an aspect of what Wurtele analyses as a sacrilegious use of the Song of Songs. In fact the Merchant reconstructs his virtually deconstructive manoeuvres by the structure of the tale that he tells and by Proserpina’s contextually startling affirmation that only God is absolutely good – a statement that unites sense and reference as well as inquiry and judgment.7 The whole tale then is not unlike a scholastic question, which states the main thesis only after raising all the contrary objections. The three medieval sources that I emphasize – Nicolas Trivet’s Exposicio super Boecio, De consolacione; Robert Holcot’s In librum sapientiae; and Dante’s Il Convivio – are all recognized sources of Chaucer’s. The ideas that I make use of from these authors are for the most part widely shared by other writers of the period. In the following pages, I examine the workings of sense and reference in the Merchant’s Tale in four sections: the medieval wisdom tradition; the Merchant’s ironic use of the inexpressibility topos; January’s behaviour in the counsel scene and in the garden; and the conversation between Pluto and Proserpina.

the medieval wisdom tradition The three aspects of the wisdom tradition that I examine are inquiry and judgment, the words good and certain, and the inexpressibility topos. Inquiry and judgment are the two activities that comprise wisdom,8 and each act shows different manifestations of sense and reference. Judgment, since it focuses selected senses on a particular context, is the act of reference. Inquiry can be looked on as a quest for the relevant senses, but it involves reference as well, since it is always inquiry about a determinate something. Inquiry and judgment are also part of the rhetorical tradition, since Dante and Aquinas align inquiry with rhetorical inventio, itself directed to the discovery of senses. Dante refers to a vertù that is “inventiva e giudicativa” and Aquinas seems to join the concerns of the rhetoric and wisdom traditions in a brief formula: “to find by inquiring and to judge concerning those things found” (emphasis added).9 In Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, as I hope to show, the presence of this pattern is initially suggested by words that refer explicitly to the

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wisdom tradition (sapience, 2243; wysdom, 1705; enquere, 1532, 1543; deme, 1976. mysdemeth 2410; additional uses of wyse: 1266, 1359, 1360, and so on). Of telling significance, inquiry and judgment enter into Chaucer’s gloss to Boethius’s Consolation, III m 11, as a method of obtaining truth: “Whoso wol seke the depe ground of soth in his thought, … let hym wel examine and rolle withynne hymself the nature and the propretes of the thing; and let hym yet eftsones examinen and rollen his thoughtes by good deliberacioun or that he deme” (emphasis added).10 The words “inquire” and “judge” – inquirendo and iudicet – are explicit in the parallel passage in Trivet.11 Examining and turning over the nature and the properties of a thing is a canvassing of pertinent senses; and deme, the judgment, is the act of designating which senses actually refer to the matters at hand. An example from Boethius’s Consolation can provide a strikingly precise example of sense and reference. The relationship between words and existence becomes an issue not only in the body of the work but also in Nicholas Trivet’s commentary. Employing a clearly metaphysical context, Trivet illustrates the relationship between the senses of a word and what actually exists in his observations on Book Five, Prose One. Observing that we usually know that a thing exists before we know what it is,12 he points out that, in regard to words, this order is sometimes reversed and we know what a word means before we know whether there is anything in reality that corresponds to the word.13 At this stage in the Consolation, Philosophia asserts that when the sense of “chance” is an event without a cause, it has no reference and corresponds to nothing in reality; but in a valid sense, “chance,” defined as an “unexpected event brought about by a concurrence of causes which had other purposes in view,”14 does indeed refer to an existing pattern. That is, it has both sense and reference. In the discussion of the virtues of the intellect, Aristotle relates wisdom to the understanding of self-evident principles. Medieval responses to this account can provide a kind of metaphysical commentary on Trivet’s example, and Aquinas puts the issue most existentially. It is, in effect, by means of sense and reference that we understand a self-evident principle, which we grasp as soon as we understand the terms – that is, the sense of the words. The proposition that a whole is greater than a part becomes self-evident as soon as we know the meaning (sense) of whole and part. When

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Aquinas goes on to mention the relationship of such terms to reality, he describes the deep ontological intimacy between sense and reference: “Now to know the meaning of being and non–being, of whole and part, and of other things consequent to being, which are the terms whereof indemonstrable principles are constituted, is the function of wisdom: since universal being is the proper effect of the Supreme Cause, which is God.”15 In this passage, “terms” points to sense and “being” invokes reference. In their discussions of the role of the self-evident proposition in wisdom, Trivet, Peter Auriol, and William of Ockham allude to this self-evidence, an immediate convergence of sense and reference. For these thinkers, the sense of words seems intermediary between self-evident principles and Being itself.16 The words “good” and “certain” raise the issue of sense and reference in the Merchant’s Tale, where the narrator is almost obsessed with certainty; and January, Justinus, Pluto, and Proserpina are concerned with what makes a good wife or woman. In these discussions, there can be explicit or implicit definitions, complex senses that can have a valid or invalid reference. We must then inquire into the meanings, or list the relevant senses, of the two terms involved, “certainty” and “goodness,” and try to form a judgment about their relative use. In a medieval context, such an inquiry releases the special dynamism of creational metaphysics, of a movement from things that have being to that which is Being.17 Lady Philosophy’s inquiry about the meanings of the word “chance” moves toward the larger definition of Providence. Similarly, an inquiry about whether “good” and “certain” refer to something that actually exists invokes the medieval hierarchy of existence, which is part of the formal definition, or sense, of the two words. “Goodness,” which Proserpina eventually invokes as the “soveregn bontee” (2289) and which is an issue in January’s choice of a wife, has two primary senses, according to Nicholas Trivet. The first one is “perfectio” or completeness, and the second “esse appetibile,” or existence as desirable.18 The word “nobility” in several medieval texts is synonymous with this completeness of the good. Anything, says Dante, can have this nobility, completeness, or “perfection” – a horse, a gem, a flower – in so far as it fulfils the requirements of its nature.19 Combining these two elements of completeness and existence as desirable, Dante speaks in the Convivio of the union of his soul

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with the noble lady who is wisdom20 and asserts that every form possesses, in a fashion, the existence of the divine nature, to which it is most germane to be (because God is existence). In his application of this principle, Dante evokes a classic medieval example of intentionality – a directedness towards something outside the self, which parallels the referential impetus of language.21 The human soul desires, with the whole force of its longing, to be, and to be united to God in order to fortify its being. Because it is in the excellences (bontadi, “goodnesses”) of nature that this divine principle of existence manifests itself, the soul unites itself with these excellences in proportion as they appear most perfect – a quest that involves closure and openness in special ways, for it is at once highly particular and inexhaustible.22 Furthermore, existence and completeness are in a sense the same: existence is all there is, for outside of this, there is nothing. Finally, the good as the completeness of all there is entails a radical deferral. The fact that existence contributes to the complex sense of the word “good” seems to impart a special disposition for the extramental and the extralinguistic. The complex sense seems to entail a kind of referential élan, in that it describes a movement by which the soul goes out of itself and out of language to join with other forms that participate in existence, and finally to God, the source of its existence. The nobility, goodness, or completeness of knowledge is certainty, a quality that attracts January and Pluto and fascinates the Merchant himself. The Merchant’s concern with certainty invokes the wisdom tradition, for wisdom, excelling the other intellectual virtues in goodness, perfection, or nobility, would have to be the most certain knowledge as well.23 There are three senses of certainty that bear on our reading of the Merchant’s Tale: “science”; knowledge of the first cause; and the certainty of presence.24 First of all, “science,” for a medieval thinker, is necessary knowledge of something that cannot be otherwise than it is.25 It results from an inquiry and has a pronounced closure. Second, and vastly more encompassing, is the certainty that is the result of the whole process of human knowing, the sum of all answers to all questions, the conclusion of all inquiries. This certainty has an imagined closure, with, so to speak, a working deferral.26 In the Christian tradition, it is knowledge of the supremely existential first cause, the “I am Who am” (Exodus 3:14).27 According to Boethius, the Divine Mind is the most certain

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well of all things;28 for Dante, the truths of theology are most certain in themselves, but least certain to us, and they can be approached only through a process of negation.29 As Myles points out, the supreme principle of reality is “beyond the power of discursive knowledge”; and Being or the whole of reality “is not absolutely knowable.”30 The ambiguity of this primal certainty is a satirist’s delight, for while such knowledge is the most certain that we can have, we cannot have it, for its complete possession eludes temporal achievement altogether. The words “good” and “certain” are inherently ironic and inherently paradoxical: Because neither “absolutely good” nor “absolutely certain” is possible for either word respectively, these important senses are radically deferred. Whether something exists, or does not exist, is most dramatically at issue in the third type of certainty, what we might call the “certainty of presence,” as it is described in Trivet. It is a conviction that applies to what is certain to our senses, what we know for sure because we perceive it happening now.31 Without such closure, ordinary life would be impossible; for this is the kind of certainty that January abandons when May persuades him that he did not see what he actually saw in the tree. But all this is heady stuff, and the intoxicating desire for certainty needs a special temperance. Since certainty can have such different meanings, Aristotle says that the mark of a disciplined man is to know how much certainty to expect from each situation32 – or, in our context, which sense refers to what actual situation. Dante reinforces this principle in regard to certainty by showing how two types of unsound intellect fail to refer the different senses of certainty to the proper contexts. Violating sense and reference, the first type of unsound intellect supposes itself to know everything and “affirms uncertain things as certain.”33 Second, those who do not believe that knowledge is possible effectively deny certainty, as well as sense and reference of any kind.34 Of the three types of certainty, that most obvious in the Merchant’s Tale is the certainty of presence, which January rejects when he acquiesces in May’s denial of what happened in the tree. By denying the validity of what January saw, she persuades him to look for the wrong sense of certainty, “science,” when only the certainty of presence is possible. The Merchant’s search for guarantees in religion invokes the certain knowledge of the first cause,

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but he is unaware of, or unwilling to accept, the deferral of complete knowledge and the paradoxes involved. Wisdom, expressed through inquiry and judgment, seeks the completeness that is final only in the supreme existence of the first cause, but which is found in the analogical fulfilment, or goodness, of every existing thing. By means of reference, the inquiry and judgment of wisdom fulfil sense by achieving contact with existing things and with the often-elusive types of certainty entailed by such contact. This reference, which is existential and finally hierarchical, is what January avoids, and finally simply denies, and what Justinus affirms. The Merchant’s attitude is more complex. His frequent ironies tend to subvert this dynamic reference, but he clearly rejects, in turn, January’s rejection of reference. Most important, Proserpina, in the context of affirming the existence of good women, follows the hierarchical impetus of reference to affirm supreme goodness and existence as manifested only in God. The next section deals with the Merchant’s seemingly deliberate and conscious confusion of the senses of certainty. In this pronounced sceptical, or nominalist, phase, he is ambivalent towards particular kinds of judgment, some of which he even rejects outright, and evinces a conviction that some words have sense and no reference. The third section attempts to show how the Merchant opposes his own doubts by the story that he tells: January, by avoiding inquiry and judgment at decisive moments, takes refuge in a closed system of discourse and, rejecting the certainty of presence, finally gives up reference altogether. This is an avoidance of speech that the Merchant clearly rejects. The fourth section deals with how the Merchant provides a comic affirmation of existential reference, an affirmation that is specific but also, in intellectual and dramatic terms, deferred, when Proserpina takes an argument with Pluto to a Boethian conclusion.

the merchant and the senses of certainty Although the Merchant profoundly doubts the nature of judgment and is at least intermittently sceptical, nevertheless, by satirizing January’s rejection of inquiry and judgment and by presenting Proserpina’s existential affirmations with comic persuasiveness, he

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transcends his very real experience of scepticism. As narrator of the tale, he reveals a deep unease about the nature of certainty, which manifests itself at the most obvious level in ironic subversion, and then substantially challenges the nature of reference itself. In his discourse, whether we find him humorously sympathetic or darkly abusive, the issue of sense, discovered by inquiry, and reference, enacted by judgment, is paramount. Although he will satirize January for affirming uncertain things as certain, he reveals his own ambivalence about the relevant senses of certainty in a series of ironic statements, the clearest of which, for our purposes, is a reference to the certainty of a wife’s judgment. A man should thank God on his bare knees for his wife: “For thanne his lyf is set in sikernesse; / He may nat be deceyved, as I gesse, / So that he werke after his wyves reed” (1355–7; emphasis added). The Merchant’s certainty (“sikernesse”) is outrageously heavy-handed. Elsewhere the Merchant ironically employs the word sikernesse, associated here with certainty of judgment, in the context of the reliability of the spouse amid the uncertainties of fortune: of worldly folk, husband and wife “holden the siker weye” (1390); bachelors, in their unrestrained liberty, find only brittleness, “whan they wene sikernesse” (1280). Finally, in a statement that suggests the certainty associated with the first cause, we are told that the priest at January’s wedding makes all “siker ynogh with holynesse” (1708; emphases added).35 Without slighting the rich comedy of these passages, we must emphasize the Merchant’s tendency to assume that the paradoxical certainty of theological discourse should have given a comforting sense of closure in situations that have by nature an unpredictable openness. Related to this undermining of certainty through the ironic use of “siker” and “sikernesse” is a crucial device in the Merchant’s speech – his use of the inexpressibility topos, which asserts that sense or reference is impossible because of inability in the speaker, a deficiency in language itself, or the profound mystery of the situation to be described.36 Taking the form of “I cannot say,” the sense of this device is changed by irony from an expression of uncertainty to the vehicle of one of the Merchant’s most certain judgments: whether January desired marriage “for holynesse or for dotage,” he declares, “I kan nat seye” (1253–4). In such a locution, the Merchant is obviously expressing the certainty that January is an old fool. Given the reference to January, the sense is obviously ironic. A similar patent

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inversion of the inexpressibility topos begins another passage in which, however, the irony becomes explicitly theological: “A wife! a, Seinte Marie, benedicite! / How myghte a man han any adversitee / That hath a wyf? Certes, I kan nat seye. / The blisse which that is bitwixe hem tweye / Ther may no tonge telle, or herte thynke.” (1337–41; emphasis added, except benedicite). The declaration in the final two lines of this passage suggests not only that reference is impossible (“no tongue can tell”) but that the sense cannot even be imagined by man (“or heart imagine”). Such a declaration differs substantially from the opening simple irony. These lines may be a paraphrase and adaptation to marriage of St Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, 2.9, which is itself a paraphrase of Isaiah 64:4: “But as it is written: That which the eye has not seen nor ear has heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man – those things which God has prepared for those who love him.”37 In these scriptural passages, the inexpressibility topos – here a traditionally acknowledged inadequacy of sense coupled with reference sustained by religious belief – evokes an intuitive leap to an order of truth so profound that no formulation can do it justice.38 Nevertheless there is existential reference in the designation of a specific semantic field and the deferral of sense in the mystery enveloping the terms involved. The experience referred to is the heavenly reward or state of final justice, a participation through grace in the sovereign good that Proserpina will affirm. The Merchant’s adaptation of the passage to marriage entails ironic inversion – the relationship between husband and wife is certainly and perhaps unspeakably painful – and this irony delights us, but precisely by making us aware of the theological sense. A good marriage is a symbolic experience of this final state: it is obviously not the final state itself. In his realization that the symbol entails a dimension of meaning that is not literally true, the Merchant in effect denies comprehensible sense and reference to this probable biblical paraphrase. The scriptural passage offers a classic example of that process of negation that Dante says is necessary to understanding truths that are most certain in themselves but least certain to us, a process that combines closure and openness in a unique way. On that level, his use of the inexpressibility topos to express a certainty denies the mystery with a knowing assurance: his point is that experience refutes such verbal formulas, which are not therefore referential

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judgments. For him, these words refer to nothing that exists, like the false definition of chance in Boethius. Clearly showing an awareness of the paradoxical senses of theology, the Merchant’s complex use of the inexpressibility topos to express a dismissive certainty moves towards a rejection of existential reference in its deepest medieval sense: a rejection of the discourse of wisdom, which insistently refers to an ultimate but inexpressible certainty as founding a hierarchy of subtly different kinds of certainty and uncertainty, complex variations of sense and reference. Furthermore, his remarkable allusion to The Marriage of Mercury and Philology (1732–9) asserts that the “myrthe” of January’s wedding to May is inexpressible even for the poet, Martianus Capella.39 Apart from its humorous ironic certainties, the Merchant’s outburst puts in question that marriage of eloquence and wisdom which is the explicit subject of Martianus’s poem. As is clear from the Ciceronian use of this commonplace, the union of eloquence and wisdom describes a speech in assured contact with the realities of human society and is in effect an affirmation of the importance of existential judgment, of authentically saying something to someone about something. Referring to those who have eloquence, but no wisdom, Cicero observes that “it was not undeserved, I am sure, that whenever rash and audacious men had taken the helm of the ship of state, great and disastrous wrecks occurred.”40 Over the last century, the unwise eloquence of dictators has become the paradigm of a pathological disjunction between sense and reference, fantasy and political reality. Hence, when the Merchant parodies the marriage of eloquence and wisdom, he also disputes, I believe, the possibility of uniting language and reality. The corollary seems to be that engaging in theological or even ethical discourse is an illusion: dazzled by the beauties of sense, one can become careless about reference. Such a state once more echoes the false definition of chance in Boethius, which corresponds to nothing in reality. But having raised such doubts about whether the discourse of theology and ethics is more than a language game, about whether, in fact, the word “good” has any ultimate existential reference, the Merchant comes back to the experiential certainty that people often behave very badly – that they often fail in goodness. The final dramatic parody of May’s manipulation of sense and reference, January’s rejection of referential judgment, and the debate between

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Proserpina and Pluto are the means by which the Merchant counters his sceptical mood and affirms in effect at least a major principle of wisdom: that a wise man should seek only the certainty permitted by the situation.

january’s behaviour In obvious conflict with the sceptical comments of the narrator are the principal actions of January, whose story embodies an inquiry into sense and reference for the Merchant himself. There is a counterpoint between the Merchant’s commentary and the story that he tells, a sic et non that is resolved mainly in the speech of Proserpina. January’s failure in the counsel scenes results mainly from his refusing openness of inquiry, just as his later abdication of reference results from refusing the closure of judgment. He exactly reverses the requirements of decision and deferral. By denying the existence of what is happening right in front of him, January will abandon not only the certainty of presence, but also the referential component of speech itself. Moreover, his refusal of inquiry derives from the fact that, in Dante’s terms, he suffers from the first type of unsound intellect: he affirms uncertain things as if they were certain.41 The Merchant sums up this habit: “For whan that he hymself concluded hadde, / Hym thoughte ech oother mannes wit so badde / That inpossible it were to repplye / Agayn his choys, this was his fantasye” (1607–10). Such a habit of certainty makes January an easy target for satire. With his boastful recitation of evidently laudable reasons for marriage (1441–55), he is simply citing items from a sacramental lexicon, possible senses of which he has no intention of actualizing. It is only a kind of affectation of inquiry, governed by a resolute intention to avoid reference to his own actual situation. Compounding this evasion of inquiry, Placebo, by simply repeating January’s words, pointedly rejects the possible relevant senses that could make an actual choice complete: “I woot wel that my lord kan moore than I. / With that he seith, I holde it ferme and stable; / I seye the same, or elles thyng semblable” (1498–1500). Justinus, in contrast, precisely enacts the sense and reference of judgment. He has an explicit awareness of the possible senses that are being excluded from this discourse; and the presence of wisdom as a formal criterion is indicated by his actual use of the words

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enquere and wys: “Men most enquere – this is myn assent – / Wher she be wys, or sobre or dronkelewe, / Or proud, or elles ootherweys a shrewe, / A chidestere, or wastour of thy good, / Or riche, or poore, or elles mannyssh wood” (1532–6; emphasis added). Engaging in the openness of inquiry, mentioned again at line 1543, Justinus brings to bear diverse senses that specify what good or bad might be in a possible wife and how such senses might refer to a particular individual. Moreover, although reference by itself entails the good of existential fulfilment, Justinus also explicitly applies one of Trivet’s essential characteristics of the good, the deferred aspect of completeness or perfection: “Al be it so that no man fynden shal / Noon in this world that trotteth hool in al” (1537–8; emphasis added). When considering the good, one must indeed envision the sense of wholeness or perfection, but with the realization that such a goal or reference will never be fully achieved by a created being. Justinus’s emphasis on the meaning of “good” as complete or perfect also anticipates Proserpina’s use of the phrase “sovereign bontee” in her rebuttal to Pluto in the same context of the references of “good.” Finally, by pointing to a deferred sense in the application of these characteristics of a good wife, he also affirms the link of judgment to a kind of existential openness.42 Although Justinus fails to persuade January to inquire, and although January will go on to refuse judgment as well, circumstances will momentarily surprise him into a spontaneous fusion of sense and reference. In the garden scene, January unblindedly experiences the certainty of presence, briefly abandons his semantic evasiveness, and achieves the appropriate closure of judgment. Skipping for a moment the parallel conversation between Pluto and Proserpina, we realize that when May climbs the tree to Damian, and Pluto gives January back his sight, the moment of truth arrives for the very possibility of speech. Suddenly, January sees “as well as evere he myghte” (2384), erupts with expletives, and blurts out at last a real inquiry: “O stronge lady stoore, what dostow?” (2367). May’s classic reply, that to heal his eyes there was nothing better than to “strugle” (2374) with a man on a tree, is a referential adventure without the warrant of sense. Escaping briefly from the false certainties of an unsound mind, January reacts with unqualified indignation to the certainty of presence. In firm, if momentary, possession of judgment, he finally chooses the right words: “’Strugle!’ quod

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he, ‘Ye, algate in it wente!’” (2376); and “He swyved thee, I saugh it with myne yen” (2378; emphasis added). His choice of possible senses is instantaneous and instinctive. Based on a clear awareness of context, this is January’s major achievement of sense and reference in the tale: he incontrovertibly says something to someone about something. His contact with the completing existence of referential judgment is short-lived, however. The certainty of presence, though not absolute, is all there is in many situations; but May persuades January to violate wisdom once again by examining a sense experience for a type of certainty that it cannot have. The disciplined man, as Aristotle said, seeks only the certainty that the situation allows;43 whereas May, by calling attention to the fact that every sense experience can be doubted, because it did not have to take place, in effect substitutes the certainty of necessity for the certainty of presence. By abandoning the real but qualified certainty of presence, January has, in an important way, refused existence as well, because he has denied the reality of sense evidence. In so doing, he divorces himself from the dialectic of certainties that structure wisdom and guarantee the possibility of both knowledge and freedom. Finally, by refusing the closure of reference in such an obvious context, he becomes vulnerable to a kind of pathological deferral of judgment. The question remains, however, as to whether there is a further context that contains the context of January’s choices. Is there a field of fields or ultimate ground that escapes the limitations of metaphor, which remains open while providing the closure of coherence at any level of discourse? Justinus has hinted at such a model in his use of perfection or completeness as a criterion that is functionally necessary but never to be completely attained. The episode of Proserpina and Pluto is a comic dramatization of this principle.

pluto and proserpina’s conversation Proserpina’s rebuttal to Pluto in the garden provides a key instance of the dialectic of sense and reference in a clear Boethian assertion, together with a further deferral by means of comic irony. The character of Pluto repeats significant traits of both January and the Merchant: he affirms uncertain things as certain, does not align sense with reference, and proceeds to judgment without inquiry.

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Arriving in the garden with Proserpina just when the drama between Damian and May is unfolding in the tree, he feels no need to inquire into preceding events. Explicitly invoking the wisdom of Solomon in regard to the “bountee of man,” he proclaims with certainty that, although there is one good man in a thousand, there are no “good women” (2246–8) – a phrase, he implies, that corresponds to nothing in reality, once again like the false definition of chance in Boethius. He insists on universal feminine “untrouthe and brotilnesse” (2243) and applies “honurable” (2254) and “worthy” (2259) to the marital tyrant January. The lexical choice of such Boethian synonyms of good to the exclusion of more accurate ascriptions is made worse by the fact that Pluto’s promise of restored sight would augment the injustice of the situation. But if Pluto’s list of senses fails our requirements of reference, Proserpina is even worse, momentarily at least, with her promise to subordinate existential reference to feminine advantage. A wife will so master the art of marital deconstruction that a husband can never achieve judgment and will henceforth be certain of nothing. The defeated silence of the men envisioned by Proserpina does indeed call for a cogent way of asserting inexpressibility and may partially account for the Merchant’s addiction to this trope. But if on the one hand she institutionalizes false judgments concerning goodness, divorcing sense from reference, on the other hand the inquiry that she initiates is the most thorough in the tale. Drawing on the senses provided by the convincingly good women of “Cristes hous” (2282) and the “Romayn geestes” (2284), she completes her exercise by citing Solomon’s undoubted failures in goodness as well (2291–302). But among the possible senses of good is existence as desirable. Several uses of the motif of existence in this section prepare us for Proserpina’s conclusion, which provides a climactic and explanatory pattern. January will deny the existence of what happens before his eyes; and Proserpina gives women the ability to deny the existence of what their husbands allege. The existence of good women, which Pluto denies and Proserpina affirms, progresses, in a manner reminiscent of Dante’s hierarchy of existential forms, to the issue of sovereign goodness, which Proserpina affirms exists only in God. This play of sense and reference, comic and profound at the same time, comes to a climax in a special emphasis on the sense of existence as “good,” the metaphysical goal of wisdom as

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well as the referential aim of judgment: “But sire, ne be nat wrooth, al be it so, / Though that he seyde he foond no good womman, / I pray yow, take the sentence of the man; / He mente thus, that in sovereyn bontee / Nis noon but God, but neither he ne she” (2286– 90). The sense of absolute goodness here can refer only to God. The negative form of the assertion – perfect men and women do not exist – wipes the slate clean and draws attention to the unique existence of God and its convergence with absolute goodness. Proserpina’s discourse has actualized the significant possible senses of good. Whereas Justinus had defined goodness in a context of limited perfection and concluded that no man or beast “trotteth hol in al,” the sentence of the quotation from Ecclesiastes makes Boethius’s essential point: a being of perfect goodness does indeed exist. “Absolute goodness” is a sense that has reference. In a medieval context, Proserpina’s statement is a model of wisdom, because after a brief, but summary inquiry she provides a judgment that is unsurpassed in its existential completeness. When, in a context of explicit references to existence, she says that, in regard to sovereign goodness, there is only God, she is also saying, with the warrant of Boethius, Trivet, and Dante, that He is supreme existence as desirable: that He, to whom, as Dante says, it is most germane to be, He who uniquely is His own existence, is the goal of all things that desire to be. In her virtually liturgical utterance, inquiry becomes judgment and sense uniquely possesses reference, because, in a medieval sense, all the potentialities of language are symbolically actualized in such a theological formulation. Countering Pluto’s assertion that, like unicorns, good women do not exist, Prosperina easily proves the existence of good women, while asserting that neither good women nor good men exist in the absolute sense of “good,” preparing us for the affirmation that supreme existence and goodness are manifested only in God. Finally, this judgment, which has completed Proserpina’s inquiry, retains its deferred character, or rather its inexhaustibility, since, although we can say that men and women do not have it, we cannot say completely what this sovereign goodness really is. Its full sense invokes inexpressibility. But there is a final element of deferral in this assertion, because a comic writer seldom wants to force a conclusion. How seriously can we take a medievalized pagan goddess who, after giving all women the ability to keep their husbands from effectively protesting against

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their indiscretions, provides a Boethian affirmation of existential goodness? This laughable ironic subversion provides a dramatic openness that parallels the deferred quality of the philosophical statement itself. Putting the fullest example of referential judgment in the mouth of such an improbable spokesperson allows us the openness of whether we choose to accept it or not; but it also asserts a metaphysical framework for discourse that, having withstood the attacks of scepticism, asserts itself perhaps even more emphatically than before it was called into question. Proserpina’s improbable, comic, and precise Boethian affirmation, I believe, constitutes a key phase in the Merchant’s inquiry into and at least partial rejection of his own scepticism. That which follows in the tale has the closure typical of a fabliau resolution: January’s rejection of the certainty of presence and refusal of elementary judgment. For the Merchant to have arranged such a conclusion shows his final impatience with and rejection of the radical scepticism to which he had been compellingly attracted. By the comically outrageous response of Proserpina to Pluto, he has escaped, at least momentarily, his doubts about reference on the ethical and theological levels.44 But he himself has also perhaps moved further away from a tendency to affirm uncertain things as certain and from the radical sceptic’s inability to affirm anything at all. Yet his very doubt invites us to explore the different types of sense and reference in wisdom itself. Finally, to have completely unquestionable certainty about such matters is the end of the whole process of human knowing, the sum total of all answers to all questions, a closure that must be deferred until the end of time. The sense of such a closure can be approached only by techniques of negation, among which Chaucer’s comic ironies are certainly not the least effective.

