Rethinking Chaucer's Legend of Good Women 9781903153499, 1903153492

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RethinkingChaucer PPC_PPC 27/01/2014 10:46 Page 1

PROFESSOR ROBERT HANNING, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

T

CAROLYN COLLETTE is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College and Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Front cover: Pyramus and Thisbe. © The British Library Board. Royal MS 16 GV, f. 15r.

CAROLYN P. COLLE TTE

he Legend of Good Women has perhaps not always had the appreciation or attention it deserves. Here, it is read as one of Chaucer's major texts, a thematically and artistically sophisticated work whose veneer of transparency and narrow focus mask a vital inquiry into basic questions of value, moderation, and sincerity in late medieval culture. The volume places Chaucer within several literary contexts developed in separate chapters: early humanist bibliophilia, translation and the development of the vernacular; late medieval compendia of exemplary narratives centred in women's choices written by Boccaccio, Machaut, Gower and Christine de Pizan; and the pervasive late fourteenth-century cultural influence of Aristotelian ideas of the mean, moderation, and value, focusing on Oresme's translations of the Ethics into French. It concludes with two chapters on the context of Chaucer's continual reconsideration of issues of exchange, moderation and fidelity apparent in thematic, figurative and semantic connections that link the Legend both to Troilus and Criseyde and to the women of The Canterbury Tales.

RETHINKING CHAUCER’S LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN

‘Professor Collette’s approach to this challenging and provocative poem reflects her wide scholarly interests, her expertise in the area of representations of women in late medieval European society, and her conviction that the Legend of Good Women can be better understood when positioned within several of the era's intellectual concerns and historical contexts. The book will enrich the ongoing conversation among Chaucerians as to the significance of the Legend, both as an individual cultural production and an important constituent of Chaucer's poetic achievement. A praiseworthy and useful monograph.’

RETHINKING CHAUCER’S LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

CAROLYN P. COLLETTE

Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women

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YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS York Medieval Press is published by the University of York’s Centre for Medieval Studies in association with Boydell & Brewer Limited. Our objective is the promotion of innovative scholarship and fresh criticism on medieval culture. We have a special commitment to interdisciplinary study, in line with the Centre’s belief that the future of Medieval Studies lies in those areas in which its major constituent disciplines at once inform and challenge each other.

Editorial Board (2013) Professor Peter Biller (Dept of History): General Editor Dr T. Ayers (Dept of History of Art) Dr J. W. Binns (Dept of English and Related Literature) Professor Helen Fulton (Dept of English and Related Literature) Dr K. F. Giles (Dept of Archaeology) Professor Christopher Norton (Dept of History of Art) Professor W. M. Ormrod (Dept of History) Professor J. G. Wogan-Browne (English Faculty, Fordham University)

Consultant on Manuscript Publications Professor Linne Mooney (Dept of English and Related Literature)

All enquiries of an editorial kind, including suggestions for monographs and essay collections, should be addressed to: The Academic Editor, York Medieval Press, University of York, Centre for Medieval Studies, The King’s Manor, York, YO1 7EP (e-mail: [email protected]).

Publications of York Medieval Press are listed at the back of this volume.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women

Carolyn P. Collette

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

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© Carolyn P. Collette 2014 All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner The right of Carolyn P. Collette to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 First published 2014

A York Medieval Press publication in association with The Boydell Press an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620–2731, USA website: www.boydellandbrewer.com and with the Centre for Medieval Studies, University of York ISBN 978-1-903153-49-9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library The publisher has no responsibility for the continued existence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. This publication is printed on acid-proof paper

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For Amani and Zahra A new generation of strong and good women

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CONTENTS

Acknowledgementsix List of Abbreviations

xi

Introduction1 1. Love of Books

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2. Exemplary Women

33

3. As Etik seith: Aristotelian Ideas in the Legend

77

4. Women in Love: on the Unity of the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde117 5. A New Paradigm: Comedy and the Individual

139

Epilogue155 Bibliography159 Index165

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I want to acknowledge the help and support of colleagues and friends who have been part of the process of writing this book. First of all I want to thank Jocelyn Wogan-Browne and Peter Biller of York Medieval Press and Caroline Palmer of Boydell & Brewer for their enthusiastic support of the initial book proposal. This book grew out of a Mount Holyoke College Medieval Studies course on Boccaccio’s Famous Women, Christine de Pizan’s City of Ladies and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women which I team-taught with Claudia Chierichini, then of Mount Holyoke’s Italian Department. I am indebted to Claudia, who shares her extensive scholarship not only in her teaching but also in her sustaining friendship. Sara Sturm Maddox has helped me with Petrarch and early Italian humanism, on countless occasions discussing what has become the first chapter of this book but which began as a talk on Petrarch and Richard de Bury for the 2010 New Chaucer Society Siena conference. Nadia Margolis, with her typically unfailing generosity, helped me with the section on Machaut. Joel Kaye has shared his time and his thinking on the various occasions when we have had a chance to meet and talk over lunch. His deep knowledge sustained me through my reading and thinking about Nicole Oresme and Aristotle, as did his assurance that what I was ‘seeing’ was really there. Chick Chickering has listened to my interpretations and ideas often at our early morning coffees in Amherst; the fourth chapter of this book was originally written as a contribution to a Festschrift in honor of his retirement from a distinguished teaching career as a scholar of Old and Middle English language and literature at Amherst College. Finally, I want to thank my last two Chaucer classes at Mount Holyoke College for their fresh and acute readings of both the Troilus and the Legend of Good Women. We teach to learn.

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

Astrolabe BD Bo CA Citta ClT FranT HF LGW, F, G MED Mel MkT Navarre NPT ParsT PF Rom SNT SqT Tr WBT

A Treatise on the Astrolabe The Book of the Duchess Boece Confessio Amantis La Citta Delle Dame The Clerk’s Tale The Franklin’s Tale The House of Fame The Legend of Good Women, Prologues F and G The Middle English Dictionary The Tale of Melibee The Monk’s Tale Jugement dou roi de Navarre The Nun’s Priest’s Tale The Parson’s Tale The Parliament of Fowls The Romance of the Rose The Second Nun’s Tale The Squire’s Tale Troilus and Criseyde The Wife of Bath’s Tale

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INTRODUCTION

This book reads the Legend of Good Women as one of Chaucer’s major texts, a thematically and artistically sophisticated poem whose veneer of transparency and directed focus mask a vital inquiry into the most basic questions of value and sincerity in a society increasingly aware of what Richard Firth Green has described as a crisis of trouthe.1 To do so it places Chaucer within a broad European intellectual context, at the intersection of translation and the development of the vernacular, recognizing his ‘Englished’ stories as part of humanist interest in stories of exemplary women’s conduct, a paradoxical combination of ideal virtue, willing subordination and strength. His stories of womanhede, what he regarded as the essential female virtues of fidelity and generosity, helped shape a narrative tradition of stories of good women that have become increasingly popular and important sites for exploring subjectivity in relation to desire, ethics and the various pressures of social and political restraint in the early modern world. Chaucer wrote in a moment of literary and cultural hybridity, when love service and the courtly conventions of love poetry were consciously melded with a broader definition of love’s ‘thousand formes’ (Tr III, l. 20), which not only unite humans sexually but also hold ‘regne and hous in unitee’ (Tr III, l. 29) and sustain friendship. This notion of love is closely linked to heightened attention to what French termed le bien commun and English termed comon profit in late fourteenth century vernacular literature. As Gower’s Confessio amantis demonstrates, love becomes a trope through which to examine right action, and charity becomes a template for creating a more just polity. For generations scholars and critics have found the Legend a puzzle. It has seemed to annoy or bore its modern readers.2 How R. F. Green, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia, 1999).  2 The Legend of Good Women (1386?–1395?) has generated a large and  1

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should we understand a poem that tells abbreviated versions of classical stories all illustrating how noble pagan women were variously abandoned, betrayed or reduced to suicide? Most answers to this question focus on how it has adapted its sources. Until recently the poem has provoked very little extended criticism, and the critical essays it has generated have tended to focus on various elements of the Legend, especially the Prologue, but not the whole. This book develops an alternative approach to the work, one that treats the poem as the product of a unique cultural moment, a text best understood within multiple contemporary contexts that frame it not as an anomaly, but as a central text in the development of a major writer’s work, and as an intriguing site where early humanist and late medieval courtly conventions converge.3 Unlike most critical considerations of the Legend of Good Women, this book is not concerned with sources, development or reception. Rather it deals in synchronicity, distinguished body of criticism. Happily in this day of online access the bibliography of this work is readily available. Nevertheless I would like to call attention to some of the work which has influenced my thinking about the Legend. These studies include F. Percival, Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge, 1998); N. McDonald, ‘Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, Ladies at Court and the Female Reader’, The Chaucer Review 35 (2000), 22–42; C. Sanok, ‘Reading Hagiographically: the Legend of Good Women and its Feminine Audience’, Exemplaria 13 (2001), 323–54; S. C. Hagedorn, Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer (Ann Arbor, 2004); K. Doyle, ‘Thisbe Out of Context: Chaucer’s Female Readers and the Findern Manuscript’, The Chaucer Review 40 (2006), 231–61; A. Holton, The Sources of Chaucer’s Poetics (Aldershot, 2008). I am especially indebted to the thinking of my colleagues who contributed to The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. C. P. Collette (Cambridge, 2006): W. Quinn, ‘The Legend of Good Women: Performance, Performativity, and Presentation’, pp. 1–32; J. Coleman, ‘The Flower, the Leaf, and Philippa of Lancaster’, pp. 33–58; R. R. Edwards, ‘Ricardian Dreamwork: Chaucer, Cupid and Loyal Lovers’, pp. 59–82; N. Bradley Warren, ‘“Olde Stories” and Amazons: The Legend of Good Women, the “Knight’s Tale”, and Fourteenth-Century Political Culture’, pp. 83–104; B. McCormick, ‘Remembering the Game: Debating the Legend’s Women’, pp. 105–31; S. Meecham-Jones, ‘Intention, Integrity and “Renoun”: the Public Virtue of Chaucer’s Good Women’, pp. 132–56; J. C. Fumo, ‘The God of Love and Love of God: Palinodic Exchange in the Prologue of the Legend of Good Women and the “Retraction”’, pp. 157–75; N. McDonald, ‘Games Medieval Women Play’, pp. 176–97.  3 In referring to late medieval and early humanist conventions, modes and topics, I use the terms as equally descriptive of late fourteenth century literary and cultural interests. Early humanism grew directly out of medieval learning and medieval concern for just social relationships.

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Introduction

with late fourteenth century European literary forms and themes at a moment when the world of courtly literature embraced early humanist interest in ethics and social praxis. Anne Middleton has defined the late fourteenth century as a moment which produced an entirely new class of writers, the ‘new men’ who wrote of social issues – how to live a good life, how to establish a good society – for whom the word love evoked a wide variety of associations and interpretants far beyond human sexual desire or religious devotion.4 What is necessary to help foster a fair and just world becomes a subject of poetry. The early fifteenth century querelle of the Rose is a sign of this shift, a questioning of The Romance of the Rose, a hegemonic poetic work, of its tone, its language and its attitude toward both the classics and toward social assumptions, particularly the nature and status of women. My interest here lies in a moment of transition that appears in Chaucer’s art where the courtly forms of love and its conventions intersect with social concerns like the effects of desire, the value of fidelity and the virtue of restraint. Love is the topic through which Chaucer explores a variety of social situations shaped by Aristotelian values of temperance, in which the virtue of the mean emerges as central to human happiness and to the good society. To explore how and in what ways the Legend reflects topical subjects and tropes of its time, I have chosen to write about the poem within several distinct, but related, contexts to which I devote individual chapters. Because the Legend begins with Chaucer’s most extended statement about the value of old books, the first chapter is devoted to the context of early English humanism in the court of Edward III and the subject of bibliophilia. Robert O. Payne has described Chaucer’s invocation of books in the Prologue to the Legend as different from his customary reference to or summary of a particular book in his earlier dream vision poems. In the Legend, he has argued, ‘the narrator’s experience of books is his experience of books and their relationship to life, and no specific old book is ever invoked as the bridge to dreamland’.5 This progression from the A. Middleton, ‘The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II’, Speculum 53 (1978), 94–114, and ‘“New Men” and the Good of Literature in the Canterbury Tales’, in Literature and Society, ed. E. W. Said (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 15–56.  5 R. O. Payne, ‘Making His Own Myth: the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women”’, The Chaucer Review 9 (1975), 197–211 (pp. 201–2).  4

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particular to the general seems to reflect a philosophy of books and their relationship to life which lies at the heart of ‘early humanism’, a term I use throughout this book to signify a sharpening focus on classical-Christian ideas of moral and ethical praxis which appears in late fourteenth century European writing. Medieval culture valorized and engaged classical learning well before early humanism, of course. Early humanism constitutes a shift in attitude and approach to the literature of the past, a recognition of its alterity and a concomitant interest in how the value of the classical past might sustain medieval society. No longer texts to be moralized, the ­classics become mines of wisdom. Although closely tied to Christianity, early humanism was focused on the recovery and study of the ancient wisdom of the classics outside the clergial culture of the university. Books – their information, their capacity to show how to live a good life – were the life-blood of this intellectual evolution of late medieval interest in the classics. Chaucer is often read within early humanist French and Italian contexts – particularly his relationship to works by Petrarch and Boccaccio – but there is an English context for his work, one centered in the court of Edward III and the circle of Richard de Bury whose Philobiblon anticipates much of what Chaucer says about translatio studii and about the value of books and learning. Beryl Smalley has termed members of de Bury’s circle – Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, Robert Holcot – early humanists; Burley translated and commented on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and Holcot’s commentary on the Book of Wisdom contains exemplary narratives of women’s lives and deeds. In many respects these clerical philosophers are like Chaucer’s own Oxford Clerk, a student of Aristotle, a man of pithy speech who tells the quintessential early humanist narrative of Griselda, the woman whose adventures with her husband Walter raise numerous ethical questions, all the while demonstrating the power of restraint and moderation. De Bury’s own writing contextualizes both Chaucer’s work as a translator and specific elements of the Prologue to the Legend, especially its beginning references to books as keys to remembrance. De Bury’s connection to Petrarch through Avignon and his close affiliation with Edward III place early humanism very close to the center of the English court. The second chapter provides a synchronous comparative overview of the same stories of pagan heroines that appear in the Legend 4

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Introduction

and in works by contemporary late fourteenth century authors. It focuses on the mouvance of the stories that comprise our version of the Legend in works by Chaucer’s contemporaries and on the various exemplary purposes the stories are crafted to serve. The women of Chaucer’s Legend appear in Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione where they demonstrate the folly of love. In De mulieribus claris Boccaccio uses the same stories in his survey of women in classical history and myth to argue pagan women’s intellect, steadfastness, and capacity for performing mighty deeds, offering them as cautionary examples for contemporary women whose behavior he criticizes in contrast. In Cité des dames Christine de Pizan’s stories of classical women assert women’s strength and contribution to the history of human culture in opposition to medieval misogyny in general and to Boccaccio’s commentaries in particular. Machaut’s Jugement dou roi de Navarre raises the same kinds of questions about suffering in love as the Troilus and the Legend do, referencing the same stories that comprise the Legend within a specifically courtly context. More than thematic and exemplary similarity, the Jugement also offers a structural parallel to Chaucer’s poem, for Machaut places his narrator in the kind of situation in which Chaucer finds himself in the Prologue to the Legend, having offended by his attitudes about men and women in love, having been found wanting and having been ordered to write poetry as his penance. Gower’s Confessio amantis uses exemplary stories in which women figure prominently to sift the nature of the costs and exchanges made in love within the categories of the seven deadly sins and the power of love that both he and Chaucer assert rules the universe. A comparative reading of these authors’ work sheds light on how all adapt and shape well-known stories for their own cultural purposes. Christine, Gower and Boccaccio in particular announce their moral purposes more clearly than Chaucer, who says he is ‘simply’ telling stories of faithful women. Yet Chaucer may be the most radical of the whole group. Chaucer looks to the classics for stories of faithful women acting publically, literally putting their bodies and their lives at risk out of a matrix of desire and resistance to authority. His heroines are not cloistered virgins, but women who live public lives and whose decisions are interwoven with the fate of kingdoms. Unlike the clearer messages of Boccaccio, Christine and Gower, his message is complex and ambivalent. His women search, often unsuccessfully, for ways to satisfy themselves, while dealing with constraints imposed by their families and their responsibilities. 5

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A third context for understanding Chaucer’s stories is the pervasive late fourteenth century interest in Aristotelian ideas of moderation, temperance and the value of the mean, the subject of Chapter 3.6 Anxiety about excess permeates late fourteenth century AngloFrench writing. Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du vieil pelerin and his Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage demonstrate concern for the destructive power of indulgent tastes and profligate lifestyles. In Cité des dames Christine de Pizan specifically warns women about the dangers of excess and extremes in love relationships and argues for prudence, temperance and moderation, all Aristotelian principles associated with achieving virtue. The Legend contains stories in which the liberal generosity of women of high rank is extended to castaways; wealth and love are met with betrayal and abandonment. In Chaucer, Ethics and Gender Alcuin Blamires has argued for understanding the moral and ethical themes Chaucer engages in the Tales, and for the essentially Senecan nature of the philosophy he seems to advocate there.7 In a similar way, and in discussing a very different text, I propose that Aristotle’s Ethics, with its exploration of the ‘mean’ of virtue and direct engagement with how disproportionate wealth or status influence affective relationships, may offer a topical and timely context for the poem. The Ethics, with its analysis of the dynamics of exchange in all human relationships, contributes to late fourteenth century cultural interest in value and ‘price’, as Joel Kaye has shown.8 Chaucer’s interest in exchange value in human relationships appears in multiple texts, perhaps most clearly in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue where she speaks of sex as a system of elaborate exchanges in which unequal parties negotiate the terms of their relationship. His most extensive treatment of the topic occurs in Troilus and Criseyde, a text that sifts friendship and exchange throughout its plot. His stories in the Legend continue that same parsing. They are stories of disproportion in love, examinations of women who find themselves traded by men who exchange them for people and goals of more ‘value’. Their unhappy conclusions highlight the cost of such late medieval virtues as generosity, open-handedness and willingness to love. These concerns are, of course, not new, but fourteenth-century culture newly defines and highlights their value in social interaction.  7 A. Blamires, Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender (Oxford, 2006).  8 J. Kaye, Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century: Money, Market Exchange, and the Emergence of Scientific Thought (New York, 1998).  6

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Introduction

The final context through which I propose to read the Legend is one of literary creation and intertextuality, treated in the fourth and fifth chapters. The premise of the entire poem is to be found in its beginning, a humanist assertion that books are the key to remembrance, to understanding the past, and ourselves. Late medieval Italy, France and England all claimed to inherit the mantle of translatio studii, the transmission of classical culture into the vernacular culture of late medieval Europe. Richard de Bury describes Minerva as having ‘forsaken Athens, departed from Rome, passed by Paris, and … happily come to Britain’.9 Chaucer seems aware of such sentiments for he continually calls attention to his reliance on the writing of classical authors and he regularly places himself within a tradition of story-telling as translation. But Chaucer goes further and creates in his own work a literary tradition in which each succeeding text speaks to and alters its predecessors. The Legend is an explicit palinode in response to Troilus and Criseyde, but it is as much a reprisal as a repudiation of much of the action and many of the themes of the Troilus, which constitutes its fullest and best context. Working on the assumption that the Legend of Good Women we have today is a truncated version of an original text, likely much richer, longer and more directly related to Troilus and Criseyde in respect to theme and language, the fourth chapter of this book explores a group of thematic tropes and figures present in both the Troilus and the Legend as a means of understanding Chaucer’s poetic project in the Legend. It argues that the Legend is not a literary failure, rather that even in its current incomplete state it is a work of Chaucer’s full literary maturity, a story of women’s vulnerability in love, as well as an exploration of poetic voice and narrative persona that uses stories of women to explore the nature of love, happiness and fidelity. Grounded in the tragic story of Troilus, the Legend looks toward the comedic narratives of the Tales. An essential step in the development of Chaucer’s craft, the Legend is also, as R. W. Frank argued,10 a serious poetic experiment of more than limited success. Long criticized as stylistically inept, the narratives that comprise the body of the Legend are thoughtfully wrought in many ways: they are  9 10

Richard de Bury, Philobiblon, trans. A. Taylor (Berkeley, 1948), p. 61. R. W. Frank Jr, Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women (Cambridge MA, 1972). Comparatively little critical attention has been devoted to considering Troilus and the Legend together.

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told in rhymed couplets that anticipate both Chaucer’s fluid mastery of that form in The Canterbury Tales and the ironic capacity of the later heroic couplet. The several narratives are linked by recurrent images of water, the sea, caves, interior spaces and weather – images and themes that appear centrally in the Troilus and in poems like ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ and ‘The Franklin’s Tale’, all stories of women’s exemplary virtue. The fifth chapter discusses how Chaucer revisits and re-inscribes many of the issues of fidelity, love, sincerity and exchange that he engages in both the Troilus and the Legend in The Canterbury Tales, his deliberate creation of comedy. His heroines in the Tales – Griselda, the Wife of Bath and Dorigen – are manifestations of various elements of the women in the Legend and of Criseyde: in his female characters Chaucer imagines most freely the benefits and costs of enacting the social codes he valorizes and yet questions. In the Tales Chaucer revisits many of the plots and attitudes he has presented elsewhere in stories of loss and betrayal, turning them into stories of women’s successes. The Wife of Bath, Dorigen, Griselda, each in a different way, are women who undergo severe tests and emerge to spend the rest of their lives happily. This is a new mode for Chaucer, a distinct change from his previous invocation of women as suffering and betrayed. I have written this book of multiple paths into the Legend mindful of Caroline Bynum’s observations on the partial nature of the knowledge and insight into the past we can achieve, and the freedom that acknowledging the fragmentary nature of our knowledge can generate. In language that evokes early humanist tropes of the discovery of ancient texts as resurrected and revivified, she describes our understanding of the past as a shifting mosaic of approaches, an attempt to bring the past to life in the present: Exactly because we recognize pars for pars, we can have greater confidence – and greater pleasure – in a kaleidoscopic whole that is far larger than the limited vision of any one of us. The sources are there to be deciphered, the charnel houses to be excavated, the reliquaries to be studied in terms of their contents as well as their design.11

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C. Bynum, ‘Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist’s Perspective’, Critical Inquiry 22 (1995), 1–33 (p. 31).

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Introduction

This book is not so much an argument for one reading or another as an explication of possible foci all drawn from the dynamic literary culture which gives rise to the Legend and which the Legend in turn helps to shape.

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Chapter 1 Love Of Books

Books appear in virtually all of Chaucer’s poems, referred to in passing, part of the staging of the scenes and action, constantly invoked as arbiters of status, of moral orientation and authority. Almost 150 references to books occur in The Canterbury Tales in stories as varied as the Miller’s, the Friar’s, the Shipman’s (where books refer to account books), the Merchant’s tale, and of course in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue. They are consistently mentioned in the Troilus and in the Legend of Good Women, where books are invoked as sources, both of literary authority and as narrative guides. In the dream visions Chaucer writes of books in ways that are both casually incidental, as in the opening of the Book of the Duchess, and earnest, as in the Prologue to the Legend. Chaucer’s poetry grows out of his profound love of books.1 Celebrated historically for his realism, he found his sources and his subjects largely in books. His writing consistently testifies to a sense of the vitality and the power of books. That Chaucer was learned is beyond doubt; even when he jests about his delight in books, behind his mirth one sees the habits of a lifetime of pleasure and devotion to the book as an object of vertu. In this chapter I want to place Chaucer’s love of books and learning  1



Forms of the word book appear, for example, in the following poems: bok: BD 52, 57; HF 712, 1093; PF 19, 29, 87, 110; LGW F 39, G 264, 348, 405, 498; F 1022, 1608, 1721; TR III, 1818, V, 1786; Rom. B 4884, C 7132, 7135, 7450 bokes: HF 385; PF 10, 16, 24, 695; Bo. I p. 5, 43; TR 1 788, III 91, 1199, 1429, 1774, V 19, 375, 799, 1060, 1089, 1463, 1478, 1533, 1562, 1753, 1776, 1855; LGW F 17, 25, 28, 30, 34, 578, G 17, 25, 27, 30, 34, 578, F 609, 918; All citations of Chaucer’s poetry are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry Benson et al., 3rd ed. (Boston, 1987).