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“Lo how I vanysshe”: The Pardoner’s War against Signs david williams

Few commentators have been gentle with Chaucer’s gentil Pardoner, seeing in him the wages of sin, physical degeneracy, and moral malice in degrees measured according to the critic’s particular perspective. Typical of his own good nature, Douglas Wurtele may be the most charitable in mitigating Kittredge’s severe sentence1 by suggesting that the scurrilous quaestor could in fact have been cured of his evil and therefore saved, not through any power or virtue of his own, but through the ministerings of Christus medicus, whose inexhaustible mercy and forgiveness can overcome any human degradation.2 While one would not want to be found in disagreement with Wurtele’s optimistic eschatology, the precise nature of the Pardoner’s sins still requires investigation, if only so that we can better imagine his absolution. Chaucer’s description of the Pardoner’s physical condition has inspired comment on his sexuality as the core of his vice. His own exuberant confession leads many to see his guilt as constituted by his disdain and exploitation of his fellow men, particularly of the poor and ignorant among them. Abuse of office and sensual self-indulgence are also prominent among his sins. While all of the individual sinful acts attributed to the Pardoner and the various categories of sin to which they belong are indeed operative in the text, I argue here that the offence that unifies all the others is impiety of signification – an abuse of the

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God-given redemptive tool of language, with which mankind is meant to re-establish communion with the sacred. As Jesus Christ is the Word of God and thus God Himself (as the speaker’s word is the speaker and the speaker is the word that he or she expresses), such an abuse exceeds sin and passes into the arena of sacrilege. That Chaucer might have explored such a theme in the portrait of the Pardoner is not surprising, since his concern as a poet with the nature of language is to be expected. But to examine the ethics of the sign at the tropological level of the text is innovative on Chaucer’s part, since most medieval literature limits its didacticism to the conventionally moral. This is not to say that there is no extra-literary precedent for such a concern, for philosophers and theologians of the Middle Ages, from Ambrose and Augustine on, concerned themselves with the metaphysical and ethical aspects of language and signification in general. In the figure of the Pardoner and in his discourse, Chaucer presents a wide range of medieval semiosis, distinguishing kinds of signs according to the relative proximity to their signified. Chaucer’s evident belief in the power of signification to make manifest the beings of things (res) indicates his realist philosophical assumptions and his inclination towards incarnational metaphor.3 The Pardoner’s equally evident belief in the complete arbitrariness of the sign and his insistent use of metaphors of corruption and death reveal him as the opposite of what Chaucer himself believes – that is, as a nihilist who has become a hater of life itself. The other side of the hatred of life is the love of death, and it is one of Chaucer’s most brilliant achievements in this portrait to have correlated the semiotic and the ethical. The Pardoner’s abuse of signs, especially the Eucharist, seems to generate his necrophilia, while at the same time his necrophilia seems to be the origin of his semiotic nihilism. This aesthetic device is made possible through the Christian paradox of language, which posits simultaneously the Word as life and words as death. Catherine Pickstock, in a penetrating critique of deconstruction and the “linguistic turn,” describes the potential morbidity of language suggestive of the strange modernity of the Pardoner’s necrophilia: “The logos is identified as life … which would confirm that supplementation of this kind is not a necrophiliac sign of absence and death, but can, by an alternative phenomenology of ‘self-supplemented presence,’

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be regarded as the principle of life. But the coincidence of absence and presence is genuinely infinite, and so, outside such a structure of plenitude, signs are empty, and everything Derrida says about the sign is profoundly correct.”4 Chaucer scholarship has long recognized the Pardoner as a figure preoccupied with signs. A host of commentators have examined the Pardoner’s misuse of words,5 and his abuse of relics has received increasing attention, as shown, for example, in an ambitious study by Eugene Vance.6 The Pardoner’s manipulation of eucharistic theology and imagery has also received its share of comment, some of it, like the excellent study by Martin Stevens and Kathleen Falvey, extensive enough to suggest a comprehensive interpretation of the Prologue and Tale.7 Such pieces individually cover a range of signs and the specific abuses that they undergo at the hands of the Pardoner; considered together, they reveal that the Pardoner is up to much more than lying and cheating. His is an unlimited assault on signification itself, beginning with the relation of word to thing, intensifying through a separation of relic from the whole of which it is a part, and culminating in the deicidal sacrilege of denying the mysterium of presence in the consecrated host. This range of signification in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale reflects the gamut of the sign in medieval thought: the word, most familiar of all signs, bears to its signified a conventional relation, a meaning agreed on within a community of speakers; the bond between the relic and that which it betokens, unlike the word and its meaning, is natural, in that the relic, in order to have any signifying power at all, must be an actual part of that which it signifies – it is synecdochic; the consecrated host is unique in that it is the only example in its class, a category in which the sign and the signified are ontologically exactly the same. I suggest here that medieval theorization of these semiotic categories illuminates Chaucer’s poetic use of signs and their violation in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale. In this essay, I examine the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale and their theological and semiotic context in terms of three central concepts – signs, relics, and the Eucharist – and the Pardoner’s misuse of each of them. I then show how Chaucer brings together the Pardoner’s perversions of all three in the extraordinary finale of the Tale.

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signs It is, of course, Augustine who establishes the basic vocabulary of the philosophy of language for the Middle Ages and for the West generally. In De doctrina christiana he gives the famous definition of signs: “Among signs, some are natural and others are conventional.” As examples of the natural sign Augustine offers smoke as a sign of fire and animal tracks as the sign of the animal that left them: “Those are natural which, without any desire or intention of signifying, make us aware of something beyond themselves, like smoke which signifies fire.” But it is not the natural that interests Augustine in this case, but rather the conventional sign: “Conventional signs are those which living creatures show to one another for the purpose of conveying, in so far as they are able, the motion of their spirits or something which they have sensed or understood.”8 We note the emphasis in both cases on intentionality – negative in the case of natural signs, which Augustine defines by the fact that they lack human intention; affirmative in the case of conventional signs, because their very conventionality is constituted by their being produced by an intention of the will. Whereas we normally think of linguistic convention as expressed through the fact that different societies use different words for the same thing (res), Augustine’s view of conventionality is communal. Human beings come together (con: together, with; venire: to come; conventio: meeting) physically and intellectually. They gather physically to transmit an accurate representation of an idea, an emotion, or a thing; they meet intellectually when they come together in their intentions, in agreement that such and such a sign rightly stands for such and such a thing (a convention). The strong social and ethical dimension of Augustine’s definition of the conventional sign is obvious: signification depends on the honest intention of the signifying agent as well as the forthright intention of the receiver to understand as intended. When these two moral states are present, there exists an intentio communis. Augustine frequently foregrounds this ethical dimension of semiotics. Since intention is initially private, residing within the mind of the speaker, one intention may be substituted for another without the interlocutor necessarily realizing that a false signification is taking place. One may, for instance, desire to appear other than one truly is and therefore use signs differently than the convention

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authorizes so as to establish this self-image. This is what the Pardoner does in his preaching, in order to give himself an air of the authority that he does not rightly have: “And in Latyn I speke a wordes fewe, / To saffron with my predicacioun” (345–6).9 Here the Pardoner corresponds closely to one of the “weak men” whom Augustine describes: “The more men are offended by these things [authority and convention], the weaker they are. And they are weaker in that they wish to seem learned, not in the knowledge of things, by which we are truly instructed, but in the knowledge of signs, in which it is very difficult not to be proud” (II, xiii). Here and throughout his writings, Augustine remains true to his realist perspective, giving priority to things over their signs. Such priority not only has important epistemological implications but also determines moral vision. If truth resides in the thing and the sign exists to conduct us through itself to the thing, any loitering in the sign – because of its beauty, its charm, its delectability – risks preventing the knower from arriving at the true destination of signification. Augustine associates such error with sensuality: “If it is a carnal slavery to adhere to a usefully instituted sign instead of to the thing it was instituted to signify, how much is it a worse slavery to embrace signs instituted for spiritually useless things instead of the things themselves? Even if you transfer your affections from these signs to what they signify, you still, nevertheless, do not lack a servile and carnal burden and veil” (III, vii). The Pardoner’s wallowing in signs is the beginning of his misuse of them: “Myne handes and my tonge goon so yerne / That it is joye to se my bisynesse” (398–9). Since the sensual pleasure of signs cannot remain private, communication of these abused signs must necessarily follow. The Pardoner needs an audience, as does every exhibitionist, in order fully to delight in sin. In this case, that of the transgression of signification, he takes particular relish in luring others into accepting the falsification of signs as well, even if they do so unwittingly: “And whoso fyndeth hym out of swich blame, He wol come up and offre a Goddes name, And I assoile him by the auctoritee Which that by bulle ygraunted was to me.” By this gaude have I wonne, yeer by yeer,

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148 Chaucer and Language An hundred mark sith I was pardoner. I stonde lyk a clerk in my pulpet, And whan the lewed peple is doun yset, I preche so as ye han herd bifoore, And telle an hundred false japes moore. (385–94)

The separation of sign and signified here operates on two levels simultaneously. The Pardoner convinces his devout audience that his words bear an intention towards their salvation and that the seal that he brandishes signifies, as is the convention, power to absolve. Duped as they are, the common people “buy into” this process of false signification. This description is itself, however, a communication to the Pardoner’s fellow pilgrims signifying, they suppose, an accurate account of the matter. But we begin to suspect that we have here and throughout the portrait a variation on the paradox of the liar (I am a liar; everything I say is a lie) because the Pardoner’s intention at the level of his communication to the pilgrims is to create a wholly deceptive self-portrait, and he does it by telling the truth. Thus his candour concerning his personal corruption is true and false at the same time: yes, he is a grasping materialist who exploits others to get “monie, wolle, chese, and whete” (448); no, this kind of material gain is not his ultimate intention, and his motive is most certainly not to “have a joly wenche in every toun” (453). Rather, he intends these signs of material greed and of virility to throw us off the scent. Chaucer separates them from their normal conventional associations and transfers them to an effeminate ideologue in order to mask the real state of that significatum. In short, the Pardoner’s signification is false on two levels: his intention is not to save the penitent; he is not primarily a figure of material greed and virile appetite. In direct contrast to Augustine, the Pardoner gives priority to signs over things: sexual identity inheres not in nature but in words; the efficacy of sacrament is produced not by its divine author’s intention but through the recipient’s belief. The inevitable epistemological and ethical results of such prioritization follow. The possibility of knowing, and even the desire to know, the world as it is objectively fades and gives way to a phantom reality of words. This strategy of calling things what the speaker wants them to be and then declaring that things are what they are called produces not the happiness of desire fulfilled but

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hatred of desire frustrated, not a sense of endowment but one of loss. The constant impingement of the reality of the world of things causes unease and resentment, until self-loathing remains all that can be celebrated: “But shortly myn entente I wol devyse: / I preche of no thyng but for coveityse. / Therefore my theme is yet, and evere was, / Radix malorum est Cupiditas” (423–6). The precedence of sign over signified allows the Pardoner to parrot the scholastic principle that one may know the good but not will it. The Pardoner perverts this idea so as to assert that, since a person with evil intentions may speak words that have good effect, therefore as long as something is believed it is true – even the words of a liar: “But though myself be gilty in that synne, / Yet kan I maken oother folk to twynne / From avarice and soore to repente. / But that is nat my principal entente” (429–32). The Pardoner’s chief perversion of the linguistic sign corresponds directly to the misuse of conventional signs of which Augustine warned. Identifying a further division within the category of conventional sign, Augustine describes two types: “Signs are either literal or figurative. They are called literal when they are used to designate those things on account of which they were instituted; thus we say bos [ox] when we mean the animal of a herd because all men using the Latin language call it by that name just as we do. Figurative signs occur when that thing which we designate by a literal sign is used to signify something else; thus we say ‘ox’ and by that syllable understand the animal which is ordinarily designated by that word, but again by that animal we understand an evangelist” (II.x). The figurative sign (signum translatum) is a metaphor, and the characteristic that Augustine’s definition highlights is its greater distance from the thing that is its origin: to signify the evangelist whose symbol is the ox, we must first invoke the thing by the word for it and then transfer the sense of that sign to another thing – in this case, a particular person in his capacity as scriptural writer. The more complicated process of signification that is the metaphor creates considerable dangers of that process going wrong, and Augustine warns about the misuse of metaphor and of literal signs as well: “To this warning that we must beware not to take transferred or figurative expressions as though they were literal, a further warning must be added lest we wish to take literal expressions as though they were figurative” (III.x).

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Such inversion of the literal for the metaphoric and the metaphoric for the literal is the basis of intellectual misunderstanding and deception and of moral depravity as well: “If Scripture commends something despised by the customs of the listeners, or condemns what those customs do not condemn, they take the Scriptural locution as figurative” (III.x). In other words, wanting to have things our own way, we declare metaphoric those hard truths that displease us and literal those statements with which we agree. Pursued far enough, this misuse of signification makes of all reality a word game, and such is the world of the Pardoner as Chaucer depicts him in the process of reconstructing reality. The chief means for this constructivism turns out to be the manipulation of ambiguity: “But the ambiguity of figurative words, which are now to be treated, requires no little care and industry. For at the outset you must be very careful lest you take figurative expressions literally. What the Apostle says applies to this problem: ‘For the letter killeth, but the spirit quickeneth.’ That is, when that which is said figuratively is taken as though it were literal, it is understood carnally. Nor can anything more appropriately be called the death of the soul than that condition in which the thing which distinguishes us from beasts, which is the understanding, is subjected to the flesh in the pursuit of the letter” (III.v). It would be difficult to find anywhere in literature a better illustration of this error than the Pardoner’s brilliant play with metaphor, which concretizes the figurative and turns its normal direction up so doun: “‘Mete unto wombe, and wombe eek unto mete, / Shal God destroyen bothe,’ as Paulus seith. / ‘Alas a foul thyng is it, by my feith, / To seye this word, and fouler is the dede, / Whan man so drynketh of the white and rede / That of his throte he maketh his pryvee’” (522–7). Here St Paul’s lesson against material greed is itself materialized into the image of the upside-down body, where two orifices, throat and rectum, are inverted. As Janet Adelman has pointed out, the further allusion to Eucharist in the mention of the “white and the red,” and other abuses of Eucharistic symbolism, create a paradigm for the inversion of the spiritual into the literal and greatly enrich the theme of the relation of the literal to the figurative in language by extending it to substance and appearance, spirit and matter, presence and absence.10 The reduction of the figurative to the literal reaches its lowest point in the Tale when the three riotoures converse with the young boy

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about the demise of one of their friends: “‘Sire,’ quod this boy, ‘it nedeth never-a-deel; / It was me toold er ye cam heer two houres. / He was, pardee, an old felawe of youres, / And sodenly he was yslayn to-nyght, / Fordronke, as he sat on his bench upright. / Ther cam a pryvee theef men clepeth Deeth” (670–5). Whereas the boy naturally and easily employs personification and metaphor, the addled men immediately conceive in their own minds the figurative as literal: “And we wol sleen this false traytour Deeth. / He shal be slayn, he that so manye sleeth” (699–700). The text is so permeated with this process of taking the figurative as literal and vice versa that the device emerges as a kind of metafigure. In the cultural context of Chaucer’s audience, the carnality of making the spirit into the letter echoes another, positive paradigm in which spirit takes on flesh in order precisely to slay the death of the soul, as Augustine called it, that negative carnality has caused. The use throughout the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale of incarnational allusions evokes the presence in the text of a perverse and blasphemous sense of “Word-made-flesh” and thus creates two levels of metaphoricity: one through which, by the riotoures’ literalizing of Death (words made fleshly, literal), the pilgrim-author demonstrates to his audience a misuse of signs by the wrongly directed characters that he has created; the other through which, by the implied presence of the incarnation, he hopes to draw his audience into an unwitting sacrilege. By making ambiguous the sense of in/carnation, the Pardoner hopes to lead the audience to choose flesh against spirit, word against thing. The Incarnation is not the only sacred concept that is blasphemed in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale; the triad of drunken revellers rather obviously suggests an infernal trinity: “Herkneth, felawes, we thre ben al ones” (696). The Last Supper is clearly evoked at the end of the Tale when, to celebrate their good fortune, the band propose to take bread and wine: “And brynge us breed and wyn ful prively” (797), and the Crucifixion is referred to repeatedly in the Pardoner’s sermon on swearing: “That it is grisly for to heere hem swere. / Oure blissed Lordes body they totere” (473–4). Indeed, the complete theological narrative, from the hypostasis of Trinity, to Incarnation, to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion, is parodied, the Resurrection being mocked and inverted in the parricidal destruction of the trio at the end of the Tale. In her analysis of postmodernism’s intellectual and moral difficulties, Pickstock identifies the origin of contemporary morbidity

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as the medieval reaction against scholasticism and the ascendancy of logic over metaphysics, especially in the anti-Thomism of Duns Scotus and the iconoclasm of the sixteenth-century humanist Peter Ramus, whose intellectual descendants Pickstock recognizes in Derrida and Levinas. Crucial in the displacement of truth by language was the new emphasis on the knower at the expense of the known; with the rise of logic in the late thirteenth and throughout the fourteenth centuries, intelligibility becomes increasingly the criterion of being: “This determination of what is knowable, and therefore of what ‘is,’ according to a set of unchangeable rules, apparent to the single mind, inverts the traditional movement from ontology to epistemology, yet nevertheless assumes an ontological redefinition of reality as the clear and distinct.”11 The inversion of the relationship between ontology and logic produces an inordinate emphasis on the knower and on epistemology, which spawns in turn a valorization of the sign over and above the signified. Pickstock sees in this revision the beginnings of modern nihilism: “The logical outcome of an immanentist ontology where epistemology is paramount is … the reduction of being to the object whose existence does not exceed the extent to which it is known to the subject. Thus the subject assumes the status of that which confers existence upon reality. But we have also seen that the subject’s realm of operation contains contradictory and nihilistic aspects.”12 The impression that the Pardoner has something of the contemporary in him may well have to do with the intellectual history that Pickstock traces and which makes the postmodern heir to a relativist world-view that had its beginnings in the nominalism of the fourteenth century. The emphasis in that medieval perspective is on the priority of individual, material phenomena and human experience of them. This materialism leads inevitably to the determining characteristic not only of the postmodern but of all materialist cultures – the longing for death: “Pseudo-eternity is composed of things which are only preservable and manageable as finite, and therefore as ‘dead.’ On this basis it can be claimed that modernity less seeks to banish death, than to prise life and death apart in order to preserve life immune from death in pure sterility. For in seeking only life, in the form of a pseudo-eternal permanence, the ‘modern’ gesture is secretly doomed to necrophilia, love of what has to die, can only die.”13 The Pardoner, as Chaucer’s portrait of the living dead, embodies the necrophilia born of its own frenzied opposite, necrophobia. For

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in its project of demoting the ontological and totalizing the logical, banishing the signified in order to set free the signifier, nominalism (both medieval and modern) sets in motion a whole series of fissions, including pre-eminently the separation of death from life. As a now-autonomous reality, death comes to be seen as annihilation, as erasure, to be dreaded and denied. But the invincibility of the enemy provokes the opposite reaction, and, to console ourselves with the illusion of being in control, we rush to embrace the inevitable: necrophobia becomes necrophilia. Thus the Pardoner’s Tale is one about youths seeking Death, preceded and introduced by the narrator’s own vampirizing of language’s meaning through images of waste and excrement. Sin is the mother of death and, like her child, possesses the weird power of attracting man to that which he flees by transforming his natural repulsion into something to delight in. Lee Patterson, in an influential study of confession and penance in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, describes a scene from Piers Plowman as an example of sin’s ability to deform its own cure into further pathological life: “Langland’s scene demonstrates how sin destroys its own cure, and so condemns itself to itself. By subverting the contrition that would annul them, the Sins succeed in prolonging a life of anguish, condemning themselves to damnation, a death without death and an ending without an end.”14 This state of the living dead, achieved morally through the embrace of sin, is also achieved semiotically through the Pardoner’s perverse pleasure in the sign.

relics The Pardoner’s misuse of verbal signs is matched, if not trumped, by his misuse of relics. Unlike words, relics are natural signs, possessing no figurative sense except when words are used to refer to them. Thus a piece of the true cross relates to its signified as part does to whole, whereas verbal references to pieces of the true cross – for instance, in a narrative of the life of St Helen – could function metaphorically. The intimacy between the relic sign and its signified is suggested by the primitive designations for relics; they were called membra (limbs, members), exuviae (skin, covering), as well as signa (signs). The formal language of the Church defines relics as things that have been in actual, physical contact with Christ or the saints and which recall them to us, “not in the same way as holy images do, by simple representation, nor as a sacred object, by a cultural

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function, but rather by an objective relation to the body of Jesus in his human life, by being the belongings, more or less intimate, in the past lives of the saints or blessed who are now in heaven. Moreover, no convention can make a thing into a relic; it either is or it is not a part of that which it signifies.”15 The eventual use by Christians of the term reliquiae to refer not only to the physical remains of a human body, as the Romans used the term, but even to objects touched by, or placed in the vicinity of, the departed indicates the ontological concept of the extension of being into thing, making the thing virtually part, as well as sign, of the whole. Although a distinction was maintained between firstclass relics (body parts) and second-class relics (objects touched by the saint: brandea, sacramenta), both of these representative relics are nevertheless signs participating in the energy, the élan vital, of the holy person. They are the continued life on earth of the deceased, now sanctified in paradise.16 The relation of relics to words was specifically addressed in the early theorizing of signification, and it is clear that in its original conception the relic sign is wholly different from the verbal sign in that its relation to its signified is more intimate; relics are material things that participate in the being and essence of their signified, whereas words are ephemeral and conventional, too abstract fully to “make present” their signified. Therefore the writings of the saints, no matter how important, how sacred, were not considered relics unless written in the author’s own hand, “precisely because the relation that they have to their authors is too abstract and purely spiritual.”17 The falsification of relics, specifically by pardoners, was also addressed. Siegfried Wenzel, in his study of the Pardoner’s misuse of relics, cites a fourteenth-century description of such deception that equally suggests the misuse of words as empty signs: “We should thus know that people that veil their sins in this fashion are like these false pardoners, who show their relics in some golden vessel that is decorated with precious gems, or else wrapped in cloths of gold and silk, so that they may look truly precious before the people. But as it often happens, when they open them up, you will find nothing but the bones from a farm animal that have been pulled out of a ditch, stinking and dried up and worthy of every abomination.”18 The authority for the concept that a part of a body sanctified by God during its earthly existence could possess the virtue of the

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entire body of the saint now sanctified in heaven comes partially from scripture. In Matthew 9:20–2, for instance, the actual working of a relic, perhaps better called here exuviae, is described: “Then from behind him came a woman, who had suffered from a haemorrhage for twelve years, and she touched the fringe of his cloak, for she said to herself, ‘If I can only touch his cloak I shall be well again.’” A power goes out of Jesus and, in conjunction with the woman’s faith in Him, cures her. Similarly, defenders of the cult of relics often cited as authority the scriptural account of what is believed to have been the first popular Christian cult of the relic as such: “So remarkable were the miracles worked by God at Paul’s hands that handkerchiefs or aprons which had touched him were taken to the sick, and they were cured of their illnesses, and the evil spirits came out of them” (Acts 19:11–12). We note here the prudence with which the incident of Paul’s relics is related; the curative power is God’s, and Paul is a mere instrument through whose hands God works. Such a view provided a defence against the charge of paganism and magic that was levelled against the Christians both inside and outside the church because of the veneration of relics. Augustine, who, once again, is responsible for much of the theoretical basis of relic signification, developed his theory in defending the veneration of relics from its detractors: relics have power even over the pagan, for all peoples have a profound respect for the dead, and most cultures express that respect through hallowing the remains of the departed. Augustine takes to task the Roman pagans saved from barbarian invaders by seeking sanctuary in Christian churches – saved, he points out, by the power of Christ working through the relics in those places: “Are not those very Romans, who were spared by the barbarians through their respect for Christ, become enemies to the name of Christ? The reliquaries of the martyrs and the churches of the apostles bear witness to this; for in the sack of the city they were open sanctuary for all who fled to them, whether Christian or Pagan. To their very threshold the bloodthirsty enemy raged; there his murderous fury owned a limit.”19 Thus the power of the relic here, unlike that in the story of the haemorrhaging woman, involves no reciprocal faith on the part of those on whom it acts. It is rather a purely objective force that halts the advance of the barbarians at the entrance to the locus made sacred by a holy presence invoked by the relic.