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within a wider historical context than is usually proposed, to see him in relation to a particular element of court culture during the reign of Edward III – the early humanism, particularly the bibliophilia, of Richard de Bury and his circle. Ultimately my argument is that we should understand Chaucer’s expression of a deeply personal love of olde bokes as his adoption of a literary trope central to the cultural shift of early humanism which developed in Italy, flourished in the court of Charles V of France and appeared in England in the writing of Richard de Bury. De Bury’s own love of books is expressed in Philobiblon, where books, their ability to create vicarious experience and their protean natures, their value for pleasure as well as ­instruction, are celebrated on nearly every page.

Richard de Bury and early English humanist Bibliophilia In his early fourteenth-century service to the royal family, Richard de Bury was an intimate part of the household of the young Edward, prince of Wales, who would become Edward III.2 His name appears in relation to a variety of situations that required subtle but directive intervention. In 1325, when Queen Isabella fled to France with the prince of Wales, de Bury, in his function as constable of Bordeaux, was their close associate, crucially able to supply them with needed money.3 Mark Ormrod has argued that Richard de Bury became Edward III’s royal servant, a close confidant and a participant in creating a diplomacy of secrecy that became a hallmark of Edward’s policy.4 He was clearly an intimate of the royal household whose interest in books was not entirely separate from his own. Edward III’s mother, Queen Isabella, is famous for her lending library of romance volumes, but a roll of chamber accounts from N. Denholm-Young, ‘Richard de Bury (1287–1345)’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 4th s. 20 (1937), 135–68 (p. 138). On Richard de Bury’s life see J. De Ghellinck, ‘Un évêque bibliophile au XIVe siècle: Richard Aungerville de Bury (1345). Contribution à l’histoire de la littérature et des bibliothèques médiévales’, Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique 18 (1922), 271–322.  3 Denholm-Young, ‘Richard de Bury’, 144.  4 W. M. Ormrod, ‘The King’s Secrets: Richard de Bury and the Monarchy of Edward III’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, c.1150– 1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, eds. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle and L. Scales (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 163–78.  2

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1341 testifies to her wider interest in books. She regularly read books, shared and loaned them, and ordered them to be written and illuminated. Susan Cavanaugh’s ‘A Study of Books Privately Owned in England: 1300–1450’ shows that Isabella’s taste was in fact more eclectic than stories about her romances suggest, and that in 1327 Edward III ordered John Fleet, clerk of his Wardrobe, to convey to Isabella seven volumes which included a Renard, as well as two books on history and military skills, De historiis de Normanorum and De arte militie.5 De Bury’s own wide knowledge of books and Isabella’s library are not exactly congruent, but they encourage us to look more closely at some of the assumptions literary critics have made about literary culture at Edward III’s court. Putting aside the myth that de Bury was the young Edward’s tutor, we may yet be able to ask if de Bury’s love of books may have been nourished in Edward’s royal household or may have encouraged bibliophilia there. Evidence of awareness of new Italian styles and tastes appears in royal household records associated with Isabella and others in the court. When the queen mother died in 1358, she left thirty volumes of books, of which ten were romances, vernacular stories of Tristan and Isolde, Percival and Gawayn, a Brut, and a book of the Trojan War. In addition to these and other volumes of secular, vernacular literature, Isabella’s possessions contained a series of three panel paintings de opere Lumbardorum, that is, painted in the style of Northern Italy. In 1361 Hugh of St Albans, the king’s principal painter in St Stephen’s Chapel, left ‘unam tabulam de VI peces de Lombardy’ in his will and the chapel itself seems to have been influenced by Lombard style.6 According to Vale, these are the earliest evidence of English awareness of the new Italian style in art. Edward III, like Richard II, has been assumed to have been uninterested in collecting books.7 But Philippa of Hainault, Edward’s queen, attracted writers to her court, including Froissart, who served S. Cavanaugh, ‘Books Privately Owned in England: 1300–1450’, 2 vols. (unpublished dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1980), pp. 456–60.  6 J. Vale, Edward III and Chivalry: Chivalric Society and its Context 1270–1350 (Woodbridge, 1983), p. 52; see p. 170 for books and paintings in Queen Isabella’s possession on her death.  7 See W. S. Gibson, ‘Book-Hunting Under Edward III’, Miscellanies of the Philobiblon Society 9 (1865–66), 3–78; see, too, E. Rickert, ‘King Richard’s Books’, The Library 4th s. 13 (1933), 144–7.  5

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as her secretary and who presented his Chroniques to her.8 Juliet Vale’s work on chivalry and the court of Edward III has brought to light the fact that Edward did indeed have a fairly extensive library of 160 volumes in his Wardrobe in the Tower, administered by John Fleet. Many of these books were spiritual in nature, but a large number were secular and included texts on governance as well as vernacular translations.9 Edward III’s own collection of books may have been more extensive than it might seem at first, although it is safe to say that none of the royal collections could challenge the libraries of large monastic foundations. One of the salient elements of Richard de Bury’s intellectual life is the group of eminent English scholar-theologians who formed his household and circle and who were active authors, commentators and translators. They included Thomas Bradwardine, Walter Burley, Richard FitzRalph and Robert Holcot. It is hard to know just what the relationship was between these men and de Bury and others named as part of his circle – was it a matter of intellectual affinity or preferment that drew them together, or both? In Philobiblon de Bury describes his household as one in which meals were followed by conversation and discussion on various learned subjects, members of his household and guests participating. We know that these men gathered not only in Durham, but also in London at de Bury’s residence as the bishop of Durham, and that members of this group also served Edward III: Bradwardine became Edward’s valued confessor, and Burley was chaplain to Queen Philippa and later tutor to the Black Prince. Moreover, this group has been specifically linked to early humanist learning. F. M. Powicke ventures the assertion that the ‘wider, the less systematic and less professional range of the books which came to Merton after the middle of the fourteenth century’ reflects the humanistic interest of the fellows associated with Bradwardine. These were men, Powicke says, who ‘belonged to a more expansive, cultivated, and wealthier set’ who ‘moved in and often became ornaments of high ecclesiastical life’ in England and on the continent.10 Beryl Smalley agrees, suggesting it was Bradwardine’s influence that may have been ‘responsible for the On her interest in books and writers, see M. J. Bennett, ‘Mandeville’s Travels and the Anglo-French Moment’, Medium Aevum 75 (2006), 273–92 (p. 281).  9 Vale, Edward III and Chivalry, p. 50. 10 F. M. Powicke, The Medieval Books of Merton College (Oxford, 1931), p. 25.  8

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more humane character of the books acquired’ by Merton College, as Powicke notes.11 Members of de Bury’s affinity, intimate members of Edward III’s household, composed works that constitute a famous apogee in the history of medieval English logical thought. But they went beyond scholasticism. Walter Burley wrote a commentary on the Nichomachean Ethics c. 1330 as well as a treatise titled De vita et moribus philosophorum – biographies of ancient philosophers, with excerpts of their work. He composed this text on the continent where he lived at various centers of humanist scholarship, including Toulouse, Montpellier, Bologna and Avignon, the great intellectual entrepôt of the age.12 Richard FitzRalph, who spent a number of years between 1337 and 1355 in the papal court at Avignon where he was a frequent preacher, engaged in a line of thinking about the relationship between lordship and grace developed to criticize mendicant claims of privilege. These men combined theology with an emphasis on worldly praxis, and challenged themselves to think in new categories. Ultimately Wyclif adapted FitzRalph’s thinking in his own doctrine of lordship and grace to argue that those who abuse their faculties and privileges have no right to them in the sight of God. Bradwardine, famous for his refutation of Pelagianism, also imagined a universe in which God might have created many earths, and posited that the springs of ‘virtue’ lay not in the planets per se, but in a combination of planetary influence and essential human nature. Robert Holcot, who anticipated Nicole Oresme in writing a commentary on Aristotle’s De coelo, developed a radical theology of grace based on individual capacity and intention. Each of us earns salvation by doing as much as it is within us to do, and within these individual constraints God grants salvation to those who do their best to obey his commands and adhere to the Articles of the Faith. Particularly 11 12

B. Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), p. 73. Richard de Bury and Petrarch met at Avignon in 1333; Petrarch recounts their meeting and a particular conversation in a letter to Tommaso da Messina on the subject of his hope that de Bury might be able to tell him the location of Ultima Thule. Francesco Petrarca, Rerum familiarium Libri I–VIII, iii.1, trans. A. S. Bernardo (Albany, 1975), pp. 115–19. For Petrarch’s opinion of Avignon, see R. Coogan, Babylon on the Rhone: a Translation of Letters by Dante, Petrarch, and Catherine of Siena on the Avignon Papacy (Madrid, 1983), p. 73f, ‘A Den of Thieves’ (Letter XIII).

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close to de Bury, he is often cited as the actual author of Philobiblon. He is also, as Beryl Smalley has shown, one of the most inventive and imaginative of the group, leaving a body of work original for its wit, its ekphrastic structure, combining words and images, and his interest in stories. His commentary on the Book of Wisdom includes a praise of good women which begins with Christian women and then moves into praising classical women, in a series of narratives of the lives of pagan heroines as exemplary figures13 – seemingly in the line of what Boccaccio and Chaucer attempt later. Chaucer’s Clerk, with his knowledge of Aristotle, his pithy conversation and his knowledge of Petrarch’s story of Griselda, might have fit very well in de Bury’s household. Beryl Smalley concludes her learned and informative work on the English friars and antiquity by emphasizing the discontinuity between the scholarly classicism of English theologians in the early fourteenth century and the world of early humanist exploration in Italy. She emphasizes the role of the Black Death, the power of English scholasticism and English development of alternative lines of intellectual inquiry – mathematics and theology particularly – in arresting or preventing a full flourishing of English humanism. But even as she remarks the apparent absence in England of men like the highly educated class of urban Italian professionals who had the time and money to search and debate the classics, she overlooks a phenomenon that Anne Middleton subsequently described as the ‘new men’ of Richard’s court. This circle of courtly writers, the clerks and scholars who people Chaucer’s world, arguably constituted an English equivalent of what Smalley sought but could not find among merchant or legal communities in England. Middleton describes these new men as turning away from love as individual desire and longing; they were men interested in ethics and morals, and they ‘created a literature designed to exemplify an ideal of communal responsibility … an altruistic and outward turning form of love that might be called ‘common love’ in a ‘public poetry focused on felicity, and peaceful harmonious existence’.14 These men had contemporary counterparts in France, as Joel Blanchard and Daniel Poirion have both argued,15 who similarly turned away 13 14 15

Smalley, English Friars and Antiquity, p. 155. Middleton, ‘The Idea of Public Poetry’, pp. 95–6. J. Blanchard, ‘L’Entrée du poète dans le champ poètique au xve siècle’,

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from the conventions of courtly literature centered in the self and individual emotions to awareness of the existence of the ‘external’ world of polity, morals and social relations. Their interest matched that of early Italian humanists, particularly Petrarch whom Chaucer cites with such admiration and deference. Nancy Struever writes of Petrarch’s opposition to the ‘formal and dysfunctional academic constraints of the university’ and his dedication to a new kind of learned community, that of the ‘informal and intimate relations of friendship, of a community conceived as a circle of friends devoted to litterae, to literate wisdom’ whose common interest is to answer the question ‘How should one live?’16 A generation after the flourishing of de Bury’s circle,17 Chaucer’s devotion to books developed in the same court, nourished by access to works of the classics as well as to works by more recent European authors. In the Prologue to the Legend, Chaucer refers to books as keys to remembrance, storehouses of ancient wisdom and information. In this affirmation he echoes Richard de Bury who expressed the same sentiment, ironically more poetically and ­effusively, claiming that: In books I behold the dead alive; in books I foresee things to come … All things decay and waste away in time, and those whom Saturn begets he ceaseth not to devour. Oblivions would overwhelm all the glory of the world, had not God provided for mortals the remedies of books.18

Richard de Bury’s rhapsodic writing about books, inflected with frequent semi-erotic moments of delight about the physical

16 17 18

Annales E.S.C. 41 (1986), 43–61 (p. 47); D. Poirion, Le Moyen Age II: 1300–1480 (Paris, 1971), p. 91. N. Struever, Theory as Practice: Ethical Inquiry in the Renaissance (Chicago, 1992), p. 6. Richard de Bury died in 1345, presumably shortly after Chaucer’s birth. Philobiblon, p. 8. In an effort to capture de Bury’s rich prose style the translation I have chosen to use is by Archer Taylor. For longer passages cited I have footnoted de Bury’s Latin from the dual language edition of Philobiblon by E.C. Thomas. ‘In libris mortuos quasi vivos invenio; in libris futura praevideo; in libris res bellicae disponuntur; de libris prodeunt iura pacis. Omnia corrumpuntur et intabescunt in tempore; Saturnus quos generat devorare non cessat; omnem mundi gloriam operiret oblivio, nisi Deus mortalibus librorum remedia providisset’; from Philobiblon, Richard de Bury, ed. and trans. E. C. Thomas (Oxford, 1960), p. 16. All subsequent citations of the Latin text of Philobiblon are from this edition.

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pleasures of discovering and then possessing them, enlivens every page of Philobiblon. Its chapters reveal a personal and conversational explication of his devotion to books and to the learning they convey. Chapters entitled ‘What love is reasonably due to books’, ‘The complaint of books against the clerks lately promoted’, ‘Though we love more the works of the ancients, yet we have not condemned the studies of the moderns’, ‘Who ought to be the especial lovers of books’ and ‘What benefits the love of books confers’19 suggest the passionate nature of his writing and thinking on the subject. For him books transcend time and place, they unite people across geography and across centuries, and they evoke thoughts of generation, fertility and divine creation. Above all he, like Petrarch, sees the search for books containing works of the classical past as a primary duty of recovery and resurrection. De Bury depicts books anthropomorphically as ‘hiding’ or ‘languishing’, awaiting discovery. He writes of ‘freely searching into the hiding places of books’.20 The chests of monasteries, he writes, … were opened; cases were brought forth, caskets were unlocked, volumes that had slumbered long ages in their tombs awakened astonished … Books once most dainty but now become corrupted and disgusting, strewn over with the litters of mice and bored with the gnawings of worms … Nevertheless seizing on every moment of leisure, we sat down among them … for there we found both the object and the incitement of our love …21

The recovery of books is crucial because books are central to memory, not so much in the sense of being inscribed as aides-mémoire, but in the sense that their contents create memory and in so doing feed the imagination as well as the understanding, thereby sowing seeds for future books.

19 20 21

These titles appear on the contents page of Archer Taylor’s translation. Philobiblon, trans.Taylor, p. 47. Ibid., p. 48. ‘Tunc nobilissimorum monasteriorum aperiebantur armaria, reserabantur scrinia et cistulae solvebantur, et per longa saecula in sepulcris soporata volumina expergiscunt attonita, quaeque in locis tenebrosis latuerant novae lucis radiis perfunduntur. Delicatissimi quondam libri, corrupti et abominabiles iam effecti, murium quidem foetibus cooperti et vermium morsibus terebrati, … Inter haec nihilominus, captatis temporibus, magis voluptuouse consedimus … amoris nostri obiectum reperimus et fomentum’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 82.

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De Bury refers to books as ‘wells of living water’.22 Provided by Providence, books alleviate humankind’s native thirst for knowledge, ‘as all men by nature desire knowledge, and as by books we can obtain the knowledge of the ancients, which is to be chosen above riches, what man that liveth true to nature would not have a hungering for books?’23 Found in obscurity, reclaimed in dim libraries, this precious treasure is linked to contemplation, quiet and regeneration. Like Petrarch, whose love of books was linked to solitude and to quiet, de Bury writes of the libraries of Paris as ‘green pleasure gardens’, ‘academic meadows … lounging-seats of Athens’.24 Recovered books are not merely the dust and detritus of dead hands, but potent and generative: But the written truth of a book, not fleeting, but lasting, discloses itself plainly to the sight, and, passing through the open portals of the eyes, the antechamber of perception, and the halls of the imagination, enters the chamber of the understanding and reclines upon the couch of memory, where it engenders the eternal truth of the mind.25

Toward the end of Philobiblon he writes of the power of books to unite and transcend time: ‘By books we call to mind the past, we prophesy in some manner of the future, and by the remembrance of writing we strengthen the present, which ever flows and glides away.’26 The transcribers of old books ‘are as it were, begetters of new sons’,27 working in the shadow and mode of God the creator: ‘Our Savior performed the office of a writer … bending Himself downward, He wrote with His finger on the earth …’.28 22 23

24 25

26 27 28

Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 10. Ibid., p. 15. ‘Tandem cum omnes homines natura scire desiderent ac per libros scientiam veterum praeoptandam divitiis omnibus adipisci possimus, quis homo secondum naturam vivens librorum non habeat appetitum?’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 28. Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 49 Ibid., p. 10. ‘Sed veritas scripta libri, non succissiva sed permanens, palam se praebet aspectui et per sphaerulas pervias oculorum, vestibula sensus communis et imaginationis atria transiens, thalamum intellectus ingreditur, in cubili memoriae se recondens, ubi aeternam mentis congenerat veritatem’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 20. Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 85. Ibid., p. 87. Ibid., p. 88. On the prevalence of erotic and generative language throughout Philobiblon, see M. Camille, ‘The Book as Flesh and Fetish in Richard de

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De Bury argues that books not only instruct and support the individual but that they are also crucial to the conduct of polity. As authority he cites Boethius, who contended that ‘no one can justly rule a commonwealth without books’; ‘it concerns a wise man to devote himself in turn now to the study of truth and now to the governance of temporal things’.29 In ancient Greece and Rome princes who ‘lacked skill in letters were not reckoned noble’.30 Further on he asserts, ‘the love of books is in truth the love of wisdom’, those who love books cannot love mammon and ‘occupation with letters or books is the life of man’.31 Books, if treated well and allowed to flourish, manifest a semimagical multiplicity in their very existence. Praising the ‘infinite virtue of books’, de Bury writes, There they lie at Paris or in Athens; at the same time they resound in Britain and in Rome. Though at rest, they move; and while yet keeping their own places, they are borne around everywhere to the understanding of those that hear them.32

Books are vectors in the ongoing process of translatio studii, and of developing knowledge through appropriation, even at the risk of what we now term plagiarism: we who are now said to be of Rome derive our real origin from Athens; for Carmentis was ever a pillager of Cadmus. And those of us who but lately were born in England will be born again tomorrow in Paris, and, taken thence to Bologna, will be allotted an Italian origin based on no kinship of blood.33

29 30 31 32

33

Bury’s Philobiblon’, in The Book and the Body, ed. D. Warwick Frese and K. O’Brien O’Keeffe (Notre Dame, 1997), pp. 34–77. Cited Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, pp. 77–8. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., pp. 81, 82, 84. Ibid., p. 23. ‘Iacent Parisius vel Athenis simulque resonant in Britannia et in Roma. Quiescentes quippe moventur, dum ipsis loca sua tenentibus, auditorum intellectibus circumquaque feruntur’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 40. Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, pp. 26–7. ‘Revera de Athenis exstitimus oriundi, qui fingimur nunc de Roma, semper namque Carmentis latruncula fuit Cadmi, et qui nuper nascebamur in Anglia cras Parisius renascemur, et inde delati Bononiam Italicam sortiemur originem, nulla consanguinitate suffultam’; Thomas, p. 48.

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De Bury here recognizes the inevitable series of adaptations and interpretations that develop from books; even in the process of ‘mere’ translation meaning is changed as successive clerks and authors combine and recombine their sources, developing new ideas and new categories of knowledge out of ancient authority. Richard de Bury anticipates several of Chaucer’s recurrent tropes and patterns of language, commonplaces revealing classically and biblically inspired perspectives on literature. Chaucer’s dichotomies of mirth and solace, game and play, appear in de Bury’s discussion of literature as an attractive means to virtue, where he notes that ‘our depraved nature does not move toward the virtues with that same zeal with which it casts itself headlong into vice’ and he quotes Horace in Ars poetica: ‘Poets all seek to profit or delight. … He carries every point who mingles joy and use.’34 He also cites Bede’s approbation of those who are learned enough to read beyond the pleasure of poetic art, looking through what Chaucer terms the chaff in both the Man of Law’s tale (l. 701) and the Nun’s Priest’s (l. 3443). But de Bury moves beyond simple dualism to a more subtle affirmation of the individuality of reader response, saying, Let everyone, then, encourage in himself desires governed by pious intent; and in any subject whatsoever, if he regard the conditions of virtue, he may make a study acceptable unto God. And if he have found profit in a poet … he has not failed.35

Defending himself against critics who suspect his motivation in collecting books, he embarks upon a discussion of the matter of intent, a subject that recurs throughout Chaucer’s writing as a source of anxiety because the crucial matter of intention gives or denies morality to action. This subject, addressed in Book II of Aristotle’s Ethics, was a matter of pressing importance in the world of performance that constituted late medieval court culture. As Aristotle 34

35

Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 74. ‘Non enim natura corrupta eo impetu, quo prona se pellit ad vitia, transmigrat ad virtutes. Hoc in brevi versiculo nobis declarat Horatius, ubi artem tradit poeticam, ita dicens: Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae. … Omne tulit punctum qui miscuit utile dulci’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 126. Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 75. ‘Statuat igitur sibi quisque piae intentionis affectum et de quacunque materia, observatis virtutis circumstantiis, faciet studium Deo gratum; et si in poeta profecerit, quemadmodum magnus Maro se fatetur in Ennio, non amisit’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 128.

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argues in the Ethics, truly ethical behavior requires synchrony of thought and action. Chaucer repeatedly praises those in whom deeds and action align, and deprecates those whose inner thoughts and performance may not or do not match. In defending himself against his critics de Bury admits the crucial nature of discerning intent in actions, even as he denies that one’s intent can ever be fully known: since the final intent of a secret desire lies hidden from men and is open only to God, the inspector of hearts, they [his critics] deserve to be rebuked for their perverse temerity in that they so easily write a sinister inscription over human actions the fontal principle of which they cannot see. For the intent in matters of conduct holds the same place as principles in speculation or as suppositions in mathematics, as witness the prince of philosophers in the seventh book of his Ethics. Wherefore, just as the truth of a conclusion appears from the evidence in the premises, so oftentimes in matters of conduct moral excellence is stamped on a deed by the intent of an honest purpose, where otherwise the deed itself should be judged indifferent, so far as concerns morals.36

In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Chaucer encounters his own difficulties with entente when the God of Love challenges him as one who has written books in despite of his power. Chaucer’s defense is that his intention was pure: ‘yt was myn entente/ To forthren trouthe in love and yt cheryce,/ And to ben war fro falsnesse and fro vice/ By swich ensample; this was my menynge’ (LGW F, ll. 471–4) In writing as in collecting books, when intention is misapprehended the consequences can be dire. De Bury’s invocation of Aristotle on the matter of intent suggests that Chaucer’s own pervasive interest in the subject may derive in part from Christian doctrine about sin and in part from the topicality of the Ethics where Aristotle discusses the relationship between virtuous acts and intention in Book II. 36

Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 100. ‘Cum enim voluntatis secretae finalis intentio homines lateat unicoque Deo pateat, cordium inspectori, perniciosae temeritatis merentur redargui, qui humanis actibus, quorum fontale non vident principium, epigramma tam faciliter superscribunt sinistrum. Finis enim se habet in operabilibus, sicut principia in speculativis vel suppositiones in mathematicis, teste Aristotele, 7o Ethicorum. Quapropter, sicut ex principiorum evidentia conclusionis veritas declaratur, ita plerumque in agibilibus ex honesti finis intentione bonitas moralis in opera sigillatur, ubi alias opus ipsum iudicari deberet indifferens quo ad mores’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 164.

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De Bury’s complaint, and perhaps Chaucer’s as well, is against those who do not understand the true nature of books. In books, as in life, one must read beyond the chaff for the wisdom. For de Bury, books are only partially material, their essence is insubstantial and their price far beyond riches and even beyond the supreme good of true friendship. Their value lies in the wisdom they contain and in how that wisdom can ‘perfect reason’ and spread the truth of revealed Christianity. In Philobiblon de Bury links God’s creative capacity to writing in a metaphor of creation as inscription (see p. 19), but in defending the excellence of books he moves beyond that powerful trope to quote Jesus’s language in his argument in the wilderness with the devil: For when making ready to quit Himself stoutly against the Tempter, He girded Himself with the shield of truth – not truth of any sort, but that which was written – saying, ‘It is written’ concerning that which He was about to utter by the oracle of His living voice (the fourth chapter of Matthew).37

Even the son of God cites books for their truth and their authority.

Chaucer’s Books Perhaps the most frequent and consistent use of the terms bok, bokes, book, bookes in Chaucer’s writing occurs in variations of the terms ‘as olde bokes tellen us’ and ‘as the bok seith’. Chaucer’s slipperiness with citing specific authorities for what he writes, his suppression of sources, his penchant for invention, appropriation and adaptation all suggest that he is not unduly constrained by the idea of authorship as possession. But he is clearly engaged by the idea of authority. Books do not contain, they say, they tell, they trete. Disembodied voices from the past, the voices recorded in books constitute a generic form of authority that requires attention and respect. The powerful invocation of divine authority by the phrase ‘It is written’ finds a corollary in a secular culture that believed the wisdom contained 37

Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 14. ‘Hoc autem est veritas libris inscripta, quod evidentius figuravit Salvator, quando contra Tentatorem praeliaturus viriliter scuto se circumdedit veritatis, non cuiuslibet immo scripturae, scriptum esse praemittens quod vivae vocis oraculo erat prolaturus: Matt. 4o’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 26.

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in books was a gift from God, as de Bury repeatedly says. Chaucer, however, writes with a caveat that de Bury never expresses in his hymn to books, for Chaucer entertains the possibility that books, like people, can deceive. Adopting the early humanist trope of books as speaking vessels of knowledge, he acknowledges that authority brings with it the concomitant anxiety ‘but if bookes lye’ (MkT, l. 2498). De Bury affirms the governing truth of books. For Chaucer, qualification, as always, finds its way to the center of his attention. What Chaucer says about his own relationship with books suggests his affinity with de Bury’s enthusiasm for the inspirational, generative power of books. Chaucer’s opening references to books in the dream visions, particularly his book of romances at the opening of the Book of the Duchess, instantiate the power of books both to stimulate the imagination and to prompt the continual procreation of re-inscription, the engendering of the ‘eternal truth of the mind’, through intellectual and affective response. When he refers to old books, he tells tales of the sympathetic and creative imagination. At the beginning of the Book of the Duchess, he describes a book in ‘olde ryme’ (BD, l.53) intended for pleasure and instruction in which he finds the tale of Ceyx and Alcione, a story of a woman bereft of her husband who, unknown to her, has died at sea, and so does not return. His encounter with the story was so powerful that it overwhelmed his thoughts, ‘trewly I, that made this book/ had such pittee and such rowthe/ To rede hir sorwe that, by my trowthe,/ I ferde the worse al the morwe/ Aftir to thenken on hir sorwe’ (BD, ll. 96–100). At the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls Chaucer links his tale of love and common profit to books, through a proverbial assertion of the power of books to generate ideas: ‘for out of olde feldes, as men seyth,/ Cometh al this new corn from yer to yere/ And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,/ Cometh al this newe science that men lere’ (PF, ll. 22–25), and at the end of the poem he returns to books as the source of imagination, hoping that his reading will be translated into profitable dreams: ‘I wok/ and othere bokes tok me to,/ To reede upon, and yit I rede alwey./ I hope, ywis, to rede so som day/ That I shal mete som thing for to fare/ The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare’ (PF, ll. 695–9). But it is in the Troilus and in the Legend where Chaucer most frequently references books, citing ‘olde bokes’ as the sources of our knowledge, particularly books that ‘tellen us’ about the past. Chaucer’s references to books in both poems create a world of book ownership, of readership, of ready access to books 24

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which become guides to thinking and understanding as well as historical knowledge. In the Troilus Criseyde bewails her future as a figure in books, which in time will be ‘olde’, yet will still contain her story, told without sympathy or understanding, a hint from Chaucer that what books tell us is often compromised truth. In the Legend, where books are invoked generically as ‘a book’, or specifically as ‘the’ book, and once, l. 1721, as ‘oure bok’, books exist in a variety of specific relationships to people and to events. On one occasion, l. 1608, the word bok evokes guidance and knowledge – Jason was able to counterfeit the language and terms of love ‘withoute bok’. More typically the word bokes denotes authority, if not absolute truth – ‘but if that bokes lye’ (F 609) – and ‘in al my bokes’ Chaucer finds few if any men as faithful as Piramus who stands as a model (F 918).38 The trajectory of Chaucer’s relationship with books moves from the inspirational and generative to identification and unification in the dream visions. At the beginning of the Book of the Duchess he becomes drowsy and falls asleep ‘right upon my book’ (l. 274). He and the book are united through his grasp. The narrative of his dream encounter with the knight who has lost his love ensues, and the poem ends with Chaucer awakening, still clasping the book he fell asleep over: Therwyth I awook myselve And fond me lyinge in my bed; And the book that I hadde red, Of Alcione and Seys the kyng, And of the goddes of slepyng, I fond hyt in myn hond ful even (BD, ll. 1324–9)

He decides to make a poem of the whole adventure of reading, sleeping and dreaming. His relationship to the book in this poem is a metaphor of his relationship to all his sources, closely held, always to hand. De Bury describes the relationship of book and reader as intimate and generative. The wisdom of a book enters through the sight into the chambers of the mind and is stored in memory where the unity of 38

The slight but perhaps significant difference between the G and F Prologues lies in G’s greater reliance on the word ‘bokes’, as in G 82 ‘to bokes olde’ vs F ‘To stories old’; G 27 ‘All thy bokes’ has no equivalent in F, nor does G 273 to the ‘sixty bokes’ Chaucer is said to have ready access to; and G 342 ‘he useth bokes for to make’ in F is ‘he useth thynges for to make’.

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reader and text generates a new truth. Chaucer’s reading of Seys and Alcione provides a template in which to encounter and ultimately recount a similar, but not identical, story of the knight and his lost love, which in turn will become a new ‘book’, the poem he writes. Clutching his source to his bosom, Chaucer is able to create a new version of the meta-narrative he has read. The House of Fame carries this melding of reading and of individual imagination a bit further. In this poem Chaucer easily falls asleep and dreams of the temple of glass and the stories depicted on the walls, a veritable survey of popular Greek and Roman myths, including many of the stories that appear in the version of the Legend that we have. Having seen the stories of Dido, Phyllis, Theseus, Jason and Aeneas, having recounted an essentially ekphrastic possession of them – knowing both the language of these tales and vividly imaging them – he passes out into a desert landscape where he meets the eagle who will take him further, to the House of Fame. As the eagle lifts him higher and higher, Chaucer begins to identify ever more closely with figures from his reading of classical mythology (HF, ll. 584–95), until the eagle disabuses him of such fantasies, explicating his knowledge of how Chaucer’s mind works in tandem with his library and his awareness of Chaucer’s hopes of creating his own contribution to the rank of books written about love, a subject of which he has no personal experience: Although that in thy hed ful lyte is–– To make bookys, songes, dytees, In ryme or ells in cadence, As thou best canst, in reverence Of Love and of hys servantes eke, That have hys servyse soght, and seke; And peynest the to preyse hys art, Although thou haddest never part. (HF, ll. 621–8)

The eagle continues with this theme, praising Chaucer’s diligence in writing of Love in Jove’s praise, for love is an expression of all creation and not just the province of the God of Love. The eagle echoes Chaucer’s claims that he is always an outsider at ‘the daunce’, suggesting that books are indeed the vicarious experience that both de Bury and Chaucer claim: In thy studye, so thou writest, And ever mo of love enditest,

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Love Of Books In honour of hym and in preysynges, And in his folks furtherynges, And in hir mater al devisest, And noght hym nor his folk dispisest, Although thou maist goo in the daunce Of hem that lyst not avaunce (HF, ll. 633–40)

The eagle describes Chaucer’s extreme devotion to his bokes as essential to his own particular brand of love-service: For when thy labour doon al ys, And hast mad alle thy rekenynges, In stede of reste and newe thynges Thow goost hom to thy hous anoon, And also domb as any stoon, Thou sittest at another book Tyl fully daswed ys thy look; (HF, ll. 652–8)

But here, too, there is a disquieting sense of separation: ‘domb as any stoon’, Chaucer sits and reads, but does not tell stories – yet. In the invocation to the unfinished third book of the poem he appeals to Apollo, god of knowledge and light, to guide his book, deficient as it may be in respect to ‘art poetical’, full of ‘rym … light and lewed’, and more focused on ‘o sentence’ than on elegance of style. In particular he prays for help in expressing his imagination: ‘me to shewe now/ That in myn hed ymarked ys –/ Loo, that is for to menen this,/ The Hous of Fame for to descryve’ (HF, ll. 1091–105). The phrase ‘ymarked ys’ suggests a previous conception of the Hous fully developed in his mind, for which he is struggling to find the words. In the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women these half-articulated thoughts are clear and straightforward. Chaucer and his books have become one. They are no longer clutched to his heart, but part of his mind. Chaucer begins with the matter of experience, authority and credibility: ‘But God forbede but men shulde leve/ Wel more thing then men han seen with ye!’ (LGW F, ll. 10–11). Books are the sources of vicarious experience, to be cherished because we cannot know everything ourselves: Than mote we to bokes that we fynde, Thurgh whiche that olde thinges ben in mynde, And to the doctrine of these olde wyse, Yeve credence, in every skylful wise,

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women That tellen of these olde appreved stories Of holynesse, of regnes, of victories, Of love, of hate, of other sondry thynges, Of which I may not maken rehersynges. And yf that olde bokes were aweye, Yloren were of remembraunce the keye. Wel ought us than honouren and believe These bokes, there we han noon other preve.    And as for me, though that I konne but lyte, On bokes for to rede I me delyte, And to hem yive I feyth and ful credence, And in myn herte have hem in reverence So hertely, that ther is game noon That fro my bokes maketh me to goon, But it be seldom on the holyday. … (LGW F, ll. 17–35).

When he does leave his books to go out into nature, he carries their wisdom within him. His encounter with the God of Love is a meeting between an offended deity and an author. Alceste tries to contain him within the category of the hapless translator, but the God of Love refers to Chaucer’s poetry in the G version as his bok or bokes (LGW G, l. 264, l. 271, l. 348), although at the same time Chaucer’s claim to authorial status is somewhat undercut by Alceste’s pleading that ‘he kan nat wel endite’ (LGW F, l. 414). His project in the Legend is complex: he intends (‘myn entent is’) the ‘naked text in English to declare/ Of many a story, or ells of many a geste,/ As autours seyn; leveth hem if you leste’ (LGW G, ll. 85–8). At the crucial juncture of claiming authorial status Chaucer seems to number himself in the company of these equivocal authors whose credibility is in question. Language is the unwieldy tool that creates books. Alceste has denied Chaucer’s ability to use language well, and he has vowed not to stretch too far stylistically in his book of good women, an Englished version of classical tales. Vernacular translators of the period – Oresme in his translations of Aristotle for Charles V, the translators of the Wycliffe Bible in England, and Chaucer in the prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe – all defend their work by historical analogy, placing themselves within a tradition of workers in the vineyard of cultural transmission. In the Astrolabe Chaucer defends the use of the vernacular because, he asserts, all cultures receive ideas, information and argument in their own language: 28

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Love Of Books But natheles suffise to the these trewe conclusions in Englissh as wel as sufficith to these noble clerkes Grekes these same conclusions in Grek: and to Arabiens in Arabik, and to Jewes in Ebrew, and to Latyn folk in Latyn; whiche Latyn folk had hem first out of othere dyverse langages, and written hem in her owne tunge, that is to seyn, in Latyn. And God woot that in alle these langages and in many moo han these conclusions ben suffisantly lerned and taught, and hit by diverse reules; right as diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome. (Astrolabe, ll. 25–40).

Chaucer regards English as both equal to other languages historically and yet lexically challenging because he is not able fully to command it to serve his purposes. Further on in the Astrolabe he refers to his ‘lighte Englissh’ (l. 51) and to himself as a ‘lewd ­compilator of the labour of olde astrologiens, and have it translatid in my Englissh oonly for thy doctrine’ (l. 63). Poetry is an especial challenge in English, a language which seems, in Chaucer’s recounting, to fail its speakers recurrently. In the Book of the Duchess, he laments, ‘me lakketh both Engliyssh and wit/ For to undo it at the fulle’ (BD, l. 898–9), and in the Prologue to ‘The Man of Law’s Tale’, the Man of Law mentions that Chaucer, ‘thogh he kan but lewedly/ On metres and on rhyming craftily’, has told his stories ‘in swich Englissh as he kan’ (ML Prol, l. 49). The Man of Law himself finds English deficient when it comes to conveying the perfidy of Donegild: ‘I have noon Englissh digne/ Unto thy malice …’ (l. 778). This trope of insufficiency recurs in the Squire’s praise of Canacee’s beauty: ‘Myn Englissh eek is insufficient’ (SqT, ll. 35f); and it appears in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women where Chaucer, praising the daisy, laments that he does not have ‘Englyssh, ryme or prose/ Suffisant this flour to preyse aryght’ (F 66), And, of course, sometimes it is not the language, but its user that fails, as in the ‘Complaint of Venus’, For elde, that in my spirit dulleth me, Hath of endyting al the subtilte Wel nygh bereft out of my remembraunce, And eke to me it ys a gret penaunce, Syth rym in Englissh hath such skarsete, To folowe word by word the curiosite39 Of Graunson, flour of hem that make in Fraunce. (ll. 76–82) 39

Intricate skill and artifice.

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The burdens of language and of limited ability under which Chaucer says he labors help to render all translations subject to misinterpretation and misunderstanding.40 Under the best of circumstances an author’s entente can be misunderstood. When language itself is slippery, intention is hostage to reception. At the end of the Troilus he acknowledges that there is ‘so gret diversite/ In Englissh and in writyng of oure tongue’ (V, l. 1794) that meaning is often lost. In the Prologue and tale of the Second Nun, Chaucer constructs a speaking voice quite concerned with the correlation of source language, Latin, and English, referring repeatedly to equivalent terms: ‘men clepe in Englissh Ydelnesse’, (SNT, l. 2), ‘It is to seye in Englissh “hevenes lilie”’ (SNT, l. 87), ‘For “leos” “people” in Englissh is to seye’ (SNT, l. 106). Similarly in ‘The Parson’s Tale’, in discussing lechery and virginity he turns to Latin in an effort to be clear: ‘I ne kan nat seye it noon oother weyes in English but in Latyn it highte Centisimus fructus’ (ParsT, l. 869). It is clear that English is both a commitment and a problem for Chaucer, one that he works through in various ways in his experiments with metrics and form. In the Legend, Chaucer pleads ignorance and lack of intent in just such a case of appropriation when the God of Love chastises him for his selective translations of stories of unhappy love (Prol. ll, F, ll. 321–40). Alceste defends him, arguing that he ‘useth thynges for to make/ Hym rekketh noght of what matere he take’ (Prol. G, ll. 364–5). But in truth, self-awareness about mouvance occupies Chaucer’s attention continuously in his writing; he stipulates that all good transmissions of others’ stories are necessarily adaptations and yet faithful in spirit to an original, if they communicate original sentence.41 In such assertions he reveals his preoccupation with the paradox of translation and of transmission – the slippage of language and intention that makes a new text out of an old one no matter what the intention of the translator. He is aware of the precepts, if not the terminology, of the modern theory of adaptation which posits that each new telling is a new version with its own entente and its own circumstances, part of a multiplication in which 40

41

This frequent invocation of limited speech may be more substantial than conventional if we entertain the almost heretical idea that the French language may have been more familiar to Chaucer than English in some respects. This trope recurs in the General Prologue to the Tales, in the Proheme of Book II of the Troilus as well as in the Astrolabe.

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new versions of a text stand next to previous ones.42 Alceste defends Chaucer’s poetry to the God of Love, saying that ‘He hath nat doon so greviously amys/ To translaten that older clerkes written,/ As thogh that he of malice wolde enditen/ Despit of love, and had himself yt wroght’ (LGW Prol. F, ll. 369–72), defending him from the charge of an original attack on the god’s hegemony, but subtly acknowledging the inevitable change each translation imposes on its original. As Richard de Bury said of books, ‘Though at rest, they move … And those … who but lately were born in England will be born again tomorrow in Paris.’43 Texts multiply constantly. Chaucer, like de Bury who wrote of the libraries of Paris as green pleasure gardens and academic meadows, frequently connects his books to gardens, both for the overt symbolism of natural fertility and also to invoke an ideal of generative reflection. In the dream visions he begins with books and passes into nature where the knowledge of books is refined. Books open the world of dream visions for Chaucer, sites where ordinary time and space are altered. So, too, for de Bury books provide a means of transcending place and time.44 Books are the means of radical communication, between generations, between languages, between the divine and the mortal. They offer the mental spaces that open on vistas otherwise unimaginable to individual minds. When de Bury writes of ‘the truth’ of a book entering the mind of its reader, he imagines a movement through space, passing through antechambers of the mind, to the moment of reflection when there is only the idea and the thinking consciousness that holds the idea before a moment of understanding he describes as procreative (p. 000). We might call that moment interpretation, insight, appropriation, creation. Whatever it is, it grows out of books. Richard de Bury’s biography customarily concludes with the failure of his projected common library – he had intended his collection of books, those legitimately gained and those extorted from unwilling donors – to go to his Oxford college library. But his story can be told with another kind of conclusion. In a trope of knowledge used by Oresme, and the translators of the Wycliffe Bible, he 42 43 44

See L. Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation (New York, 2006). Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 23. Ibid., pp. 85, 87, 88. See also p. 00 of this chapter.

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writes in Philobiblon of Minerva traversing ‘the nations of men from end to end of the world’ … having passed from the Indians, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, and the Greeks, the Arabians and the Latins, ‘Already she has forsaken Athens, departed Rome, passed by Paris, and is happily come to Britain, the noblest of islands.’45 All knowledge, de Bury says, builds on past knowledge – ‘The creeds we chant are the sweatings of the Greeks’.46 Even the great Aristotle ‘had seen through the sacred books of the Hebrews, the Babylonians, the Egyptians, the Persians also, and the Medes … Receiving their sayings that were rightly spoken, he smoothed down the rough, cut away the superfluous, supplied the lacking, and blotted out the erroneous’; ‘no one alone ever created any science … What would Virgil, the most excellent poet of the Latins, have done had he not plundered Theocritus, Lucretius and Homer’;47 ‘… the unwearied investigations of many … have swollen the great body of knowledge by successive increase to the vast proportions we behold’.48 Philobiblon engages essential elements of humanist scholarship – the value and perils of translation, crucial knowledge of Greek and Hebrew, and a certainty that England will be the ultimate inheritor of classical knowledge. Its attitudes open the way to a literature of appropriation, adaptation and creativity, precisely the kind of work that constitutes the fruit of Chaucer’s literary genius. 45

46 47

48

Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 61. ‘Minerva mirabilis nationes hominum circuire videtur…Indos, Babylonios, Aegyptios atque Graecos, Arabes et Latinos eam pertransisse iam cernimus. Iam Athenas deseruit, iam a Roma recessit, iam Parisius praeterivit, iam ad Britanniam, insularum insignissimam quin potius microcosmum, accessit feliciter. …’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 106. Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 65. ‘Sudores sunt Graecorum symbola quae cantamus. …’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 112. Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p.64. ‘Quinimmo Hebraeorum, Babyloniorum, Aegyptiorum, Chaldaeorum, Persarum etiam et Medorum, quos omnes diserta Graecia in thesauros suos transtulerat, sacros libros oculis lynceis penetrando perviderat. Quorum recte dicta recipiens, aspera complanavit, superflua resecavit, diminuta supplevit et errata delevit. … Nemo namque solus quamcunque scientiam generavit … Quid fecisset Vergilius, Latinorum poeta praeciptuus, si Theocritum, Lucretium et Homerum minime spoliasset et in eoroum vitula non arasset?’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans.Thomas, p. 110 Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 63. ‘Sed per plurimorum investigationes sollicitas, quasi datis symbolis singillatim, scientiarum ingentia corpora ad immensas, quas cernimus, quantitates successivis augmentationibus succreverunt’; Philobiblon, ed. and trans. Thomas, p. 108.

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Chapter 2 Exemplary Women

‘the past is inevitably a construction of the present’1

It is a commonplace that Chaucer’s genius lay in his seemingly infinite capacity to adapt stories and forms to serve his particular purposes. In his work readers constantly hear multiple echoes and perceive shadowy antecedents. His sources are often identifiable but so altered by his imagination as to function as analogues, as the wellknown relationship of Chaucer’s Troilus to his source in Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato demonstrates. In the same way that the Troilus adapts and renovates Filostrato, Chaucer’s Legend is paradoxically both derivative and an original conception. It is a singular adaptation of a series of narratives which appear as a group in early humanist writing, examples drawn specifically from the classical tradition to exemplify behavior in the secular world. Early humanism authorized collections of exemplary narratives under the aegis of providing moral instruction for the aristocracy. Petrarch’s Illustrious Men, followed by Boccaccio’s Illustrious Men and Famous Women are prime examples. Within this broad template of exemplary narratives, several major late medieval European writers – Machaut, Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan, Gower and Chaucer – adapt classical stories of women, imbuing them with various thematic foci to illustrate the particular point each wants to make. Their combined work demonstrates the  1

R. Barton Palmer, ‘The Metafictional Machaut: Self-Reflexivity and SelfMediation in the Two Judgment Poems’, in Chaucer’s French Contemporaries: the Poetry/Poetics of the Self and Tradition, special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination 20 (1987), 23–39.

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adaptability of the trope of women’s fidelity to exemplify a variety of social and ethical issues. The trope is as at home in the courtly tradition of Machaut’s Jugement dou roi de Navarre as in the overtly classicizing collections Boccaccio constructs. The topic of women’s fidelity and steadfastness in love functions in exemplary narratives as an umbrella theme for all kinds of social relations between men and women, parents and children, and between generations. By their very nature, stories of women’s steadfastness create standards of behavior for men as well as women. Chaucer is quite clear about this in Alceste’s instructions, which assert that stories of women’s fidelity require narratives of men’s betrayals: Thow shalt, while that thou lyvest, yer by yere, The moste partye of thy tyme spende In makynge of a glorious legende Of goode wymmen, maydenes and wyves, That weren trewe in loving al hire lyves; And telle of false men that hem bytraien, That al hir lyf ne don nat but assayen How many women they may doon a shame; For in youre world that is now hold a game. (LGW F, ll. 481–9)

Creating exemplary moral narratives for fourteenth-century readers and audiences was an historicizing project, a means of bringing the past into the present. This process, as many scholars have shown, depended on and created an inevitable mouvance in an unstable group of narratives whose details as well as construction could be continually appropriated and refashioned for contemporary purposes, creating new originals. Reading Chaucer’s contemporaries’ adaptations provides a context in which to recognize how Chaucer’s narratives both echo common social concerns of the period and reflect his own unique perspectives.2 Understanding his contemporaries’ narrative preoccupations allows us to locate Chaucer’s poem on a contemporary literary continuum.

 2

On Chaucer’s growth as an English writer in relation to European counterparts, see J. Simpson, ‘Chaucer as a European Writer’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. S. Lerer (New Haven, 2006), pp. 55–86.