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The physicality of the relic is one of the characteristics that distinguishes it from words. It is both res and signum at one and the same time, and it is its material participation in the thing, not its relation to it as sign, which creates its miraculous power. This coexistence as sign and thing is dramatically declared in the story of Pope Gregory I (the Great) about Pope Leo I, who once convinced petitioners of the authenticity of a piece of cloth that had been put in proximity to a saint’s body. These brandea, as they were called, were second-class relics used in the early Middle Ages in the West, where, unlike in the East, the fragmentation of the saint’s body was forbidden. Even though the piece of cloth had touched the body of the saint, it clearly possessed a more remote intimacy than a part of the body itself. Further, it was more anonymous, one of innumerable pieces of cloth, all of them looking alike, and bearing no obvious evidence of their authenticity. Thus the brandea were inherently less convincing than, for instance, a skeleton, a finger, or any other body part. According to Gregory, Leo overcame suspicion by taking scissors to one disputed brandeum, cutting it, and producing from it a flow of blood. It is the very physicality of this miracle that satisfies the incredulous and raises the bit of cloth beyond the category of sign to the higher status of relic.20 In discussing the early Western prohibition against disturbing the tombs or the remains of the saints – a scruple derived from Roman reverence for the dead – the great Bollandist hagiographer Father Delehaye points out that this principle guaranteed not only the integrity of the physical remains of the saints but the specificity of the sacred locus as well. Thus, for instance, in the early period the Basilica of St Lawrence on the Tiburtina in Rome was his one and only post-mortem residence. All other churches bearing his name did so, it was understood, on the authority of possessing some symbol, some sanctuaria of the saint, but never a physical part, and therefore, propounds the hagiographer, “no one would have sought St Lawrence elsewhere than in his basilica.”21 The later practice of dividing up and distributing pieces of the sacred corpse, a practice well established by Chaucer’s time, had the effect of despecifying locus and making presence ubiquitous. Now every church bearing the name of St Lawrence was the real abode of the saint himself, who fully inhabited the place through the power of a part of his earthly body. Similar to the Eucharist, but more limited,

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presence is now universalized. Speaking of the Byzantine church, which had always allowed the fragmentation and distribution of the saintly bodies, Leclercq indicates how the religious mentality conceived of relics: “For the possessors of relics in Byzantium, these holy remains were like the soul of the buildings in which they resided; to them these were not dry, old bones. They had once been animate bodies, personalities, whose existence, now physically ended, persisted in this luminous trace.”22 A remarkable architectural metaphor for the semiosis of the relic is found in the disposition of the early Christian churches and in the means of creating representative relics. In a church that possessed the intact body of its patron saint, a crypt was built directly beneath the altar and the body sealed within. Between the crypt and the floor of the altar was constructed a small tubular passage making a vertical connection between the crypt and the altar floor. Beside this well was another shaft less deep, not reaching down to the crypt but communicating with the well horizontally through a small grilled window. Into this shaft were placed cloths and other objects destined to become representative relics. Once a year a censer with burning incense was lowered down into the well and not only purified and blessed the holy remains in the crypt, but created a physical, if brumous, link between the body and the nascent relics. The well through which the two were connected was called the umbilicus, a name that radically corporealizes the entire structure and figuratively suggests a mother–child relation between the body of the saint and the objects, which, through the effluvium passing from the body’s chamber, are nourished and animated into the figurative offspring of the matrix.23 This metaphoric consanguinity between the saint and his or her signs communicates not only the unique and peculiar representational process of the relic, but also its defining material and physical characteristics. A similar physicality characterizes the sensational metaphoricity of the Pardoner, who also uses the body – particularly its passages and orifices – for purposes of representation, but in a far less life-affirming way: “O wombe! O bely! O stynkyng cod, / Fulfilled of dong and of corrupcioun! / At either ende of thee foul is the soun” (534–6). Here the body is reduced to the digestive tract, a body part that, unlike the life-sustaining umbilicus of the hagiographical figure, the Pardoner’s language fashions into a consuming–defecating

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engine productive of nothing but waste. Maggie Kilgour points to the complex association between belly and falsehood and its extentions in Dante: “For Dante, drawing on the antithesis between Christ the Word and the lying belly in Romans 16:17–19 and Philippians 3:18–21, the belly is associated with false and lying poets … In Hell, especially in the belly, the spirit is abstracted from the letter and then substituted for it by a kind of infernal reification in which the polarizing opposites collapse by consuming each other.”24 Kilgour notes in the Inferno25 the “increasing reduction of spirits to mere flesh,” which in turn becomes food. In the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale we find Chaucer’s variation on this image, where everything substantial and real is turned to amorphous waste and neither spirit nor flesh survive. The Pardoner’s vigorous abuse of signs graduates from words to relics, an ample supply of which he carries with him on the pilgrimage. Eugene Vance has discussed the significance of these relics in relation to medieval semantics generally and to Chaucer’s theory of language specifically. He perceives Chaucer’s use of inversion as a device that functions to validate its opposite, so that perverse or erroneous use of language by a negative character, like our Pardoner, reinforces the wholesome and correct use of language to which Chaucer subscribes: “By his transgressions, Chaucer’s perverse preacher calls attention to both the semiotics and the ethics of truth-making processes in fourteenth-century ecclesiastical discourse.”26 Vance’s discussion tends, however, to conceive the relic as just another sign, not unlike words, depending on certain social conventions. Thus he identifies relic signification with the semiotics of economy, claiming that “relics express a vertical economy where the sins of the penitent are repurchased by the relic as pledge money (pignus) left behind by the now resurrected saint.”27 Vance identifies Chaucer’s concept of signs with Wyclif’s, both of which he seems to characterize as relativistic: “Chaucer’s constant concern is to explore ethical suppositions underlying the supposedly neutral conventions of different discourses. Like Wyclif, Chaucer does not imagine ontological continuity between the order of human discourse and the Word. Rather, in The House of Fame Chaucer makes it clear that human discourse has no center, but is labyrinthine, selfreferential, and inflationary.”28 While one can imagine such a view being held by Wyclif, to attribute to Chaucer a concept of language as lacking ontological

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continuity or ethical centre has the effect of identifying him with his character, the Pardoner, who clearly does subscribe to a theory of language as decentred, arbitrary, and subjective (or “self-referential,” as Vance calls it); it is precisely this view of language and reality that allows the corrupt Quaestor to represent things as he pleases and that identifies him as an extreme nominalist and relativist. But such an identification would seem to contradict Vance’s earlier suggestion that Chaucer uses the Pardoner as a negative example of his own views on language.29 The association of the Pardoner’s body with his relics is irresistible, largely because it is he who insists on it. Vance’s idea that the Pardoner is an example of the medieval poetic device of using a lying character to highlight the truth of language works well with the Pardoner’s body–relic association, since normatively the relic is a part of the body. In this instance of typical Chaucerian inversion, the false relics in the Quaestor’s bag betoken and participate in the fraudulence of his body – that is to say, the false relics have the same efficacy and power as his emasculated and impotent self. The first relic to which the Pardoner refers is his bulles: “And thanne my bulles shewe I, alle and some / Oure lige lordes seel on my patente, / That shewe I first, my body to warente” (337–9). John Fleming has pointed to Chaucer’s macaronic pun on bullae and “balls” here,30 and the fact that bullae were bombé metal forms containing relics worn on the body as amulets31 firmly anchors the double entendre. This provides another example of Chaucer’s device in the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale of inverting signification so as to characterize the Pardoner’s body, while in turn using his body, as Vance puts it, to “mov[e] to the centre of critical attention … the power of the Word,” in this case through the relic.32 The Pardoner articulates his belief that the power of the relic, if any, resides in the belief and devotion of the faithful who venerate the object. This subjectivism has several consequences for the theory of signs – if a thing is simply what one wants it to be or if its virtue arises out of the confidence or sentiment of the human observer, then any sign will do; if we can all just agree to call dogs chiens, or even cats, then we have acceptable and correct signification. Similarly, according to the relativist, if we can all agree that a newly woven cloth is a piece of the sail of St Peter’s ship, then it is! Since things are ultimately names and it is the individual’s experience of things that authorizes their names, any significance

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may be assigned to any thing: “Than shewe I forth my longe cristal stones, / Ycrammed ful of cloutes and of bones – / Relikes been they, as wenen they echoon” (347–9; emphasis added). In the Pardoner’s world-view, human knowing and naming give reality to the intelligible – subjective belief – and understanding (wenyng) quickens the object of belief. This “anthropognosis,” a trait that increasingly characterized the fourteenth-century via moderna, menaced not only the independent existence of the real, but the objective centredness of signification that guaranteed its “inherent power to refer” as well.33 A more or less innocent version of it is seen in the Wife of Bath’s rather incompetent use of experience as the philosophical contrary of auctoritee, but a less candid and far more sinister insinuation of the anthropocentric world-view is attempted by the Pardoner through his use of language in general and of relics in particular: “But sires, o word forgot I in my tale: / I have relikes and pardoun in my male, / As faire as any man in Engelond, / Whiche me were yeven by the popes hond. / If any of yow wole, of devocion, / Offren and han myn absolucion, / Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun” (919–25). Much commentary has analysed Chaucer’s intentions in this peculiar manoeuvre. However one sees it, the incident clearly constitutes a proposition to the audience to accept as genuine what it has already been told are inauthentic relics or, more accurately, to treat as real what they know to be unreal – to assent through an obsequious kowtow to the principle that there is no objective truth. It is this scene that reunites the Prologue with the Tale and unifies the entire text by illuminating the Pardoner’s ultimate authorial intention. Since that intention has to do with the entire medieval system of signification, we come to understand this final scene fully only after examining the Pardoner’s deformation of the last and greatest mode of signification, the Eucharist.

the eucharist With the Eucharist we encounter an example of the highest category of medieval sign, the sacrament. The Latin sacramentum is closely related in meaning to the Greek mysterion, as is seen in the frequent reference to the “mystery of the Eucharist.” The etymology of the Greek word, “to close” (the lips, the eyes), suggests that the signifying power of the sacrament is not only independent of social

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convention but transcendent in origin and ultimately beyond the comprehension of man, unuttered, invisible. Whereas conventional signs, such as words, are indicative, caused by the human desire to communicate something, and come to “stand for” that something, the sacrament is efficacious and is itself the cause of that which it signifies. All sacraments require for their outer signification matter and form: in the case of the Eucharist, the matter is bread and wine, and the form is the words of Jesus at the Last Supper used to express the sacramental action.34 It is in this unification of all modes of signification – material, visual, conceptual, and verbal – that the superiority of the eucharistic sign inheres. The transformation of matter into spirit by the force of words is described by St Ambrose, one of the major theologians of the Eucharist: “How is it that bread become the body of Christ? By consecration! By whose words, by whose discourse? By the discourse of Jesus Christ Himself … What is the discourse of Christ? To be sure, it is that by which all that is came into existence. The Lord created everything that exists by words … If, therefore, there is such power in the discourse of Jesus, to the point that what was not came into being, how much greater is the operation that changes that which has been created into still another creation?”35 Ambrose’s strong metaphysical language here typifies the Christian concept of Eucharist; as all being is word-originated, brought into existence through the Word of God, so the transformation of things – bread and wine – into something else, res into ens, earthly into divine, is accomplished by a verbo-ontological operation. It is from the paradigm of the coexistence of word and being in the Word-made-flesh that the realist view of signification derives, and its perfect expression is the Eucharist. God’s Word causes things to be, but in human semiotics only the sacramental sign is efficacious, and its efficacy in the case of each of the seven sacraments is grounded in the fact that the words that start the sacramental operation were uttered and instituted by the Word Himself. In a strange and perverse way, the Pardoner looms as a rival saviour who would turn all words into perverse sacraments through his constructivist theory that by whatever one names a thing its reality is so constituted. However, such a view, related to the nominalist emphasis on experience as determinant of truth, quickly lapses into a relativism that debilitates all effective communication.

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The realist view as seen in the theory of the sacramental is wholly different; the visible sign produces inwardly what it signifies outwardly, and what it effects is sanctification – that is, a divine life in the soul. Whereas the natural character of the material element of the sacrament is transformed by being infused with a power independent of it, the material thing that signifies cannot be arbitrary: “The sign is constituted in the first instance by physical, sensual elements, one of which, the sacramentally indeterminate (matter), must possess inherently an analogous, if distant, rapport with the signification properly speaking sacramental, to which it adds, by virtue of Christ’s instituting it, the determinant element, the form (words).”36 The Eucharist is the greatest of sacraments because what it effects is the presence of the author of all sacraments, Christ. It was instituted for the same reason that Christ became human, to reestablish the broken communication between God and mankind. In this sense it is the continuation of the Incarnation, as is seen in the figure that governs both, the Word-become-flesh. Medieval discussions of the Eucharist, including imaginative literature, often employ the analogy to the Incarnation, as we see below. The transformation of the intention of the Godhead, expressed as Word, into the human body of Jesus in Mary’s womb prefigures the later change of the essence of bread and of wine into that same body. The Pardoner’s rendition perverts the intimate identification of Eucharist with life into its opposite. Just as in his Tale eating produces death, and in his Prologue food is faecal, so too the Pardoner’s discourse has its origin in what Pickstock describes as a necrophiliac theory of the sign. Chaucer’s typical use of inversion to validate opposites here makes consummately appropriate the employment of the Eucharist to set in motion a series of opposites that reveal the Pardoner’s world as excrement, as Stevens and Falvey have shown,37 flowing from a world-view that is antieucharistic, anti-semiotic, anti-life. It is of course the theory of transubstantiation that is central to the understanding of the Eucharist and the often-ferocious polemics that surrounded it in the Middle Ages. The controversy was never hotter than in Chaucer’s own day, and F.N. Robinson’s observation that Chaucer must have had in mind the Lollard attack on the sacrament of the Eucharist when writing the Pardoner’s Prologue

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and Tale now seems indisputable.38 Although Christians had from the earliest times celebrated the Eucharist as a making-present and sacrifice,39 it was not until the late eleventh century that the theological description of the change of the “substance” of the bread and of the wine into the body and blood of Christ, with the continuation of their “accidents,” occurred. Soon afterwards, in the early twelfth century, the word “transubstantiation” appeared for the first time.40 Through the continuing power of Jesus’ words at the Last Supper, He returns to earth and mystically enters into the bread and wine, body and blood, each time the words are repeated by a consecrated priest; the substance of the bread and wine becomes the substance of Jesus’ body and blood, although their appearance remains unchanged. This explanation of the Eucharist emphasized certain parts of the narrative of the Last Supper. Jesus’ own repeated reference to His imminent departure and return, His juxtaposition of His absence and presence – “In a short time you will no longer see me, and then a short time later you will see me again” – expanded the significance of his later words in Luke 22:19–20: “Do this as a memorial of me” (in the Vulgate, in meam commemorationem). The commemorative act would be made possible by the actual return of the subject mysteriously (mysterium/sacramentum). The specific address to the remaining faithful apostles and Jesus’ distinguishing them from those to whom they must take his message made it clear that the power of his institutional words was given to them alone (“You are the men who have stood by me faithfully in my trials, and now I confer a kingdom on you” [Luke 22:28–9]). But it was the words themselves that were understood to be the matrix of the power of transubstantiation. As the great scholar of the Eucharist Darwell Stone reconstructs the event, at the Last Supper Jesus holds up a piece of bread and, in Aramaic, declares, in effect: “This, my body.”41 But later conventional words, even the same ones uttered by the Word, are not enough by themselves to set in motion the sacramental kinesis. Three things are necessary: the material reality, unleavened bread, wine, and water; the words of Jesus as instituted at the Last Supper; and the intention of the officiating priest to perform successfully the operation of transubstantiation. The necessity of this last element, that of intention, reveals that what Chaucer so often refers to as good entente was still required on the part of the human agent, even though the power

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of the signifying process came from outside. The perfect communication between humanity and God that the Eucharist enacts is therefore a co-operative one. When all three elements are in place – things, words, and intention – the Spirit comes down on and into the things: “When the priest stands before the Table, holding up his hands to heaven, and calling on the Holy Ghost to come and touch the elements, there is great quiet, great silence. When the Spirit gives His grace, when He descends, when He touches the elements, when you see the Sheep sacrificed and consummated, do you then cause tumult or turmoil, or strife, or abuse?”42 The fact that the elements, the bread and wine, retain their outward appearance after they have been substantially changed to the body and blood of Christ preserves the reality of sign as such, for it is the outer appearance that constitutes the sign. Of what then is this farinaceous host as sign a sign? It is a sign not of a thing independent and other than itself, like a word, nor is it, like the relic, a part of the whole that it signifies. The white wafer raised up by the priest after the words of transubstantiation is not a metaphor, a sign, or a symbol standing for Christ, who is no longer present on earth. Rather, it is the living reality of that which it betokens, and in this case, and this case only, sign and signified are the same. It is in this sense that in medieval semiotics the Eucharist is the perfect union of sign and signified, a restoration of the prelapsarian oneness of language and being, a oneness that itself both betokened and effected the communion of mankind and God and vivified all signs generally. Pickstock points to the connection between Eucharist and the very possibility of meaning: “Where death is not held as over against life, it is possible to restore meaning to language, and … the optimum site of this restoration is the integration of word and action in the event of the Eucharist.”43 More specifically and radically, Pickstock claims that “the words of Consecration ‘This is my body’ therefore, far from being problematic in their meaning, are the only words which certainly have meaning, and lend this meaning to all other words. This is because they fulfill the contradictory conditions of the beneficent secrecy of every sign (certain / uncertain, continuous / discontinuous, iconic / arbitrary, present / absent) to such a degree of oppositional tension that the inhering of bread in Body is not a relation of signification (as for a Zwinglian view) but more like a condition of possibility for all signification. The bread / Body amalgam is, as

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it were, such an extreme case of sign that it is no longer a sign, but that which gives signs to be.”44 It is the very possibility of this apotheosis of sign that the Pardoner attempts to abort in his assault on signification, as if this eunuch were compelled to project his lack into language itself, castrating the sign at its seminal origin. As Stevens and Falvey, among others, have shown, the entire direction of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale is from life to death, and Chaucer accomplishes this aim through the brilliant transmutation of signs of life and growth into those of death and corruption: “Everywhere life is turned to death and spirit and flesh into hollow bones. In fact, one of the image patterns that keeps intruding upon our consciousness is the digestive process, and as a result we sense something disturbingly organic about the world that the Pardoner reveals.”45 Particularly in his famous deforming of the Eucharist, prefaced by one of his several associations of signs with defecation, the Pardoner’s anality is made clear: “Fulfilled of donge and of corrupcioun, / At either ende of thee foul is the soun. / How greet labour and cost is thee to fynde! / Thise cookes, how they stampe and streyne and grynde / And turnen substaunce into accident / To fulfille al thy likerous talent” (535–40). The fact that Chaucer lifted these lines from the treatise of Lotario Cardinal dei Segni, De miseria condicionis humane, and the fact that by the time he did so Lotario had served as Pope Innocent III greatly enrich the allusion. On the one hand, because the Pardoner uses dei Segni’s very words, he is automatically associated with him; on the other hand, because the original author is understood to be employing the extreme imagery of the contemptu mundi tradition in order to condemn sensuality, worldliness, materialism, and literalism, the association is immediately annulled through the echo of the Pardoner’s overriding words – that he is an agent and paradigm of everything that he denounces (a further extension of the liar paradox, perhaps). He is thus an anti–dei Segni. The fact that Chaucer and his fourteenth-century audience thought of the author not as dei Segni but as Innocent III introduces into the complications of the figurative construct the association of papacy and thus potentially all of the considerable polemics that surrounded Eucharist, papacy, and sacrament in Chaucer’s society.46 In Chaucer’s allusion, then, the Pardoner emerges as an anti-papal preacher with much to say on the hot

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issues of the time – sacramental language, Eucharist, confession, absolution, and priesthood. As has been shown by Pickstock, Duns Scotus’s voluntarist attack on the Thomistic theory of transubstantiation introduced an irreconcilable division between body and soul, flesh and spirit, and ultimately between death and life. His claim that Christ’s body was present in the Eucharist, but not His soul, rendered the Eucharist a sign of a dead corpse.47 The Pardoner’s necrophilia is expressed through his own transubstantiation heresy in which he views the Eucharist – and everything else – in purely physical terms. Thus his famous analogy between the culinary and digestive processes and the operation of transubstantiation is perfectly appropriate to his materialist conception of the Eucharist and of reality itself: “Thise cokkes, how they stampe, and streyne, and grynde, / And turnen substaunce into accident” (538–9). Just as the Scotists viewed transubstantiation as making present Jesus’ body without spirit, so too the Pardoner, who views the whole world as a rotting cadaver, represents Christ’s presence and the Eucharist as desiccate, the sign as deathly. In Chaucer’s time the theologian most famously associated with dissident eucharistic and anti-papal views was, of course, John Wyclif, and the Pardoner’s Tale is in part a refutation of his challenge. Among Wyclif’s many concerns about orthodox Christian belief, transubstantiation was pre-eminent. He could not accept the idea that accidents, or qualities such as colour, size, and shape, could exist independent of some subject in which to exist – that is, some substance. This, he insisted, defied all human logic: “Natural reason teaches us that it is not possible for accidents to exist without a subject. A subject cannot exist without its accidents, and therefore this is much more true the other way round.”48 Wyclif is quick to cry “heretic” at all who disagree with his views and, like the Pardoner himself, knows how to finger the enemy without necessarily naming him: “Bot e moste heresye at God suffred cum to his Chirche is to trowe at is sacrament is accydent wiouten subgett … Ow! How gret diversyte is bytwene us at trowen at is sacrament is verrey bred in his kynde, and bytwene heretikes at tellen at hit is an accydent wiouten suggett.”49 Chaucer’s Pardoner has more or less the same tolerance for disagreement and opposition: “For whan I dar none oother weyes

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debate, / Thanne wol I stynge hym with my tonge smerte / In prechyng, so that he shal nat asterte / To been defamed falsly, if that he / Hath trespased to my bretheren or to me. / For though I telle noght his propre name, / Men shal wel knowe that it is the same / By signes and by othere circumstances” (412–19). Robert E. Nichols, Jr, in a particularly perceptive discussion of Chaucer’s use of eucharistic symbolism, notes the allusion to Wyclif in the figure of the Pardoner. He suggests that the Pardoner represents the targets that Wyclif singled out and seems to want to support this view by reference to the historical situation in which Chaucer and his contemporary Wyclif found themselves: “From original belief in the miracle of the Eucharist, Wyclif, friend to John of Gaunt, Chaucer’s sometime brother-in-law and benefactor, came to doubt the possibility of accidents (such ‘sensible’ properties of bread and wine as color and taste) existing without substance in the consecrated host.”50 While one might agree that such belief-by-association may provide a clue to Chaucer’s perspective, it must be remembered that John of Gaunt, who had done much to protect and even promote his protégé Wyclif, abandoned him entirely when his efforts to get him to give up his heretical views on the Eucharist failed. It was not long after “Chaucer’s sometime brother-in-law and benefactor” had declared Wycliffian eucharistic theory detestabilis in the early 1380s that Chaucer began penning the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.51 Stevens and Falvey are perhaps closer to the mark when they describe the relation of the Pardoner to Wyclif this way: “It is clear that the Pardoner’s Tale is an attack on the Wyclifite position: the Pardoner’s materialism is the ultimate extension of the Wyclifite dogma. In this sense, the Pardoner’s Tale is a subtle fictional refutation of the Lollard dialectic.”52 The Pardoner’s degradation of the holiest of Christian sacraments dominates the whole Prologue and Tale. It begins even before his prologue when, invited by Harry to “telle us som myrthe or japes,” the newly authorized Teller responds with an allusion to bread and wine in demanding drink and “cake,” a word commonly used in Middle English for the consecrated Host:53 “‘But first,’ quod he, ‘heere at this alestake / I wol bothe drynke, and eten of a cake’” (321–2). The materialization of the eucharistic sign and its efficacy are achieved through the insistent imagery of gluttonous consummation, which reaches its height in the image of vomiting up the

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“white and the rede” (526), in which the body of the communicant is figured as a latrine: “of his throte he maketh his pryvee” (527). This materialist idea of the consumed host passing through the digestive tract and ending in a latrine was a feature of the Lollard polemic against the sacrament. It is this image that precedes the Pardoner’s association of transubstantiation with culinary arts.

making the connections The culmination of the anti-Eucharist imagery and of the devaluation of signs and relics correlates with the magnificent finale of the tale, in which Chaucer gathers up and unifies all of the several strands of semiotic imagery that have been winding through the narrative. Having discovered Death personified in the concrete, material, individual gold coins (“the wages of sin is death”), the brotherhood will celebrate its “good fortune” with bread and wine acquired by the youngest of the three.54 Consistent with the governing irony of inversion, his mission, the youngest decides, is not to bring life, but to bring death; from an apothecary he buys “som poyson, that he myghte his rattes quelle,” and it is with a lethal Last Supper that the Pardoner’s Tale ends. Chaucer’s reference here to rats is not just a piece of literary realism. The association of vermin and Eucharist has its own very clear echo in Chaucer’s society as both a theological consideration about the sacrament and still another polemical taunt by the Lollards: what if a rat or mouse were to get to the consecrated host in the ciborium, during the night, for instance, and eat it? Would the rat have received the Body and Blood of Jesus? Would the sacrament work its power on the rat, giving it everlasting life? These were some of the degrading possibilities used to ridicule the orthodox belief in transubstantiation and, beyond that, any concept of signs as other than conventional and subjective.55 The Pardoner seems almost to have borrowed directly from Wyclif’s own necrotic imagery: “The sacrament of the altar is bread, but naturally considered it is worse than rat food; the sacrament of the chalice is wine, but naturally considered, it is worse than poison.”56 The echo of this lugubrious consideration is loud in the Pardoner’s description of the transformation of life into death that the three riotoures undergo. The youngest, sent off for the elements for celebration, seeks instead “som poyson, that he myghte his rattes