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Boccaccio’s Women: Doing the Best They Can Chaucer’s well-studied debt to Boccaccio almost defies description. Never named among the writers Chaucer praises, never acknowledged, Boccaccio’s invention is nevertheless the primary source for much of Chaucer’s work.3 Chaucer’s art followed Boccaccio’s lead: the Filostrato became Troilus and Criseyde, the Teseide the Knight’s Tale. While neither Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione (1342–43) nor his later Famous Women – De mulieribus claris (1361–62) is a direct source for the Legend, both offer intriguing insights into Chaucer’s choice of themes and his conceptual imagination. The first collection of stories of famous women in the European tradition,4 dedicated to Andrea Acciaiuoli, Florentine countess of Altavilla, whom he praises for her ‘outstanding probity … women’s greatest ornament’,5 Famous Women is often read as a series of semi-laudatory assertions undercut by Boccaccio’s own frequent interpolations, moralizations and interpretive directives. The tension that arises from the humanist imperative to recover history and the ethicist imperative to condemn immorality is complicated by the authorial voice and its interpretive judgments presented as derived from moral authority and historical knowledge, yet ironically often problematized by admissions of vagueness about various details of names and events. Margaret Franklin argues that the tension in the work derives from an even more basic strain between female achievement and ideal femininity, that it may not result so much from inconsistency as from a text that ‘presents a consistent delineation of the parameters of acceptable female authority with the goal of providing a preemptive defense of a social framework implicitly challenged by legendary women who participated actively in public life’.6 The women in Boccaccio’s collection are remarkable for surpassing See R. R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Houndmills, 2002) and D. Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio (Woodbridge, 1985).  4 Like the Amorosa visione, Boccaccio’s De mulieribus claris was known in England in the fifteenth century.  5 Giovanni Boccaccio, Famous Women, ed. and trans. V. Brown, I Tatti Renaissance Library (Cambridge MA, 2001), p. 3. All subsequent citations of this text are to this edition.  6 M. Franklin, Boccaccio’s Heroines: Power and Virtue in Renaissance Society (Aldershot, 2006), p. 1.  3

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what he terms ‘the limited natural capacity’ of women in general. Members of a sex endowed with naturally ‘sluggish minds’, their achievement of deeds of intelligence and bravery merits attention and applause, while their various unusual motivations often merit censure. The women who achieve greatness in battle or in statecraft often do so because of their almost masculine sense of power and ‘keen desire for the fleeting glory of the world’.7 Yet in Boccaccio’s tellings, their achievements, as in the case of the incestuous Semiramis, for example, are frequently associated with insatiable and shameless lust. The truly good women of the collection are those who are faithful, steadfast, chaste and long-suffering. Fortune figures prominently in the lives of these good women, underscoring the difference between male achievement through volition and will and female achievement through indirect agency, qualities of mind, both good and bad – all tactical elements for taking advantage of what fortune presents.8 And while Boccaccio dedicates his text to a woman, and offers it ‘as a kind of reward’ to the women he praises, he writes it in Latin and destines it for a largely male readership.9 He presents it to his dedicatee as a book that might be enjoyed by those who have no idea of their own history,10 but ironically, the history he constructs invariably focuses on the men whom they desire, the men who challenge them to exert their wills, the men who fail to control their own lusts.11 Boccaccio may indeed be, as Franklin argues, afraid of the very power he has presented in these stories, fearful of how the tales may invite women to public speech and overt action, because the culture in which they were received was a culture in which women’s power, though real, was obliquely exercised. Christine de Pizan counsels discretion and indirection in Le livre des trois vertus as the best strategic and tactical paths for women to follow in leveraging Famous Women, p. 13. On this subject of women’s ‘inability’ to ‘transcend … their predicaments’, given their inherent position of subordination, see Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity, pp. 102–3.  9 It was much translated in the fifteenth century into several vernaculars including English and so was received by a much broader audience than he expected. 10 Famous Women, p. 13. 11 See S. Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout, 2005).  7  8

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power. Geoffroi de Charny voices the predominant mid fourteenth century chivalric attitude toward women, and understanding of natural gender, in section 43 of The Book of Chivalry, writing of how women do not have access to the field of action open to men who wish to make their way in the world and so fall back on attractive ­appearance as a tactic: Men can joust and tourney: women cannot do this … Men go out more widely in society than women can. It is appropriate for women, because they spend more time at home than do men and do not often leave it and cannot get the same recognition, that they should pay more attention to their physical appearance and be more splendidly adorned with jewels, rich ornaments, and apparel than would be suitable for men, who can in so many different ways win recognition for their achievements.12

Although Boccaccio’s purpose is not to praise women’s fidelity, he includes most of the exemplars of fidelity who appear in Chaucer’s fragmentary poem, but uses them to focus attention on generational tensions between parents and children, played out in domestic and political circumstances. Boccaccio’s story of Pyramus and Thisbe, for example, underscores the unpredictable dangers of ardent sexual desire, the tricks of envious fortune and human failure to account for both. Chapter XIII, ‘De Tisbe babilonia virgine’, follows narratives of powerful women rulers and Amazons. Thisbe, like the women whose stories precede hers, is intrepid, slipping away from her family to arrive at Ninus’s tomb before Pyramus, ‘being perhaps the more ardent’, Boccaccio observes. Boccaccio’s version of the story emphasizes the blood which appears everywhere and which symbolizes the ultimate union of the two lovers in death: ‘Thus envious Fortune could not prevent the mingling of the unhappy blood of those whom she had prevented from joining in a 12

Geoffroi de Charny, A Knight’s Own Book of Chivalry; The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation, ed. R. Kaeuper and E. Kennedy (Philadelphia, 1996). Charny embeds these observations in a discussion of how men should clothe themselves in the courtly virtues, rather than in embroidered finery. Boccaccio also touches on this venerable theme by exhorting Andrea Acciauoli to eschew cosmetics and rely on ‘integrity, holiness and the finest actions’ (p. 7) to create her beauty. In chapter XV, the story of Niobe, Boccaccio opines, ‘For the most part Nature has made men highspirited, while she has given a meek and submissive character to women, who are more suited to luxury than to power’; Famous Women, p. 69.

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gentle embrace.’ Medieval physiology treats semen and human milk as forms of blood, and Boccaccio’s description invites the correlation, especially in his moralization where he comments first on their union as a ‘bloody death’, and then on the power of sexual desire in the young as Nature’s means of insuring the continuation of the human race. His focus at the end of the story is on the despoiling power of Fortune, the failure of parents to perceive the power of youthful sexual desire, and their attempt to thwart nature: To love while in the flower of youth is a fault, but it is not a frightful crime for unmarried persons since they can proceed to matrimony. The worst sin was Fortune’s, and perhaps their wretched parents were guilty as well. Certainly the impulses of the young should be curbed, but this should be done gradually lest we drive them to ruin in their despair by setting up sudden obstacles in their path.13

The next story, Chapter XIV, is that of ‘Hypermnestra, Queen of the Argives and Priestess of Juno’, the story of another daughter who rebels, and of generational conflict centered in sex. Her father Danaus, brother of Aegisthus, having heard a prophecy that he would be murdered by one of his nephews, first agrees to marry his daughters to his nephews and subsequently demands on pain of death that each daughter slay her husband on their wedding night, as the bridegrooms lie torpid from food, drink and, presumably, sex. All agree to this unnatural privileging of the old before the young, the senescent over the virile, except Hypermnestra who, having fallen in love with her husband, ‘as girls often do, she loved at first sight and so took pity on him’. Having warned her husband, whose significance in the story Boccaccio undercuts by confessing he does not know his exact name, she watches as the young bridegroom flees to safety. Her father praises her sisters for their murderous deeds, and condemns Hypermnestra to prison ‘where for some time she tearfully lamented her kind action’. Having now undercut his heroine’s salient act of resistance, Boccaccio proceeds to inveigh against the jealousy of old age and its iron will to survive at all costs, manifest in Danaus’s attempt ‘to prolong his trembling years 13

Famous Women, p. 61; ‘Florentis etatis amor crimen est, nec horrendum solutis crimen; in coniugium ire poterat. Peccavit sors pessima et forsan miseri peccavere parentes. Sensum quippe frenandi sunt iuvenum impetus, ne, dum repentino obice illis obsistere volumus, desperantes in praecipitium inpellamus’; De mulieribus claris, ed. Brown, pp. 58–60.

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with the bloodbath of his nephews’. Here, as in the story of Thisbe, the parent succeeds only in destroying his future lineage even as he corrupts his daughters by his request. Fleeing from Egypt to Greece, Danaus captures the kingdom of the Argives, only to be killed by Linus, Hypermnestra’s husband, who succeeds to rule the Argives. Boccaccio uses the passive voice to say that Hypermnestra ‘was freed from prison’, and was re-joined in marriage to her erstwhile husband and shared his reign. He merely mentions that she became a priestess of Juno and concludes that her fame over the centuries derives from ‘her own righteous conduct’. She is, of course, the ‘best’ of the characters, but her mixed emotions in prison and her susceptibility to love at first sight signify her essentially weak feminine nature. Her conduct in this one instance was moral and right, but her exemplary function stems not from her own consistently strong character so much as from a variety of shifting circumstances that align to compel her decisions. Her major choice, her husband over her father, is the lesser of two evils. After an intervening narrative about Niobe, Boccaccio tells the story of another one of Chaucer’s legendary good women, Hypsipyle, in Chapter XVI, introducing the narrative as a story about family – love of her father and rescue by her sons. The story begins with gender tensions, the desire of the women of Lemnos to kill all the males on the island. Hypsipyle manages to help her father escape, motivated by the ‘thought that it would be inhuman to sully herself with her father’s blood’. She pretends that she has murdered him and is proclaimed queen by the ‘wicked women’ who have hatched the murderous plot. Boccaccio here moralizes about the debt children owe to parents, and praises Hypsipyle for honoring this debt: ‘Hypsipyle scrupulously repaid this debt to her father and thus deserves to be placed among distinguished women.’14 The story shifts focus as Jason enters Hypsipyle’s life; he lands on the shores of Lemnos while seeking Colchis, arriving ‘despite the women’s opposition … either because of a storm or through his own design’ – Boccaccio is once more unsure of a crucial detail central to a narrative of personal relationship. The grammar of his visit is as compact as the detail is sketchy: ‘The queen received him into her house and into her bed.’15 Even odder is the conclusion to 14 15

Famous Women, p. 73. Ibid., p. 73.

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their implied relationship: ‘After his departure she bore him in due course twin sons.’ The story of her life seems a series of fortuitous events without direction. To save their lives she sends the sons to Chios where her father still lives. This action becoming known, she is dethroned and flees by sea to seek her father and sons, but is captured by pirates and enslaved, finally given as a gift to Lycurgus, king of Nemea, who entrusts her with the care of his only son, Opheltes. While she watches this child in a meadow, Adrastus, king of Argos, and his army come by on their way to Thebes. Needing water, they ask for her help and she leaves the child to show them the spring of Langia. In the process of telling her misfortunes to Adrastus, she is recognized by her two sons, Euneus and Thoas, soldiers in his army. Hypsipyle’s happiness is short-lived, for when she returns to him she discovers that Opheltes has died from a serpent’s bite. Lycurgus goes mad with grief at the loss of his child, and Hypsipyle’s sons take her away with them, to what fate or end Boccaccio protests he does not know. Jason seems to be the link between Hypsipyle’s story and the next one, about Medea (Chapter XVII), who, Boccaccio claims, exemplifies the ‘cruelest example of ancient treachery’. The theme of parental obligation opposed to youthful desire appears early in the story, when Medea develops a passionate desire for Jason for whose love she is willing to ‘instigate a war’ against her father in order to help Jason succeed in his quest for the Golden Fleece. Overcome by the lust of her eyes, she compounds her betrayal by fleeing with Jason and with ‘all her father’s wealth’.16 In order to facilitate her escape she enlists the help of her father’s natural parental affection: she kills her brother and dismembers his body, knowing that her father will search for all his scattered limbs. Jason takes her to Thessaly where she marries him. Her father-in-law Aeson is so happy at his son’s return, his success and the treasure he brings with him that he seems ‘to regain his youth’. Boccaccio’s way of finessing Medea’s witchcraft is to focus her story on family relationships. When Medea goes on to stir up familial discord and political strife within the ruling family, Jason tires of her, preferring Creusa, the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. In a jealous rage Medea destroys Creon’s palace, kills Creusa and before his very eyes she ‘butchers’ the two sons she had borne Jason. Ultimately she flees to Athens, marries King 16

Ibid., p. 75.

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Aegeus, bears a son, tries to poison Theseus and flees once more. Jason eventually takes her back, but both are exiled from Thessaly and she returns to Colchis where she restores her aged, exiled father to the throne. Boccaccio claims not to know anything more about her life or ultimate fate after this point, but he uses her extraordinarily protracted story to launch a diatribe against the ‘wandering gaze’,17 the faculty of sight as the gateway to sin, especially lust, and to conclude that between heaven and earth ‘there is no safe direction for the eyes to turn’. If only Medea had closed her eyes or looked elsewhere instead of gazing ‘longingly at Jason’, her father’s reign, her brother’s life and her ‘virginal honor’ would all have been preserved. Instead all perished ‘because of the shamelessness of her eyes’.18 Boccaccio’s Dido (Chapter XLII) is not part of the cluster of family-centered stories. Hers is a tale of cunning and chaste widowhood. Boccaccio begins by avowing his hope to praise her in such a way that his ‘modest remarks may cleanse away (at least in part) the infamy undeservedly cast on the honor of her widowhood’.19 Not just faint praise, this opening also functions to allow Boccaccio to control the reception of the tale. Stories are told for a point, and authors are obliged in telling somewhat of game to tell somewhat of earnest, as Chaucer would put it. But where Chaucer’s signature response to his own tales is to create ambiguity often where one most wishes for clarity, Boccaccio (like Gower and Christine) sees no advantage in tolerating textual indeterminacy in his narratives. Lineage and heritage figure prominently in Boccaccio’s imaginary and this story is no exception. When her brother Pygmalion succeeds their father Belus as king of Phoenicia, Dido is married to Sychaeus (once again Boccaccio is not quite certain of a name, suggesting also Acerbas or Sicarbas as alternatives) whose wealth attracts Pygmalion’s greed and results in his death at Pygmalion’s hands. Emotionally overcome by grief but mentally acute, she casts aside ‘womanly weakness’ and earns the name by which history knows her: not Elyssa, but Dido, virago in the Phoenician language. Her flight depends on a trick: bags full of sand supposed to be her husband’s treasure are thrown overboard before the sailors of her 17 18 19

Ibid., p. 77. Ibid., p. 79. Ibid., p. 167.

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fleet who have no recourse but to continue with her or to return to Pygmalion’s wrath. Eventually arriving on the shores of North Africa, she employs another trick, buying from the local landowner only so much land on the coast as can be covered by an ox hide. She manages to procure an unexpectedly large parcel of land by cutting the hide into thin strips which when joined together encompass a substantial area. On this she builds the city of Carthage using the wealth she has secretly brought with her on her ships. Although a woman, she focuses her attention on polity and community. ‘Walls, temples, a forum, and public and private buildings’ spring up at her command. Laws are codified as well as codes of conduct,20 and her fame spreads far and wide – fame for her city and, Boccaccio asserts, for her ‘remarkable beauty and exceptional virtue and purity’. These entwined qualities enflame the desire of the neighboring king of the Massitani who threatens war against Carthage if the city elders do not give her to him. Knowing of her vow of chaste widowhood, the elders of Carthage succeed in tricking her into going to the Massitani as part of a delegation to bring this people into a ‘more civilized way of life’.21 Dismayed, but loyal to her word, she agrees to go if she can have a ‘fixed date for going to her husband’22 and thereupon sets out to commit suicide rather than surrender her chastity. Her very public performance of intention and determination as she impales herself on a knife ends her life before ‘the arrival of the Trojan Aeneas (whom she never saw)’. Boccaccio then falls into an extended digression praising Dido’s chaste decision to ‘use her mental strength to escape in the only way she could – through death’ and excoriating contemporary widows who enter ‘second, third, and even more marriages’ on the excuse of wanting children or needing companionship or at the urging of family or friends. Here, as in the case of Medea he urges women to ‘lower their eyes to the ground’,23 to trust in God to deliver them, before concluding that Dido’s reward was the veneration and honor generations of Carthaginians offered her as ‘their common mother and their ruler … also as an illustrious goddess and their constant protector’.24 20 21 22 23 24

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. p. p. p. p.

173. 173. 175. 177. 181.

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Five stories later Boccaccio returns to the theme of the chaste woman as a protector of nations and peoples, but the scene has changed from North Africa to Rome, and the virtue displayed, while still leading to suicide, is domestic, with implied public consequences. Lucretia (Chapter XLVIII) is presented as an example of modesty and frugality, two virtues linked by restraint and avoidance of excess. The narrative Boccaccio tells adheres fairly closely to other versions of the well-known plot. The siege of Ardea, male boasts of their wives’ honor, the discovery of chaste wives enjoying quiet company and the discovery of the soberly dressed Lucretia spinning wool all appear in Boccaccio’s version.25 Lucretia attracts the attention of Sextus, the son of Superbus, who, enflamed to passion by merely seeing her, is impelled to possess her, and so, on a subsequent night, returns to her home. Claiming to be ‘her husband’s relative’, he gains a welcome access to Lucretia’s house. In the dark of night, when all are asleep, he comes into her bedroom, sword drawn, and threatens to kill her if she does not yield. When she resists he threatens to kill her and one of her male servants and to report that he had caught her in adultery. Loss of reputation and inability to clear her name if she were dead cause her unwillingly ‘to give her body to the adulterer’. In other versions she faints and so is unconscious during the rape. In Boccaccio’s version her consciousness is implied in the grammar of her surrender, opening the possibility of sexual response. In the morning she joins her family, explains the events of the night, and announces, ‘Although I absolve myself of the sin, I do not exempt myself from the punishment, and in future no woman will live dishonorably because of Lucretia’s example.’ She then strikes herself with a knife and dies in front of her husband and her father.26 Inverting his usual censure of the female gaze, Boccaccio ascribes her death to her ‘unfortunate beauty’ that overwhelmed Sextus, whose gaze is apparently not at fault. Boccaccio praises her purity which required that she expiate the ‘ignominy thrust violently upon her’ with her own life. But he does not commend her steadfast resolution or her courage in facing death, even though her death restored her reputation and led ‘ultimately to freedom for Rome’, an allusion to the rebellion against the Tarquins and the establishment of the Roman Republic. 25 26

Ibid., p. 197. Ibid., p. 199.

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The theme of female beauty and its disturbing potential recurs in the final narrative that both Boccaccio and Chaucer tell, the story of Cleopatra, queen of Egypt (Chapter LXXXVIII). This narrative explores the ‘greed, cruelty and lust’ masked by her destructive beauty. Cleopatra succeeded to power through wickedness, for ‘she had no true marks of glory except her ancestry and her attractive appearance’.27 The events of this narrative turn almost exclusively on her sensual appetites and her will to power exercised by manipulating or repudiating close relationships. Jointly appointed to rule Egypt with her husband-brother (a sign of her wickedness), she poisons her spouse in order to claim the throne for herself. The range of her desire encompasses not only imperial leaders, but the geography of empire as well. Caesar and Antony succumb to her charm and submit to her will, surrendering conquered lands and nations to her control.28 She tries but fails to seduce Herod Antipater in Jordan, and both the captive Armenian king Artavasdes and the treasure from Antony’s conquest of Armenia are yielded to her; she embraces Antony ‘with such seductive power that he divorced Octavia, sister of Octavius Caesar, and gave all his love to Cleopatra, making her his wife’.29 Her will is insatiable and her power over Antony tremendous as she persuades him to kill her sister Arsinoë who has fled for refuge to the temple of Diana at Ephesus. After a lavish feast at which she drinks pearl dissolved in vinegar, Antony is so besotted with Cleopatra that he grants her request for the Roman Empire itself. This foolish gesture precipitates a war with Octavian, climaxed by the sea battle at Actium from which first Cleopatra and then Antony flees. Antony kills himself after the battle, but Cleopatra, in Boccaccio’s version, tries to seduce Octavian, without success. Fearing she is destined to be displayed during an imperial triumph in Rome, she commits suicide. Antony and Cleopatra are buried together in the tomb they had begun themselves. Famous Women constitutes a comparatively well-known analogue to Chaucer’s Legend, but Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione (1342–43; revised 1355–60) is rarely invoked in connection with the poem. An early work, the Amorosa visione comprises a series of allegorical triumphs of worldly goods painted on the walls of a pleasure palace, 27 28 29

Ibid., p. 361. Ibid., p. 365. Ibid., p. 367.

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presenting a cavalcade of figures, historical and mythological, all related to one of five themes –Wisdom, Glory, Wealth, Fortune and Love. In his introduction to the dual-language edition of the poem, Vittore Branca cites the ‘fervent classical enthusiasm’ of Amorosa visione,30 describing it as the first vision poem in Italian literature entirely secular and also concerned with love.31 Ultimately the poem rejects the worldly goods Boccaccio so richly delineates in favor of a larger concept – that the only ‘lasting good … is the virtue which leads to God’.32 Yet the poem is essentially a humanist project, for it presents a series of … ancient figures … chosen for the purpose of representing the most valid champions of mankind confronting those five great providential forces [Wisdom, Glory, Wealth, Fortune, Love]. Culture thus somehow aspires to become a measure of life and of humanity. And the classical world is consequently presented as paradigmatic for human and Christian values, at all times and under whatever heaven.33

The revision that produces the second version of the poem (c. 1355– 60), Branca posits, reflects the development of early humanism in Italy: Aside from its stylistic and metrical revisions, this later text clearly aims at accentuating a moralizing approach, at bringing its classical borrowings and allusions up to date in accordance with recent cultural acquisitions, at emphasizing the paradigmatic value of the Greco-Latin world.34

In part this revision is the result of the bibliophilia of early humanism, discussed in chapter 1. It derives from the intellectual culture of Avignon, the influence of Petrarch, and from ‘discoveries of manuscripts, the extraordinary and revealing acquisitions of new texts …’.35 The relationship of this work to Chaucer’s House of Fame, with its similar focus on fortune and enumeration of historical figures, 30 31 32 33 34 35

Giovanni Boccaccio, Amorosa visione, Bilingual Edition, trans. R. Hollander, T. Hampton and M. Frankel (Hanover, NH, 1986), p. xv. Ibid., p. xvii. Ibid., p. xix. Ibid., p. xxii. Ibid., p. xxii. Ibid., p. xxiii.

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was noted by G. C. Child in 1895, who commented that ‘the poets favored one another’ in many respects.36 Boccaccio drew on multiple sources for his poem, including the Romance of the Rose, the revival of classical dream vision conventions and the mid fourteenth century work of Giotto, who painted a series of triumphs of allegorical figures in Assisi, Pisa, Siena and in Naples where Boccaccio saw and admired his work.37 In the fourth canto of the poem Boccaccio writes of Lady Wisdom painted on the wall of a bright chamber so beautifully that he concluded, ‘I do not believe human hand was ever/ extended with so much genius/ as every single figure there made manifest/ unless by Giotto, from whom beautiful Nature/ hid no part of herself / in the art on which he sets his seal’ (Canto IV, ll. 13–18).38 Amorosa visione, with its overt emphasis on fortune and on fame and its ekphrastic use of moralized images and its focus on a female guide has not been associated with the Legend in spite of some obvious and informative parallels. Yet both Boccaccio and Chaucer draw on the Romance of the Rose for elements of their conception of a magnificent God of Love, and both place him in a green meadow adorned with flowers, though they differ in the way they ascribe magnificence to the god. Boccaccio’s God of Love is youthful, presented through nature; he sits on two eagles, with his feet on two lion cubs. The young lions belie the force of the raptors, suggesting love’s mixture of joy and compulsion. The god bears a golden crown which sits on his golden hair. His face, like ‘snow … mixed with crimson’, ‘had a reddish mixture/ impressed upon its angelic features’. Two ‘golden wings over his shoulders extended 36

37 38

G. C. Child, ‘Chaucer’s House of Fame and Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione’, Modern Language Notes 10 (1895), 190–2. Child provides textual comparisons that suggest Chaucer’s direct reliance on the poem in his descriptions of Fame, and references to Phyllis, Phaedra and Dido in The House of Fame. The Riverside Chaucer editor of HF, J. Fyler, cautions about such comparisons. The poem was known in fifteenth-century England and C. W. Lemmi argued that S. Hawes (1474?–1523) adapted major structural elements of the Amorosa to his Pastime of Pleasure (C. W. Lemmi, ‘The Influence of Boccaccio on Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure’, Review of English Studies 5 (1929), 195–8. See Branca’s introduction to Amorosa visione, ed. Hollander, Hampton and Frankel (hereafter Amorosa visione), p. xiv. Giotto was at the court of King Robert of Naples 1328–33, and Boccaccio was in Naples 1327–40. See C. L. Joost-Gaugier, ‘Giotto’s Hero Cycle in Naples: a Prototype of Donne Illustri and a Possible Literary Connection’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 43 (1980), 311–18.

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toward heaven’, and he holds two arrows, one of gold, one of lead. He is youthful, jovial and benign (Canto XV, ll. 12–42). Chaucer’s god is more remote, clothed in green, his face shining so brightly that it is impossible to determine its hue. He holds ‘two firy dartes … and angellych his winges gan he sprede’ (LGW G, ll. 160–8). In contrast to Boccaccio’s convivial figure, Chaucer’s is stern. Perhaps the most salient similarity between the two lies in the fact that each is accompanied by a lovely woman who exerts power over the god. In the Legend Alceste’s mediation staunches the God of Love’s anger, redirecting it, while Boccaccio’s lady, who ‘seemed like an angel, born in heaven’ (Canto XV, l. 52), exerts a similar restraining influence by her very nature: Beholding Love, she seemed to arrest his desire at her clear light: as an eagle makes love manifest to her offspring, at their birth, so that she guides them to follow her nature, thus does she, I think, affect him who makes her his leader … (Canto XV, ll. 79–84).39

This lady, like Alceste, is both distinct from and melded with the God of Love: ‘His flame still so shines in me/ that at times, many believe that I am he,/ since there is little that separates us’ (Canto XVI, ll. 13–15). Sent from God, she unites divine and earthly love: ‘Compassion is my sister and of mercy/ am I a sweet source. God has sent me to you/ to give you a part of the good which He possesses’ (Canto XVI, ll. 7–9). Love ‘desires’ her, and she accompanies him before she returns to heaven (Canto XVI, ll. 26–7). Chaucer, too, connects divine love and earthly love in the figure of his lady, Alceste, whose myth is a Christian type: she gave her life for her husband.40 In Cantos VII–X Boccaccio also refers in passing to a number of the women whose stories Chaucer tells; Dido, Medea, Hypsipyle and Cleopatra all appear among those who covet and achieve glory. They reappear in the Triumph of Love, Cantos XX–XXIX, where 39

40

‘Contemplando ivi a Amore il suo talento/ parea fermasse en la sua chiara luce:/ com’aquila a’figliuol nel nascimento/ con amor mostra ond’ella li perduce/ a seguir sua natura, cosi questa/ credo che facci a chi la si fa duce’; Amorosa visione, p. 64. Not entirely willingly, a fact routinely omitted in these medieval narratives.

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their stories are told more fully, emphasizing their fidelity and their suffering.41 Sylvia Huot has observed that a good deal of Amorosa visione is taken up with Ovidian narratives of tragic love stories and of women betrayed by faithless men – Medea, Ariadne, Dido, Hypsipyle, Cleopatra, Phyllis all appear, and a correlative theme of abandonment and loss recurs throughout Cantos XV–XXIX, the Triumph of Love.42 There Pyramus and Thisbe escape to the woods and meet their deaths (Canto XX, ll. 44f), Jason appears with Hypsipyle, Medea and Creusa, and Hypsipyle laments his betrayal, having trusted his ‘faithfulness, as empty as the wind’ (Canto XXI, ll. 20–30). Medea tells her story of ruin and destruction. Theseus appears, followed by Ariadne, whom he betrays for her more beautiful sister. Ariadne laments, ‘… oh, why is your ship/ in such a rush to flee? Have pity/ on me a woman, loving and young!’ (Canto XXII, ll. 19–21). Demophon and Phyllis appear in Canto XXV, where ‘she hurled her curt speech at him, reminding him once more/ how much she and her possessions had all been/ available to serve him, and how now, / because he failed in the faith he had promised her/ from loving overmuch too much sorrow held her heart’ (ll. 64–9).43 Dido reappears, and Boccaccio resumes the story he began to tell in Canto IX, here drawing out the tale of her love for Aeneas and her abandonment, following Ovid (Canto XXVIII–XXIX, l. 30). At the end of the Triumph of Love, Boccaccio’s persona celebrates his experience, speaking to his female guide: Looking at her I said, ‘Oh how worthwhile it has been, seeing these various things, which You said were full of great evil! Now what could ever be more worthy than they, what more wondrous to have or to consider or to hear about!’ (Canto XXX, ll. 7–12)44

41 42

43

44

They appear as part of a much larger narrative of mythical lovers. S. Huot, ‘Poetic Ambiguity and Reader Response to Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione’, Modern Philology 83 (1985), 109–22 (p. 111). For an extensive analysis of the theme of abandoned women in the poem, see Hagedorn, Abandoned Women. ‘Tutta turbata sue parole conte/ gittavali, rocordandoli ancora/ quant’ella e le sue cose tutte pronte/ al suo servigio furono, e com’ora.a lei fallita la promessa fede,/ per troppo amor troppo dolor l’accora’; Amorosa visione, p. 104. ‘Lei mirando, le dissi: – Oh quanto vale/ aver vedute queste varie cose/ che

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To which she replies, ‘The good which you sought, does it seem to you that you see it painted here? And yet these things are fallacious and without truth. To me it seems that such looking has goaded your mind into false opinion, extinguishing all sense of duty in you. Do return to yourself as you ought: remember that death, with its terrifying stroke, has conquered all these people. It is true that some, more valorous than others, merited fame; yet even if the world endure, their glorious names shall die. For fame is like the grass which Aries pushes forth for you; then, later, Libra arrives and turns it dry and brown.     You should seek no other good than that to which the strait way leads us where you did not wish to go, hastening here instead. (Canto XXX, ll. 13–30).45

The Triumph of Love is a digression that reveals love as rapacious, bestial, unstable. Lovers are unfaithful, women are betrayed, and cherished desires come to naught. But in the end, when the book is closed, Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione is very like Famous Women in its tension between its proclaimed morality and the lovingly portrayed classical figures summoned for its ethical purposes.

45

dicevate piene di gran male!/ Or come si porria più valorose,/ che sieno queste, mai per nullo avere/ o pensare o udir più meravigliose?’; ibid., p. 122. ‘Rispose allor colei: – Parti vedere/ quel ben che tu cercavi qui dipinto,/ ché son cose fallaci e fuor di vere?/ E’mi par pur che tal vista sospinto/ in falsa oppenion t’abbia la mente,/ ed ogni altro dovuto ne sia istinto./ Adunque torna in te debitamente:/ ricorditi che morte col dubbioso/colpo già vinse tutta questa gente./ Ver è ch’alcun più ch’altro valoroso/ meritò fama, ma se, ‘l mondo dura/ e’perirà suo nome glorioso./ E questa è simigliante alla verdura/ che vi porge Ariete, che vegnendo/ poi Libra appresso seccala ed oscura./ Null’altro ben si deve andar caendo/ che quello ove ci mena la via stretta,/ dove entrar non volesti qua correndo’; ibid., p. 122.

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Guillaume Machaut: Pleading in the Court of Love Machaut’s Jugement dou roi de Navarre (c. 1349), together with his Jugement dou roi de Behaigne (before 1342? 1346?), focuses on a demande d’amour that also structures Chaucer’s Troilus and Legend: who suffers more, the woman whose lover is lost, or the man whose lover is unfaithful? From the time of Kittredge, critics have been aware of the debt Chaucer owed to Machaut’s poetry.46 Machaut’s Jugement dou roi de Navarre has been proposed as a ‘source’ for various elements of Chaucer’s Legend with good reason.47 In both poems we find an author challenged by a powerful figure to 46

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See, especially, introduction to Guillaume Machaut, The Judgment of the King of Navarre, ed. R. Barton Palmer, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, s. A 45 (New York and London, 1988), pp. xlv–lxi and passim. See also on Chaucer’s debts to Machaut, in Palmer, ed.,Chaucer’s French Contemporaries (cited in n. 1 above): R. Barton Palmer, ‘Editor’s Comment’, 1–7; W. Calin, ‘Machaut’s Legacy: the Chaucerian Inheritance Reconsidered’, 9–22; Palmer, ‘Metafictional Machaut’, 22–39. See, too, W. Calin, The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England (Toronto, 1994). J. Wimsatt has argued for Chaucer’s hybridization of Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Machaut’s expressions of love and love longing in the Troilus. He proposes that much of the Boethian background assumed in critical discussions, may be better understood as Boethian ideas channelled through Machaut’s own writing on love and fortune, particularly from the Remede de fortune: ‘Guillaume de Machaut and Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde’, Medium Aevum, 45 (1976), 277–93. If this is the case, the argument of sources shifts to a critical discussion of Chaucer’s craft as a uniquely English hybridization of Italian and French forms on the cusp of early humanism. D. Wallace points out that in the Amorosa visione Boccaccio united the humanist-classical motif of the triumph with the French courtly setting of the garden of love (Wallace, Chaucer and the Early Writings of Boccaccio, pp. 13–15). Chaucer, who could hardly have known that in the future he would be regarded as writing as an early humanist, is both a famous translator of ancient literature, and an adapter of its forms and tropes to his own ends. On the parallels and influences, see Calin’s French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England , where he argues that Machaut’s inept persona in Navarre influenced authorial self-presentation in Chaucer, Gower and Hoccleve (pp. 227–8), and that the charges, as well as the similar punishment and penance Machaut and Chaucer perform, indicate a connection between the poets and/ or courtly culture (p. 228). Calin, like Robert Estrich before him in ‘Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend of Good Women and Machaut’s Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre’, Studies in Philology, 36 (1939), pp. 20–39, argues for Machaut as a more likely source for some of the stories of good women both poets tell, rather than Ovid (see Calin, French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England, p. 290). Estrich notes that Machaut’s Franchise argues her point by

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defend himself against a charge of having slandered women, then defending himself inadequately, being told to be quiet and then being sentenced to compensate for his fault by writing stories of women’s faithfulness. Interestingly, both Boccaccio’s narrator in Amorosa visione, who insists on entering the garden of love although advised against it, and Machaut’s persona here are ‘Chaucerian’ in the sense that they are self-defensive as well as self-willed, a triune similarity that suggests a latent convention. Certainly both Chaucer and Machaut write with a self-consciousness that creates a sense of constant awareness of their personae performing in an unfamiliar setting, an awareness that leads to flashes of humor.48 But similar as the structural outlines of the Legend of Good Women and Le jugement dou roi de Navarre may be, on the level of detail and development the works also differ in significant ways. Machaut’s text opens with a recollection of the winter of 1349–50, a season of plague, social dislocations, earthquake, celestial harbingers of pestilence and destruction, war, hypocrisy and loss, all interpreted as God’s wrath at the corruption of earth and humankind (ll. 1–460). Immuring himself in despair and impotency, unable either to confront or ameliorate the sad state of the world, he endures in isolation until one day he hears the music of seven pairs of instruments (l. 464) as if they were playing for feasts and wedding celebrations. Emerging into a new world of spring, to the idea of marriage, celebration and society, he mounts his palfrey and moves into the spring countryside determined to watch and to hunt hares, a sport he defends as worthy and noble, and one which certainly occupied his attention totally, much as the daisy occupies Chaucer who leaves his world of books and history for a similarly restorative countryside. His dedication to the hare hunt occupies him but does not provide the fullness of happiness. Machaut, like Chaucer, is then accosted in the midst of his revelry, unexpectedly called to account for his writing. The charge suddenly leveled against him – by a magnificent lady who is later revealed to be Happiness – is two-fold. She begins by berating him for being

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‘recounting the stories of Ariadne and Medea, told, like the Tale of Dido, from exactly the same point of view that Chaucer adopts….’ (p. 35). I do not agree with W. Calin’s ‘A Reading of Machaut’s “Jugement dou Roy de Navarre”’, Modern Language Review 66 (1971), 293–7, which argues the pervasive melancholy of a senescent narrator whose activities, particularly his quest for hares, inflect the poem with comic overtones. In point of fact, hare-hunting was a noble activity, not a comic or low pastime.

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too wrapped up in his own pursuits, failing to recognize and salute her and her attendant ladies as he ought. Allegorically she thus represents a new road (‘I took the path on the right/ And looked toward the left; Quite plainly I saw you riding’ (Navarre, ll. 772–4)) he has not yet taken, having lived with sorrow and desolation for so long. The second charge is more specific: ‘You have sinned against women,/ And thus you’ve taken on a burden/ That you’ll not be able to bear up under,/ Nor put down when you’d like to’ (Navarre, ll. 811–14) … ‘Because the case against you is something/ You’ve written in one of your books’ (ll. 866–7), a false opinion ‘Which is so seriously biased against women,/ A severe penance is called for …’ (ll. 919–21): you have said and expressed in a ‘conclusive judgment’ that the man        … has much more ill fortune Grief, torment, unpleasantness, and suffering He who found his lady false To him through her hypocrisy, Than has the very gracious, dear lady Who had her sweet lover Joined to her heart irrevocably Through love, and not in any other way, Then she learned he was in the power Of death, and there will remain, So that she’ll never see him again. And how did you dare say this, Or write it down in your book? (Navarre, ll. 1015–28).49

The ensuing trial takes place in a court of love presided over by the king of Navarre whose admirable qualities epitomize courtly chivalric values (Navarre, ll. 1095–114). The Lady’s attendants are allegorical representations of courtly virtues and the intellectual virtues that sustain them: Understanding, attended by Discretion, Reason, Temperance, Peace and Harmony, Faith, Constancy, Charity, Honesty mantled in Simplicity, Prudence and Wisdom, Generosity and Sufficiency. These female figures comprise a court of love, 49

‘Que cils a trop plus malement,/ Grieté, tourment, mal, et souffraite/ Qui treuve sa dame forfaite/ Contre lui en fausse maniere,/ Que la trés douce dame chiere/ Qui avera son dous amy/Conjoint a son cuer, sans demy,/ Par amours, sans autre moien,/ Puis le savera en loien/ De la mort ou il demourra,/ Si que jamais ne le verra./ Et comment l’osastes vous dire,/ Ne dedens vos livres escrire?’, Navarre, ed. Palmer, p. 46.

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women who try Machaut, inviting him to defend himself, debating his assertions and, most interestingly, determining the verdict that he has argued immoderately and poorly. This court setting and the speeches that Machaut imagines offer an intriguing way into reading the end of Chaucer’s Prologue to the Legend. In the course of the pleadings the allegorical women respond to Machaut’s examples of men who have suffered greatly because of false lovers with a series of examples of faithful women and false lovers – Dido and Aeneas (Navarre, ll. 2095–132), Theseus, Ariadne and Phaedra (Navarre, ll. 2728–69), Jason and Medea (Navarre, ll. 2770–804). All of these women are adduced as evidence, and their narratives evaluated not on the basis of ethics or emotional response so much as on the basis of relevance. Responding to these stories of female fidelity and male betrayal, Guillaume rejects the stories of Theseus and Jason as beside the point, saying they have ‘nothing to do with the issue we’re arguing,/ And this is hardly the first,/ Nor will it be the last betrayal/ To be discovered among lovers,/ Both women and men’ (Navarre, ll. 2825–9). A second issue is then raised by Franchise/Frankness who offers these rejected stories, observing, ‘A man might suffer as much bitterness as women do;/ In any case the man has a hundred/ Remedies unavailable to women’ (Navarre, ll. 2820–2). Later Prudence picks up this same theme, and describes the fate of women who love this way: And so it is with many ladies Who surrender both heart and soul And whatever is theirs to their lovers, And when each woman has given so much That their men acquire knightly honor, Something manifest in word and action, The women have no reward at all in turn, Except a little glory in the deed itself. The men get the kernel; the women have the chaff. Whatever might happen, men find honor in some way. But if something turns out wrong at any time, The ladies are the first to suffer (Navarre, ll. 2977–88).50 50

‘Einsi est il de pluseurs dames/ Qui mettent les cuers et les ames/ Et quanqu’elles on [t?] en leurs amis,/ Et quant tant chascune y a mis/ Qu’il sont en vaillance parfait,/ Apparent par ouevre et par fait,/ Elles n’en ont autre salaire/ Fors un petit de gloire au faire./ Il ont le grain;/ ells on la paille;/

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Guillaume’s response to this is to plead obliquely, asserting that women’s suffering cannot be deep or long because of the well-known fact of women’s inherent instability in matters of love: ‘… I affirm/ That nothing’s stable in a woman’s heart,/ Nothing’s certain, there’s no constancy/ But rather complete instability’ (Navarre, ll. 3019–22). Men, in contrast, possess a heart that ‘… is firm, secure,/ Wise, experienced, and mature,/ Virtuous and strong enough to endure,/ But humble in suffering adversity’ (Navarre, ll. 3047–50). Sufficiency then invokes the stories of Thisbe and Hero to refute Machaut. The pleadings on both sides are not linear, but accrete, point by various point, to make a case. The verdict of the court, requested of the judge but actually rendered by Moderation and Reason with the king’s acquiescence, leads in yet another direction: the defendant’s judgment. Guillaume is shown to have been immoderate in commending the man who, at the request of his lover, returned a ring she had given him by cutting off his finger and sending both to her, and generally to have pleaded ‘Things which are stupid, foolish, empty and vain’ (Navarre, l. 3630). Reduced to a worm-like level of insignificance like that endured by Chaucer, Machaut is convicted and instructed by Reason, For the custom of love is such That if anyone defames women, And does not recant doing so, afterward refraining, He must make severe amends Or pay quite dearly. Now about this first misdeed, I tell you, on the part of sovereign Love, who is lord and master, The physician of the wounds of loving, That the judgment here has been made That you are to be condemned. So it’s necessary for you to make amends; The time for this quickly approaches. Furthermore, I am empowered to order you To make amends – and you must do so – For another deed that displeases me,

Car l’onneur ont, comment qu’il aille./ E s’aucune fois leur meschiet,/ Tout premiers seur les dames chiet’; ibid., pp. 132–4.

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Exemplary Women Namely that you undertook a debate Against a lady of such worth … (Navarre, ll. 3800–17).51

Bested in court, Guillaume receives three penances for his three errors of pleading: first, his failure to prove that the Clerk who went out of his mind did so because of his lady, rather than another cause; second, his citing that the knight who cut off his finger with the ring on it created a ‘monument’ of shame and madness; third, his mistake about the suicide of the Chatelaine of Vergy which was caused by her lover who was not a sufferer, but a cause of suffering. Machaut’s penance is to compose a lay, a song of three stanzas and a refrain, and a ballade. This invocation of some of the conventions of courts of love offers a context in which to place the scene among Alceste, the God of Love and Chaucer in the Prologue to the Legend, as well as Alceste’s direction to Chaucer annually to write a lengthy legend to be presented to Queen Anne. The God of Love’s long diatribe against Chaucer, like the pleadings and charges in Machaut’s poem, evolves from point to point: he is a slanderer (LGW G, ll. 249–50), a heretic (LGW G 256) , an aged doter (LGW G, l. 261), a reader who cannot separate ‘the draf of storyes … and the corn’ (LGW G, l. 313). The god’s chief accusation is that Chaucer has chosen selectively to tell stories of unfaithful women rather than of the good women who are ‘clene maydenes, trewe wyves …’ and ‘stedefaste wydewes’ (LGW G, ll. 282–3), who choose death before dishonor, not for religious reasons, but ‘for verray vertu and clennesse,/ And for men schulde sette on hem no lak’ (LGW G, ll. 285–98). In ascribing a concern with honor and reputation – fame – to the good women who people the books Chaucer has read, the God of Love centers his defense of women and his charge against Chaucer in Chaucer’s poetry. Alceste’s pleading for Chaucer, which follows, also focuses on the bokes of poetry he has written and his intention. Chaucer’s very recognition of Alceste 51

‘Car d’Amours est tells li usages/ Que s’aucuns des dames mesdit,/ S’il ne s’en refreint et desdit,/ Amender le doit hautement/ Ou comparer moult chierement,/ Or de ce meffait premerein/ Vous di de par le souverain/ Amours, qui est maistres et sires,/ Des plaies amoureuses mires:/ Jugemens en est ordenez/ Dou quell vous estez condempnez./ Si qu’amender le vous couvient;/ Hastivement li terms vient./ Encor vous puis je commander/ Si qu’il vous couvient amender/ Un autre fait qui me desplait,/ De ce que vous prenistes plait/Contre dame de tel vaillance…’; ibid., p. 170.

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derives from a book, for the God of Love says, ‘Hast thow nat in a bok, lyth in thy cheste/ The grete goodnesse of the queene Alceste …’ (LGW G, ll. 498–9), and Chaucer replies, ‘Yis,/ Now knowe I hire …’ (LGW G, ll. 505–6), books being the key to knowledge as well as to remembrance. The women cited in the Prologue to the Legend are produced, as in Machaut’s poem, as evidence in a trial of intention and deed, in which Chaucer is found to have offended the God of Love. In their interaction Alceste, Chaucer and the God of Love do not act within the fictional paradigm of court pleading, but within a paradigm of queenly intercession. The God of Love’s wrath is assuaged and his judgment is influenced by a woman whom he praises both for her reputation preserved in books and as ‘so charytable and trewe/ That nevere yit sith that the world was newe/ To me ne fond I betere non … Al lyth in yow, doth with hym what yow leste;/ And al foryeve …’ (LGW G, ll. 434–40). Chaucer is pardoned and Alceste decides what his penance will be. She orders him to write poetry and directs him annually to send a poem in praise of a good woman to the Queen ‘at Eltham or at Sheene’ (LGW F, l. 497) on Alceste’s behalf. In ending as they do, both Machaut and Chaucer’s poems, separated by approximately twenty-five years and significant cultural differences, announce their participation in ongoing Anglo-French courtly concern for the defense of women in love through the production of poetry. While debate still flourishes about how ‘real’ courts of love were,52 whether they had jurisdiction in custom, in 52

This vexed subject remains unsettled, but a good deal of evidence suggests the existence of social puys focused on honoring women and the production of poetry. On the origin of the idea of courts of love, see J. F. Benton, ‘The Evidence for Andreas Capellanus Re-Examined Again’, Studies in Philology 59 (1962), 471–8. P. Remy has argued that such courts never became functional in adjudicating disputes, but remained social, literary phenomena; see his ‘Les “cours d’amour”: légende et réalité’, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles 7 (1954–55), 179–97 (esp. pp. 196–7). P. Goodrich, in Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (New York, 1996), constructs the case that courts of love did exist to adjudicate interpersonal disputes, a ‘minor jurisprudence’ that ‘challenges the law of masters, the genre and categories of the established institution’ (p. 3), jurisdictions that were eventually subsumed into more ‘traditional’ law. See, too, his ‘Gynaetopia: Feminine Geneaologies of Common Law’, Journal of Law and Society 20 (1993), 276–308. A. Piaget discusses the foundation, membership and practices of Charles VI’s cour amoureuse in ‘La Cour Amoureuse: Dite de Charles VI’, Romania 20 (1891), 417–54.

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courtly play or in arbitration, the popularity of the idea of such courts and their close link to the production of formal genres of poetry in praise of women found expression in 1400 in the constitution of the Cour Amoureuse, a combination court of love and aristocratic puy established by Charles VI of France during the plague winter of 1399–1400 and recorded in Statuts de la Cour Amoureuse, Copie de la chartre de la Court D’Amours, publiée à Paris en l’Ostel d’Artoiz, le jour Saint Valentin, l’an de grace mil quartre cens.53 The statuts largely concern organizational elements of the court and puy, but their selfproclaimed reasons for existence offer insight into Chaucer’s themes and his poetic choices in the Legend. The court exists to exalt the virtues of humility and loyalty, for ‘l’honneur, loenge, recommandacion et service de toutes dames et damoiselles, laquelle fondacion florissant en exemplees de bonne meurs …’.54 In particular it exalts love through poetry and condemns all those who create or cause to be created dittierz, complaintes, rondeaux, virelays, balades, lays ou autres quelconques façon et taille de rethorique, rimee ou en proze, au deshonneur, reproche, amenrissement ou blame de dame ou dames, damoiselle ou damoiselles, ensemble quelconques femmes, religieuses ou autres, trespassees ou vivans, pour quelconques cause que ce soit, tant soit grieve dolereuse ou desplaisant.55

Women are to have the right to petition this court, as well as the power to judge the quality of poetry submitted at the frequent meetings of the court, which in addition to the first Sunday of the month also included the five annual Feasts of the Virgin Mary and a May Day celebration.56 Failure to abide by the central principle of the court, or any of the rules about attendance and participation, invited 53 54 55

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La Cour Amoureuse Dite de Charles VI, vol. 1, Étude et édition critique des sources manuscrites, ed. C. Bozzolo and H. Loyau (Paris, 1982). Ibid., p. 36. Ibid., p. 42; ‘stories, complaints, rondeaus, virelays, balades, lays or whatever other pattern and form of fine language, in rhyme or prose, to the dishonor, reproach, diminishment or blame of a lady or ladies, maiden or maidens, women of any sort, religious or lay, dead or alive, for whatever cause at all such that they may cause sorrow or displeasure’. An implicit invocation of the origin of such puys in honor of the Virgin Mary. See A. F. Sutton, ‘Merchants, Music, and Social Harmony: the London Puy and its French and London Contexts, circa 1300,’ The London Journal 17 (1992), 1–17; and H. Cooper, ‘London and Southwark Poetic Companies: “Si tost

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public shaming in the form of the obliteration of one’s coat of arms, publicly displayed in the chamber dedicated for the purposes of the court. In addition to the nobility of France, membership in the cour was open to men of many classes, lay and clerical; royal secretaries like Jean de Castel, son of Christine de Pizan, were particularly welcome.57 The large roster of members included those ‘ayans experte congnoissance en la science de rethorique, approouvez factistes par apparence et renommee’; such men were to have the title ‘de Ministre de la Court d’amours’. The challenge was to write poetry on demand, according to set refrains, in set forms and for specific dates. Poetry was submitted and judged by women chosen for their wisdom and discretion. Standards were strict and any verse awarded a prize had to be free of false rhymes, neither too long nor too short in regard to meter and fulfill all the expectations of form.58 Descriptions of poetic forms – and condemnations of failure to adhere to them – echo Chaucer’s own descriptions in his Retraction of the forms he employed, and the concern with meter and length provides a context for his anxiety about scribal alterations of either that goes beyond mere frustration and may suggest a broader context for his concern. Was he part of such a court or puy?59 We know that Chaucer admired and exchanged work with both Deschamps and Graunson, and both V. J. Scattergood and R. F. Green have argued for the existence of similar affiliations dedicated to poetry in the court of Richard II.60 The similarity of pleading and judgment in Jugement dou roi de Navarre and the Legend of Good Women places the over-arching theme of the poem, to honor women, and the plan of writing one legend a year to be sent to the queen at court in the context of contemporary and evolving aspects of ­Anglo- French

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c’amis” and the Canterbury Tales’, in Chaucer and the City, ed. A. Butterfield, (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 109–26. He was secretary to the king in 1409, 1410, 1414, according to Bozzolo and Loyau (La Cour Amoureuse). La Cour Amoureuse, ed. Bozzolo and Loyau, p. 40. On the early fourteenth century London puy and participation of Chaucer’s French contemporaries in puys, see A. Butterfield, The Familiar Enemy: Chaucer, Language and Nation in the Hundred Years War (Oxford, 2009), pp. 234–6. See V. J. Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II’, and R. F. Green, ‘The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages , ed. V. J. Scattergood and J.W. Sherborne (New York, 1983), pp. 29–43, 87–108.