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quelle” (854). After murdering the one who brings bread and wine (Benedictus qui venit in nomine [Domini]), the two celebrate his death by drinking what he has prepared, and through this feast his vengeance is made present again, even after his demise.57 The horrific anti-transubstantiation of bread and wine into death and perdition finalizes the Pardoner’s several images of inversion and perversity and ends the brilliant narrative that he has created. But Chaucer’s authorship is not finished. The closure of the wider framing text takes place at the level of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, where the Pardoner attempts to extend his authorship beyond the limits of his fiction. Chaucer lays the groundwork for his conclusion within the Pardoner’s narrative itself by having his pilgrim author create a character whose significance far transcends the Pardoner’s authorial intention. Perhaps the most astonishing thing about the Old Man of the Pardoner’s Tale is that this character, brought to life within a mere sixty-seven lines of description, seems to justify the myriad of interpretations about him. This polysemous dimension has to do with his mysterious and ambiguous appearance and actions. He is, we know from one of the riotoures, completely covered, except for his face, with what we assume is a shroud-like cloth. Why do we assume a shroud? Because of the immediate association of the figure with oldness and death: “Why lyvestow so longe in so greete age?” (719). He is alive, but he should be dead; indeed, the Old Man wishes he were dead and searches for death, just like the three youths: “Ne Deeth, allas, ne wol nat han my lyf. / Thus walke I, lyk a restelees kaityf” (727–8). The Old Man who wanders the world seeking Death is a mirror image of the three youths in that both he and they are on the same mission. They do not recognize in him their own reflection because signs for them, young and “modern” as they are, do not signify any reality beyond their own experience and desires. Even the Old Man’s broad, if ironic, hints about their similitude do not penetrate the hard shell of literalism that characterizes their anti-sacramental world-view: “Ne dooth unto an oold man noon harm now, / Namoore than that ye wolde men did to yow / In age, if that ye so longe abyde” (745–7). He who cannot connect with death can, however, point the way to it, and so he does when one of the thugs threatens him – a threat

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that, as usual, says far more than its author intends: “Thou spak right now of thilke traytour Deeth, / That in this contree al oure freendes sleeth. / Have heer my trouthe, as thou art his espye, / Telle where he is or thou shalt it abye, / By God and by the hooly sacrement! / For soothly thou art oon of his assent” (753–8). The youth is entirely correct that the Old Man prefigures Death (espy: to see at a distance) and that he is “of his assent” (in agreement with Death), just as a predicate is in agreement with its subject or as a sign has something in common with its signified. How true this is he does not realize, any more than he perceives how extensive is his invocation of the image of the Eucharist. He and his fellows will in fact find Death through the agency of the Old Man and by the grace of the Pardoner’s version of the “hooly sacrement.” That the Old Man points the way to death but cannot himself attain what he denotes identifies him as the disconnected sign, the free-floating signifier, forever divorced from its natural home and matrix within the signified. He vanishes before our very eyes because, in the absence of the umbilical connection to that which it signifies, no sign can receive the sustenance that it requires to be a vivifying, dynamic force: “Lo how I vanysshe, flessh, and blood, and skyn!” An anti-Eucharist himself, the Old Man is a sign without power, unable to represent the transformation of thing into living flesh and blood and thus signifying only himself, the living dead. St Anselm, in an effort to teach the relation between the sign and the signified in a realist rather than in a nominalist world-view, anticipated Chaucer in concept, though not in vividness of imagery: “Therefore don’t you see that rightness is in signification not because rightness begins to be when what is is signified to be or what-is-not is signified not to be, but because the signification is made in accordance with a rightness which always exists? Don’t you see, too, that rightness is absent from signification not because rightness perishes when the signification is not as it ought to be or when there is no signification, but because the signification lacks the rightness which never perishes?”58 In many of the Canterbury Tales the pilgrim author is discovered in one of the characters of his or her own creation, usually unintentionally revealing more about the author than the author would wish. In the Pardoner’s Tale, the author seems to intend the audience to find him in the three virile, blasé, transgressive riotoures, and this is why he attributes to them the sins that he himself

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professes. What he does not intend, we may suppose, is that the audience will also find him in the Old Man who points the way to death. But we do! Lee Patterson has understood the Old Man as the personification of the Pardoner’s “own irreducible contradictions”; he is the disconnected sign, the free-floating signifier who “knows the truth but is unable to use it,” who “knows where Death is to be found but cannot find him himself.”59 We encounter the full force of the Pardoner’s emasculated body, which, as sign, signifies nothing but what-is-not; of his mendacious words, which, leading to sin, stand for the nothingness that is evil; and of his fraudulent relics, which are contraceptive to the fruitful faith of the devotee, in the Old Man as sign severed from signified, which personifies the living death that is the Pardoner. Why does the otherwise-gullible Canterbury audience shrink back from the Pardoner’s final tactical manoeuvre? Indeed, why do we? “But sires, o word forgat I in my tale: / I have relikes and pardoun in my male / … / If any of yow wol, of devocion / Offren and have myn absolucion, / Com forth anon, and kneleth heere adoun, / And mekely receyveth my pardoun” (919–26). All audiences sense that here looms before them a threat that, like the sinners in the tale they have just heard, they are being pointed towards a path to some kind of demise. The Pardoner is the Old Man, and the pardoun that he offers is remission and release from reality itself, a passport to a world in which meaning has no stability at all, a perverse realm where Anselm’s “rightness that never perishes” has, along with all other objective realities, perished after all. Tita French Baumlin has made the connections between language and life and language and death in the Pardoner’s Tale and drawn the analogy between the verbal transformation of the spiritual into the literal and the process of life turning into death. She sees further that the Pardoner’s ultimate menace is to the Canterbury pilgrimage itself: “He interweaves a story of the false brotherhood of the three rioters who set off to find death; his tale is a vicious parody of the Canterbury pilgrimage, which is to be a search for a new life in this season of springtime fecundity.”60 For an assembly of believers, however ragtag, on their way to venerate the relics of a saint, the Pardoner’s proposition strikes at

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the very raison d’être of their community and the meaningfulness of their directionality. If the significance of a relic inheres simply in the word that signifies it and the assent of the believer to that signification, then anything one pleases ought to be able to be called a relic; if the signified is not the matrix of the sign, and words mean what we want them to, there is little point in taking the trouble to travel to Canterbury or anywhere else to venerate a relic. By convention the revisionist community can, like the Pardoner himself, invent relics just as good as the real ones! If the Canterbury pilgrims accept this pardoun, they accept irrevocably its author’s world-view, and the Canterbury pilgrimage comes to an instant halt.61 Does this explain Harry Bailey’s rage? “‘Nay, nay!’ quod he, ‘thanne have I Cristes curs! / Lat be,’ quod he, ‘it shal nat be, so theech! / … / I wolde I hadde thy collions in myn hond / In stide of relikes or of seintuarie. / Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie.” (946–54). As leader of the Canterbury pilgrimage, Harry feels the threat of relativism first and most sharply, for his entire enterprise is threatened by the suggestion that pilgrimage and all other symbolic acts are merely affectations of the credulous. But Harry and his fellow pilgrims are not the only ones present whose undertaking is threatened by the Pardoner, for if the Canterbury pilgrimage ceases, so do the tales told on it. The affinity between storytelling and life and death permeates Chaucer’s rendition of the Pardoner’s text. Chaucer’s portrayal here of an enemy of life attacking not biological life but poetry reveals a profound philosophical conception of narrative. Catherine Pickstock draws the relation between story and vivification: “This space between knowing and not knowing is that of the resurrected life which is characterized by the act of worship. Residing beyond both metaphysics and nihilism, it is in turn the space of story. Above all, there is only story because there is resurrection … On the one hand, ‘death’ construed as nihilistic dereliction might be the end of every story; on the other hand, it ends the possibility of story. And so every story is by definition a resurrection story.”62 Chaucer perceives in the semiotics and anti-metaphysics of his Pardoner the destruction of literature itself, because if there is no truth, there is certainly no fiction; if no objective reality, no narrative. For one theory of poetics, one that it seems Chaucer embraced,

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the guarantee of the value of art lay in the existence of a real world, guaranteed in turn by the existence of a world of the real for which it was itself a sign. The nominalistic proposals of the Pardoner blur the boundaries and dissipate the substance not only of particular and universal but of the realms of signs and things, earth and heaven, fiction and fact, and in so doing they construct a hallucinatory world in which everything means nothing and only nothing means. It is towards this nihilistic world of the Pardoner that the fourteenth century was slouching and to which the curative negation of Harry Bailey and his creator was addressed: “‘Nay, nay, … / It shal nat be!’”

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Notes

acronyms EETS ELH JEGP PL

PMLA

Early English Text Society English Literary History Journal of English and German Philosophy Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina. Ed. Abbé Migne. Paris: Garnier, 1878–90 Papers of the Modern Language Association chaucer and character

1 I am considering here only Wurtele’s Chaucer criticism, which comprises the bulk of his work. He has also published on other medieval literature as well as Spenser and Milton. 2 See Andrew Delbanco’s essay review of the subject, “The Decline and Fall of Literature,” which considers seven recent books on the disturbingly desultory state of the study of English literature. 3 A few years ago, knowing of Wurtele’s distaste for “fads” in criticism, I attempted a friendly provocation of him by asking him what school of literary criticism he belonged to “this year.” With a grin, he stated: “I am now a Neo-Robertsonian.” Perhaps this is a Robertsonian who has been touched by what James Simpson (“Ut Pictura,” 168) calls, with tongue in cheek, the “intentionalist contagion.”

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176 Notes to pages 5–7 4 Manly, Some New Light, 54. 5 The quotation is from H. Marshall Leicester cited in Simpson’s “Ut Pictura,” 169. I am indebted to Simpson in what follows, particularly for the discussion on Robert M. Jordan. Simpson cites and/or lists the major anti-intentionalists in Chaucer criticism. His own position (similar to my own) is that he is an unrepentant practitioner of the “sin of intentionalism” (168). The first sentences are worth quoting: “I have a problem to which I’d like to confess. I can’t help talking about authors. I know I shouldn’t, but when I’m teaching Chaucer, say, I find myself irresistibly drawn to hypothesizing about authorial strategy. I find no other way of talking about Chaucer’s poetry than to adduce the presence of an author behind the rhetorical surface of narratives, and behind the narrators of those poems. This is pretty bad, I know, but what’s worse is that I attribute agency to narrators as well” (167). 6 Read Harold Bloom’s amusing description of the reaction of a theory-bound colleague when he, Bloom, asserted “that Joyce’s Leopold Bloom seemed to me the most sympathetic affectionate person I had encountered in any fiction” (“Introduction,” 2). 7 For a discussion of and references to “three-level semantics” from Augustine to today, see Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 87–90. 8 Wurtele, “Chaucer’s Man of Law,” 24. 9 Wurtele, “‘Double Sorwe,’” 230n24. 10 Leicester in Simpson, “Ut Pictura,” 169. 11 Wurtele, “Figure of Solomon,” 78. 12 Wurtele, “Ironical Resonances,” 76. 13 Wurtele, “Blasphemy.” 14 Jordan, Chaucer and the Shape of Creation, 146. 15 Ibid., 150. 16 The relationship between New Criticism and deconstruction has been mentioned by others. A recent comment: “in acknowledging what every true writer knows – that words are never quite governable by the will of the author – the New Critics were planting the seeds of future trouble for English studies. Paul de Man, who introduced the deconstructionist theory of Jacques Derrida to American readers after the New Criticism had become a received orthodoxy, detected in the New Critics a ‘foreknowledge’ of … ‘hermeneutic circularity’” (Delbanco, “Decline,” 36.) Of course, the concept of the hermeneutic circle need not imply pure circularity, endless repetition, and deferral of meaning, as (ultimately) nihilist criticism often

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17

18 19 20

21 22

23

24 25 26 27

28 29

assumes; but may rather suggest richer and richer interpretation and understanding: the latter is how I apply the term to Wurtele. By 1987, in Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader, Jordan has become fully postmodern, equating Chaucer’s poetics with a “poetics of uncertainty, where the given are not unity and coherence but multiplicity and contingency” (20). See Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 11–16 for an extensive critique of Jordan’s views in this text. Simpson, “Ut Pictura,” offers a full critique of Jordan’s Chaucer and the Shape of Creation. Wurtele, “Proprietas,” 578. Wurtele, “Chaucer’s Monk,” 205. Minnis, “Theorizing the Rose.” I have attempted to argue “psychological realism” in Chaucer from a number of other perspectives (Chaucerian Realism). See Wimsatt, “John Duns Scotus.” Wurtele’s interest in authorial intentionality is sparked by his broad understanding of the intentionality of language and signs in general, and not the simplistic and dogmatic approach to authorial intentionality exemplified by E.D. Hirsch, Jr: “a text means what its author meant” (Validity in Interpretation, 10). A point made by Pierre Jacob, for example, a self-admitted materialist, in What Minds Can Do. The book begins with the usual nod to the “Scholastic” source of the concept and the word “intentionality” (9). Searle, “Literary Theory,” 113 (emphasis added). Ibid., 113–14. The thesis of Hugo Keiper in “‘I wot myself best how y stonde.’” See also his overview of the concept in “Introductory Essay.” Myles, “Chaucer’s Anti-Essentialism.” Two collections explore the concept of “literary nominalism” particularly as it applies to Chaucer: see Utz, ed., Literary Nominalism, and Keiper, Bode, and Utz, eds., Nominalism. The present author’s other contribution to this collection aims in part at further establishing this fact. On “open texts” see Bruckner, Shaping Romance, and McGerr, Chaucer’s Open Books. The connections between “nominalism” (i.e., an essence, a definition of dog or truth or justice or chair, is a relative construct, and so there is “no ‘right’ or ‘correct’ scheme of classification, and that the things we happen to classify together have … only the name in common” (Haack, “Realism,” 281),

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178 Notes to pages 11–12 particularly scholastic nomalism, and art or literature are, “at best, the reflection of common interest” (Courtenay, “Nominalism,” 58). “withouten oother compaignye” 1 Psycholinguists and cognitive psychologists agree that ambiguity is a “general and pervasive phenomenon” at “many levels” of language, including lexical, syntactic, and “practical,” and that language users must frequently disambiguate in order to achieve meaning; however, they cannot agree on how language users actually do this. There are several competing models to explain the mental process by which disambiguation is accomplished in order to achieve meaning (Gorfein and Bubka, “Introduction,” 4, 20). 2 Some rhetoricians acknowledged that poets sometimes deliberately employed ambiguitas in the figure known as amphibolia and, further, that this figure might have a “legitimate” albeit “oblique purpose,” such as facetiousness; even so they could not approve it, since the figure was “more commonly” and “more culpably” used for the purposes of deception or evasion, as in the misleading words of pagan oracles; Fleming, Classical Imitation, 52. Edmund Reiss, in contrast, has maintained that medieval writers, on the authority of classical rhetoric, consciously employed multiple meanings and ambiguity (Reiss, “Ambiguous Signs,” 114). Reiss includes Chaucer in his brief survey but focuses on Chaucer’s use of deception as narrative theme and offers no verbal examples of conscious ambiguation. 3 Fleming, Classical Imitation, 42 4 Ibid., 66. 5 Mann, Chaucer. 6 Ibid., 197. 7 Ibid., 200. 8 Ridley, “Introduction,” xii. 9 There seems to be more willingness to address the issue of authorial intention now than there was in 1973, when Jill Mann (Chaucer) first pointed out the moral ambiguity in Chaucer’s portraits of the Canterbury pilgrims in the General Prologue. Mann avoided the issue altogether in her conclusions. In 1980 Florence Ridley observed that Chaucer’s use of ambiguity “appears to be intentional” (“Introduction,” xii), while Beryl Rowland in 1985 attributed Chaucer’s creation of “ambiguities so pronounced that critics still argue over his intentions” to his authorial “detachment” (“Seven Kinds of

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10 11

12 13

14

15

Irony,” xxvii). However, to date, the only critic to have confidently inferred from a text of Chaucer’s that the poet’s use of ambiguity was intentional is John Fleming (Classical Imitation). In his study of the Troilus he offers several suggestions as to why Chaucer employed “conscious ambiguation,” but he considers neither its effect on the reader nor Chaucer’s intentions in that regard. Cf. Mann, “Authority.” Fleming makes a similar point with regard to the Troilus, finding that Chaucer’s “conscious ambiguation” is the cause of the ongoing and apparently irresolvable critical controversy over the meaning of that text (Fleming, Classical Imitation, 2). For the range of disagreement among critics regarding the moral character of the Prioress, see Beverly Boyd’s useful overview of the criticism in her introduction to Boyd, ed., The Canterbury Tales, Part 20 (the Variorum edition of the Prioress’s Tale). Mann, Chaucer, 126. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from the General Prologue come from Moorman and Ransom, eds., The Canterbury Tales, Part 1 (the Variorum edition), and all other quotations of Chaucer’s works from Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer. The primacy of the moral meaning among English townsfolk during this period is suggested by the existence of a number of verse treatises, composed from the mid-fourteenth century onwards, in which the speaker is a mother and “Good Wife” teaching her daughter how to be a “good wife,” i.e., a virtuous woman or wife. They may well have been written by clerics, for their moral content is strikingly similar, even though each of the three extant versions is independent of the others, but their audience was always “middle-class women” living in or near towns (Mustanoja, The Good Wife, 68, 81). The bourgeois Wife of Bath and the country Parson are the only two pilgrims to be introduced initially as “good.” The Variorum edition, following Hengwrt, obscures the parallel meanings of “good wif” and “good man” by capitalizing “Wyf” as though it were a proper noun, thus inviting the reader to see difference rather than similarity between the “good woman” from Bath and the “good man” of religion. Both phrases could also be written as compound nouns, and this is the form in which they survived into early modern English. According to the OED , “goodwife” retained only the second of the two medieval senses – “the mistress of a house or other establishment”

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16 17

18

19

20

(OED 1) and, when prefixed to a surname, a sense equivalent to that of “Mrs.” (OED 2). “Goodman,” however, retained its moral sense well into the early modern period, sometimes as a “vague title of dignity or a respectful form of address” (OED 1, obs.). This suggests that the social meaning of these compound nouns derived from the phrases expressing moral approval and eventually supplanted them, albeit much earlier in the case of “goodwife.” Duffy, Stripping, 125. There may have been a civic as well as a religious significance attached to the phrases “in charitee” or “out of charitee” in urban areas during Chaucer’s time. Certainly by the early sixteenth century, the Christian ideal of living “in charity” with one’s fellow Christians was promoted in London as a civic as well as a religious virtue, although the extent to which this dictum actually affected social behaviour is difficult to determine (Brigdon, “Religion”). Mustanoja, The Good Wife, 158. In the earliest of the three texts, the daughter is advised not to be seen either standing or sitting next to a man “ar sunne mai be wro3t,” even if the man in question wishes to marry her, for “A sclandre at is reised is euil to stille” (ibid., 158). Moreover, in the longer version of this text she is instructed to prepare for the marriage of her own daughters as soon as they are born and to give them “sone to man, when ei ben of age” for “Maydenys ben louelich and noing sekir” (ibid., 171). The early-twentieth-century view that these lines are ironical, based on a statute of Richard II which claimed that some of the cloth made in the West Country of England was so bad that English merchants abroad were in danger of their lives, has proved very influential among critics (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 404), even though the work of English historians does not support such a reading. On the contrary, English cloth in the late fourteenth century was good enough to gain a large share of the European market at the expense of the Flemish and Italian clothmakers (Carus-Wilson, “Trends,” 176–7). Even if one agrees with Manly that the phrase “of beside Bathe” refers to the parish of St Michael’s – “juxta Bathon,” just outside the north gate of the walls of the city, where weaving was a principal occupation – as Bowden does (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 400–1), it does not necessarily follow that the Wife herself is a weaver rather than a clothmaker who employs weavers. Robertson asserts that the phrase “of biside Bathe” could refer to any village

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21 22 23

24 25

near Bath and argues that the Wife is a clothmaker whose ostentatious wealth derives from rural land holdings, probably including a fulling mill (Robertson, “And for my land thus hastow mordred me?” 409ff). Carruthers likewise concludes that the Wife is a West Country “capitalist clothier” (Carruthers, “The Wife of Bath,” 210). However, the conclusions of both Robertson and Carruthers rely on the work of E. Carus-Wilson, a historian who argued that urban clothmaking suffered a severe decline in England during the fourteenth century (Carus-Wilson, “The English Cloth Industry”). Her thesis has since been rebutted by A.R. Bridbury, who lists Bath among the important urban centres of clothmaking in the midfourteenth century (Bridbury, Medieval English Clothmaking, 59). Hodges, “The Wife of Bath’s Costumes.” Margulies was the first to suggest that the Wife owes her wealth primarily to her husbands (Margulies, “Marriages”). Barron and Lacey document the custom in London (Barron, “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women”; Lacey, “Women and Work”). Unfortunately, surviving documentation for many boroughs is scant and for others, such as Bath, non-existent. Hutton finds it “probable” on the basis of scant documentation from Shrewsbury that this borough did not allow the custom, since she found so few instances of married women appearing in court without a husband (Hutton, “Women in Fourteenth-Century Shrewsbury,” 86). However, Lacey finds in the records of the London mayor’s court that husbands of women operating as feme sole usually appeared in court because they were “usually named in the plea,” even though “the wife answered the charge” (Lacey, 40). This would suggest that Hutton’s evidence does not warrant the “probable” conclusion that she draws from it. Hodges, “The Widow of Bath.” Hodges points out that the General Prologue portrait of the Wife of Bath “depicts two separate costumes”: first “her Sunday attire” (GP 453–7) and later “a travelling outfit” (GP 470–3). The Sunday attire reflects her wealth and social position, while the pilgrim’s garb reflects her practicality as a “seasoned traveller, careful to protect and defend herself and her clothing from the elements and soil of the road while, if necessary, forcefully managing her ambler” (Hodges, “The Wife of Bath’s Costumes,” 359–60). In a more recent paper, Hodges shows that both the wimple that the Wife wears while travelling and the elaborate coverchiefs that she wears to church on Sunday, which could also “constitute her version of

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26

27 28

29

30

31

32 33

widow’s weeds,” are ambiguous as to whether they signify “her age and/or her widowhood” (Hodges, “The Widow of Bath”). The Wife’s age is also indeterminable from Chaucer’s description in the General Prologue: he portrays her as “attractive” but neither “temptress” nor “bawd” (Mann, Chaucer, 126), i.e., neither young nor old. Curry, Chaucer, 109. Cf. Curry, “More,” 46. And the two variant passages in the Wife’s own prologue that proclaim this strong Martian influence (III.609–12 and 619–26) are of dubious authenticity. See below, 38–40. Wurtele observes that physiognomy was “a mode of popular wisdom,” but he advises modern critics to be cautious in interpreting physiognomical details on two grounds: first, medieval physiognomists disagreed regarding the significance of such details – a point that he illustrates with regard to the Pardoner; and second, we cannot be certain of Chaucer’s own belief regarding the truth value of physiognomical lore. Wurtele concludes that Chaucer used it as “an instrument of complex irony” (Wurtele, “Some Uses,” 133–4, 140). Ralph W.V. Elliott concurs with the editors of the MED in this case but finds them “misguided” in thinking that “boold” as a description of Harry Bailly’s speech in l. 755 means “well-spoken” (6a) because, in his view, everything that Bailly later says “bears out the interpretation of boold as forthright to the point of crudeness” (Elliott, Chaucer’s English, 380). Elliott’s response to the MED editors’ interpretation of Harry Bailly’s “boold” speech typifies critical response to the Wife of Bath’s portrait – interpreting the text of the General Prologue in the light of information obtained much later in the Canterbury Tales. Andrew rightly observes that Elliott’s reading would “necessitate an ironic reading of the line” (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 575). The “Good Wife” texts never, in so many words, say that a woman should not look a man in the eye, but they seem to imply it in their repeated admonitions to women not to speak with a man in the street, nor sit alone or talk privately with a man (cf. Mustanoja, The Good Wife, 162–3, 174, 176–7). Curry, Chaucer, 108. Chaucer’s description of Rosamounde’s cheeks as “lyke Ruby” has been commonly taken as an example of parody by means of exaggeration. Stemmler argues vigorously against this view, citing

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34 35 36 37

38 39

40

41

countless other medieval texts in which ruddy cheeks clearly betoken beauty, including the description of Sir Bertilak’s wife in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Stemmler, “Chaucer’s Ballade,” 14– 15). For our purposes it does not matter whether Stemmler is right or wrong about Chaucer’s parodic intent in “To Rosamounde,” since its very possibility depends on rosy cheeks’ being a commonplace of feminine beauty. Mann, Chaucer, 121. For example, Wood, “Chaucer’s Use”; Wilcockson, “Note.” For example, David, “An abc”; Frank, “Chaucer’s Prioress.” See Boyd’s commentary (Canterbury Tales, Part 20) for an overview of criticism on the Prioress’s rosary and its significance. Daichman compares Chaucer’s portrait of the Prioress to the representation of Dona Garoza in the Libro de buen amor and finds that Chaucer’s description has fewer obvious ambiguities, possibly because it is both shorter and more subtle (Daichman, Wayward Nuns, 159–60). Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 225. Empson’s essentially New Critical approach takes for granted that poetic imagery springs unconsciously as well as consciously from the poet’s mind. His opinion is that the “total effect” of this seventh type of ambiguity is “to show a fundamental division in the writer’s mind” (ibid., 225). Rowena Archer notes that remarriage was much more acceptable in England than it was on the Continent in the late medieval period and quotes the wonderment expressed by a visiting Italian at the “ancient custom” that sanctioned a woman’s remarrying “every time that she is left a widow” (Archer, “Rich Old Ladies,” 15–16). Manly’s investigations of women named Alice living near Bath in this period turned up several who had three or more husbands, though none “who had clearly achieved five” (cited by Andrew, Critical Commentary, 414). Barbara Todd notes that the rate of remarriage of young widows was very high in the medieval period and still as high as 73 per cent in the sixteenth century (Todd, “The Remarrying Widow,” 61). The OED offers seven examples of “withouten” in this sense (5) between 1205 and 1535: all but two – this line from Chaucer’s General Prologue and one from Trevisa’s translation of Higden’s Polychronicon – occur in the context of enumerating very large numbers (hundreds or thousands) of people, animals, or ships. My examination of the “withouten” slips at the MED project offices in

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42

43

44

45

46

Ann Arbor, Michigan, confirms that roughly three-quarters (twentyone of the twenty-eight slips annotated as examples of “besides” or “in addition to”) occur in such a context. Of the remaining seven, two come from enumerations of bequests in a will, and one, this line from Chaucer’s portrait, in an enumeration of husbands. This second, uncommon meaning of “withouten” is even rarer than the first. The OED offers no examples after c.1320. My own tabulation of the “withouten” slips in the MED files shows that, apart from two doubtful cases, the slips classified as meaning “except” (OED 6) were half the number of those classified as meaning “besides” (OED 5). But it is extremely difficult to distinguish between usages of “withouten” meaning “exclusive of,” “except,” or “not including” (OED 6) and those meaning “besides” or “in addition to” (OED 5), particularly in those numerous cases when “not including” might just as well be translated as “in addition to.” Cited in Fleming, Classical Imitation, 42. Hanks has shown that Chaucer’s texts, in their medieval – i.e., “essentially unpunctuated” – form regularly require this type of retrospective reading. Medieval readers had to read “tentatively,” from line to line, and were frequently unable to determine the correct context for interpreting a given line until they had first read through it and the next line as well and then circled back, however briefly, to see which line provided the appropriate context. Often both lines were appropriate, creating a syntactic ambiguity that allowed two different meanings and thus enriched the text (Hanks, Kamphausen, and Wheeler, “Circling Back,” 44, 47). Andrew’s notes for lines 475–6 show that there is little agreement among critics as to the nature, purpose, and effect of the reference to Ovid but that no critic has ever suggested that the Wife might use her knowledge of the “remedies of love” to preserve her virtue, while several, including Puhvel, have favoured the view that her “remedies” are either abortifacients or aphrodisiacs (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 428–30). These are clustered together as nos. 4, 5, 6, and 8 (by my reckoning): have sex with someone else first; adopt an awkward and unpleasing position; distract yourself with other girlfriends; or enjoy her to excess (Ovid, The Art of Love, 193–7). Robertson’s interpretation of “Old Dance” as “the dance of fornication, spiritual or physical” led by the devil has been extremely influential (Robertson, Preface, 131). Even Ross, who argues for “more

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47 48

49

50

suggestions” to “daunce” than Robertson allows, believes that it refers to sexual intercourse in this passage, as, in his opinion, it does in the Roman de la rose (Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy, 67). However, all the examples from Chaucer that Ross cites to sustain “daunce” as coition could equally well support “daunce” as courtship or seduction, particularly the passage in which Criseyde asks Pandarus, thinking him to be in love, “How ferforth be ye put in loves daunce?” (Tr 1106). Andrew notes that before Robertson’s study the phrase “To know the olde daunce” was generally taken to be “fourteenth-century slang in French as well as English,” for being “artful, knowing” and not just in the affairs of love. Robinson’s “standard” paraphrase of this line is “she knew all the rules of the game” (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 430) Kennedy, “Contradictory Responses,” and see below, 52. “Compaignye” is also ambiguous, its possible meanings ranging from heavenly hosts (cf. MED 1), through social gatherings (MED 2) and “intimate association with another” (MED 3), to “companionship or intimacy between the sexes; sexual union, intercourse,” particularly in the idiom “compaignye of man” (MED 4). However, this context limits its possible meanings to some form of intimacy with a member of the opposite sex. Coleman assumes that those chosen to read texts aloud would either have had professional training as prelectors or been chosen for their natural ability (Joyce Coleman, Public Reading, 121–2). Koff questions whether any performer of Chaucer’s work would have had either the desire or the ability to stay in character during extremely long monologues (Koff, “Who Speaks for the Wife of Bath?” 129ff), but it seems likely to me that any kind of oral performance must have entailed resolving the most irresolvable of Chaucer’s textual ambiguities (such as “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe”) by means of tone of voice, facial expression, and/or body language. Alan Gaylord has argued persuasively that any dramatic performance of Chaucer’s text amounts to an “adaptation,” since it necessarily “‘solves’ ironic or ambiguous constructions,” being unable to “signal two things at once” (Gaylord, “Reading Chaucer,” 87, 106). Of course, many modern readers would have had the experience of hearing a teacher read Chaucer’s text aloud and been profoundly influenced by that teacher’s performance. In “Alison’s Testimony,” Bowden played tapes of different readings of sections of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue to show that teachers of Chaucer are able to convey

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51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58

59

widely divergent interpretations of the Wife’s character simply by means of their tone of voice and that these readings clearly have a strong influence on their students. Unfortunately, she does not include this material on the Wife of Bath in her Chaucer Aloud. Winny, ed., The “General Prologue”; cf. Schmidt’s “woman possessing goods” (Schmidt, ed., The “General Prologue”). Skeat, ed., The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer; Kee, Geoffrey Chaucer. Hopper, ed., Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales; Howard, comp., The Canterbury Tales; Kolve and Olson, comps., The Canterbury Tales. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer; cf. Fisher’s “without counting” (Fisher, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose of Geoffrey Chaucer). Winny, ed., The “General Prologue.” Mack and Walton, eds., General Prologue. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer; cf. Donaldson’s paraphrase of the line as a whole: “She knew all the tricks of that trade” (Donaldson, ed., Chaucer’s Poetry). Notes in the Variorum (Moorman and Ransom, eds.) show that Tatlock in 1916 was merely the first, not the only, critic to believe that Chaucer’s use of withouten in this phrase is “a deliberate double entendre,” which “leaves us guessing whether or not the Wife of Bath had lovers before she married.” Paul Baum in 1956, in his (otherwise) influential essay on Chaucer’s puns, also identified withouten as an example of “deliberate ambiguity” and “certainly a pun” on two equally possible senses: “not having any” and “not to mention.” Finally, Donald Howard, who glossed withouten on the page of his student edition to mean “not to mention,” later, in 1976, discusses it in relation to Chaucer’s irony as one of those lines where the poet “means exactly and only” what he says: “without other company in youth.” According to Howard, the remark may seem to mean “outside of other company in youth,” yet it does not necessarily mean that. It can equally mean “without having other company in youth” (all cited in Andrew, Critical Commentary, 413– 14). In his posthumously published study of Chaucer’s life and works Howard reiterates his opinion that the line supports both meanings (Chaucer, 411n). For example, Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer glosses “Withouten” on the text page as follows: “not counting; see n.” The critical notes give Tatlock’s opinion, but clearly Benson thinks Tatlock wrong, as do most Chaucer editors and translators. Of the twenty-

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60 61 62

63 64 65

66

one modern editions and translations that I acquired as a teacher of Chaucer, five translations, two dual-language editions, and eleven of fourteen editions of the Middle English text decide for their readers that withouten in line 461 means either “in addition to” or “not counting.” Only three editions differ: Donaldson refrains from glossing the line in any way; Pratt’s page gloss gives both possible meanings, “without” and “in addition to”; and Beidler allows for both possible meanings but privileges the first. His marginal note defines “withouten” initially as “not to mention” and goes on to observe that “the line is usually taken to mean that she had other sexual company before she was married” before allowing that it “could mean simply that she was without other company before she was married.” Ross, Chaucer’s Bawdy, 236; Braddy, “Chaucer – Realism or Obscenity?” 125. Mann, Chaucer, 126. Liberated from the internal gloss of these two passages, the “chambre of Venus” couplet reveals itself to be just as wittily and deliberately ambiguous as the phrase “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe.” In the immediate context of the Wife’s confession that she gave “al” her “herte” to Jankyn, “chambre of Venus” is more likely to refer to her heart than to her “queynte.” To be sure, the latter possibility cannot be dismissed, given Jean de Meun’s obscene pun on “venus chambre” in the Roman de la rose; at the same time, however, Jean’s obscene meaning is very unlikely to have been intended by a rich bourgeois woman on pilgrimage to Canterbury (Kennedy, “Reambiguating the Obvious” and “Cambridge Dd.4.24,” 354). Kennedy, “Cambridge Dd.4.24” and “Reambiguating the Obvious.” Peter Robinson, “A Stemmatic Analysis.” In that section of his commentary entitled “Evidence of the Added Passages,” Fisher concludes that the present state of our knowledge does not allow us to make a “final decision” regarding the authenticity of these passages. However, he points out several characteristics which suggest that they are not the author’s – most notably their limited and erratic manuscript attestation and the fact that “the continuity of the expression” is not “at all impaired by their absence.” I am grateful to Professor Fisher for allowing me to read these comments in advance of the publication of his edition. The OED notes that using “wander” to translate the Latin ambulare was a characteristic of the first Wycliffite Bible that may have been

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67

68 69 70

71

72

the second version abandoned and hence that it may have been a peculiarity of the first translator. The editors of the MED may discover a wider usage in the late fourteenth century, but even if they do not we may presume that Chaucer was familiar with this early Wycliffite usage, given his connection with Lollard knights. Andrew observes, “though the presence of ambiguity in this line is widely accepted, commentators regularly emphaize [sic] the nonliteral sense” (Critical Commentary, 421). Ibid., 417. Luttrell, “Englishwomen,” 184. St Bridget of Sweden has left an account of her pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1372, but Margery Kempe’s account of her pilgrimage to Jerusalem and other holy sites in 1414 is better known and also more relevant to the Wife’s experience: both Sheila Delany and Donald Howard have compared the Wife to her (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 418). Equally relevant, as a sign that it was not uncommon for late medieval bourgeois women to leave their families behind when making the pilgrimage to Jerusalem, is the fifteenth-century treatise The Good Wyfe Wold A Pylgremage, in which the Good Wyfe’s determination to journey “vnto e holly londe” provides the ostensible occasion for the verse treatise, the mother desiring to advise her “der do3tter” on how to comport herself during her absence (Mustanoja, The Good Wife, 173). Sterility was commonly thought to be shameful in medieval Europe and was invariably blamed on the woman. Warner observes that many medieval European shrines to the Virgin were visited by barren wives and that to this day many Mediterranean shrines are visited by childless women (Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, 274–81). Finucane reports that one of the miracles ascribed to the intercession of Thomas Cantilupe was the conception of twins by a childless woman who had visited his shrine at Hereford (Finucane, Miracles and Pilgrims, 105). Kennedy, “The Variant Passages,” 97–8. That the Victorian bias of nineteenth-century editors carried over into twentieth-century criticism is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in the work of Haldeen Braddy. An expert in “Chaucer’s Bawdy,” Braddy is the only critic to have interpreted “withouten” in line 461 to mean that the Wife confined her lovemaking to her five husbands (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 413–14), but he regards her as “promiscuous” none the less, pitying her “inability to understand that she

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74

75

76

77 78

turns serial marriages, legal though they be, into sin” (Braddy, Chaucer, 137). Both Tatlock and Robinson noted the apparent contradiction between alleging other lovers in her youth and the very early age of her first marriage, but “despite” this “most commentators … adhere to Skeat’s reading” (Andrew, Critical Commentary, 413). This is another reason why her present marital status is doubtful, even though she “welcome[s] the sixte, when that evere he shal” (III.47). For example, Knapp, Chaucer, 120. This even though the only unambiguous statement that either Chaucer or the Wife ever makes regarding her sexual morality is that she would not commit adultery with her “body” in “no foul manere,” not even to seek revenge against her philandering fourth husband (WBP 485). The dismissal of this statement as a lie strikes me as a particularly egregious example of what Barrie Ruth Straus has called phallocentric criticism, which “need[s] to master, control and penetrate.” Straus argues that modern Chaucer critics have “condemned” the Wife and labelled her “criminal and mad” because she admits that all women are liars, thus undercutting the very possibility of criticism (Straus, “Subversive Discourse,” 550). Since criticism of the Wife continues to proliferate, I would argue rather that it is the Wife’s alleged sexual licence that has enraged critics, who then selectively invoke her admission of lying to support their condemnation of her. In a recent study, the sociologist Lois Banner has taken the Wife of Bath to be the “historical prototype” of older woman in our culture, symbolizing “the polarities of authority aging women could command and the antagonism they could arouse” and also the ambivalence of men towards sexually active older women (Banner, In Full Flower, 130, 169–75). See also the role of the Wife as imagined in Coghill and Starkie’s musical comedy, based on Neville Coghill’s translation of the Canterbury Tales, and the visual representation of the Wife by G. Irons on the cover of The Wyf of Bathe: A Liberated Woman’s Great Story, a comic-book edition, with Middle English text, of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale. Lindley, “Pinning Gawain Down,” 39. In the case of the deliberately ambiguous preposition withouten, they might also note that the negating sense was by far the most common in Chaucer’s day and that, with one possible exception, he appears never to have used it to mean “in addition to” or “aside

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79

80 81

82 83 84

from” elsewhere in his work. Both the representative list of specimens for withouten in Tatlock’s Concordance to Chaucer and the exhaustive KWIK concordance confirm this. The one possible exception comes from Troilus and Criseyde, when Pandarus says to Criseyde, “Ye ben the womman in this world lyvynge / Withouten paramours, to my wyttynge / That I best love …” (Tr 2.235–7). “Withouten” here is usually glossed as meaning “apart from” or “excepting” (OED 6) and taken to refer to the paramours of Pandarus; however, this reading cannot account for the phrase “to my wyttynge,” except as a filler for the sake of rhyme. In my view, the whole passage makes much better sense if we take “withouten” to mean simply “without” and to refer back to “womman,” i.e., Criseyde herself, who, as far as Pandarus knows (“to my wyttynge”) has no paramours. Jauss, Toward an Aesthetic of Reception, 146–7. See Patterson, Negotiating the Past, for a survey of the history of historicism in Chaucer studies and also a review of the problems inherent in recovering past meanings from medieval texts. Patterson, Negotiating the Past, 151. Without directly addressing the issue of Chaucer’s use of ambiguity, several recent studies of his work have drawn attention to the necessity of reading his text actively (for example, Knapp, Chaucer; Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics) and to the poet’s awareness of the interpretive activity of his readers (for example, Schibanoff, “The New Reader”). Judith Ferster notes that Chaucer’s works are “full of descriptions of the audience’s power to use literary works as it will” and speculates that he may emphasize its responsibility in this way in order to “minimize his own responsibility” as an author (Chaucer, 11). See also Mann, “Authority.” Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 135. Ibid., 118. Joyce Coleman has observed that in Chaucer’s day the aural mode of reception was the preferred mode and had the advantage of allowing authors of Richard II’s reign (1377–1400) to transmit a “sociopolitical agenda” by means of “public discussion.” In support of this observation she cites the work of Anne Middleton, who has argued on more than one occasion that Chaucer, as well as Gower and Langland, “believe[d] that poetry justifies itself within society, or ought to, as a moral force, in essentially public terms” (Coleman, Public Reading, 94–5).

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191 Notes to pages 32–41 85 In his study of Chaucer’s “Retracciouns” Victor Haines argues that Chaucer expected his readers to respond to his own good intention by reading with “good entente,” i.e., by “pulling back” from any worldly or sinful meanings to affirm the alternative, ironically implied moral meanings. In the case of the line “Withouten oother compaignye in yowthe,” this would mean “pulling back” from the meaning implied by either of the less common meanings of withouten (Haines, “Where Are Chaucer’s ‘Retracciouns’?” 145). However, in private conversation Haines has assured me that he did not mean to imply that there was only one way in which a “good” reader should interpret withouten. In the case of a deliberately ambiguous text, a good Christian reader might just as charitably abstain from judgment altogether. 86 Fleming, Classical Imitation, 70. 87 Wurtele, “Penitence,” 356. 88 My argument in this essay supports Anne Payne’s hypothesis that Chaucer, in many of his works, including Troilus and Criseyde and parts of the Canterbury Tales, was writing Menippean satire – i.e., presenting different and sometimes contradictory possibilities held in suspension, thus celebrating humankind’s freedom to choose between different truths at the same time as acknowledging its inability to know absolute truth (Payne, Chaucer). the wife of bath 1 Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 24–5; General Prologue (GP ), ll. 70, 120. 2 Wood, Elements, 97. 3 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la rose (1965 edition), I, 212; ll. 6898–901. 4 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Robbins, 142. Subsequent quotations are from this edition, cited by page number in the text. 5 “a soutenir nature humaine” (6933). 6 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Dahlberg, 136: “purses, harness, things, or prickles.” 7 Elliott, Chaucer’s English, 233. 8 Ibid., 385. 9 Thundy, “Matheolus.” For a very different slant on this euphemism, which perceives it as deriving from the opening word of the

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192 Notes to pages 42–5 final doxology of the Gloria in the Mass, see Delasanta, “Quoniam and the Wife of Bath.” Delasanta adroitly characterizes the Wife as “an ecclesiastical camp follower” (203). 10 Robertson, Preface, 318–31. the franklin 1 My presentation of an earlier version of this paper at the joint meetings of the Canadian Society of Medievalists and the Association of Canadian Collegiate and University Teachers of English (Université d’Ottawa, 28 May 1998) prompted my grateful recollection of many hospitable meetings of the Ottawa–Carleton Medieval–Renaissance Club. All three organizations have long depended on the generous support of Douglas Wurtele. I am grateful also for the research of Aleksandra Szadkowska, for the suggestions and encouragement of Mervin Butovsky, Beverly Kennedy, Brian S. Lee, Robert Myles, Michael J. Sweet, and David Williams, and for the support of the Faculty of Arts and Science of Concordia University. 2 Skeat, ed., Etymological Dictionary s.vv. “Wont, Win.” 3 Horace, Ars Poetica, 335; GP 798. 4 Despite Dante’s quite different subordination to Beatrice, Brunetto Latini and he are “parent” and “son,” respectively, in Inferno 15, as Astell notes (Chaucer, 80–2). 5 Epicurus, Extant Remains, 101; cf. Nussbaum, Therapy, 490, 500. 6 Cf. Pater, Marius, chap. 16, especially 185–6. 7 Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer gloss. 8 Bober, Art, 20; Hieatt and Butler, Curye, 20. 9 The legendary Angevin Julian, who with his wife “gave help to travellers and built a refuge for poor people … has been honoured as the patron of ferrymen, innkeepers, circus people, and others” (Attwater, Dictionary, 207) and so may also be associated with the Host and the Narrator. Cooper discusses the Franklin’s healthy diet (Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 95). 10 Huppé, Reading, 164. 11 Shoaf in 1986 summarized a critical tradition of denigration of the Franklin, finding “superficiality [and] status-anxious flight from all depth” (“The Franklin’s Tale,” 278), beginning with an Epicurean teaching that “all sensations are true.” A year before, Pearsall had rejected that tradition, holding the General Prologue epithet “a hyperbolical little jest” (Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, 148). The

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12 13

14 15

16 17 18 19

usually conservative Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, however, slightly warms to the philosopher, citing on the passage under discussion the previous editor, F.N. Robinson: “The philosophy of Epicurus was associated (somewhat unjustly) then as now with luxurious living.” Pépin, Théologie, 74–6, 123–5. “Epicurei dicti ab Epicuro quodam philosopho amatore vanitatis, non sapientiae, quem etiam ipsi philosophi porcum nominaverunt, quasi volutans in caeno carnali, voluptatem corporis summum bonum adserens; qui etiam dixit nulla divina providentia instructum esse aut regi mundum. Sed originem rerum atomis, id est insecabilibus ac solidis corporibus adsignavit, quorum fortuitis concursionibus universa nascantur et nata sint. Adserunt autem Deum nihil agere: omnia constare corporibus: animam nihil aliud esse quam corpus. Vnde et dixit: ‘Non ero, posteaquam mortuus fuero,’” Isidorus, Etymologiarum 8.6.15. For another of Boethius’s values Isidore reported that Stoics held to eternal glory, also in place of the immortality of the soul (8.6.10). On Isidore’s behalf I have noted a possible etymology for the name of Epicurus, but an association with the pig was apparently common, as if that accounts for Horace’s cheerful description of himself among “Epicuri de grege porcum,” as he praises the many happy attributes of his friend Apius (Epistulae 1.4.16). For the perennial possibility of the second teaching, compare, for example, Hopkins’s formula, “all Life death does end and each day dies with sleep,” the concluding “comfort [that] serves in a whirlwind” to his catastrophic poem “No worst, there is none” (Hopkins, Poems, 65, pp. 106–7). Cf. Weinreich, Modern, 731; for further colloquial use of the term I am grateful to Mervin Butovsky and Michael J. Sweet. So Cooper, “The nature of true ‘felicitee’ is to be one of the great debating points of the Tales, and Chaucer does not resolve it here. Once again, his voice refuses to be assimilated in any simple way to that of the moralist. It reports, it comments; it avoids any interpretation beyond that of the appearance” (Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 46). Aristotle, Rhetorica, 1.1–2. 3. Prosa 2.74–82. See Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 45–6. Specht observed that the Franklin thus has the same dignity and status as Boethius, to which one can add that Chaucer’s narrator

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194 Notes to pages 47–8

20 21

22 23

24 25

26 27

28

29

then takes on the voice of Philosophia, as indeed does his Troilus, again from a middle passage in the development of The Consolation of Philosophy (see Specht, Chaucer’s Franklin). The deep question is why the narrator does not voice Philosophia earlier in the treatise. The Parson is another pilgrim whose positions can be directly verified, as is the Clerk in his Prologue. The Franklin’s account of Scithero in the Prologue to his Tale is possibly more unstable, not that scorn of Cicero is unheard of, even in the tradition of eloquence. Cf. Williams, “Distentio.” In realist contrast, Flaubert’s late work (“La légende”) dwelt on those moments of youth and death, amplifying Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, 30.4. See Booth, Rhetoric. If Huppé might observe of the Frankin’s Tale, “It is possible that his marriage of courtesy provides no adequate solution” (Reading, 167), it may be that human relations of that sort are always projects of inquiry, as The Wife of Bath’s Prologue also bears witness. Cf. Sklute, Virtue; Ronquist, “Rhetoric,” 53. 3.prosa 2.88–125. The historical cookbook of Hieatt, Hosington, and Butler, Pleyn Delit, is a celebration of this aspect of “pleyn delit,” noting the “fresh seasonal ingredients” and “appetizing seasonings … for what were often very simply cooked foods” (xiv). Hieatt and Butler, eds., Curye, 8. Wetherbee, Chaucer, 50–1, 77, 82; Lerer, Boethius, 164. The poem on Orpheus concludes the re-evaluation of goods in De consolatione 3 m 12. It shifts the sense of felicity of Vergil’s “Felix, qui potuit rerum conoscere causas” (Georgics, 2.290) to the double sublimation of “Felix qui potuit boni Fontem uisere lucidum, Felix qui potuit grauis Terrae soluere uincula,” passages juxtaposed by John of Salisbury, Policraticus 7.8 652b–c. Cf. Nussbaum, Fragility, 150–1, assimilating Philebus to the purity that she finds typical of Plato’s thought. It is tempting to suppose that, like Nussbaum, Chaucer might have preferred Aristotle, who is named in praising the Clerk’s expenditures in the General Prologue (295). “Ad stoicorum precepta me revocas, populorum opinionibus aversa et veritati propinquiora quam usi,” Secretum 1, p. 14. For Petrarch’s disdain, see Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, chap. 10.

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195 Notes to pages 48–51 30 Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, Book – for example, 4, p. 34; 47, p. 63; 62, p. 79; 98, p. 129 (about Susannah); 106, p. 142. In his discussion of (sexual) Foldelit as the fifth branch of Luxure, Gower revised Boethius’s formulation, holding that Epicurus “Disoit que ly charnels delitz Soverain des autres biens estoit, et pour cela trestout laissoit Les biens del alme et se donnoit A sa caroigne” (Gower, Miroir de l’omme, 9533–7, p. 111). Langland, Piers the Plowman, Passus 1, B-text 29–30, associated Lot’s delight in wine with his lechery. 31 See Murray, “The Epicureans.” 32 According to the Secretum secretorum, gluttony is melancholic, so the Franklin’s sanguine complexion belies that, as Mann noted, although she did find precedents for details of the Franklin’s portrait in satiric literature, as well as features of praise (Mann, Chaucer, 152–9.) 33 ParsT, 653; cf. Miller, “Epicurean Homily.” 34 Miller, “Augustinian Wisdom” and other texts; Robertson, “Chaucer’s Franklin”; Huppé, Reading. 35 There is recent clear discussion of the two discourses by Kimmich (“Epikureische Neugierde”), Perrin (“La transition”), and on moral philosophies not based on happiness (Bernard Williams, Morality, 75–81). 36 Burnley, Chaucer’s Language. 37 Cited from Gallacher, “Dame Alice,” 274. 38 Cf. Nussbaum, Therapy, 40–4, 74–5. Among Cicero’s friends was notably the Epicurean Titus Pomponius Atticus, who edited the extensive collection of letters that he had received. For its suggestive parallels, see the note by E. Badian: “In 85 Atticus left Rome after realizing his assets in Italy, in order to escape the civil disturbances that he foresaw, and settled in Athens until the middle sixties (hence his cognomen). He there studied and adopted the Epicurean philosophy and henceforth combined a life of cultured ease and literary activity with immense success in business … and an infallible instinct for survival” (Badian, “Atticus”). The ancient proposal that Cicero edited the great Epicurean poem of Lucretius is not absolutely improbable, given his syncretic interest in the collection and reiterating of philosophical lore. 39 Abelard, Dialogus, 98–9, f. 25r–v [PL 178.1641–2]. 40 Burnley, who develops a vocabulary that sides with the Stoics (delight, Epicurus, felicity, and voluptas are not in his index),

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196 Notes to pages 51–3

41 42

43

44 45

46

47 48 49

discusses modifications by Cicero and Seneca of the notion that the emotions are a weakness and sickness (Chaucer’s Language, 117; for “tranquility,” 72). Luscombe, Abelard’s Ethics, xxvi. “Quies autem voluntatis, et cujuslibet appetitus in bono, est delectatio. Et ideo secundum delectationem voluntatis humanae praecipue judicatur homo bonus vel malus: est enim bonus et virtuosus qui gaudet in operibus virtutum, malus autem qui in operibus malis,” Thomas Aquinas, Summa, 1–2, 34.4, response; for the summum bonum, see article 3. Aquinas, Summa, Supplementum 49.6; for sexual pleasure as a “positive virtue” in late medieval thought, see Noonan, Contraception, 292–5. Aquinas, Summa, 1–2, 34.1, response. My translation of Policraticus 7.8 653c (cf. 7.15 671b): “Cum ergo uirtus sola beatum faciat, ad thronum eius, sumpta occasione ex traditionibus doctiorum, per uarios calles ascendere conati sunt. Stoicus enim, ut rerum contemptum doceat, in mortis meditatione uersatur; Peripatheticus in inquisitione ueri; uolutatur in uoluptatibus Epicurus; et, licet ad unum tendant, uarias sententias quasi uias beatitudinis auditoribus suis aperiunt. De quibus dubitare et quaerere liberum est, donec ex collatione propositorum quasi ex quadam rationum collisione ueritas illucescat.” John of Salisbury, trans. van Laarhoven, Entheticus maior 527–38: “Esse boni summam putat alter gaudia mentis, / atque voluptati cuncta subesse docet. / Hoc equidem recte, sed si sit pura voluptas, / si ratio dicti gaudia vera capit, / si status appetitur, ut quod vult assit, et absit / quod non vult animus, ad pia vota studens, / si labor aspirat veram conferre quietem, / si mens tranquille gaudia pacis habet. / Militat ad pacem labor officiosus, et ambit, / quod sibi laetitiam perpetuare queat; / in virtute labor positus dulcescit, et in se / mens benefactorum conscia laeta viget.” John of Salisbury, Policraticus 7.15. Hill, Chaucerian Belief, 7–8. Reflecting perhaps the Boethian subordinate value of wealth, the Man of Law praises merchants in a way that suggests arguments for free trade. Thus at the beginning of his Tale exchanges of trading information open a brief window of a more tolerant future of religious pluralism, when the sultan of Syria is attracted to the daughter of the Holy Roman emperor because of her virtue rather than