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court culture particularly attentive to the status of women linked to poetry through courtly rituals.

John Gower: the Personal and the Political In Law in the Courts of Love, Peter Goodrich succinctly articulates the essential and well-known principle of love in late medieval English culture: ‘the jurisdiction of love traditionally concerned the hierarchical relation between sovereign and subject and was predicated upon the identity of all such relationships’.61 Gower’s final words on love in the eighth book of Confessio amantis62 revisit the characters and themes of his entire poem where domestic relationships function as types of political relationships in which covenants, exchanges and value figure prominently. After Venus has reminded him that he is too old to enter into the exchanges of love – ‘What bargain scholde a man assaie,/ Whan that him lacketh for to paie?’ (CA VIII, ll. 2431–2) – he envisions Cupid’s parlement of young, lusty lovers focused on the twin pursuits of chivalry and love (CA VIII, ll. 2497–9). Theseus and Phedra, Jason and Medea, Troilus and Criseyde, Pyramus, Dido, Phyllis and Demophon, Ariadne, Cleopatra, Thisbe, Progne and Philomela all appear within the group (CA VIII, ll. 2520–83). But paramount in this parlement are the four faithful wives, held in ‘reverence,/ As thogh thei hadden be goddesses,/ Of al this world or emperesses’ (CA VIII, ll. 2610–12). Penelope, Lucrece, Alceste and Alcione are honored for having proven faithful in their lives, exemplars of marital fidelity, a type of political fidelity. Understanding Gower’s ideas of love means understanding how he connects love to politics. The two recensions of the ending of Confessio amantis help clarify the connection. The earlier mentions Chaucer as a disciple of Venus and her devoted poet, who in his youth had written ‘ditees and songes glade’ (CA VIII, l. *2945) in her praise. Her last words to Gower are to urge Chaucer in his ‘latere age’ to ‘make his testament of love/ As thou hast do thi schrifte above,/ So that mi court it mai recorde’ (CA VIII, ll. *2955–7), a passage that contains possible reference to a court of love, or a puy. A prayer for Richard, asking 61 62

Goodrich, Law in the Courts of Love, p. 48. John Gower, Confessio Amantis, ed. Russell A. Peck, 3 vols. (Kalamazoo MI, 2003–06).

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that he may promote ‘Love and acorde’ (CA VIII, l. *3018) at home and abroad, follows, and a leave-taking of the love that bargains and seeks repayment allows the poem to conclude with an affirmation of a better kind of love which is Withinne a mannes herte affermed, And stant of charité confermed, That love is of no repentaile; For it berth no contretaile, Which mai the conscience charge, But it is rather of descharge, And meedful heer and overal. Forthi this love in special Is good for every man to hoolde, (CA VIII, ll. *3099–107)

The so-called Lancastrian recension, a later revision in light of changed politics, replaces the prayer for Richard with a prayer for England, and highlights the political failure of charity, under pressure of mercantile exchange and the monetization of social bonds. Love fades while trickery and deception flourish in a world where, as the Wife of Bath says, ‘al is for to selle’: Men sein that trouthe hath broke his bond And with brocage is goon aweie, So that no man can se the weie Wher for to fynde rightwisnesse. And if men sechin sikernesse Uppon the lucre of marchandie, Compassement and tricherie Of singular profit to wynne, Men seyn, is cause of mochil synne, And namely of divisioun … (CA VIII, ll. 3032–41)

And, like Chaucer at the end of the Troilus, Gower concludes his great work on love with a formal, rhetorically structured affirmation of the power of spiritual love modeled on an ideal of free grace and mercy: … thilke love which that is Withinne a mannes herte affermed, And state of charité confermed: Such love is goodly for to have, Such love mai the bodi save, Such love mai the soule amende.

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Exemplary Women The hyhe God such love ous sende Forthwith the remenant of grace, So that above in thilke place Wher resteth love and alle pes, Oure joie mai ben endeles. (CA VIII, ll. 3162–72)

Gower’s project in Confessio amantis was to instruct through pleasure, following his middle way of mirth and solace.63 Part of the pleasure of his tales is the sheer delight he takes in telling them. In contrast to Chaucer’s abbreviated versions, Gower’s versions of the stories of Pyramus and Thisbe, Medea, Dido, Ariadne, Philomela and Lucrece dwell on details and develop complicated plots. The structure of Confessio amantis is overtly didactic, the alignment between exemplar and moral point always articulated.64 Gower’s examples, however, are often expressed in rich poetry, while Chaucer chooses an opposite course: the naked text, brief narratives which pare down the stories so that what details and elements of plot remain achieve significance for the reader without interpretive directives from the author. Gower is famous for his clarity about the moral ends for which he tells his tales. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is placed in Book 3, among tales of wrath, to illustrate the perils of willfulness and folhaste, a form of violence that comes of will and desire that can lead to disaster. Gower’s story is a tale of the compulsion of love that cannot be denied and of imprudent hastiness. The walled city that encloses the lovers symbolizes the constraints they labor under, their parents’ opposition and the countervailing power of love that impels them. Cupid ‘hath so the thinges schape,/ That thei ne mihte his hand ascape’ (CA III, ll. 1351–2). The lion figures love’s devouring passion as it comes to the well and destroys Thisbe’s wimple in its bloody mouth while she hides. Pyramus’s discovery of the same bloody wimple results in his ‘sodenly’ taking out ‘His swerd al nakid … In his folhaste’ (CA III, ll. 1428–30) and having prayed to the gods that he might have Thisbe for his love in another world, ‘For hiere wolde he noght abide …’ (CA III, l. 1441), he impales 63 64

H. Cooper, ‘“Peised Evene in the Balance”: A Thematic and Rhetorical Topos in the Confessio Amantis’, Mediaevalia 16 (1993), 113–39. On the individual apprehension of ethical precepts and performance of ethics, see J. A. Mitchell, ‘Gower for Example: Confessio Amantis and the Ethics of Exemplarity’, Exemplaria 16 (2004), 203–34.

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himself upon his sword which passes through his heart, ‘With his folhaste and deth he nam’ (CA III, l. 1447). Thisbe is less precipitate: she inveighs against Venus for compelling them to love and for destroying Pyramus undeservedly: This Piramus, which hiere I se Bledende, what hath he deserved? For he your heste hath kept and served, And was yong and I bothe also. Helas, why do ye with ous so? Ye sette oure herte bothe afyre, And maden ous such thing desire Whereof that we no skile cowthe; Bot thus oure freisshe lusti yowthe Withoute joie is al despended, Which thing mai nevere ben amended (CA III, ll. 1468–78).

In no rush to leave Pyramus, Thisbe embraces and kisses her dead lover until a force greater than her love overcomes her: ‘Til ate laste, er sche it wiste,/ So gret a sorwe is to hire falle,/ Which overgoth hire wittes alle./ As she which might it noght asterte’ (CA III, ll. 1486–9). She falls on the pointed sword and dies: ‘And thus bothe on o swerd bledende/ Thei weren found ded liggende’ (CA III, ll. 1493–4). The story of Dido, illustrative of sloth in the form of procrastination or Lachesce, concentrates on Dido’s great desire for Aeneas in opposition to his primary, if delayed, dedication to destiny. Aeneas is at fault for taking his ‘herbergage’ in Carthage, inflaming Dido’s desire, and then ‘as it be scholde,/ Fro thenne he goth toward Ytaile’ (CA IV, ll. 92–3). Dido writes to him ‘And dede him plainly for to wite,/ If he made eny tariinge’ (CA IV ll. 100–01) in his return she would be like the swan who destroys herself for her lost love. But he, having other thoughts on his mind, ‘hadde hise thoghtes feinte/ Towardes love and full of Slowthe,/ His time lette’ (CA IV, ll. 118–20), and Dido destroys herself. The moral is that ‘tariinge upon the need/ In loves cause is for to drede’ (CA IV, ll. 139–40). Gower’s story of Dido is brief in comparison to Chaucer’s, but his story of Medea and Jason is infinitely richer than Chaucer’s. Part of the tales of Book V, stories of Avarice, the story of Medea and Jason, Oetes and Eson and their multiple, conflicting desires, achieved through deception, work together to create a unified, multi-layered narrative in which Medea is lover, guide, witch and sorceress. Perjury 62

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is the form of avarice Gower addresses under the wider umbrella of the urge to profit in love, to gain what one desires, whatever the cost to others. Jason chiefly embodies this urge under the noble appearance of ‘worthi Jason’, who has a great desire to see ‘strange regiouns/ And knowe the condiciouns/ Of othre marches where he wente’ (CA V, ll. 3283–4). The tale is entwined with the story of Troy as Lamedon, king of Troy, refuses the Greek Argonauts permission to land, planting the seed of vengeance which will become the Trojan war (CA V, l. 3302f). The Argonauts are more favorably received by King Oetes of Colchis, who is charmed by Jason and worried that he might be destroyed in his quest and his destruction laid at Oetes’ door. Meanwhile Jason lives by a fatalistic philosophy – ‘Of every worldes cure/ Fortune stant in aventure’ (CA V, ll. 3349–50) – that guides his quest. When he cannot dissuade Jason from his planned course, Oetes summons his daughter Medea who immediately falls in love with Jason at first sight and he with her, until he thinks much less often of his ship than of Medea: ‘Al was Medea that he thoghte’ (CA V, l. 3407). Of one mind, they desire to marry and their marriage takes the form of a covenant: she will save his life in return for marriage, a contract sealed with their bodies: ‘If thou wolt holde covenant To love, of al the remenant I schal thi lif and honour save, That thou the flees of gold shalt have.’ He seide, ‘Al at youre oghne wille, Ma dame, I schal treuly fulfille Youre heste, whil mi lif mai laste.’ Thus longe he preide, and ate laste Sche granteth, and behihte him this, That whan nyht comth and it time is, Sche wolde him sende certeinly Such on that scholde him prively Alone into hir chambre bringe. He thonketh hire of that tidinge, For of that grace him is begonne Him thenkth alle other thinges wonne (CA V, ll. 3449–64)

In her chamber he swears on a figure of Jupiter that if Medea helps him achieve his purpose, ‘Thei scholde nevere parte atwinne,/ Bot evere whil him lasteth lif/ He wolde hire holde for his wif’ (CA V, ll. 3490–2). Jason achieves his quest, with her magical aid. Gower 63

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describes the achievement of the fleece in great detail, as well as Medea’s anxious watch for his return, the feast her father prepares and the lovers’ plan to steal away together – with her father’s wealth. With the dawn of the next day, Medea’s father and mother realize they have been robbed of a daughter as well as of wealth, as Gower describes Jason as heading ‘to Grece with his preie’ (CA V, l. 3927). In Greece, at Jason’s request, Medea summons her magic for Eson, invoking the dark powers of Hecate to rejuvenate him. She was, we learn, a goddess (CA V, l. 4107). Gower lavishes a great deal of description on the magic she performs, hundreds of lines in a tale nearly a thousand lines long are devoted to what Gower would likely have understood as a process akin to alchemy which was believed to contain the secret of how to reverse the state of matter.65 As the tale approaches its conclusion, Gower takes time to sum up the situation: Lo, what mihte eny man devise, A womman schewe in eny wise Mor hertly love in every stede, Than Medea to Jason dede? Ferst sche made him the flees to winne, And after that fro kiththe and kinne With gret tresor with him sche stal, And to his fader forth withal His elde hath torned into youthe, Which thing non other woman couthe. But how it was to hire aquit The remembrance duelleth yit. (CA V, ll. 4175–86)

Gower constructs their relationship as a bargain, fundamentally a covenant of exchange. Medea has ‘fulfild his wille’ and he ‘scholde of riht fulfille/ The trouthe, which to hire afore/ He hadde in the’yle of Colchos swore’ (CA V, ll. 4189–92), but, instead, he takes Creon’s daughter Creusa to wife, breaking covenant. Medea exacts a terrible revenge, giving Creusa a mantle that bursts into flame and burns her to death, and giving Jason the bodies of their two sons, whom she slew. At the end of the story, Medea joins Pallas Athena in her 65

On Gower’s serious interest in alchemy see C. P. Collette, Species, Phantasms and Images: Vision and Medieval Psychology in The Canterbury Tales (Ann Arbor, 2001), pp. 128–40.

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‘court above’ where she laments the falseness of love, and it is Jason who is left ‘in gret destresse’ (CA V, l. 4222). Jason is the perjurer, the man who enters into multiple bargains of exchange and seems to break them all. Medea, on the other hand, seems to live to create bargains and exchanges. Everything has a price and a value for her. The various elements of the story – the quest for the fleece, Eson’s desire for renewed youth, Jason and Medea’s desire for each other – are all negotiated for a price. Perjury is not just lying, but a form of avarice when truth and deception help negotiate exchanges that will not be honored. Such violation of the sacred concept of promise, particularly promise in cases of love and marriage, incurs terrible consequences. Gower’s story of Theseus and Ariadne, also in the fifth book of avarice, exemplifies ingratitude. As the tale unfolds, a theme of unnatural behavior provides a sub-textual commentary on the nature of ingratitude. While he was away at the siege of Troy, Minos’s wife Pasiphae conceived a ‘cruel monster’, the half-man half-bull Minotaur, in ‘a riote’, an act of wanton sensuality. The concept of the unkinde act that created the Minotaur and condemned the youth of Athens to death provides the theme for the tale in which Ariadne falls in love with Theseus through his reputation and his appearance (CA V, ll. 5334–7). She provides him the means of slaying the Minotaur, and subsequently yields herself to him after he promises marriage and life-long fidelity (CA V, ll. 5378–85). With her sister Fedra she elopes with Theseus and, fearful of the sea and the winds that drive the ship, asks Theseus to anchor at an island where she goes ashore and falls asleep. Gower explicates the betrayal that follows through repetition of the terms kinde and unkinde: Bot certes sche was evele macched And fer from alle loves kinde. For more than the beste unkinde Theseus, which no trouthe kepte, Whil that this yonge ladi slepte, Fulfild of his unkindeschipe Hath al forgete the goodschipe Which Adriane him hadde do (CA V, ll. 5422–29).

Using a rhetoric of exchange, Ariadne complains that Theseus has unkindly betrayed her and the exchange they had mutually ­promised: 65

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women I wende I hadde his love boght, And so deserved ate need, What that he stop upon his drede, And ek the love he me behihte, It is gret wonder hou he mihte Towardes me nou ben unkinde (CA V, ll. 5448–53)

The confessor hammers this point home in his final moralizing commentary, asserting that the story stands in ‘cronique of remembrance./ And ek it asketh a vengance/ To be unkinde in loves cas’ (CA V ll. 5471–3), lamenting both the unkinde abandonment of Ariadne and Theseus’s subsequent taking of Phedra, his wife’s sister, another unkinde deed. The final verdict is that Theseus and those like him are incapable of the natural, virtuous exchanges that help create the good society through honored bonds among individuals, for ‘he can no good dede aquite’: For thilke vice of which I meene, Unkindeschipe, where it falleth, The trouthe of mannes herte it palleth, That he can no good dede aquite. So mai he stonde of no merite Towardes God, and ek also Men clepen him the worldes fo; For he no more than the fend Unto non other man is frend, Bot al toward himself alone. Forthi, mi sone, in thi persone This vice above alle othre fle (CA V, ll. 5484–95)

The story of Theseus’s unnatural betrayal is followed by another example of the unkinde, the story of Tereus and Philomela, a story of rapacity, of overweening self-will which is manifest, says the Confessor, in the power of the strong to take what they want from the weak. The illustration of this sin is the story of Tereus in whom the sight of his sister-in-law Philomela generates compelling lust. When he finds time and place, he subsequently proceeds to satisfy that desire. The term rapacity, denoting greed in general and sexual desire in particular, is cognate with the term raptor, and Gower, like Chaucer in both the Troilus and the Legend, depicts desire through a metaphor of the power of the raptor: ‘O fader, o mi moder diere,/ Nou help!’(CA V, ll. 5635–6), cries Philomela, but Tereus is ‘so wod’ that he is beyond reason: 66

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When Tereus subsequently robs her of the power of human speech, she is robbed of the ability to form words, she can only form sounds, only ‘chitre and as a brid jargoune’ (CA V, l. 5700). Philomela, however, is not totally without power. She enacts the exchange template that governs so many of these stories – not aid in exchange for marriage, but here truth in exchange for deception, by resorting to art to weave the story of her betrayal. Silent, she is still able to tell the tale, because evil deeds cry out for vengeance. When she and Philomela are reunited, Progne finds her sister ‘specheles and deshonoured/ Of that sche hadde be defloured/ And ek upon hir lord sche thoghte,/ Of that he so untreuly wroghte/ And hadde his espousaile broke/ She makth a vou it schal be wroke’ (CA V, ll. 5811–16). Determined to settle a score, together the sisters repay Tereus in kind, unnatural act for unnatural act, as Progne kills her son and feeds his flesh to his father Tereus, who ‘Himself devoureth agein kinde,/ As he that was tofore unkinde’ (CA V, ll. 5905–6). All three, victims each in his or her own way, commit inhuman acts, and are metamorphosed into birds whose natures correspond to their own human nature: Philomela becomes a nightingale who keeps herself hidden and private, singing only at night; Progne becomes a swallow who ‘chitereth out in hir langage/ What falsehood is in marriage’ (CA V, ll. 6011–12); and Tereus is changed into a lapwing, ‘the brid falseste of all’ (CA V, l. 6047).66 Predation, the power of the strong against the weak, and the severing of social bonds recur in Gower’s tale of Lucrece in the seventh book of stories illustrating true chastity. This last of Gower’s versions of the collocation of stories that comprise much of our version of Chaucer’s Legend repeats many of the tropes and themes Gower employs to describe the self-alienation – or perhaps the self-revelation – that attends desire. Tarquin loses his wits as love’s ‘fyri dart’ (CA VII, l. 4852) wounds him. Like Januarie in Chaucer’s 66

A crested plover with an irregular flight and shrill, wailing cry. Its crest was said to signify royalty, while its long, sharp beak signified violence.

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Merchant’s Tale and like Theseus and Tereus in the Confessio, he allows his own imagination to define reality; he recalls Lucrece’s image, making what Chaucer terms a mirror of his mind, recalling the details of how she spoke and moved. Determining that she is the epitome of ‘wommanhiede’, he tries to devise ‘some crok./ Although it were agein hire wille,/ The lustes of his fleisshe fulfille;/ Which love was noght reasonable’ (CA VII, ll. 4892–5). Like ‘a wylde man’ he leaps on his horse and comes to Collacea, the gate of Rome, having ‘schape his net/ Hire innocence to betrappe’ (CA VII, ll. 4914–15). He enters the house, not by stealth, but by indirect ‘cousinage’, claiming relationship and the right to hospitality, ‘And as the tigre his time awaiteth/ In hope for to cacche his preie’ (CA VII, ll. 4944– 5). He is a man in the grip of an extreme emotion, without reason or self-restraint. The rape itself is barely described; sword in hand he enters her room, threatens her if she cries out, ‘And thus he broghte hire herte in doute/ That lich a lomb whanne it is sesed/ In wolves mouth, so was desesed/ Lucrece, which he naked fond’ (CA VII, ll. 4982–5). Lucrece swoons; he has his way with her unconscious body and leaves. In the morning, distressed and, like Philomela, ashamed of what she has suffered (CA VII, ll. 5033–50), she nevertheless tells her tale to her husband and father who swear to avenge her and hold her guiltless, praying her to compose herself. She is inconsolable and determined to pay the price for what has happened: she has been besmirched, her reputation put into question. The only way she can redeem and preserve that reputation is by taking her own life; a ‘naked’ sword is her means. Lucrece has exchanged her life for her reputation, the price of the rape for her. Her father and husband will take vengeance for the damage done not only to her but also to them, and by extension to the body politic vulnerable to the evil of powerful men like Tarquin, whose tyranny over others is indeed a form of rapine, sexual, political and economic. Gower concludes that ‘rihtwisnesse and lecherie/ Acorden noght in compaignie’ (CA VII, ll. 5125–6), an oblique but apt reference to the ideal of a just ruler in a just kingdom.

Christine de Pizan: Women’s Nature, Women’s Strength Christine de Pizan’s Cité des dames (City of Ladies, c. 1405) postdates Chaucer’s death and yet it serves as much as any work of Boccaccio’s, 68

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Machaut’s or Gower’s as part of the cultural moment that gave rise to the Legend. She wrote it at a time in French court and literary history when the defense of women became an open and debated issue. Christine’s son Jean de Castel was one of the original members of the Cour Amoureuse, the noble company designed for the twin purposes of defending women and writing poetry. Christine herself participated in the extended (1401–04) debate over the language and tone of the Romance of the Rose, which she redirected to the matter of the treatment and depiction of women’s ethical and moral selves.67 The City of Ladies, a defense of women, their contribution to culture and their mental capacities, is in many ways Christine’s most extended statement in the querelle des femmes. Close to the center of the French court, patronized by royal princes, her work reflects the melding of French court culture and Italian humanism, in which she was schooled by her father. In the City her subject is the nature and the deeds of women. Rejecting Boccaccio’s frequently invoked stereotype of the weak, deceitful woman, she affirms ‘There is not the slightest doubt that women belong to the people of God and the human race as much as men, and are not another species or dissimilar race, for which they should be excluded from moral teachings’,68 that men and women are similarly capable of fidelity and of deceit. Women, she asserts, can equal men intellectually: ‘Nature provided them with the quality of body and mind found in the wisest and most learned men.’69 The restriction placed upon women stems not from their capacities but from their need constantly to tend and preserve their fragile reputations. It is common knowledge that the City of Ladies rewrites Boccaccio’s Illustrious Women, using his text as a general outline, affirming where he is doubtful or skeptical, re-orienting the exemplary function of

67 68

69

For a clear and succinct yet detailed discussion of this topic, see N. Margolis, An Introduction to Christine de Pizan (Gainesville FL, 2011), p. 61f. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. E. J. Richards (New York, 1982), p. 187. ‘Et n’est mie doubte que les femmes sont aussi bien ou nombre du peuple de Dieu et de creature humaine que sont les hommes, and non mie une autre espece, ne de dessemblable generacion, par quoy elles doyent estre forcloses des enseignemens moraulx.’ Christine de Pizan, La Città delle Dame (dual language edition), trans. P. Caraffi; Middle French text ed. E. J. Richards (Milan, 1997), pp. 376–8). All future citations of City of Ladies in English and in French are to these two editions. City of Ladies, p. 64.