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197 Notes to pages 54–9

50 51 52

53 54

55

56 57 58 59 60

61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69

70

her faith. With some similarity at the present moment Europe is venturing on the experiment of having a single currency of exchange precede political and cultural federation. Liebeschütz, Mediaeval Humanism, 29. See Scott, Recollection, 10, 30; 161–3 discusses a possible misunderstanding by Cicero of innatist thinking in Epicurus. Pater, Marius, chap. 16, 177. Cf. Mertens-Fonck, “Le Franklin,” 273. Cf. also Nussbaum, Therapy, 500, comparing Epicurean and Sceptic ataraxia. Ronquist, “Learning.” See Peck, “Chaucer,” 745, 758, and David Williams, The Canterbury Tales, 16–21, for Chaucer’s interrogations of the fit of words and deeds. For the complex voicing of the terminus of the Canterbury Tales, see Wurtele, “Penitence,” 342. Chaucer’s religion can also be said to be more Marian and christological than mystic and theocentric, not as encyclopaedic as Dante’s (cf. Mann “Chaucer and Atheism,” 16–17). Which Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, 159–60, has also emphasized. Mann, “Chaucerian Themes,” 146. Cf. Vattimo and Rovatti, Il pensiero debole. Berlin, “Pursuit,” 8–13. There is in this a similarity to the analysis of aristocratic society and recursive “intrication” in Vico, whose thinking Struever suggests is in turn similar to the pragmatic “qualification of practice” in C.S. Peirce (Struever, “Definition,” 34–41). Also preliminary is Hill, Chaucerian Belief, 11. Rosenthal, Charles Peirce’s Pragmatic Pluralism, 29. Cited from ibid., 115. Kennedy, “The ‘Gothic Venus,’” citing Twycross, The Medieval Anadyomene, 59, fig. 8. Lydgate, “Balade.” See further Specht, Chaucer’s Franklin, 177–8. See Reinhardt, “Epicurus christianus.” Vickers, “Valla’s Ambivalent Praise”; Joy, “Epicureanism.” See Strohm on “Lenvoy a Buxton” in Social Chaucer, 73–5. For pragmatic pastoral work with marriages, see Schnell, “Discourse,” 776; for responsiveness, see Mann, “Chaucerian Themes,” 139. See further note 15 above. “The emergence in the twelfth century of a new moral science in such works as the Moralium dogma philosophorum, attributed to

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198 Notes to pages 59–61

71 72 73 74

William of Conches, and in the summas produced in the circle around Peter the Chanter in Paris at the turn of the century points to a significant change in the mode of analysis of human behavior. At the same time, the widespread experimentation with forms of social and political organization in this period suggests an openness to fundamental structural changes that seems at variance with the conservative views expressed in contemporary sources regarding the nature of the social order. Finally, Albertanus’s stress on the role or urban professionals transcends the approaches taken by many of his contemporaries.” Powell, Albertanus, 4. Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers; Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. Sklute, Virtue, 96–7. Cf. Jaritz, ed., Norm und Praxis. Again, the Franklin stands in Philosophia’s First Stage: “For yif that moneye, or honours, or thise othere forseyde thynges, brynge to men swiche a thyng that no good ne fayle hem ne semeth faile, certes thanne wol I graunte that they ben maked blisful by thilke thynges that thei han geten.” But a Later Stage was also hypothesized: “But yif so be that thilke thynges ne mowen nat performen that they byheten, … sheweth it not thanne clerly that false beaute of blysfulnesse is knowen and ataynt in thilke thynges?” (BO 3, pr. 3). mapping a history

1 See, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw’s recent suggestion that a contemporary queer touch can help denaturalize the forces that have worked to produce Father Chaucer as a medium for the reproduction of a heterosexual tradition. Commenting on the Pardoner’s queerness, Dinshaw remarks: “It’s typical of Chaucer, in some ways a classic liberal humanist (this is why he is so continuously popular, I think), that this queer gets to speak and begins to open a perspective on heteronormativity only to have that norm reinscribed in even greater force – greater, that is, for its continual reinscription.” Thus the “force of the queer touch” in the Tales – whether the monstrous abnormality of the Pardoner or the Wife’s staging of feminine gender and desire as discursive production – is “carefully controlled and managed … and it’s only our latter-day bodies that can feel the shock and appropriate that power for queer use.” The contemporary critic, then, “looking back at this medieval poem,

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199 Notes to pages 62–3

2 3 4

5 6

7

8

finds those queer touches that its culture has tried to disavow, opens up their denaturalizing perspective on heterosexual identity and can thus contribute to the mapping of heterosexuality’s long and varied history” (Dinshaw, “Chaucer’s Queer Touches,” 90, 79, 91). Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 12–13. Ruby, “The Five Wounds,” 157. For de Louens’s Le Livre de Melibee, see J. Burke Severs’s edition in Bryan and Dempster, eds., Sources, 568–614; and see Albertano of Brescia, Liber consolationis. Baugh, ed., Chaucer’s Major Poetry; Donaldson, ed., Chaucer’s Poetry. The locus classicus for Melibee as proof of Chaucer’s allegorizing moral intentions for the Canterbury Tales is, of course, D.W. Robertson, Jr, A Preface to Chaucer: “Chaucer tells us that the Melibee, although it differs verbally from the other tales the audience has heard from the ‘sondry folk’ who proceed toward Canterbury, and contains more proverbs than any of the others, after which it is now placed, does not differ from them in sentence. But all this is a rather indirect and poetic way of saying something else: pay attention to the sentence of the Melibee because it affords a clue to the sentence of all the other tales which come before it” (369). But a similar tendency to read Melibee straight also dominates other, less programmatic, approaches. Although antithetical to Robertson in his understanding of “the idea of the Canterbury Tales,” Donald Howard, too, sees Melibee as a moment in which Chaucer “appears before us in good earnest” and thus underscores the tale as “the focal point of an ‘address to the court’ which runs throughout The Canterbury Tales” (Idea, 315). See, for example, Gaylord, “Sentence”; Kempton, “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee”; and Waterhouse and Griffiths, “‘Sweete Wordes’ of Non-sense.” For fifteenth-century anthologizations of Melibee, see Silvia, “Some Fifteenth-Century Manuscripts.” See also Lerer, Chaucer, 95ff, on the uses of manuscripts of Thopas and Melibee in household instruction – particularly the Helmingham manuscript (now Princeton University Liberary, ms Princeton 100). Albertano of Brescia’s works themselves were widely disseminated throughout the later medieval period in over three hundred manuscript copies, as noted by a recent modern editor (Hiltz, “Albertano,” 290–325; see also Powell, Albertanus, 14, and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 214–21).

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200 Notes to pages 64–7 9 See Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 46–55, and Patterson, “‘What Man Artow?’” 139–50; also Larry Scanlon’s recent cultural studies analysis of the ideological work performed by such citations of the Fürstenspiegel traditions. For Scanlon the role of narrative in the tale is especially interesting in its relation of Prudence’s rejection of vengeance to innovations in late-medieval jurisprudence and in its discussion of Chaucer’s recapitulation of the monarchism of Renaud’s text while bringing it to a new audience: thus “the submission to royal authority implicit in Melibee’s relinquishing of the ideal of vengeance will paradoxically make a share of that authority available to him … Sovereign power is something Melibee can acquire only in renouncing. It is offered to him by the abject submission of his adversaries, but the very moral logic which motivates their submission depends on his renunciation of the power they offer him. His assumption of it is entirely symbolic” (Scanlon, Narrative, 213–14). 10 As Seth Lerer has noted, “Melibee, for its mediaeval readers, was appreciated as a compilatio, a florilegium of moral texts, instructive quotes, and valuable citations. The fifteenth-century scribes who transmitted it often filled in the margins with the names of the auctores cited, keying them by means of symbols or red highlights to the quotations within the text. Its status as a compilatio was also reinforced by the effect it had on later readers. Whether abstracted from the Canterbury frame or written in the complete manuscripts of the Tales, the Melibee appears unique in the many variations of its wording, its length, and its sheer weight of authorial citation. Part of this phenomenon, certainly, is due to the prose nature of the Tale and to the greater possibilities of scribal error when unconstrained by the patterns of verse and rhyme. But part of this phenomenon, I believe, is due to the very staging and narration of the Melibee itself: a work presented as but one version of familiar, inherited material, a work self-consciously announced as longer than the others – and, hence, subject either to scribal truncation or to further augmentation by those who would seem to follow Chaucer’s model” (Lerer, “‘Now holde youre mouth,’” 195). Lerer cites the example of Huntington Library, ms hm 144, where the tale appears without its author’s name or any reference to the Canterbury Tales and is headed simply “Prouerbis.” See also note 8 above. 11 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 217.

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201 Notes to pages 67–9 12 Wallace’s recent discussion of Albertano of Brescia’s authorship of the original Latin text emphasizes Albertano’s fundamentally rhetorical and professional, rather than religious aims. He notes that “reading a manuscript of Seneca’s moral epistles, Albertano was moved to mark passages ripe for recycling into his own treatises with a striking series of mnemonic devices.” Equally, Albertano’s advertisement of his links with the friars was a way of authorizing or theologizing his own profession as causidici (or legal advocate), arising out of the need for such specialized groups in emergent urban culture to form professional elites and to develop a citycentred, rather than rural–monastic, spirituality. Wallace notes that “Chaucer is similarly concerned, in the Canterbury Tales, with defining and justifying his own profession of authorship … he trusts that the Melibee in prose, especially when complemented by the prose of the Parson’s Tale, will win him an authority that is both urbane and religious in its appeal; that will both anchor and license his poetic fictions.” “Chaucer, I believe, would have recognized Albertano’s Liber consolationis et consilii (even through vernacular intermediaries) as a work of counsel authored not by a magnate but by someone (much like himself) confecting a social and authorial identity from divergent bases of authority: a ‘new man’” (Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 218–20). 13 Chatterjee, The Nation, 36. 14 Strohm, Social Chaucer, 67–8. 15 Patterson, “‘What Man Artow?’” 117–18. 16 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 212–13. 17 Here, as so often in the Tales, the Host’s vulgar comments at the end of Melibee bring to the surface the ideological work that it has been attempting. For the Host’s comments about his wife and social precedence act as a mirror image to the lessons of Melibee, underscoring the latter’s gendered and sexualized power structures, as well as the fact that the tale’s emphasis on patience, interiority, secrecy, and control in Melibee’s identity formation is all about power in the world. Later, the Host’s highly sexualized characterization of the Monk as “a tredefowel aright” (MkT 1945) and his joking assertion that such a waste of potency is the cause of the world’s problems, not its salvation – “for al the world is lorn! / Religioun hath take up al the corn / Of tredyng, and we borel men been shrympes” (MkT 1954–5) – are not-so-sly indications that the Host has understood

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202 Notes to pages 69–70 that this new identity will assert a new hegemony based on lay husbands and householders. 18 Cf. Cohen’s recent discussion of masculinity in Fragment VII as an economy of flows: “The six narratives of Fragment VII and their dramatic bridges explore how masculinity represents itself as bigger than life, like a giant, a universal. Yet masculinity ‘in reality’ turns out to be a phenomenon of little things: merchant bodies, elvish authors, tiny clergeons, infantilized knights, self-inflated monks, farmhouse fowls” (Cohen, “Diminishing Masculinity,” 144). 19 “The only assemblages are machinic assemblages of desire and collective assemblages of enunciation … There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality (the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject … How can the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce? The cultural book is necessarily a tracing: a tracing of other books however different they may be, an endless tracing of established concepts and words, a tracing of the world present, past, and future. Even the anticultural book may still be burdened by too heavy a cultural load: but it will use it actively, for forgetting instead of remembering, for underdevelopment instead of progress toward development, in nomadism rather than sedentarity, to make a map instead of a tracing … Between things does not designate a localizable relation going from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 22–5). 20 “Scholars and activists have reminded us not only that sex has a history, but also that history has its pleasures. Queer theory, the history of sexuality, and gay and lesbian studies pursue a fraught but ebullient rethinking of the ethics of pleasure. While recent studies in sexuality make clear that we ought to know the past, they also affirm that we want to. It is true, of course, that after Freud – and Foucault – ‘wanting’ will never be the same. But one of the most productive paradoxes of contemporary work on sexuality is that, while it does not take pleasure at face value, it also does not

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203 Notes to pages 72–85 take it for granted. Pleasure can be doubted, scrutinized, politicized, historicized, debated – and enjoyed. We do not, then, pursue the history of sexuality just because we think we must; we study it because we know that what we must or ought to do is intimately related to what we want to do … History – and not just family history – is an erogenous zone” (Fradenburg and Freccero, Premodern Sexualities, viii). chaucer 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13 14 15 16

Kiser, Truth, 4. Saussure, Course, 65–6. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 157. Ibid., 5. Goodman, “Fabrication,” 8. Rorty, Philosophy, 332. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 176, 318–19. Partner, “Making Up,” 97, 117. Ibid., 97. See, for example, Gellrich, Idea. For other studies that examine medieval literature in relation to the issues of contemporary criticism, see Finke and Shichtman, eds., Medieval Texts; Gallacher and Damico, eds., Hermeneutics. See, e.g., Jordan, Chaucer’s Poetics and the Modern Reader. Kiser, Truth, 147. As Kiser herself claims (ibid., 2). Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 6–8. Patterson, Negotiating the Past, 62. chaucer’s clerk

1 Quoted in Lubac, Exégèse médiévale, 23. 2 Haines, “A Unified Theory,” 211–13. 3 The Cloud of Unknowing, 137; Myles, “‘This litil worde “IS,”’” 141–3. 4 Charity, Events, 109. 5 Gregory, Moralia in Iob, III, xviii. 6 Augustine, Contra Faustum, xxii, 87. 7 Myles, “‘This litil worde “IS,”’” 137, 142.

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204 Notes to pages 85–94 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

Carlo, Ultimate Reducibility, 65. Waterhouse and Grifffiths, “‘Sweete Wordes,’” 346. Kirk, “Nominalism,” 111. Stepsis, “Potentia.” Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 18. Steinmetz, “Late Medieval Nominalism,” 51. Delasanta, “Nominalism,” 224. Grossi, “The Clerk,” 156, 152. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, Q. 88, art. 2. Finnegan, “‘She should have said no to Walter.’” Haines, “Where Are Chaucer’s ‘Retracciouns’?” McClellan, “Lars Engle,” 504. Babylonian Talmud, Sanhedrin, 74a. Salter, Chaucer, 65–6; Windeatt, “Literary Structures,” 202. Hudson, The Premature Reformation, 432. Babylonian Talmud, 502. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II. II, Q. 124, art. 4. Aquinas repeatedly makes the point that sometimes a promise ought to be broken (ibid., 417, 429, 418, 425, 434, 435, 495), which also appears frequently enough in the writing of early canonists: Burchard of Worms (col. 879), Ivo of Chartres (cols. 782–83, 798), Gratian of Bologna (pp. 875–6), Bartholomew of Exeter (246). Robert Mannyng of Brunne’s popular work Handlyng Synne refers to Herod’s promise to Salome (Mark 6:22–28) and Jephthah’s promise to God (Judges 11: 29–40) and, on the authority of Augustine, concludes that they were better “to have broke that yche vowe” (103). Alan T. Gaylord (“Promise”) notes (354) that Robert probably had in mind a passage from Ambrose, not Augustine, since, in De officiis ministrorum, Ambrose uses these two examples to illustrate his principle that if one does make a promise, it is more tolerable not to keep the promise than to do something wicked: “ac se promiserit, tolerabilius est promissum non facere, quam facere quod turpe sit” (16, 167). Augustine does not mention Jephthah, but in his treatise on lying Contra mendacium (494–7) he mentions David’s vow to kill Nabal (Samuel 25:22), which is properly revoked. Robert’s most immediate source is the Anglo–Norman Manual des Pechiez, which belongs, as Gaylord says, to a family of confessional and penitential treatises that “disseminated basic pastoral theology and Christian ethics in virtually identical terms” (353).

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205 Notes to pages 94–107

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

In The Book of Vices and Virtues, the author treats rash promises as a case of sinful swearing: “whan a man swereth thing that he may not hold without synne; such swerying schal a man not holde, but withdrawe him and do his penaunce for the ooth folily sworen” (62). Dan Michel’s Ayenbite of Inwyt gives the same advice (64). Both derive, according to The Book’s editor, Nelson Francis (ix–xlvi), from the thirteenth-century French Somme le roi and the widely influential Miroir du monde. Utley, “Five Genres,” 223. Engle, “Chaucer,” 455. Kellogg, “Evolution.” Severs, Literary Relationships, 274–5. Ashton, “Patient Mimesis,” 237. Christina E. Coleman, “Narrative Strategies.” Wurtele, “Chaucer’s Man of Law,” 175, 25. Engle, “Chaucer,” 453–4. Ibid., 454. Haines, “Rhetoric and Existence.” Kennedy, Knighthood. Georgianna, “The Clerk’s Tale.” Gray, “Chaucer”; Harding, “Function.” Finnegan, “‘She should have said no to Walter,’” 304. The sense of the final word is not having the last word: good discussions continue. In honour of Beverly Kennedy’s memory, I continue the discussion of her note 85 (p. 191). Unlike “for my sake,” the ambiguity of “withouten” implies two different worlds. Charity does not allow us to abstain from choosing an interpretation. The Wife of Bath must be judged for what she is in a makebelieve world shaped by what we already believe and our character. Unlike Beverly Kennedy, I judge those editors and readers who have chosen wrongly to be guilty. For I should know: I was one of them. confusing signs

1 Deely, Basics, 13. 2 This is sometimes called “three-level semantics” (Harney, Intentionality, 3; Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 88–90), based on the work of Frege (Küng, “World,” 15) but already found in the triadic nature

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206 Notes to pages 108–16

3 4 5

6 7 8 9 10 11

12 13

14 15 16

of the sign described by Augustine (Markus, “St. Augustine,” 74; Eco, Semiotics, 18). Nöth, Handbook, 108. Ibid., 81. “Fifteen centuries before Saussure, he [Augustine] will be the one to recognize the genus of signs, of which linguistic signs are a species” (Eco, Semiotics, 33). Augustine discusses signs in a number of works; for easy access to these, see Todorov, Theories, 36–59. Augustine, De mendacio, 3. Eco, Theory, 7. Deely, Basics, 11. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 2.1.2. Augustine, De Trinitate 15.10.19. I am applying here C.S. Peirce’s description (a direct descendant of Augustine’s) of the triadic relationship necessary for making and interpreting signs (for an introduction, see Merrell, Peirce’s Semiotics Now). I summarize a fine example from John Deely (see New Beginning, 214) to illustrate sign relationships: there are three aspects of every sign relationship – the sign, for example, a fossilized bone; the interpreting thought (which Peirce calls the interpretant), here the interpreting thought of the palaeontologist who sees the thing as a fossilized bone and not simply as a rock that is, independently of being a sign; and that no-longer existent object of which the “bone,” through the thought of the palaeontologist, becomes a natural sign of that to which it refers, namely, a dinosaur that once existed. Nöth, Handbook, 92. In Literary Relationships, Severs not only presents his source manuscripts but is the first to make assured assertions based on comparison of sources. See particularly the chapter “Chaucer’s Treatment of his Sources,” in which he considers “Chaucer’s Technique” and “Chaucer’s Originality.” Also see his introduction to the sources in his chapter, “The Clerk’s Tale,” in Bryan and Demster, eds., Sources. Most noteworthy among subsequent source studies is Elizabeth Salter’s Chaucer. For an excellent overview of the criticism of the Tale to 1994, see Bronfman, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, 16–50. Severs, “The Clerk’s Tale,” 289. Ibid., 290. Victor Haines in conversation pointed out to me that the word “greveth” can mean “pains” in the physical sense. As this meaning

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207 Notes to pages 117–21

17 18 19 20 21 22 23

24

25

26 27 28

29 30

31

32

would have been available to Chaucer’s contemporary audience, Griselda may be deliberately equivocating, referring to physical rather than to mental pain. Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 1–22. Bronfman, Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, 23–35. Petrach, Letters, Sen. 17.4, 670. “Le Livre Griseldis” in Severs, “The Clerk’s Tale,” 297, l2. Petrarch, Letters, Sen. 17.3 656. Ibid. For example, when Walter sends Griselda back to her father, in both sources he turns away to weep privately. Because the sign tears occurs privately, we have no reason to interpret it as other than natural. By removing the private tears from his version, Chaucer augments the reading of Walter as cruel and amoral. Manetti, Theories, 166, states that “Augustine’s signa data are not ‘conventional signs’” and lists those modern commentators and translators who have made this error. He then opts for the term “intentional signs,” listing those whom he follows in this choice. Nöth, Handbook, 17, 107. Todorov uses one term in his text and another in his quotations from Augustine – for example, Theories, 46. For a historical survey of the natural–conventional sign controversy see Eco et al., “On Animal Language.” Clarke, Principles, 43. “Naturalia sunt quae sine voluntate atque ullo appetitu significanci praeter se aliquid aliud ex se cognosci faciunt, sicuti est fumus significans ignem” (De doctrina christiana, 2.2). Letters are, of course, also things in themselves as well as signs. Smoke for fire, like breath for life, milk for birth, and so on, is an indexical natural sign (see Peirce in Nöth, Handbook, 113), one that has a direct physical connection with that which it signifies. This is not true of an arbitrary sound, which, by convention, becomes the sign of a certain thing. “vultus irati seu tristis affectionem animi significat, etiam nulla eius voluntate qui aut iratus aut tristis est; aut si quis alius motus animi, ultu indice proditur, etiam nobis non id agentibus ut prodatur” (De doctrina christiana, 2.2). For a discussion of modern phenomenology and its relation to the Middle Ages, see Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 5, 44, 45, 76, 82, and, particularly, 95.

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208 Notes to pages 122–3 33 34 35 36 37

38 39 40

41 42 43 44 45 46

Nöth, Handbook, 81. Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 73. Nöth, Handbook, 25. Ibid., 81, 41. Pansemiotism is sometimes opposed to “transsemiotic agnosticism,” the view that “nothing can be said about the nonsemiotic world,” a position ascribed to Saussure and many others (Nöth, Handbook, 81). Nöth argues that the opposition is exaggerated (81–2). These two approaches to the “delimitation of signs from nonsigns” are among the six that Nöth describes (81). Manetti, Theories, 157. Deely, Introducing Semiotics, 17. There are many summaries and discussions of Augustine’s theories and original contributions to semiotics and their relations to more recent theory. Particularly useful for the relation of Augustine’s sign theory to earlier forms and for both primary and secondary sources is Manetti, Theories, 157–68. Augustine’s definitions, however, deal only with sensible signs, and not with signs that are primarily mental. After Aquinas, this limitation was overcome by later scholastics, first by modifications such as those of Roger Bacon (Tabarroni, “Mental Signs,” 198) and then by the division of signs into “instrumental” and “formal” signs in the sixteenth century (Deely, “Coalescence,” 12, and New Beginnings, 58–9). We can see the continuum from Augustine in the fact that the semiotics of C.S. Peirce resembles the most mature form of the Augustine-based scholastic doctrina signorum of the seventeenth century (Deely, “Four Ages”). Moreover, the scholastic understanding of intentionality, intimately linked with semiological metaphysics, was recovered by Peirce’s contemporary Franz Brentano, leading to Husserl and modern phenomenology, to much of modern philosophy generally, as well as to the philosophy of mind and language typified by Austin and Searle (Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 33–54, 75–90). Eco, Semiotics, 34. Manetti, Theories, 71. Augustine, De doctrina christiana 2.3.4. Manetti, Theories, 158, 162. Todorov, Theories. In “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen,” Nobel Prize–winning physicist Stephen Weinberg argues that “the radical part of Kuhn’s theory … is quite wrong” (49). However, he sees many useful

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209 Notes to pages 123–8

47 48 49

50 51 52 53

aspects to this theory as well. Weinberg’s own neo-positivist approach to “truth” raises its own questions. Ibid., 49. Ibid., 50. I have discussed Chaucer’s anti-essentialism (Chaucerian Realism, 63, 63n11, and “Chaucer’s Anti-Essentialism”). See also my discussion of the Cloud author’s anti-essentialism and Christian existentialism – the other side of the coin for some (“‘This litil worde “IS”’”). Because for many people today anti-essentialism has become synonymous with “nominalism,” relativism, constructivism, idealism, and so on, I have proposed “fallibilism” (in “Chaucer’s Anti-Essentialism”). This term carries the senses that “truth may outrun us” (the position of “transcendental realism”; Haack, “Realism,” 283), that the satisfactory attainment of truth “lies beyond our grasp” (Oxford Companion to Philosophy, s.v. “fallibilism”), and that error is possible but that knowledge does not require absolute certainty. In effect, it allows us to accept “generals,” classifications (or universals), and so on on a provisional basis. Deely, “Four Ages,” 235. Bloom, “Introduction,” 2–3. Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 33–54. I thank David Williams, John Parry, Victor Haines, and Richard Cooper for their suggestions. sense

1 Myles, Chaucerian Realism. I have also been substantially influenced in my study by Lonergan, Insight. 2 Ibid., 2. 3 Ibid., 22. 4 For an introductory account of the distinction, see Kenny, Frege. Paul Ricœur has greatly developed and extended the concepts of sense and reference, especially in The Rule of Metaphor, 217–20; in The Conflict of Interpretations, 86, 252; and in the work in A Ricœur Reader, 68, 88, and passim. A stimulating discussion of sense and reference in a literary context occurs in Dowling, Senses, 46–8, and passim. Colette, in “Umberto Eco,” does not touch on reference at all. 5 Wurtele, “Blasphemy,” “Figure,” and “Ironical Resonances.” 6 Wurtele, “Concept,” 61, 78.