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some biographies, overriding Boccaccio’s mantra that women who excel in any way overcome their natural gender and act like men.70 Christine does so by gracefully co-opting Boccaccio’s opinions, as in her description of the poet Cornificia, one of Boccaccio’s illustrious women, whom he praises for her ability to rise above typical female sloth this way: How glorious it is for a woman to scorn womanish concerns and to turn her mind to the study of the great poets! Shame on slothful women and on those pitiful creatures who lack self-confidence! As if they were born for idleness and for the marriage bed, they convince themselves that they are useful only for the embraces of men, for giving birth, and for raising children. Yet, if women are willing to apply themselves to study, they share with men the ability to do everything that makes men famous.71

Christine attaches a moralization to the biography entirely different from Boccaccio’s screed against womanly inertia. Not blaming or excoriating women, she identifies lack of confidence and misplaced modesty – not inherent sloth or incapacity – as the forces restraining women from study: Boccaccio also talks about the attitude of women who despise themselves and their own minds, and who, as though they were born in 70

71

For discussions of the relationship of City of Ladies to Famous Women, see A. Jeanroy, ‘Boccace et Christine de Pisan: Le De Claris Mulieribus, principale source du Livre de la Cité des Dames’, Romania 48 (1922), 92–105; P. A. Phillippy, ‘Establishing Authority: Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris and Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames’, Romanic Review 77 (1986), 167–193; J. A. Kellogg, ‘Christine de Pizan and Boccaccio: Rewriting Classical Mythic Tradition’, in Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends, ed. C. N. Moore and R. A. Moody (Honolulu, 1989), pp. 124–31; G. Angeli, ‘Encore sur Boccace et Christine de Pizan: remarques sur le De Mulieribus Claris et le Livre de la Cité des Dames’, Le moyen français 50 (2002), 115–25, and D. M. González Doreste et F. del Mar Plaza Picón, ‘À propos de la compilation: Du De claris mulieribus de Boccace à Le Livre de la Cité des Dames de Christine de Pisan’, Le moyen français 51–3 (2002), 327–37. For a comparison of Chaucer and Christine see J. Laird, ‘Good Women and Bonnes Dames: Virtuous Females in Chaucer and Christine de Pizan’, The Chaucer Review 30 (1995), 58–70. Famous Women, pp. 353–5; ‘O femineum decus neglexisse muliebria et studiis maximorum vatum applicuisse ingenium! Verecundentur segnes et de se ipsis misere diffidentes; que, quasi in ocium et thalamis nate sint, sibi ipsis suadent se, nisi ad amplexus hominum et filios concipiendos alendosque utiles esse, cum omnia que gloriosos homines faciunt, si studiis insudare velint, habeant cum eis comunia’, ibid., p. 354.

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Joel Blanchard discusses Christine as a compiler, an agent in whose choices he sees the ability to overpower a source, Déplacement des références, suppression ou amplification, contamination et hybridation des modèles révèlent une sorte de passion pour le parti pris littéraire chez le compilateur qui prend des libertés avec le texte choisi … Le compilateur sa livre à un bricolage des textes compilés. Comme dans un travail de marqueterie, il utilise bribes, fragments, morceaux pour construire une œuvre dont il est seul à connaître le dessein.73

In just this manner, Christine’s concern with proving women’s capacity for study as equal to men’s leads her to break open and recombine her sources, adding, shifting emphasis, constructing a text she alone can foresee. On the subject of fidelity she continues creating her pattern of equal male and female ability, and undertakes to compare a series of mythical and historical women to mythical and historical male figures, particularly a series of Roman emperors,74 72

73

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City of Ladies, p. 65. ‘Dist oultre cellui Bocace, certiffiant le propos que je te disoie de l’engin des femmes qui se deffient d’elles meismes et de leur entendement, lesquelles, ainsi que se elles fussent nees es montaignes sans savoir que est bien et qu’est honneur, se descouragent et dient que ne sont a autre chose bonnes ne prouffitables, fors pour acoler les hommes et porter et nourrir les enfans. Et Dieu leur a donné le bel entendement pour elles appliquer, se elles veulent, en toutes les choses que les glorieux et excellens hommes font, se elles veulent, estudier les choses ne plus ne moins leur sont communes, comme aux hommes et pevent par labour honneste acquerir nom perpetuel …’; Città, pp. 156–8. On her co-optation of Boccaccio, see also City of Ladies, pp. 68, 78, 82, 84, 121–5. J. Blanchard, ‘Compilation et légitimation au xve siècle’, Poétique 74 (1988), 139–57 (pp. 152–3). Displacement of references, suppression or amplification, contamination and hybrization of originals reveals a kind of passion for literary creation on the part of the compiler who takes liberties with a chosen text … the compiler surrenders herself to a creation of bits of texts, as if creating a work of marquetry, s/he uses bits, fragments, pieces to construct a work of which s/he alone knows the design. City of Ladies, pp. 166–70. Interestingly, this discussion of imperial immorality is followed by Christine’s version of the Griselda story.

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who, she contends, were radically unfaithful and duplicitous. She uses imperial excesses as a way to show how women struggle against the imposition of a double moral standard. Keenly aware of the effect of this double standard, of the destructive ways women either internalize its values or rebel against them, she charges that men should not hold something to be a crime for women which they consider only a peccadillo for themselves … these men allow themselves liberties which they are unwilling to tolerate in women and thus they – and they are many – perpetrate many insults and outrages in word and deed.75

In the same way that she engages in a kind of historical bricolage in recounting the excesses of Roman emperors, she picks and chooses among the details of stories of ancient women. Her extensive catalogue of great and strong women includes the recurring group of classical heroines who appear in Chaucer’s Legend: Dido, Medea, Lucretia, Hypsipyle, Thisbe. In Christine’s work faithful women partner faithful men. Theseus is not the betrayer of Ariadne but the faithful lover of Hippolyta, who becomes his wife. Similarly Dido appears as the wise queen, chaste widow of Sichaeus, builder of Carthage. Hypsipyle appears as the brave and loving daughter of a father whose life she saves at the risk of her own. Initially Medea appears as a woman of arcane and powerful knowledge.76 Subsequently introduced as an example of fidelity, Medea, faithful lover of Jason, quietly endures his betrayal as one ‘who would rather have destroyed herself than do anything of this kind to him’; she ‘turned despondent, nor did her heart ever again feel goodness or joy’.77 Thisbe is described as a child, a very young woman who with Pyramus was ‘overwhelmed by too much love’, and plotted to meet her lover by a white mulberry tree outside the city. Of the two, Christine says, she was the one who ‘loved the more’, and so, when she saw her dead lover, she ‘did not wish to live any longer’ 75

76 77

Ibid., p. 165. ‘et non pas reputer a elles estre grant crisme ce que ilz tiennent a eulx estre petit deffault … Mais de fait ilz se donnent tele auctorité que ilz ne veulent supporter les femmes, ains leur font and dient, plusieurs en y a moult d’oultrages et de griefs …’; Città, p. 336. City of Ladies, p. 69. Ibid., p. 190.

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and killed herself with the same sword that took his life.78 Lucretia’s story is told in two parts in the second book. Initially it is used to refute the claim that women want to be raped, casting her suicide as a direct result of the mortification of rape: ‘I cannot free myself from the torment nor extricate myself from the pain’, she says before she kills herself. Tarquin’s villainy spelled the end of kingship in Rome. But even more important for Christine, ‘… because of this outrage perpetrated on Lucretia, so some claim, a law was enacted whereby a man would be executed for raping a woman, a law which is fitting, just and holy’.79 Later in the same book Christine returns to the story of Lucretia to illustrate Rectitude’s contention that woman are loved for their virtues more than their beauty. Lucretia was raped, according to Christine, ‘because of her great integrity’, which attracted Tarquin’s lust when he arrived at her house and ‘saw her outstanding honesty, her smile and fair conduct, and her serene manner. He was so captivated by her virtue that he began to plan the folly which he committed later.’80 Ironically Lucretia suffers for performing the kind of virtue Christine lauds above all, that which springs from temperance, measure and prudence. In writing of Isis, who introduced the art of gardening, Christine describes her as a law-giver, helping the Egyptians, who ‘until then lived like savages without law, justice or order, to live according to the rule of the law’.81 Ops, queen of Crete, is praised for her prudence: ‘she knew how to conduct herself most prudently and steadfastly among the prosperities and adversities which befell her during her lifetime’.82 Similarly Dido/Elissa built Carthage and then ‘instituted statutes and ordinances so that the people would live according to the rule of law and justice. So remarkably and prudently did she govern that her reputation spread to all lands.’ She became famous for her ‘outstanding strength, courage and her bold undertaking’.83 But when Aeneas came, her prudence deserted her. She loved him without measure, pouring out her wealth and kindness:

78 79 80 81 82 83

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

p. p. p. p. p. p.

192. 162. 207. 77. 95. 95.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women she had restored and enriched him with property and ease, his ships refreshed, repaired, and placed in order, filled with treasure and wealth, like a woman who had spared no expense where her heart was involved.84

His secret betrayal led to her death. She was, Christine says, a woman ‘who had loved too much’, who under the influence of the god of Love forgot the ideals of measure and prudence.85 The danger of loving too much permeates Christine’s advice to women.86 In the story of Lisabetta and Other Lovers, she concludes a group of several sensational tales saying she could tell many more stories of women who come to grief from love: stories of women overcome by such great love that they loved too much, too deeply, and too constantly … these pitiful examples … should in no way move women’s hearts to set themselves adrift in the dangerous and damnable sea of foolish love, for its end is always detrimental and harmful to their bodies, their property, their honor, and – most important of all – to their souls. Women should conduct themselves wisely and with good sense and should know how to avoid this kind of love and not to listen to those who incessantly strive to deceive them in such cases.87

She concludes the City of Ladies with a direct address to women of all stations and classes to act well, and above all to be wary of men who would seduce, discard and finally destroy them, men who are: … deceptive flatterers who, using different charms, seek with various tricks to steal that which you must consummately guard, that is, 84

85 86 87

Ibid., p. 189. ‘elle l’ot tout reffait et enrichi d’avoir et d’aise, ses nefs refrechies, refaites et ordenees, plain de tresor et de biens, comme celle qui n’avoit espargnié l’avoir la ou le cuer estoit mis’; Città, p. 380 Christine, like Bocaccio, frequently observes that those who love ‘too much’ come to grief; see Thisbe and Hero, City of Ladies, p. 193. Her anxiety about this subject recurs in Le livre des trois vertus and in Le livre du duc des vrais amans. City of Ladies, p. 202. ‘… des histories des femmes en tele fole amour surprises que trop ont amé de grant amour sanz varier … ces piteux exemples … ne doivent mie estre cause d’esmouvoir les courages des femmes de eulx ficher en celle mer tres perilleuse et dampnable de fole amour, car tousjours en est la fin a leur grant prejudice et grief en corps, en biens et en honneur et a l’ame. Qui plus est, si feront que sages celles qui par bon sens la saront eschever et non donner audience a ceulx qui sanz cesser se traveillent d’elles decevoir en tel cas’; Città, pp. 402–4.

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Exemplary Women your honor and the beauty of your praise. Oh, my ladies, flee, flee the foolish love they urge on you! Flee it, for God’s sake, Flee! For no good can come to you from it. Rather, rest assured that however deceptive their lures, their end is always to your detriment. And do not believe the contrary, for it cannot be otherwise. Remember, dear ladies, how these men call you frail, unserious, and easily influenced but yet try hard, using all kinds of strange and deceptive tricks to catch you, just as one lays traps for wild animals.88

Good women find literature a dangerous place. Appropriated, co-opted for authorial ends, their lives are continually re-inscribed, expanded, excised at the will of a compiler. What this brief survey shows is that Chaucer’s subject, good women, as well as his own adaptation of the exemplary stories he and his contemporaries tell, shares a great deal in method as well as topic. All these authors are compilers in the way that Blanchard uses the term, artisans who fit together pieces of cultural history into designs of their own making. Each has a different design in mind, and each succeeds in crafting exemplary stories to illustrate the particular goal they hope to achieve. Like Machaut, all these authors use the stories of classical women as ‘evidence’ for a point of view. Chaucer’s Legend is no different; in fact, if anything, this brief survey of how his contemporaries treated the literary tradition he also works with reveals that the Legend is typical in theme as well as in construction. Chaucer uses the exemplary stories he tells for his own purposes, creating original stories out of common sources. As is usually the case with Chaucer, we can see his work – brilliant, ultimately original in its ability to appropriate and redirect – is part of the larger mosaic of the culture which shapes his thinking and which his art brings to life for us hundreds of years later.

88

Ibid., p. 256. ‘… losangeurs decevables, qui par divers attrais tachent par mains ours a soubtraire ce que tant souverainement devez garder, c’est a savoir, voz honneurs et la beauté de vostre loz. O! mes dames, fuyez, fuyez la fole amour dont ilz vous admonnestent! Fuyez pour Dieu, fuyez, car nul bien ne vous en peut venir, ains soiés certaines que quoyque les aluchemens en soient decevables que tousjours en est la fin a voz prejudices et ne croyez le contraire, car autrement ne peut estre. Souviengne vous, cheres dames, comment ces hommes vous appellent fraisle, legiers et tost tournees, et comment toutvoyes ilz quierrent tous engines estranges et decevables a grans peines et travaulx pour vous prendre, si que on fait les best aux las’; Città, pp. 500–2.

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Chapter 3 As Etik Seith: Aristotelian Ideas in the Legend

Men were deceivers ever, One foot in sea, and one on shore, To one thing constant never1

Presented as tales of women’s fidelity in love, the nine legends of good women tell other, more complex stories about the danger of lust and of loving, of the insidious nature of deception masquerading as benign intent, and of the paradoxical dangers inherent in generosity – for both giver and recipient. Such perennial issues of social and moral behavior were rendered highly visible and highly topical by the popularity of Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics in the learned secular culture of late medieval Europe. The Ethics in particular, with its explication of the value of moderation and the psychological dynamics of gift exchange, provides a rich context in which to understand Chaucer’s larger project in the Legend. The previous chapter surveyed how other major late medieval writers adapted stories of faithful and betrayed women for various instructional and thematic purposes. In this chapter I want to lay out some lines of thinking about what ends Chaucer’s versions of the same stories might have served. I propose that the stories draw attention through theme and narrative pacing to the virtues of moderation, the dangers of emotional extremes, and to broken covenants, and their effects on individuals and on the larger community. The intellectual matrix in which Chaucer and his literary contemporaries created their poetry valorized Aristotelian ideas of social and  1

Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing, Act 2, scene iii.

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political virtue – reason, moderation, alignment of intention, word and deed: all contributed to the idea of bien commun, the comon profit of Chaucer’s English. Chaucer recognized the value of these political virtues as well as the human failings that prevent their full attainment.

Valuing Ethics While he was in residence at the court of Robert of Naples, Boccaccio translated a Latin version of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics into Italian, creating his own personal copy of what was then a mustread text. The Ethics, well known to European clerks and university scholars, became a text of interest to early humanists, useful in understanding the springs of human happiness and the paths that lead to or turn away from virtue.2 This chapter argues that the Legend of Good Women reflects the broad influence of Aristotelian thought in its Prologue as well as in the individual legends. However much it may applaud fidelity, the Legend of Good Women is a cautionary, not a celebratory, poem. It tells stories of haste, excess and imprudence under the guise of love. Citing Aristotle’s famous apothegm from the Ethics – ‘virtue lies in the mean’ – in his Prologue (LGW F, l. 165), Chaucer invokes Aristotelian ideas of the mean, of mediation, excess and deficiency from the beginning of the poem. He lavishes his greatest praise on Alceste, the woman who practices emotional restraint and who works to control extreme emotion in the God of Love. In the Prologue Alceste is a mediator who reconciles the God of Love and his superabundance of power and anger with Chaucer’s lack of either power or authority and his status as little better than a ‘worm’ (LGW F, l. 318, G, l. 244). She does not reconcile their differences by homogenizing them, but by negotiating a new position for them to share, creating an exchange. Chaucer’s poetry, previously so offensive to the god, now will serve not just as the site of Chaucer’s explorations of love’s power, its happiness and sorrows, but as a site designed to honor the God of Love and exalt his power through stories of faithful lovers. Through Alceste’s temperate mediation

 2

For an exposition of the increasing popularity of the Ethics over the course of the fourteenth century in a variety of contexts, see Kaye, Economy and Nature.

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the god’s anger is restrained, and Chaucer is both chastened and empowered to craft a new literary creation. The presence of Aristotelian ideas in the Legend reflects a much larger intellectual phenomenon than one writer’s interest. By the mid to late fourteenth century Aristotle’s philosophy had moved out of the schools of Paris and Oxford into wider society, which included the Anglo-French courts. As Joel Kaye has pointed out, ‘The biography of virtually every natural philosopher of note from the late thirteenth century reveals that the world of higher thought was not bounded by the walls of the university or cloister, whether actual or metaphorical.’3 On matters relating to the smooth functioning of household and polity, Aristotle provided an authoritative framework in which to parse the recurring questions of virtue, moderation and right action in praxis. In France Charles V authorized a translation program of the Politics and the Ethics for the French nobility so that they might become better lords and better people by reading these texts.4 Nicole Oresme, Charles’s trusted adviser, a man of immense learning and inventive imagination, translated the Politiques and the Ethiques into French at the king’s command (1370–74). And while Richard II had no comparable program or aspiration, Aristotle’s Ethics was known in English court circles during the reign of Edward III, for many of the men in Richard de Bury’s circle developed ideas of exchange and proportion based on Aristotle.5 Chaucer was closely associated with Aristotle by his Kaye, Economy and Nature, p. 5. Oresme’s translations of both the Ethics and the Politics were the first vernacular translations of those works (1370–74) to survive. Menut’s 1970 edition of the Ethiques, p. 11, mentions a now lost 1305 translation: Maistre Nicole Oresme le livre de Politiques d’Aristote, ed. A. D. Menut (Philadelphia, 1970). I am grateful to Peter Biller for the following background on the matter of transmission and lexicon: ‘Of course, some of the ideas of Aristotle’s libri morales incorporated into Giles of Rome’s De regimine principum had acquired vernacular dissemination through the French and Italian translations of De regimine. To the picture of vernacular dissemination we could add Brunetto Latino’s pre-1267 Li livres dou tresor which translated into French a 1244 translation into Latin of the Arabic version of the Compendium Alexandrinum, a late (but pre-seventh century) Greek compendium of the Ethics.’  5 See Kaye, Economy and Nature, pp. 178–9. See also, chapter 1, de Bury, Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, on the Ethics, pp. 68–73 and passim. On the fate of Charles V’s library in the hands of the English, see J. Stratford, The Bedford Inventories: The Worldly Goods of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France, Society of Antiquaries (London, 1993), pp. 95–6, for how Bedford took possession of  3  4

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devoted protégé Hoccleve, who praised him as ‘heir in philosophy/ To Aristotle in our tonge’.6 Chaucer repeatedly invokes Aristotle in the Tales, the House of Fame, The Consolation of Philosophy and the Legend. In the Troilus, a story of immoderate love, Aristotelian ideas of the mean recur regularly. Some of these references are commonplaces, reflecting an almost proverbial status, as in statements such as ‘By his contrarie is every thyng declared’ (Tr I, l. 637), or ‘In every thing, I woot, ther lith mesure’ (Tr II, l. 715), ‘But wel I woot, the mene of it no vice is’ (Tr I, l. 689). Other references are more oblique, such as Troilus II, l. 392, ‘love for love is skillful guerdonynge’, which invokes Aristotle’s explication of proportionate exchange in which the self finds its pleasure in the other: ‘For ech of hem gan otheres lust obeye’ (Tr III, ll. 1690f). The Troilus is a poem heavily influenced by elements of the Ethics. Many scholars have recognized Aristotelian ideas of friendship in Pandarus and Troilus’s relationship and similarly Criseyde’s thoughtful consideration of whether to love in Book II has been explicated as an example of prudent control of emotion.7 References to the idea of moderation and the mean punctuate the narrative, most often articulated by Pandarus in proverbial form. Exchanges structure the plot, and male friendship is second only to heterosexual desire among the affective emotions Troilus feels. The friendship between Pandarus and Troilus is more fully developed and more self-consciously discussed in Chaucer’s version of the story than in Il Filostrato, a topic I will return to at the end of this chapter.8 Among the myriad lessons about human relationships French and presumably English aristocrats might have found useful the Louvre Library in 1422 on Charles VI’s death. See, too, Pierre Champion, La librairie de Charles d’Orléans (Paris, 1910), p. xxv, on how Charles d’Orléans acquired Oresme’s translation of the Ethiques after Bedford’s death in 1435.  6 T. Hoccleve, The Regiment of Princes, ed. C. R. Blyth (Kalamazoo MI, 1999), ll. 2087f.  7 See M. McAlpine, ‘Criseyde’s Prudence’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 25 (2003), 199–224.  8 See, for example, TR, BK I, ll. 582, 650–1, 972; BK III, l. 1590; BK V, l. 1730. The Aristotelian dimension of their friendship is discussed in R. G. Cook, ‘Chaucer’s Pandarus and the Medieval Ideal of Friendship’, The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 69 (1970), 407–24; L. Freiwald, ‘Swych Love of Frendes; Pandarus and Troilus’, The Chaucer Review 6 (1971), 120–9; A. Gaylord, ‘Friendship in Chaucer’s “Troilus”’, The Chaucer Review 3 (1969), 239–64.

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in Aristotle’s works, two topics seem particularly pertinent to Chaucer’s project in the Legend – the ideal of the mean, the balance point between excess and deficiency in emotions and actions, and the dynamics of exchanges within unequal social relationships. Both extreme emotional states and exchanges between unequal parties recur in the nine stories that comprise the poem, stories of love and betrayal, liberality and ruthless appropriation. In the Ethics and in the Politics, Aristotle and his translator Oresme parse, weigh and judge a variety of human relationships in the polis, the household and between individuals, within a template of excess and deficiency in which the ideal is rational moderation. The Aristotelian ideal of the mean, with its implicit anxiety about extremes, recurs in a great deal of late fourteenth century French courtly writing that deals with moderation and self-control. Froissart invokes it in L’horloge amoureuse, an allegory of self-restraint in love based on the new invention of the escapement mechanism for the mechanical clock. Philippe de Mézières is adamant about the importance of restraint of emotion in Le livre de la vertu du sacrement de mariage and in Le songe du vieux pelérin, as well as in his Epistre au roi Richart, and Christine de Pizan frequently expresses anxiety about the danger of emotional excess in women’s loving too much in the advice Le livre des trois vertus offers to noblewomen, and at greater length in Le livre du duc des vrais amans. The French court produced a particular interpretation of Aristotle in Nicole Oresme’s heavily glossed translation of Aristotle’s protean thinking about the mean and the dynamics of exchange.9 The importance of the mean as a point of balance between excess and default in late medieval thinking about human social and political interaction can be inferred from changes in the French lexicon. Equalization between excess and default was not an easy subject to discuss in a vernacular. The concept required a discourse adequate to convey generalization beyond what might be achieved by reliance on metaphors and tropes. Albert Menut, Oresme’s modern editor, writes that under the pressure of translation Nicole Oresme  9

Oresme’s glosses of the Ethiques are less full than those of the Politiques, but nevertheless warrant close attention because they are the place where he fashions Aristotle’s ideas for his contemporary readers, the secular nobility of France. In this text I cite Oresme’s glosses (which appear as ‘notes’ to each chapter) frequently as representative of contemporary fourteenth-century cultural attitudes.

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literally invented a new vocabulary of the mean; this collocation of words has persisted into our current lexicon for expressing ideas of the mean within human actions and emotions, as well as social exchanges. To meet the challenge of making Aristotle relevant to his French audience Oresme used two tactics: he employed a series of neologisms to convey Aristotle’s ideas and he used these neologisms in a series of explanatory and interpretive notes, essentially glosses, to his translation. Oresme’s new lexicon of social relationships for his French audience, and by extension for a Francophone English audience as well, introduces a new social register.10 His Table des moz divers et estranges, employed or created specifically for his translation of the Ethics, includes such familiar terms as aristocracie, civilité, contingent, democratie, demos, extreme, fortitude, monarchie, obligacion legal et moral, oligarchie, passion and rectitude. Menut has supplemented the fourteenth-century list of Moz divers et estranges with his own extensive list of words Oresme coined for his translation of the Ethics. They include such common and recognizable terms as inprudence, intemperance, modereement, moderer, proporcionnel, tragedies and voluntairement.11 Oresme’s glosses orient Aristotle’s ideas of social relationships to social issues pertinent to fourteenth-century noble culture. Not quite so independent as to constitute a parallel text, they nevertheless support Charles V’s intention that Oresme’s translation would function as a practical guide for the French nobility in the fourteenth century, addressing issues that mattered to them. In part the difficulty Oresme faced in creating a discourse of the mean derived from a shift in thinking about the concept itself near the end of the fourteenth century. He translated during a period 10

11

Menut describes Oresme’s translation as ‘free’ in the best sense of the term: ‘… the translator conceived his role to be something more than the mechanical task of setting down in French words approximately equivalent to corresponding words in the Latin text; his preoccupation is with the idea behind the word and even more than this with the clear interpretation of the idea … Oresme attempted and was in some measure successful in turning a foreign text into an indigenous work which could be read by a layman without too great awareness of its foreign origin’; Le Livre de Ethiques d’Aristote, ed. A. D. Menut (New York, 1940), p. 73. Ibid., pp. 79–83. On Oresme’s discourse of the mean and its influence on English see C. P. Collette, ‘Aristotle, Translation and the Mean: Shaping the Vernacular in Late Medieval Anglo-French Culture’, in Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England, c. 1100–c. 1500, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al. (York, 2009), pp. 373–85.