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210 Notes to pages 128–9 7 Speaking of the Merchant’s Tale, Helen Cooper refers to a clash of styles, to which I think there is a resolution (Cooper, The Canterbury Tales, 213). 8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, II–II, 45, 2, c.: “a man after inquiring with his reason forms a right judgment … Accordingly it belongs to the wisdom that is an intellectual virtue to pronounce right judgment about Divine things after reason has made its inquiry.” 9 Inquiry and judgment seem to be paired most explicitly in the tradition of Aristotle’s Ethics. Dante in Il Convivio, III, 2 (pp. 275–7): “In questa nobilissima parte de l’anima sono più vertudi, sì come dice lo Filosofo massimamente nel sesto de l’Etica; dove dice che in essa è una vertù che si chiama scientifica, e una che si chiama ragionativa, o vero consigliativa: e con queste sono certe vertudi – sì come in quello medesimo luogo Aristotile dice – sì come la vertù inventiva e giudicativa” (emphasis added). The formulation of Aquinas appears in his commentary on the Ethics, lect. 9, n. 1239, cited in a note to the passage in Il Convivio, 277: “In speculativis, in quibus non est actio, est solum duplex opus rationis, scilicet invenire inquirendo, et de inventis iudicare” (emphasis added). For Chaucer’s use of Il Convivio, see Schless, Chaucer and Dante, 252; Lowes, “Chaucer and Dante’s Convivio”; and Gallacher, “Dame Alice.” See also Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante. For the rhetorical tradition, see Murphy, Rhetoric. See also The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 801, 804. 10 Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 437. 11 The corresponding passage in Trivet, Exposicio super Boecio, p. 471, is as follows: “scilicet inquirendo naturam et proprietates rei cogat id est recolligat flectens in orbem id est redeundo iterato super cogitaciones suas et deliberando de eis antequam finaliter iudicet” (emphasis added). 12 Myles (Chaucerian Realism, 61) discusses the distinction between whatness and thatness. 13 The passage occurs at Trivet, Exposicio, Book Five, Prose One (V p 1), p. 670: “Circa primum sciendum, quod, quamuis questio si est sit preuia ad questionem quid est, secundum quod questio quid est querit de eo quod quid est rei, eo quod quiditas rei nulli conuenit nisi enti, tamen, secundum quod quaerit de eo quod quid est nominis, non est prima sed magis consequens, eo quod quid est

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211 Notes to pages 129–30 nominis est prima cognitio; et ideo ex eo, quod quid est nominis oportet inquirere de aliquo si est et propter hoc adquirendum de casu utrum sit uel non, accipit Philosophia quid est quod significatur per nomen. Et circa hoc duo facit. Primo enim ex eo, quod significatur per nomen secundum opinionem quorundam philosophorum antiquorum, ostendit casum non esse; secundo ex eo, quod significatur per nomen secundum Aristotilem et ueritatem, concedit casum [esse].” (Concerning the first, we must know that although the question is it? comes before the question what is it?, insofar as the question what is it? concerns the thing itself, because the quiddity of a thing pertains only to being – nevertheless, insofar as it seeks the meaning of a term [essence of a name], it is not first, but rather, consequent, because the meaning of a term is a first cognition; and therefore since the meaning of a term ought to inquire whether something exists, and therefore, we must inquire about chance, whether it is or not. Philosophia accepts as the essence the meaning of the word. And concerning this she does two things. First she shows that chance does not exist, according to the definition of some ancient philosophers. Second, she shows that according to the definition of Aristotle and the truth, she concedes that chance exists.) 14 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. Green, 102. Chaucer’s translation of the line is as follows: “unwar betydinge of causes assembled in thingis that ben doon for som oothir thing” (Bo 5.pr1.90–2). Philosophy has previously given the wrong definition of chance, to which nothing corresponds: “‘Certes,’ quod sche, ‘yif any wyght diffynisse hap in this manere, that is to seyn that “hap is bytydynge ibrought forth by foolisshe moevynge and by no knyttyng of causes,” I conferme that hap nis ryght naught in no wise; and I deme al outrely that hap nis [but an idel] voys (as who seith, but an idel word) withouten any significacioun of thing summitted to that voys’” (Bo 5.pr.30–9; emphasis added). 15 The whole passage from Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I–II, 66, 5, ad 4, is as follows: “[V]eritas et cognitio principiorum indemonstrabilium dependet ex ratione terminum: cognito enim quid est totum et quid pars, statim cognoscitur quod omne totum est maius sua parte. Cognoscere autem rationem entis et non entis, et totius et partis, et aliorum quae consequuuntur ad ens, ex quibus sicut ex terminis constituuntur principia indemonstrabilia, pertinet ad sapientiam: quia ens commune est proprius effectus causae altissimae,

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212 Notes to page 130 scilicet Dei. Et ideo sapientia non solum utitur principiis indemonstrabilibus, quorum est intellectus, concludendo ex eis, sicut aliae scientiae, sed etiam iudicando de eis, et disputando contra negantes.” (The truth and knowledge of indemonstrable principles depend on the meaning of the terms: for as soon as we know what is a whole, and what is a part, we know at once that every whole is greater than its part. Now to know the meaning of being and non– being, of whole and part, and of other things consequent to being, which are the terms whereof indemonstrable principles are constituted, is the function of wisdom: since universal being is the proper effect of the Supreme Cause, which is God. And so wisdom makes use of indemonstrable principles which are the object of understanding, not only by drawing conclusions from them, as other sciences do, but also by passing its judgment on them, and by vindicating them against those who deny them.) 16 Trivet observes, Exposicio, III p 10, p. 429, that it is through the meaning of a word that the philosopher argues against those who deny the principles, an important function of wisdom: “hoc ideo ex eo quod significatur per nomen manifestat, sicut philosophus contra negantes principia arguit per significatum nominis quarto metaphysice.” See Peter Aureoli, Scriptum super primum sententiarum, 167; William of Ockham, Scriptum in librum primum sententiarum, Lib. I, p. 4. For the general background, see L.M. De Rijk, “The Origins of the Theory of the Properties of Terms,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, 161–73. 17 Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 64–5. 18 Trivet, Exposicio, III m 9, p. 400: “The philosopher says in the first book of the ethics: the good is that which all things desire, but everything desires its own perfection. Wherefore it is necessary that the perfection of anything have the structure of the good.” (Unde dicit philosophus in primo ethicorum: bonum est quod omnia appetunt, quelibet autem res suam perfeccionem appetit. Quare necesse est quod perfeccio cuiuslibet rei habeat racionem boni.) The relationship of perfection to completeness is clarified by a further definition at III p 10, 437: “a perfect thing is that to which nothing is lacking” (perfectum enim est cui nichil deest). The relationship of the good to existence is stated at IV p 6, p. 638: “Whatever has the structure of the desirable is good, since the structure of the good consists in this, that it is existence as desirable, whence it is necessary that the existence and perfection of anything have the structure of goodness” (Quicquid autem habet

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213 Notes to pages 130–1

19

20

21 22

23

racionem appetibilis bonum est cum in hoc consistat racio boni quod est esse appetibile, unde necesse est esse et perfeccionem cuiuslibet nature racionem bonitatis habere). Dante provides a clear statement of the principle in Il Convivio, IV, xvi, pp. 198–9: “Dico adunque che, se volemo riguardo avere de la comune consuetudine di parlare, per questo vocabulo ‘nobilitade’ s’intende perfezione di propria natura in ciascuna cosa. Onde non pur de l’uomo è predicata, ma eziandio di tutte cose – chè l’uomo chiama nobile pietra, nobile pianta, nobile cavallo, nobile falcone – qualunque in sua natura si vede essere perfetta” (emphasis added). In a note to this passage, the following maxim is quoted from the Contra gentiles of Aquinas, l.l., c. 28: “Any particular thing has nobility according to its existence … So therefore in the measure in which a thing has existence, is its measure in nobility.” (Omnis nobilitas cuiusque rei est sibi secundum suum esse … Sic ergo secundum modum quo res habet esse, est suus modus in nobilitate.) The usage is present in Trivet as well; see Exposicio, IV p 3, p. 555: “gradus encium distinguantur secundum nobilitatem et ignobilitatem nature” (“the degrees of beings are distinguished according to nobility or ignobility of nature.”) See also II p 5, p. 241, where the nature of gems is said to be less noble than that of man. See Wicksteed, The “Convivio,” in a note to III, vi, ll. 88–107, p. 171: “The Lady of Dante’s love is primarily the divine wisdom, secondarily the wisdom of angels and of men, and derivatively the concrete knowledge (sciences) which form the body or content of human wisdom.” Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 33ff. Dante, Il Convivio, III, ii, p. 266: “ciascuna forma ha essere de la divina natura in alcun modo”; pp. 267–70: “però che naturalissimo è in Dio volere essere – però che, sì come ne lo allegato libro si legge, prima cosa è l’essere, e anzi a quello nulla è – l’anima humana essere vuole naturalmente con tutto desiderio; e però che’l suo essere dipende da Dio e per quello si conserva, naturalmente disia e vuole essere a Dio unita per lo suo essere fortificare”; pp. 269–70: “E però che ne le bontadi de la natura e de la ragione si mostra la divina, viene che naturalmente l’anima umana con quelle per via spirituale si unisce, tanto più tosto e più forte quanto quelle più appaiono perfette.” Chaucer’s knowledge of Robert Holcot’s In librum sapientiae, a commentary on the Book of Wisdom, would have provided him with a concise summary of the tradition. In lect. 2, p. 6, Holcot cites both the Ethics and the Metaphysics of Aristotle and calls wisdom the

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214 Note to page 131 most noble of the intellectual virtues: “Nam primo apud Peripatheticos dicitur, una uirtus intellectualis & speculatiua inter omnes uirtutes intellectuales nobilissima: Et sic de ea tractat Arist. 6. Ethicorum cap. 6:& l. Metaph. cap. 5. ubi descriptionem sapientis inuestigat talem.” He defines the wise man as one who knows all things, especially the difficult things, with certainty and by means of the highest causes: “Sapiens est qui scit omnia, & difficilia propter certitudinem & causam … etiam per altissimas causas” (emphasis added). Wisdom as an infused or supernatural gift, entailing an experience of divine things, is compared to natural, acquired wisdom: “Secundo apud theologos accipitur sapientia pro dono supernaturali siue infuso, per quod homo noticiam habet diuinorum & humanorum, uel ex inspiratione speciali, uel ex quadam uicinitate gratiosa ad Deum, sicut dicit Dyoni. cap. 5. de diuinis nominibus: Quod Hierotheus patiendo diuina didicit.” For Chaucer’s knowledge of Holcot, see Pratt, “Some Latin Sources.” The locus classicus for the relationship between nobility and certainty is the opening paragraph of Aristotle’s De anima. See Dante, Il Convivio, II, xiii, p. 212: “sì come dice Aristotile nel cominciamento de l’Anima, la scienza è alta di nobilitade del suo subietto e per la sua certezza” (emphasis added). Texts from Aquinas, Albert the Great, Michael Scot, and Pietro d’Albano that define the nobility of knowledge in terms of certainty are cited in a footnote to this quotation. Commenting on V p 3, Trivet, Exposicio, says that to assert that God does not have certain knowledge “greatly detracts from the nobility of his understanding.” A further relationship between nobility and certainty is Trivet’s development of Boethius’s notion that the most noble or perfect beings are most certain in their judgments. In Exposicio, V p 2 (Benson, ed., Riverside Chaucer, 458), freedom and certainty of judgment are functions of a hierarchy of beings: “Forwhy in the severeynes devynes substaunces (that is to seyn, in spiritz) jugement is more cleer.” Trivet, Exposicio, p. 688, glosses clarity here as certainty: “Unde quanto in aliqua natura est iudicium intellectus certius et voluntas fortior ne in eligendo deficiat, tanto est necesse in eis libertatem esse maiorem.” (Wherefore insofar as the judgment of any intellect is more certain and the will stronger and unwavering in its choices, freedom is necessarily greater) (emphasis added).

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215 Notes to pages 131–2 24 The certainty of wisdom is expressed in the Aristotelian tradition by a comparison with science and understanding. Robert Holcot, in In librum sapientiae, briefly sums up the relationship: (“sapientia adquisita, quae uocatur naturalis, perfectior est scientia, & intellectum etiam principiorum comprehendit, sicut patet 6. Ethicorum: quia hec sola contra negantes principia arguit, sicut 4. Meth. dicitur”) (natural wisdom, being more perfect than science and comprehending the understanding of principles, argues against those who deny first principles), Lect. 2, p. 6. 25 See Boece, 5.pr.3.109–12: “thilke thing that is conceyved by science ne may nat ben noon other weies than as it is conceyved.” 26 Aquinas, in Summa theologiae, I–II, 57, ad 2 (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, vol. 1, p. 828–9), provides a clear and concise comparison between science and wisdom, which in one respect concern truth that is known not immediately but through something else, by means of inquiry: “On the other hand, a truth which is known through another, is understood by the intellect, not at once, but by means of the reason’s inquiry, and is as a term. This may happen in two ways: first, so that it is the last in some particular genus; secondly, so that it is the ultimate term of all human knowledge. And since things that are knowable last from our standpoint, are knowable first and chiefly in their nature (Phys. i., text. 2,3); hence that which is last with respect to all human knowledge, is that which is knowable first and chiefly in its nature. And about these is wisdom, which considers the highest causes, as stated in Metaph. i. 1, 2. Wherefore it rightly judges all things and sets them in order, because there can be no perfect and universal judgment that is not based on the first causes.” 27 Trivet, reflecting the common medieval tradition, identifies the first cause, or God, knowledge of whom is in some sense most certain, as the act of existence. Commenting in Exposicio on IV p 2, p. 542, he refers to “Deum qui est ipsum esse (unde dicit Exodi tercio: ego sum qui sum)” (God who is existence itself [wherefore he says in the third book of Exodus: I am who am]). See Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 64, and also note 1. 28 Boece, 5.pr.3.41–5: “But yif so be that noon uncertein thing ne mai ben in hym that is right certeyn welle of alle thingis, than is the betydinge certein of thilke thingis whiche he hath wist byforn fermely to comen” (emphasis added).

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216 Notes to page 132 29 In Il Convivio II, xiv, pp. 229–30, Dante refers to la eccellentissima certezza of theology. In xv, pp. 435–7, he elaborates on the theme of the greatest certainty as inexpressible: “Poi, quando si dice: Elle soverchian lo nostro intelletto, escuso me di ciò, che poco parlar posso di quelle, per la loro soperchianza. Dov’è da sapere che in alcuno modo queste cose nostro intelletto abbagliano, in quanto certe cose si affermano essere che lo intelletto nostro guardare non può, cioè Dio e la etternitate e la prima materia: che certissimamente si veggiono, e con tutta fede si credono essere, e per quello che sono intendere noi non potemo; e nullo se non cose negando si può appressare a la sua conoscenza, e non altrimenti.” Note 6, pp. 436– 7, cites numerous texts from Aquinas in further explanation of this technique of negation. 30 Myles, Chaucerian Realism, 63, 5. 31 “Unde sicut illud quod in se est contingens quando est nobis presens racione presencie sortitur quandam necessitatem qua necesse est esse dum presens est, sic quia omnia sunt Deo presencia racione illius presencie in ordine ad diuinam cognicionem sortiuntur quandam necessitatem” (Wherefore that which is contingent in itself, when it is present to us, by reason of its presence achieves a kind of necessity by which it necessarily exists while it is present; therefore since all things are present to God by reason of his presence, they achieve a kind of necessity in regard to divine knowledge), Trivet, Exposicio, V p 6, p. 800. See also p. 799: “Et ideo pulcherrime et clarissime manifestat Philosophia certitudinem diuine cognicionis respectu futurorum contingencium ex certitudine cognicionis nostre respectu contigentis presentis.” (And therefore most beautifully and clearly Philosophy manifests the certainty of divine knowledge in respect to future contingencies from our certainty about the contingent present.) The distinction between simple and conditional necessity follows in the text of Boethius. 32 Dante, Il Convivio, IV, xiii, p. 157: “E nel primo de l’Etica dice che ‘l disciplinato chiede di sapere certezza ne le cose, secondo che ne la loro natura di certezza si receva’”. Holcot, In librum sapientiae, lect. 110, pp. 370–1, also expresses the principle: “disciplinati est intellectum certiorem inquirere secundum unumquodque genus, quantum natura rei permittit: sicut dicitur l. Ethicorum” (it is the part of the disciplined man to pursue a more certain understanding in every matter insofar as the nature of the thing permits, as it is said in the first book of the Ethics).

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217 Notes to pages 132–8

33

34

35

36 37

38 39

40

41 42

An example of this wise principle occurs in Boethius, Consolation, where the divine mind is described as knowing everything as certain, but not confusing the types of certainty: “Wherfore this devyne prescience ne chaungeth nat the nature ne the proprete of thinges, but byholdeth swich thingis present to hym-ward as thei shollen betyde to yow-ward in tyme to comen. Ne it ne confowndeth nat the jugementz of thingis; but by o sight of his thought he knoweth the thinges to comen, as wel necessarie as nat necessarie”; Bo 5.pr.6.136–43. Dante, Il Convivio, IV, xv, pp. 186–8: “Chè, secondo la malizia de l’anima, tre orribili infermitadi ne la mente de li uomini ho vedute. L’una è di naturale jattanza causata: chè sono molti tanto presuntuosi, che si credono tutto sapere, e per questo le non certe cose affermano per certe” (emphasis added). Ibid., xiv, pp. 190–1: “L’altra è di naturale pusillanimitade causata: chè sono molti tanto vilmente ostinati, che non possono credere che nè per loro nè per altrui si possano le cose sapere; e questi cotali mai per loro non cercano nè ragionano.” A Chaucer Glossary, 134, has the following meanings for the adjective siker: “sure A.Kn 3049, B.NP 4353, F.Fkl 1139, BD 1149, certain G.CY 1047.” See Curtius, European Literature, 159–62; and Watts, “Pearl.” In the Vulgate Bible, l Corinthians 2.9: “Sed sicut scriptum est: Quod oculus non vidit, nec auris audivit, nec in cor hominis ascenndit, quae praeparavit Deus iis qui diligunt eum.” The passage from Isaiah 64.4 is as follows: “A saeculo non audierunt, neque auribus perceperunt; oculus non vidit, Deus, absque te, quae praeparasti expectantibus te.” See Booth, Rhetoric, 267. For the nature and influence of this work, see Stahl, Martianus Capella; also Smalley, English Friars, s.v. “Martianus”; and Bolgar, The Classical Heritage, s.v. “Capella.” For the motif of eloquence and wisdom, see Trivet, Exposicio, II p 1, p. 182; and Murphy, Rhetoric, 10. Cicero discusses the necessity for the possession of both wisdom and eloquence at the beginning of de inventione, p. 9 and I, I–IV. See note 33 above. Rather startlingly, A.S.G. Edwards, in “The Merchant’s Tale,” 422, assures us that the exchange between Placebo and Justinus simply raises matters “of pleasure or pain, ease or discomfort. We are

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218 Notes to pages 139–53 presented with alternative expediencies, not any larger moral issues about the nature of love and marriage.” Infringements on sense and reference are frequent in this essay. 43 See note 32 above. 44 In “Narration,” 366, Robert R. Edwards makes what I believe to be a similar point, although he does not assert that the Merchant consciously argues with himself, as I do: “The marriage encomium, Justinus’s speeches, and the episode of Pluto and Proserpine build cumulatively to counter the Merchant’s viewpoint, even as they presumably provide material for him.” “lo how i vanysshe” 1 Kittredge’s famous insight was that the Pardoner, if we consider the contradiction between his words and his actions, was the “one lost soul” on the pilgrimage (Chaucer, 211–18). 2 Wurtele, “Concept,” 59–79. 3 The use of res to indicate anything signified by signum, rather than the modern sense of thing as object, is standard in the Middle Ages, and I use it that way in the present discussion. 4 Pickstock, After Writing, 265. 5 For instance, Stephen Kinoy, in an influential study, treats the Pardoner as a “problem” and identifies the problem as “the proper use of language and the limits of its powers to discover or create” (“Inside Chaucer’s Pardoner,” 256). Lee Patterson sees the Pardoner’s distortions of language not as errors but as the very meaning of the character and “the means by which he creates himself for others” (“Chaucerian Confession,” 162). 6 Vance, “Chaucer’s Pardoner.” 7 Stevens and Falvey, “Substance.” 8 Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book II, ch. I, II, p. 34. All citations are from this translation (by D.W. Robertson, Jr) and are identified in the text by book and chapter. 9 All citations of Chaucer are from Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer. 10 Adelman, “That We May Leere Som Wit.” 11 Pickstock, After Writing, 63. 12 Ibid., 70. 13 Ibid., 104. 14 Patterson, “Chaucerian Confession,” 158.

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219 Notes to pages 154–61 15 Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, XIII, 2313 (my translation). 16 In this sense the idea of the relic approaches the concept of the Eucharist. John M. McCulloh recounts that in The Earliest Life of Saint Gregory a story about the transformation of the host into a bit of bleeding flesh is associated with another story of a piece of cloth being transformed into a relic by being placed on the altar during a Mass, i.e., during the transubstantiation; “Cult,” 167, note 88. 17 Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, XIII, 2314. 18 Wenzel, “Chaucer’s Pardoner,” 39. 19 Augustine, City of God, Book I, ch. 1, p. 4. 20 McCulloh, “Cult,” 149. 21 Delehaye, Sanctus, 196–7. 22 Leclercq, “Reliques et reliquaires,” in Dictionnaire d’archéologie chrétienne et de liturgie, XIV, 2302 (my translation). 23 For a full description, see ibid., 2316–17. 24 Kilgour, From Communion to Cannibalism, 64–5. 25 Ibid., 65. 26 Vance, “Chaucer’s Pardoner,” 725. 27 Ibid., 737. 28 Ibid., 731–2. 29 Vance, in describing the theory of language that he believes Chaucer shares with Wyclif, makes of the latter a thoroughgoing nominalist. This contradicts most other views of Wyclif’s philosophical position, which identify him as a hyper-realist. No realist, of course, would claim that “verbal signs have no power to refer, much less assign stable meaning to human action” (732). While it seems evident to me that Chaucer is much closer to Boethius – “for every signe scheweth and signifieth oonly what the thing is, but it ne makith nat the thing that it signifieth” (cited in Vance, “Chaucer’s Pardoner,” 726) – nevertheless I agree that Wyclif did probably view signification in the nominalistic way that Vance suggests and that the case for his being realist has been overstated. 30 Fleming, “Gospel Asceticism.” 31 Leclercq, “Reliques,” 2301–2. 32 Vance, “Chaucer’s Pardoner,” 730. 33 Ibid., 732. 34 For a fuller discussion, see Crock, Discourses, 18–19. 35 Ambrose, De sacramentis, IV, 158–9. 36 Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, XIV, 2060 (my translation).

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220 Notes to pages 162–7 37 Stevens and Falvey, “Substance,” 153. 38 F.N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 730, note to lines 537ff. 39 See 1 Corinthians 10:16–21, 11:23–29; Acts 2:42, 46, 20:7, 11. 40 Guitmond of Aversa is the first to discuss substance and accident, while Roland Bandinelli (later Pope Alexander III) inaugurated the term “transubstantiation.” Perhaps the most vigorous development of the doctrine occurs in Alanus de Insulis. For this history, see O’Connor, The Hidden Manna, 104ff. 41 See Stone, History, I, 7. 42 St John Chrysostom, as cited in ibid., 85. 43 Pickstock, After Writing, 253. 44 Ibid., 263. 45 Stevens and Falvey, “Substance,” 149. 46 Lotario dei Segni, (Innocent III), De miseria. 47 Pickstock, After Writing, 134. 48 Wyclif, De Eucharistia 5, as cited in O’Connor, The Hidden Manna, 126. 49 Wyclif, “Concerning the Eucharist,” in Selected English Works, 502– 3. 50 Nichols, “The Pardoner’s Ale,” 502. 51 See, for instance, the Introduction to Thomas Netter’s Fasciculi Zizaniorum. 52 Stevens and Falvey, “Substance,” 158, note 17. I believe that the refutation goes even further. Wyclif’s insistence on the precedence of “natural reason” and logical argument over metaphysics associates him with Ockham and the moderni; his denial of transubstantiation is, as shown by Catto (“John Wyclif,” 271–2), based directly on Ockham’s argument concerning “quantity.” I intend to argue elsewhere that the view of Wyclif as a philosophical realist requires qualification and that in the figure of the Pardoner Chaucer embodies much of the harm, both intellectual and moral, that the nominalist views of Ockham and Wyclif could cause. 53 Typical is the use of “cake” in Alle ye mowen, a Middle English poem on the Eucharist: “Godys body is hed / In a cake ybakenne fresche” (300–1) and “In a cake pe kyng ys clad” (31); see Pickering, “A Middle English Poem,” 281ff. Further, Nichols convincingly shows the “cake” image as unifying the three major image groups of the poem: cake as figure for food and drink, for gluttony, and for the Eucharist (“The Pardoner’s Ale,” 498).

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221 Notes to pages 168–72 54 The whole scene in which, under the tree, the wages of sin are found and a mock Eucharist is celebrated is strongly echoed in various Eucharist exempla of the fourteenth century in which a heretic steals a consecrated host and buries it under a tree. When a branch of the tree is broken, it bleeds. Digging down into the roots, the faithful discover buried in the earth a living child who, showing them his wounds, blesses them. See Gordon, “Two Versions,” 204–10 (especially ms Ff.2.38, lines 25–104, and ms Ff.5.48, folios 117, 118). 55 Orthodox theologians (St Bonaventure, for instance) also used the same examples to anticipate the objections to transubstatiation that such examples contained. See O’Connor, The Hidden Manna, 116. 56 Wyclif, De apostasia, 172 (my translation): “sacramentum altaris est panis, sed in natura sua imperfeccius pane ratonis; et sacramentum calicis est vinum, sed in natura sua imperfeccius quam venenum.” 57 Chaucer even seems to have included in the apothecary scene reference to what at least now seems the somewhat-arcane consideration of quantitas: how can Jesus be wholly present, body and blood, in each and every of the little white hosts that are consecrated throughout the world at the same time? The apothecary may be alluding to this idea when he assures his customer that even the smallest quantity of his poison, “the montance of a corn of whete,” contains the entire power of the whole. For the more formal, but hardly simple, philosophical articulation of quantitas, see Ockham, “On Quantity,” in William of Ockham, Philosophical Writings, 137–9, where it is specifically related to the Eucharist. 58 Anselm, Anselm of Canterbury, II, 101. 59 Patterson, “Chaucerian Confession,” 166. 60 Baumlin, “Theology,” 131–2. 61 It is often asked: What if one of the pilgrims had in good faith purchased one of the false relics? Surely it would have for the believer at least a positive effect? We could perhaps compare it to the effect on disease of the placebo taken in medical experiments by patients confident that they are receiving effective medicine. 62 Pickstock, After Writing, 265–6.

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Appendix: Published Writings of Douglas Wurtele

chapters in books “Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Nicholas of Lyre’s Postilla litteralis et moralis super totam Bibliam.” In David L. Jeffrey, ed., Chaucer and the Scriptural Tradition, 89–107. Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, 1984. “Foreword.” In N.E.S. Griffiths, ed., Margaret Wade Labarge: A Medieval Miscellany. Ottawa, Ont: Carleton University Press, 1997. “Another Look at an Old ‘Science’: Chaucer’s Pilgrims and Physiognomy.” In A.E. Christa Canitz and Gernot R. Wieland, eds., From Arabye to Engolond: Medieval Studies in Honour of Mahmoud Manzalaoui, 93–111. Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, 1999.

articles “Chaucer’s Man of Law and Clerk as Rhetoricians: Narrative and Dramatic Levels of Decorum.” PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1968. “Mr. Rambler on Authorship.” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 44 (1974): 95–102. “Marian Overtones in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.” Proceedings of the Third Annual Symposium of Ottawa–Carleton Medieval–Renaissance Club. 1 (1976): 56–74. “Proprietas in Chaucer’s Man of Laws Tale.” Neophilologus 60 (1976): 577–93. “A Reappraisal of the Scottish Lancelot of the Laik.” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 46 (1976): 68–82. “The Figure of Solomon in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.” University of Ottawa Quarterly 47 (1977): 478–87. “‘Persuasive Rhetoric’: The Technique of Milton’s Archetypal Sophist.” English Studies in Canada 3 (1977): 18–33. “Ironical Resonances in the Merchant’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 13 (1978–79): 66–79. “Milton, Satan, and the Sophists.” Renaissance and Reformation O/S 15 (1979): 189–200. “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer.” Viator 11 (1980): 335–59. “Spenser’s Allegory of the Mind.” Humanities Association Review 31 (1980): 53–66. “The Blasphemy of Chaucer’s Merchant.” Annuale Medievale 21 (1981): 91–110.

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224 Appendix “Some Uses of Physiognomical Lore in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer Review 17 (1982): 130–41. “The Predicament of Chaucer’s Wife of Bath: St. Jerome on Virginity.” Florilegium 5 (1983): 208–36. “Prejudice and Chaucer’s Prioress.” University of Ottawa Quarterly 55 (1985): 33–43. “Chaucer’s Franklin and the Truth about ‘Trouthe.’” English Studies in Canada 13 (1987): 359–74. “Chaucer’s Monk: An Errant Exegete.” Literature and Theology 2 (1987): 191–209. “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and Her Distorted Arthurian Motifs.” Arthurian Interpretations 2 (1987): 47–61. “Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and the Problem of Her Fifth Husband.” Chaucer Review 23 (1988): 117–28. “The Anti-Lollardy of Chaucer’s Parson.” Mediaevalia 11 (1989 for 1985): 151–68. “The Concept of Healing in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.” American Benedictine Review 41 (1990): 59–79. “Treachwery in Chaucer’s Poetry.” Fifteenth-Century Studies 18 (1991): 315–43. “The Double Sorwe of the Wife of Bath: Chaucer and the Misogynist Tradition.” Florilegium 11 (1993): 179–205. “The Function of Paronomasia in Milton’s Poetry.” Canadian Journal of Rhetorical Studies 7 (1996): 61–72.

book reviews Richard C. Frushell and Bernard J. Vondersmith, eds. Contemporary Thought on Edmund Spenser: With a Bibliography of Criticism of the “Faerie Queene”, 1900–1970 (London: Feffer and Simons, 1973). In Queen’s Quarterly 83 (1976): 515–17. A. Kent Hiett. Chaucer, Spenser, Milton: Mythopoeic Continuities and Transformations (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1975). In Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 46 (1976): 290–1. Dorothy Foster, ed. In Praise of Cats (Toronto: Musson, 1974). In Canadian Children’s Literature 10 (1978): 43–6. Richard Rex. “The Sins of Madame Eglentyne” and Other Essays on Chaucer (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995). In Florilegium 5 (1983): 208–36. Ross G. Arthur. Medieval Sign Theory and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986). In English Studies in Canada 14 (1988): 221–5.

editorial responsibilities Editor 1979–96 and co-founder. Florilegium: Papers on Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Since 1995 official journal of the Society of Canadian Medievalists. Editor 1990–98. English Studies in Canada, quarterly journal of the Association of Canadian College and University Teachers of English.

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Works Cited

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226 Works Cited Ashton, Gail. “Patient Mimesis: Griselda and the Clerk’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 32 (1998): 232–8. Astell, Ann W. Chaucer and the Universe of Learning. Ithaca, ny : Cornell University Press, 1996. Attwater, Donald. A Dictionary of Saints. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965. Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo. City of God. Trans. Marcus Dods. New York: Modern Library/Random House, 1950. – Contra faustum manichaeum. pl 42, 207–518. – De doctrina christiana. Ed. Guilelmus M. Green. Vindobonae [Vienna]: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1963. – De mendacio. On Lying. Trans. H. Browne. Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. Vol. 3. Ed. Philip Schaff, 457–77. Edinburgh: Clark, 1890–; rpt Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1988. – De Trinitate. pl 42, 819–1098. Trans. Marcus Dods. The Works of Aurelius Augustina: Bishop of Hippo. Vol. 7. Edinburgh: Clark, 1872–1934. – On Christian Doctrine. Trans. D.W. Robertson, Jr. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958. Babylonian Talmud. Ed. and trans. I. Epstein. London: Soncino Press, 1935–52. Badian, E. “Atticus, Titus Pomponius.” In N.G.L. Hammond and H.H. Scullard, eds., The Oxford Classical Dictionary. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. Banner, Lois W. In Full Flower: Aging Women, Power and Sexuality. New York: Vintage, 1992. Barron, Caroline M. “The ‘Golden Age’ of Women in Medieval London.” In Keith Bate et al. eds., Medieval Women in Southern England, 33–58. Reading Medieval Studies 15. Reading: Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, 1989. Bartholomew of Exeter. Penitential. In Dom Adrian Morey, Bartholomew of Exeter, Bishop and Canonist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1937. Baugh, Albert C., ed. Chaucer’s Major Poetry. New York: Appleton, 1963. Baumlin, Tita French. “Theology and Discourse in the Pardoner’s Tale, the Parson’s Tale, and the Retraction.” Renascence 41 (1989): 127–42. Beidler, Peter G., ed. Masculinities in Chaucer. Chaucer Studies XXV. Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1998. Benson, Larry D., ed. The Riverside Chaucer. 3rd ed. Based on The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N. Robinson. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987.

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227 Works Cited Berlin, Isaiah. “The Pursuit of the Ideal.” In Henry Hardy, ed., The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas. London: John Murray, 1990. Bloom, Harold. “Introduction.” In Harold Bloom, ed., Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale, 1–10. New York: Chelsea, 1988. Bober, Phyllis Pray. Art, Culture, and Cuisine: Ancient and Medieval Gastronomy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy. Trans. Richard Green. New York: Bobbs, 1962. Bolgar, R.R. The Classical Heritage and Its Beneficiaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1954. The Book of Vices and Virtues. Ed. Nelson Francis. EETS os 217. London: Oxford University Press, 1942. Booth, Wayne C. A Rhetoric of Irony. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974. Bowden, Betsy. “Alison’s Testing.” Paper presented to the meeting of the Modern Language Association, New York, 1986. – Chaucer Aloud: The Varieties of Textual Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987. Boyd, Beverly, ed. The Prioress’s Tale. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987. Braddy, Haldeen. “Chaucer – Realism or Obscenity?” Arlington Quarterly 2 (1969): 121–38. Bridbury, A.R. Medieval English Clothmaking: An Economic Survey. London: Heinemann, 1982. Brigdon, Susan. “Religion and Social Obligation in Early SixteenthCentury London.” Past & Present 103 (1984): 67–112. Bronfman, Judith. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated. New York: Garland, 1994. Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn. Shaping Romance: Interpretation, Truth, and Closure in Twelfth-Century French Fiction. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993. Bryan, W.F., and Germaine Dempster, eds. Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941. Burchard of Worms. Decretorum libri XX, Liber 12, “De perjurio,” capitula 16, 18. PL 140. Burnley, J.D. Chaucer’s Language and the Philosopher’s Tradition. Cambridge: Brewer, 1979.

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244 Works Cited Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Vintage, 1983. Waterhouse, Ruth, and Gwen Griffiths. “‘Sweete Wordes’ of Non-Sense: The Deconstruction of the Moral Melibee, (Parts 1 and 2).” Chaucer Review 23, 24 (1989): 338–61, 53–63. Watts, Ann Chalmers. “Pearl, Inexpressibility, and Poems of Human Loss.” PMLA 99 (1984): 26–40. Weinberg, Steven. “A Designer Universe?” New York Review of Books: 21 Oct. 1999, 46–8. – “The Revolution That Didn’t Happen.” New York Review of Books: 8 Oct. 1998, 48–52. Weinreich, Uriel. Modern English–Yiddish Yiddish–English Dictionary. New York: Schocken, 1977. Wenzel, Siegfried. “Chaucer’s Pardoner and His Relics.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 37–41. Wetherbee, Winthrop. Chaucer and the Poets: An Essay on “Troilus and Criseyde.” Ithaca, ny: Cornell University Press, 1984. Wicksteed, Philip H. The “Convivio” of Dante Alighieri. London: Dent, 1908. Wilcockson, Colin. “A Note on Chaucer’s Prioress and Her Literary Kinship with the Wife of Bath.” Medium Aevum 61 (1992): 91–6. William of Ockham. Philosophical Writings. Ed. and trans. Philotheus Boehner, OFM. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990. – Scriptum in librum primum sententiarum. Ed. Gedeon Gal and Stephen Brown. New York: St Bonaventure, 1967. Williams, Bernard. Morality. 1972. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Williams, David. The Canterbury Tales: A Literary Pilgrimage. Boston: Twayne, 1987. – “Distentio, Intentio, Attentio: Intentionality and Chaucer’s Third Eye.” Florilegium 15 (1998): 37–60. Wimsatt, James I. “John Duns Scotus, Charles Sandess Peirce, and Chaucer’s Portrayal of the Canterbury Pilgrims.” Speculum 71 (1996): 633–45. Windeatt, Barry. “Literary Structures in Chaucer.” In Piero Boitani and Jill Mann, eds., The Cambridge Chaucer Companion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Winny, James, ed. The “General Prologue” to the “Canterbury Tales.” Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965. Wood, Chauncey. “Chaucer’s Use of Signs in His Portrait of the Prioress.” In John P. Herman and John J. Burke, Jr, eds., Signs and Symbols in Chaucer’s Poetry, 80–101. University of Alabama Press, 1981.

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245 Works Cited – The Elements of Chaucer’s Troilus. Durham, nc: Duke University Press, 1984. Wurtele, Douglas. “The Blasphemy of Chaucer’s Merchant.” Annuale Medievale 21 (1981): 91–110. – “Chaucer’s Man of Law and Clerk as Rhetoricians: Narrative and Dramatic Levels of Decorum.” PhD dissertation, McGill University, 1968. – “Chaucer’s Monk: An Errant Exegete.” Literature and Theology 2 (1987): 33–43. – “Chaucer’s Use of Rhetorical Devices in Troilus and Criseyde: With Special Reference to Amplicatio of Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato.” ma thesis, McGill University, 1963. – “The Concept of Healing in Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Tale.” American Benedictine Review 41 (1990): 59–79. – “The ‘Double Sorwe’ of the Wife of Bath: Chaucer and the Misogynist Tradition.” Florilegium 11 (1993): 179–205. – “The Figure of Solomon in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.” University of Ottawa Quarterly 47 (1977): 478–87. – “Ironical Resonances in the Merchant’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 13 (1978–79): 66–79. – “The Penitence of Geoffrey Chaucer.” Viator 11 (1980): 335–59. – “Proprietas in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale.” Neophilologus 60 (1976): 577–93. – “Some Uses of Physiognomical Lore in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer Review 17 (1982): 130–41. Wyclif, John. De apostasia. Ed. Michael Henry Dziewicki. London: Wyclif Society, 1889. – Selected English Works of John Wyclif. Oxford, 1871.

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Index

Abelard, Peter, 51 Adelman, Janet, 218n10 Albertano of Brescia, 198n70, 199n8, 201n12 Ambrose, Saint, 219n35 Andrew, Malcolm, 180n19, 182n30, 184n44, 188n67, n70 Anselm, 170 Archer, Rowena E., 183n40 Ashton, Gail, 205n30 Astell, Ann W., 192n4 Attwater, Donald, 192n9 Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, xvi, 57, 75, 84–5, 108–9, 110, 118–19, 120–4, 125, 145–7, 155, 204n25 Auriol, Peter, 130 Austin, John L., 208n40 Badian, E., 195n38 Banner, Lois W., 189n76 Barron, Caroline M., 181n23 Bartholomew of Exeter, 204n25 Baugh, A.C., 55 Baumlin, Tita French, 171 Beidler, Peter G., 187n59

Benson, Larry D., 47, 186n54, n57, n59, 192n7 Berkley, George, 122 Berlin, Isaiah, 58 Bloom, Harold, 124, 176n6 Bober, Phyllis Pray, 192n8 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 118 Boethius, 47–8, 54, 56–7, 129, 131–2, 136, 140–1, 215n25 Bolgar, R., 217n39 Bonaventure, Saint, 114 Booth, Wayne C., 47, 194n22, 217n38 Bowden, Betsy, 180n20, 185n50 Boyd, Beverly, 183n37 Braddy, Haldeen, 188n72 Brentano, Franz, 208n40 Bridbury, A.R., 181n20 Brigdon, Susan, 180n17 Bronfman, Judith, 206n13, 207n18 Bruckner, Matilda Tomaryn, 177n29 Burchard of Worms, 204n25 Burger, Glenn, xiv-xv, 61–70 Burnley, David, 195n36, n40, 200n9

Cantilupe, Thomas, 188n71 Capella, Martianus, 136 Carlo, William E., 204n8 Carruthers, Mary, 181n20 Carus-Wilson, E.M., 180n19, 181n20 Catto, J.I., 220n52 Charity, Alan C., 76 Chatterjee, Partha, 67–8 Chaucer: Canon’s Yeoman, 57; “Chaucers Wordes Unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn,” 30; Clerk, xvii; Clerk’s Tale, xvxvii, 53, 83–106; “The Complaint of Mars,” 58; “The Complaint of Venus,” 58; Franklin, xiv, 44–60; Franklin’s Tale, 94, 112; Friar’s Tale, 112; General Prologue, xiv; House of Fame, 112; Man of Law, 8, 55, 196n49; Melibee, 63–4; Merchant, xix; Merchant’s Tale, xix, 7–8, 21–2, 126–42; Monk, 8; Pardoner, xvii-xviii, 143–73; Pardoner’s Tale,

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248 Index xviii; Parliament of Fowls, 60; Prioress, 13, 18–19; Retraction, 9; Tale of Melibee, xv, 61–70; Tale of Sir Thopas, xv; Troilus and Criseyde, 11–12, 30, 190n78; Wife of Bath, xii, 11–24, 33–43, 57; Wife of Bath’s Prologue, xiii; Wife of Bath’s Tale, 53 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 50, 136, 195n38 Clarke, D.S., Jr, 119 Cloud author, 76 Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome, 202n18 Coleman, Christina E., 205n31 Coleman, Janet, 198n71 Coleman, Joyce, 185n49 Collette, Carolyn P., 209n4 Cooper, Helen, 47, 192n9, 210n7 Crock, Rev. Clement, 219n34 Curry, Walter C., 17–18, 26 Curtius, Ernst Robert, 217n36 Daichman, Graciela S., 183n37 Dante Alighieri, xix, 49, 128, 130–1, 137, 140–1, 213n22, 216n32 David, Alfred, 183n36 Deely, John, 109, 124, 205n1, 206n11, 208n39, n40 Delany, Sheila, 188n70 Delasanta, Rodney, 86 Delbanco, Andrew, 175n2, 176n16 Delehaye, Hippolyte, 156 Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari, xv, 61–2, 202n19 De Rijk, L.M., 212n16 Derrida, Jacques, 73, 75, 145, 152 Dinshaw, Carolyn, 190n81, 198n1

Donaldson, E. Talbot, 55, 186n57, 187n59 Dowling, William C., 209n4 Duffy, Eamon, 180n16 Duns Scotus, 152, 166 Eco, Umberto, 109, 206n2, n5, 207n26, 208n41 Edwards, A.S.G., 217n42 Edwards, Robert R., 218n44 Elliott, Ralph W.V., 40, 182n30, 191n7, n8 Empson, William, 19, 183n20 Engle, Lars, 99, 103 Epicurus, 45–51 Ferster, Judith, 190n81 Finke, Laurie A., and Martin B. Shichtman, 203n11 Finnegan, Robert Emmett, 94, 105 Finucane, Ronald C., 188n71 Fisher, John H., 26, 186n54 Fleming, John V., xvii, 10, 11–12, 32, 184n43, 219n30 Foucault, Michel, 67 Fradenburg, Louise, and Carla Freccero, 62 Frank, Hardy Long, 183n36 Gallacher, Patrick J., xviixix, 126–42, 195n37, 210n9 Gardner, John, 126 Gascoigne, Thomas, 9 Gaylord, Alan, 94, 185n49, 199n7 Gellrich, Jesse M., 203n11 Geoffrey de la Tour-Landry, 195n30 Georgianna, Linda, 205n37 Goodman, Nelson, 73 Gordon, Briar, 221n54 Gorfein, David S., and Andrea Bubka, 178n1

Gower, John, 190n84, 195n30 Gratian of Bologna, 204n25 Gray, Douglas, and Christine Ryan Hilary, 40, 205n38 Grossi, Joseph L., Jr, 87 Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Roman de la rose, 34–43, 187n62 Haack, Susan, 209n49 Haines, Victor Yelverton, xvii, 83–106, 191n85, 203n2, 204n18, 205n35, 206n16 Hanks, D. Thomas, Jr, 184n43 Harding, Wendy, 205n38 Harney, Maurita J., 205n2 Hieatt, Constance B., Brenda Hosington, and Sharon Butler, 192n8, 194n25, n26 Hill, John M., 52, 197n61 Hiltz, Sharon, 199n8 Hirsch, E.D., Jr, 177n22 Hodges, Laura, 15–16, 181n21, n25 Holcot, Robert, xix, 128, 213n23, 215n24 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 193n13 Hopper, Vincent F., 186n53 Horace, 44, 55–6 Howard, Donald R., 24, 186n53, 188n70, 199n6 Hudson, Anne, 93 Huppé, Bernard F., 192n10, 194n23, 195n34 Husserl, Edmund, 208n40 Hutton, Diane, 181n23 Innocent III, Pope, 165 Isidore of Seville, Saint, 45, 193n13 Ivo of Chartres, 204n25 Jacob, Pierre, 177n23 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda Aurea, 194n21

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249 Index Jaritz, Gerhard, 198n73 Jauss, Hans Robert, 29 Jerome, Saint, 34 John Chrysostom, Saint, 220n42 John of Salisbury (Joannes Saresberiensis), 51–2, 54, 194n27 Jones, Christine, xv, 71–82 Jordan, Robert, 7, 176n5, n14, 177n17, 203n12 Joy, Lynn S., 59 Keiper, Hugo, 177n26 Keiper, Hugo, Christopher Bode, and Richard J. Utz, 177n27 Kellogg, Alfred L., 205n28 Kempe, Margery, 188n70, 199n7 Kempton, Daniel, 199n7 Kennedy, Beverly, xii-xiii, 10, 11–32, 58, 104, 185n47, 187n62, n63, 188n72 Kenny, Anthony, 209n4 Kilgour, Maggie, 158 Kimmich, Dorothee, 195n35 Kinoy, Stephen, 218n5 Kirk, Elizabeth, 85 Kiser, Lisa J., 203n1 Kittredge, George Lyman, 143 Knapp, Peggy, 189n75, 190n81 Koff, Leonard M., 185n49 Kolve, V.A., and Glending Olson, 186n53 Kuhn, Thomas S., 121, 123 Küng, Guido, 205n2 Lacey, Kay, 181n23 Langland, William, 54–5, 153, 195n30 Leclercq, Henri, 156, 219n22, n23, n31 Leicester, H. Marshall, 7, 179n5 Lerer, Seth, 194n27, 199n8, 200n10 Levin, D.N., 20–1 Levinas, Emmanuel, 152

Liebeschütz, Hans, 197n50 Lindley, Arthur, 189n77 Lotario dei Segni (Innocent III), 165 Lowes, John Livingston, 210n9 Luscombe, D.E., 196n41 Luttrell, Anthony, 188n69 Lydgate, John, 59 McClellan, William, 91 McCulloh, John M., 219n16, n20 McGerr, Rosmarie P., 177n29 McNamara, John, 90 Mack, Peter, and Chris Walton, 186n56 Manetti, Giovanni, 119, 207n24, 208n38, n40, n42, n44 Manly, John M., 5, 180n20, 183n40 Mann, Jill, 12–13, 24, 178n9, 182n26, 183n34, 190n81, 195n32, 197n55, n57, n69 Margulies, Cecile S., 181n22 Markus, R.A., 206n2 Merrell, Floyd, 206n11 Mertens-Fonck, Paule, 197n52 Middleton, Anne, 190n84 Miller, Robert P., 195n34, n35 Minnis, A.J., 8 Moorman, Charles, and E. Daniel Ransom, 179n13, 186n58 Murphy, James J., 217n40 Murray, Alexander, 44–5, 49 Mustanoja, Tauno F., 179n14, 180n18, 182n32, 188n70 Myles, Robert, xii, xv-xvi, xix, 3–10, 30, 76, 85, 86, 107–25, 126–7, 132, 176n7, 177n27, 203n3, 205n2, 207n32, 208n40, 209n49, n52, 210n12, 212n17, 213n21

Neuse, Richard, 210n9 Nichols, Robert E., Jr, 167, 220n53 Nöth, Winfried, 118, 119, 122, 206n3, n4, n12, 207n30, 208n37 Nussbaum, Martha C., 194n28, 195n38 O’Connor, James T., 220n40, 221n55 Ovid, 12, 21, 22 Partner, Nancy F., 74 Pater, Walter, 197n52 Patterson, Lee, 68, 81–2, 153, 171, 190n80, 218n5 Payne, F. Anne, 191n88 Pearsall, Derek, 192n11, 197n56 Peck, Russell A., 197n54 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 58, 122, 197n60, 206n11, 207n30, 208n40 Pépin, Jean, 193n12 Perrin, Michel, 195n35 Peter Aureoli, 212n16 Petrarch, Francis, 86, 99, 103, 117–18 Pickering, O.S., 220n53 Pickstock, Catherine, 144, 152, 162, 164, 166, 172 Plato, 126 Powell, James. M., 198n70, 199n8 Pratt, Robert A., 214n23 Puhvel, Martin, 184n44 Reinhardt, Henricus, 197n67 Reiss, Edmund, 178n2 Ricœur, Paul, 209n4 Ridley, Florence, 178n8 Robert Mannyng of Brunne, 204n25 Robertson, D.W., Jr, xiv, 5, 8, 180n20, 184n46, 191n10, 195n34, 199n6 Robinson, F.N., 162, 193n11 Robinson, Peter, 185n46, 187n64, 189n73

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250 Index Ronquist, E.C., xiv, 44–60, 197n53 Rorty, Richard, xv, 73–4 Rosenthal, Sandra B., 197n62 Ross, Thomas W., 24, 184n46 Rowland, Beryl, 6, 178n9 Rubey, Daniel, 62 Ruggiers, Paul, 6 Salter, Elizabeth, 204n21, 206n13 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 72 Scanlon, Larry, 200n9 Schibanoff, Susan, 190n81 Schless, Howard H., 210n9 Schmidt, A.V.C., 186n51 Schnell, Rüdiger, 197n69 Scott, Dominic, 197n51 Searle, John, 8–9, 208n40 Severs, J. Burke, 113, 205n29 Shoaf, R.A, 192n11 Silvia, Daniel S., 199n8 Simpson, James, 175n3 Skeat, Walter W., 186n52 Sklute, Larry, 198n72 Smalley, Beryl, 217n39 Specht, Henrik, 193n19, 197n66 Steinmetz, David C., 85, 86 Stemmler, Theo, 183n33 Stepsis, Robert, 85 Stevens, Martin, and Kathleen Falvey, 145, 165, 220n37, n52

Stone, Darwell, 163, 220n41 Straus, Barrie Ruth, 189n75 Strohm, Paul, 45, 68, 197n69, 198n71 Struever, Nancy S., 197n60 Tabarroni, Andrea, 208n40 Tatlock, J.S.P., 24, 186n59, 189n73, 190n78 Taylor, P.B., 126 Thomas Aquinas, 88, 94, 129, 204n25, 210n8, 215n26 Thundy, Zacharias P., 191n9 Todd, Barbara J., 183n40 Todorov, Tzvetan, 118, 119, 123, 206n5, 208n45 Trivet, Nicolas, xix, 128, 129, 130, 138, 141, 213n19, 214n23, 215n27, 217n40 Twycross, Meg, 197n64 Utley, F., 205n26 Utz, Richard J., 177n27 Valla, Lorenzo, 59 Vance, Eugene, 145, 158–9 Vattimo, Gianni, and Pier Aldo Rovatti, 197n58 Vickers, Brian, 59 Vico, Giambattista, 197n60 Von Trier, Lars, 105

Wallace, David, 66–7, 68–9, 194n29, 198n71, 199n8, 201n12 Warner, Marina, 188n71 Waterhouse, Ruth, and Gwen Griffiths, 85, 199n7 Watts, Ann Chalmers, 217n36 Weinberg, Steven, 208n46, 209n47, n48 Weinreich, Uriel, 193n14 Wenzel, Siegfried, 154 Wetherbee, Winthrop, 194n27 Wicksteed, Philip H., 213n20 Wilcockson, Colin, 183n35 William of Ockham, 130, 212n16, 221n57 Williams, Bernard, 195n35 Williams, David, xi-xix, 126, 143–73, 194n20, 197n54 Wimsatt, James I., 177n21 Windeatt, Barry, 204n21 Winny, James, ed., 186n51, n55 Wood, Chauncey, xiii, 33–43, 183n35, 191n2 Wurtele, Douglas, vii–x, xviii, 3–10, 32, 102, 127–8, 143, 182n29, 197n55 Wyclif, John, 93, 158–9, 166–8