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in which the mean changed both its iconography and connotation. Before the late fourteenth century, as Charity Cannon Willard has shown, the iconography of the mean, or temperance, was largely a depiction of mixing, often of pouring liquids together to homogenize their differences.12 The iconography of Oresme’s manuscripts reflects a change, for it constructs the mean, the temperate balance between excess and deficiency, quite differently. In the manuscripts whose production he oversaw, the mean is depicted as a female figure, a queen, standing between a large male figure and a slight, gnomic male.13 The female figure, quite separate and different from the other two in aspect and dress, is regal and assured. Facing the reader, she represents a concept of the mean as powerful, a matter of imposition and achievement. We can glimpse some of the strengths represented in the iconography of the queen by reference to the Politics where the just polity, a product of temperance, is allegorized as a female who rules by virtue of the ‘industrie de sa prudence’, the ‘constance et fermeté de sa fortitude’ and the ‘pacience de son attrempance’,14 a series of intellectual and emotional postures often attributed to women. The discourse of the mean is one of governance, prudence, (at/c)temperaunce, reconciliation, modereement and moien, terms essential to describe the ethical moral qualities that foster social and political harmony.15 Chaucer is an early borrower of this lexicon, relying heavily on governance often in a rhyme position, and on the terms moien/mene, as well as temperance, actemperance and prudence. Just how and in what ways was Aristotle’s concept of the mean so vital to thinking about virtue and praxis in this period? Early in the Ethics Aristotle implies a basic somatic dimension to the concept of virtue by correlating the mean of virtue in the soul with regulation of essential, fundamental bodily habits, particularly in regard to food and drink. Moderation is essential to human well-being. Excess or lack of food can corrupt health, while moderation in the diet can 12 13 14 15

On this see C. C. Willard, ‘Christine de Pizan’s “Clock of Temperance”’, L’Esprit Créateur 2 (1962), 150–54. Les Ethiques d’Aristote, Brussels, Bibl. Royale Albert Ier, MS 9505–06, fol. 24r. Le livre de Politiques, ed. Menut, p. 44. Prudence and (ac)temperaunce are particularly interesting, both originally part of the lexicon of statecraft. Prudence, however, evolves from being a largely male virtue in regard to politics and is re-gendered into a female virtue; Collette, ‘Aristotle, Translation and the Mean’, pp. 375–6.

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improve and support health: ‘mais les choses qui sont amesurees et ont moien senz excés et senz deffaute font, causent et acroissent, gardent et sauvent les vertuz corporeles dessus dictes’ [but things which are measured and create the mean without excess or lack, establish, nourish, maintain and protect the bodily virtues]. In the same way, the virtues of the soul can be vulnerable to the ill effects of excessive or deficient behaviors, but supported by rational moderation: ‘Et en ceste maniere est il es vertuz de l’ame, comme sont actrempance, fortitude et les autres vertuz … par superhabondance ou par deffaute est corrumpue actrempance et fortitude aussi; mais cestes vertuz sont sauvees par le moien.’16 [And it is the same for the virtues of the soul, such as temperance, fortitude and other virtues … temperance is corrupted by excess or default and so is fortitude; but these vertues are preserved by the mean.] But unlike the instinct to eat and drink, the instinct to achieve virtue through moderation is neither an inherent element of human nature, nor totally foreign to it, but something we acquire and perfect, something to which we choose to aspire. Habitus is fundamental in realizing that aspiration: Et la vertu morale est faite et cause en nous par meurs,17 et pour ce son nom est dirivé de ‘meur’ et en differe peu. Et par ce appert il que neis une des vertuz morales n’est en nous de nature ou par nature. Et une raison est a ce; car nulle chose ne se puet acoustumer au contraire de ce que elle a de nature, si comme la pierre ne se puet acoustumer a monter haut par soy ja soit ce que elle y fust jectee .x. mile foiz; ne le feu ne se puet acoustumer a descendre en bas, ne quelconque autre chose ne se puet acoustumer au contraire de ce que elle a de sa nature. Donques les vertuz ne sont pas en nous de nature, ne aussi ne sont ells pas en nous hors nature ne contre nature, mais nous sommes naturelment néz et ordenéz a les recevoir; et l’acquisition et perfeccion de elles est en nous acomplie par bonne acoustumance.18 16 17

18

Le livre de Ethiques, ed. Menut, p. 150. Oresme’s note here adds, ‘C’est a dire, par acoustumance et frequentacion de bonnes operacions’ (Ibid., Bk II, ch. 1, p. 146). ‘Bonnes operacions’, ‘good works’, ‘proceeding well’ are the key element in achieving happiness and comity, ‘Et la plus grant partie et presque toute l’estude de science politique est faire les citoiens bons et faiseurs de bonnes operacions’ (Ibid., Bk I, ch. 14, p. 130). Ibid., Bk II, ch. 1, pp. 146–7.

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Aristotelian Ideas in the Legend [And moral virtue is established in us by habits, and for this reason the name derives from the word meur from which it differs little. And by this it appears that no one moral virtue is in us by nature or through nature. And one reason is this: because nothing can accustom itself to what it does not have in its nature. As, for example, a stone is not able to rise up by itself even though it was thrown ten thousand times; nor can fire burn downwards, nor can any other thing accustom itself to acting contrary to its nature. Thus the virtues are not in us by nature, nor are they foreign to us or unnatural, but we are naturally born and ordained to receive them; and the acquisition and perfection of them in us is accomplished by good habit.]19

If the virtue of the mean – moderation, temperance, prudence, fortitude – can be chosen and developed by acoustumance, it can be starved as well. To be virtuous is to desire to be virtuous, to rely self-consciously on practice. But critically, habit in and of itself, while necessary, is not sufficient to produce true virtue. In some instances it can mask deceit, as Oresme’s gloss emphasizes, stressing an element of betrayal Aristotle only touches upon: Car celui qui n’est pas vertueus et le vertueus font operacions en choses semblables, fors que celui quie n’est pas vertueus ne les fait pas fermement, perseveraument et delectablement. Mais toutesvoies, par les frequenter il deviant vertueus.20 [Because the one who is not virtuous and the virtuous one act similarly, except that the one who is not virtuous does not act steadfastly, persistently and with pleasure. But nevertheless by practicing them [good works] he becomes virtuous.]

This distinction opens up the possibility of what Chaucer terms feyned behavior, the performance but not the substance of virtue, a failure that recurs with depressing regularity in the legends where men perform virtue as a means of deception.21 In this matter 19 20 21

Translations of Oresme’s French in this text are not always literal. I have tried to render his ideas in idiomatic English. Ibid., Bk II, ch. 5, n. 10, p. 156. An extended metaphor of the virtue of the mean employing a sea comparison encapsulates all of these points, with the help of Oresme’s interpretive exegesis; it addresses the difficulty of identifying and achieving the mean point of moderation. The struggle to find the path to virtue is like identifying the center of a circle: it can be done, but only by those who have the science,

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i­ntention is key; the performance of virtue is not the same thing as the expression of virtue from the interior of heart and mind. The former is mere show; the latter is true virtue.22 Crucially, the achievement of true virtue relies on individual perception and individual circumstance. Aristotle’s discussions in the Ethics are notable for his relativism as he moves back and forth between considering a thing in itself and considering the same thing in relationship to individual perception altered by circumstance. Ethics, after all, are apparent not so much in predictable or repetitive patterns as in contingency. For Aristotle, the mean of virtue is not fixed, but highly circumstantial, depending on individual judgment, Oresme explains: ‘non pas qui est moien selon la nature de la chose, mais qui est moien quant a nous’.23 The example given is of food for an athlete: if ten pounds is too much and two too little, it does not follow that six is the mean, because it may be too much or too little for the individual man in question.24 This sense of relativity, of the individualization of the mean, depending on practice, habit, attitude, also appears in Aristotle’s discussions of exchanges which do not depend on absolute, fixed values so much as on individual perceptions of what is more or less valuable or desirable. Oresme begins chapter 6 of Book V with note 2, a clarifying gloss about Aristotle’s thinking that the mean depends on the things between which it mediates: ‘Aprés il monstre que chose juste est moienne selon aucune proporcionalité et sera dit que est proporcionalité ou chapitre ensuivant.’25 [Afterwards he shows that something just is a mean according to proportionality and he will speak about proportionality in the following chapter.] The concept of the mean regulates ideal moral and ethical behavior, including patterns of exchange between people in equal and unequal relationships. Each party to an exchange determines whether what is given and what is received satisfies the terms of the exchange for them; this satisfaction, a form of the mean, arises from exchanges

22 23 24 25

and a sense of the dangers that lie in wait for those who are not prudent about how they seek to perform virtue. The path to virtue is like navigating among rocks on a treacherous sea. Ibid., Bk II, ch. 12, pp. 172–3. Ibid., Bk II, chs. 1–4. Ibid., Bk II, ch. 12, n. 1, p. 172. Ibid., Bk II, ch. 7, p. 160. Ibid., Bk V, ch. 6, p. 284.

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of proportionate value to each party in the exchange.26 How people negotiate inequality, particularly in the matter of status and the markers of status – wealth and goods – is a problem Aristotle examines at length when he discusses friendship and the dynamics of gift exchange within unequal relationships in Book V of the Ethics. One of the traits of many of the good women in the Legend is their generosity. Liberality was a virtue in late medieval culture, as it was for Aristotle, but prodigality and avarice were both vices to be avoided. How to recognize prodigality in oneself or others is important, for prodigality is a form of excess, a distortion of freedom and generosity. It is possible to harm oneself in giving too freely, for even virtue becomes a vice if carried to an extreme, as when, for example, generosity becomes habitual, continual expenditure. Oresme stops to explicate this point, expanding on Aristotle’s discussion of prodigality: Celui qui gaste et despent trop pour acomplir ses delectacions en pechié de char ou en gloutonnie, il doit estre denommé du principal vice, et est desactrempé et n’est pas proprement prodige. Car pluseurs sont telz qui en autres choses sont chetis, convoiteus et avaricieus. Mais celui qui generalment ne cure et ne tient conte que il despende, il est prodige.27 [Someone who wastes and overspends to have his pleasures in sins of the flesh and in gluttony, he should be designated according to [his] principal vice, and is intemperate, and not properly prodigal. Because many are such who in other matters are miserly, covetous and avaricious. But the one who generally does not care nor count what he spends, he is prodigal.]

Attractive as the virtue of liberality may seem, it is subject to extreme forms and is therefore a lesser virtue than those that are associated with restraint, especially justice and fortitude. In a gloss that seeks to caution readers about the uses of liberality, Oresme once more amplifies Aristotle, to make a point clear for his audience: Et par consequent, ceste virtue est plus en donnant. Mails il semble que il vueille dire que les liberals sont plus améz que les autre 26

27

On the larger anxieties created by a newly ‘monetized’ society which relies on money to create proportionate exchange, see J. Kaye on the ‘Social Geometry of Monetized Society’, Economy and Nature, pp. 201–10. Le livre de Ethiques, ed. Menut, Bk IV, ch. 1, n. 3, p. 231.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women vertueus, et par ce sembleroit il que liberalité fust la meilleur vertu et la plus digne de toutes. Je respon que il ne s’ensuit pas; car combien que ceste vertu soit mieulx amee du commun des gens, c’est de fait et pour leur proffit et de amour utile. Mais quant est d’amour honneste, justice et fortitude sont plus a amer et sont meilleurs et plus nobles vertus que liberalité.28 [And consequently this virtue consists largely in giving. But it seems that he [Aristotle] wishes to say the liberal are loved more than other virtuous people, and by this it seems that liberality constitutes the best virtue and is the most worthy of all. I respond that that does not follow; because however much this virtue is loved by the populace, it is really for their gain and self-interest. But when it is a matter of honest love, justice and fortitude are more regarded and are better and more noble virtues than liberality.]

Being excessively liberal can actually create unforeseen problems. Chaucer’s poem is full of stories of women whose open-handed generosity is repudiated or abused. Why should this happen? Aristotle holds that giving imputes power to the giver and disempowers the receiver, and that such interaction ultimately poses a risk to the giver. Thus, ironically, being in the ‘superior’ position of giver carries a number of risks in relationships that depend on exchanges. When relationships are not merely a matter of equivalent giving and receiving, it is necessary to apportion value in order to reciprocate appropriately, neither too freely nor too meagerly. Aristotle says value is determined by the circumstances in which an exchange is created and Oresme terms this dimension of exchange ‘Communicacion commutative’, indicating the intertwined and extensive obligation of two parties engaged in exchange. He writes: Communicacion commutative est quant par contract voluntaire exprés ou teü un homme baille sa chose ou fait servise a autre pour aucune autre chose et ne convient pas que teles .ii. choses soient equales selon elles ou semblables, mais elles doivent estre proporcionnees en valeur selon juste estimacion tout consideré. Si comme se un fait a l’autre 28

Ibid., Bk IV, ch. 2, n. 8, p. 232. Ultimately justice is the perfect mean, for by its nature justice is by itself the mean between two things – ch. 12, Bk V, p. 298: ‘Et justice est moienne non pas come les autres vertuz dont nous avon dit devant sont moiennes, mais seulement en tant comme par elle est faite chose juste qui est moienne.’ [And justice is a mean not in the manner that other vertues of which we have previously spoken are means, but only in so far that justice creates the just thing which is [itself] a mean.]

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What is valeur in a relationship? In discussing the reasons why people may express friendship, Aristotle allows for relationships based on utility or profit, and those based on what Oresme terms delectation, the prospect of sensual pleasure of various sorts. Ideal friendship is different: it is disinterested, equal and free of expectations of gain or selfish enjoyment. Oresme’s term for ideal friendship is amistié, which denotes affection, love, regard, and he defines its essence as an equal exchange: ‘amistié est benevolence entre ceuls qui veulent l’un a l’autre bien contre bien’.30 [Amistié [true friendship] is benevolence between those who wish one another good for good.] In contrast, Et ceuls qui s’entreaimment pour chose utile ou pour proffit, il ne s’entreaimment pas selon euls meïsme; car l’un aime l’autre non pas pour la persone amee, mais selon ce que il prennent l’un de l’autre aucun bien ou proffit … Et en ceste maniere, ceuls qui aiment pour bien utile, il ne aimment pas les personnes pour elles, mais pour le proffit que ilz en ont ou actendent avoir. Et aussi ceuls qui aimment pour leur ­delectacion, ilz aimment pour la chose qui leur est delitable.31 [Those who love each other for utility or profit do not love each other for themselves; because one loves the other not for the person loved, but according to what they can gain one from the other in respect to some good or profit. … And in this manner, those who love for profit do not love persons for themselves, but for the profit which they have or expect to have. And also those who love for their own pleasure, they love for that which is pleasurable to them.] 29 30 31

Ibid., Bk V, ch. 10, n. 5, pp. 292–3. Ibid., Bk VIII, ch. 3, p. 416. Ibid., Bk VIII, ch. 4. p. 417.

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The love of amistié is a matter of choice, for people love what seems good to them: ‘Mais la verité est que chascun aime ce qui est bon a soy … a chascun est amable ce qui li est bon.’32 [But the truth is that each one loves what seems good to him … for each one that which is loveable is that which seems good to him.] Such love is characterized by faith in the loved one, Item, l’amistié des bons seule et non autre est intransmuable et neent variable. Car un bon ami ne creroit pas de legier nul qui deïst mal de son amy lequel il a par lonc temps esprouvé et ne croira ja telz diseurs [those who wish to foment discord through lies]; car il scet que son ami ne voudroit onques faire injustice ne contre quelzconques autres choses qui appartiennent estre en vraie amistié et qui en sont dignes.33 [The love of good [men] alone and no other is fixed and without variation. Because a good friend does not lightly believe ill of his longtime, proven friend and will not believe those tale-bearers, because he knows that his friend would not ever wish to act unjustly, nor act in any way against those matters that pertain to true friendship and which are worthy of it.]

The best friendships are ‘amistiés selon similitude’, because unequal or widely divergent circumstances between two people can pose problems. Distance, for example, poses a problem to amistié, not so much because it creates a rent in a relationship, but because it prohibits the performance of friendship which is often expressed through gifts.34 Similarly, difference in class, rank or household status can inhibit true friendships, as is the case of fathers and sons, husbands and wives, or in any case where one holds seigniority over another.35 Friendship, however, does have the power to equalize in itself: ‘… ceuls qui sont inequalz peuent estre meïsmement amis; car par ce ilz seront fais equalz’36 [… those who are unequal can in the same way be friends; because by this [very affection] they are made equal]. And this is because human beings naturally seek that which they lack, an implication that nature itself seeks the mean in all things: ‘Car chascun appete et desire ce de quoy il a mestier et indigence.’ [Because each one craves and desires that of which he 32 33 34 35 36

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid.,

Bk Bk Bk Bk Bk

VIII, VIII, VIII, VIII, VIII,

ch. ch. ch. ch. ch.

3, p. 416. 6, p. 421. 7, p. 422. 10, p. 426. 11, p. 430.

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needs and lacks.] Oresme explicates this idea in note 14: ‘Le povre aime le riche pour ce que il reçoit proffit de lui. Et le riche aime le povre pour son service ou pour pitié, et afin que il prie Dieu pour luy.’ [The poor man loves the rich man for the profit he receives from the rich man. And the rich man loves the poor man for his service, and for pity’s sake, and in order that the poor man will pray for him.] Oresme further glosses Aristotle’s mention of love between those who are different in respect to beauty, ‘Et a ceste maniere d’amistié actraient aucuns la fole amour charnel de deux personnes desquelles une est bele et l’autre est laide’ [And in this kind of friendship some indulge in (atrer/atraire) foolish carnal love between two persons, of whom one is beautiful and the other ugly], with this gloss from note 15: ‘C’est amistié pour delectacion; car aucunes fois sont les personnes contraires en ce que l’un est bel et l’autre lait. Mais le lait se delicte en la biauté de l’autre, et le bel se delite ou biau parler de l’autre ou en autre chose. …’37 [This is love for delectation, because sometimes people are opposite in that one is beautiful and the other ugly. But the ugly one delights in the beauty of the other, and the beautiful one delights either in speaking well of the other or in some other matter. …] While Aristotle clearly envisions true amistié as a form of exclusively male relationship, he does allow for its partial existence between men and women in marriage, which he regards as a primary relationship: L’Amistié qui est entre le mari et sa femme semble estre amistié selon nature. Car les gens sont plus ordenéz par nature a communiquer ensemble en marriage que en policie ou communité civile, de tant comme maison ou habiter et communiquer ensemble en maison est premier naturelment et plus neccessaire que n’est habiter ou communiquer en cité ou communité.38 [Friendship which is between a husband and a wife seems to be friendship according to nature. Because people are more accustomed by nature to join together with each other in marriage than in polity or civil community, to such an extent that the household, or sharing together in a household is prior to and more necessary than living or sharing together in a city or a community.]

37 38

Ibid., Bk VIII, ch. 12, p. 431. Ibid., Bk VIII, ch. 17, p. 443.

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Men and women unite not only for procreation but also for companionship. Marriage is a sphere of complementarity, in which opposites come together to create a stable whole, as Oresme explains in his gloss in note 4 to chapter 17: Par ce apert que amistié et communicacion de marriage est pour.ii. causes ou pour.ii. fins selon Aristote. Une est pour avoir ligniee et pour sauver et continuer humaine espece. Et ceste est commune as bestes, et elle ne fait pas le mariage. L’autre cause est pour le bien des personnes, pour aidier l’un a l’autre quant a communicacion domestique ou de hostel et ceste cause est proper et especial a nature humaine. Encore pourroit l’en dire que la tierce cause est pour fouir ou eviter fornicacion. Mais les .ii. premieres soufisent asséz; car l’on ne doit pas principalment faire bien pour eviter mal. Mais l’en doit eviter mal et fuir pour faire bien.39 [By this it appears that friendship and community and marriage is for two causes or two ends, according to Aristotle. One is to have progeny and to protect the human species. And this is in common with beasts, and does not [by itself] make marriage. The other cause is for the good of two people, to aid one another in domestic community or in the household and this cause is appropriate and special to human nature. In addition, one might say that the third reason for marriage is to flee or evade fornication. But the first two reasons are sufficient because one does not mainly do good to avoid evil. Rather, one ought to avoid evil and flee it in order to do good.]

Significantly, neither Aristotle nor Oresme envisions cases where women are free agents able to propose the terms of a friendship that will lead to marriage, as women do on several occasions in the Legend. Love and friendship fail alike when there is a perception of failure to keep faith with the terms of promised or expected exchanges. Et en amistié aucune fois l’amant accuse l’amé pour ce que il aime plus que il n’est amé. Et puet avenir que il n’a en soy chose pour quoy il doie restre amé. Et moult de fois avient que celui que est amé accuse l’amant de ce que il li promet pluseurs choses et rien ne parfaict. Et teles choses aviennent quant l’un aime pour delectacion de son ami et l’autre pour avoir proffit du sien Et quant amistié est pour ces choses et il ne les treuvent pas ou reçoivent tous .ii., adonques est 39

Ibid., Bk VIII, ch. 17, p. 444.

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Disappointments and recriminations spring from such rifts and give rise to ever more disruptions in human relationships. There is the problem of the one who gives loving more than the one who receives, a disproportionate exchange, as Oresme make clear in his note: C’est a savoir que le bienfaicteur aime plus le benefice que le benefice ne aime le bienfaicteur. Et donques un homme aime plus sone benefice que il ne aime son bienfaicteur. Et toutesvoies, il est certaine chose que il est plus tenu et plus obligié a son bienfaicteur.41 [That is to say that the benefactor loves the beneficiary more than the beneficiary loves the benefactor. And then one man loves his beneficiary more than he loves his benefactor. And nevertheless it is a sure thing that he is more bound and more obligated to his benefactor.]

There is also the problem that power lies in giving and weakness in receiving. Those who receive in disproportionate relationships are in effect the creation of the giver: Item, c’est chose naturele que chascun aime ce par quoy sa puissance est manifestee et monstree. Et il est voir que l’ouevre denunce et declare de fait la puissance de celui qui l’a faite. Note: Mais celui qui l’a faite ne declare en ce la puissance de l’euvre. Et donques naturelement celui qui a faite une oeuvre aime plus son oeuvre que son oeuvre ne l’aime. Et par consequent, le bienfaiteur aime plus le ­beneficié, etc.42 40 41 42

Ibid., Bk IX, ch. 1, p. 452. Ibid, Bk IX, ch. 3, p. 460. Ibid., Bk IX, ch. 9, p. 474.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women [Also, it is a natural thing that each one loves that by which its power is manifested and demonstrated. And it is seen that the work in fact announces and declares the power of the one who created it. Note: And therefore naturally he who has created a work loves his creation more than his creation loves him.]

Chapters 8 and 9 of Book IX explore the idea that the power to give is the power to shape the recipient. Aristotle implies that such power is creative by comparing it to the creation of poetry. But finally, Aristotle concludes, under such circumstances in human relationships the position of the recipient in unequal relationships becomes a kind of endurance, a suffering, rather than a joy: ‘Item, amacion ou amer est semblable a faccion ou a faire. Et estre amé est semblable a souffrir.’43 [Also, loving or to love is like creation or making. To be loved is like suffering [i.e. being patient, bearing, allowing, passive rather than active].] To love is both to give and to receive affection as well as material goods, to realize that a perpetual cycle of lending and being indebted is a mark of a truly stable and ultimately equal human relationship. Not to be able to create such a pattern of alternating giving and receiving creates strains that ultimately rend the fabric of friendship, amistié, and affection.44

Chaucer’s Women: Finding the Mean in Love Chaucer’s stories in the Legend celebrate women’s patience, generosity and fidelity through a contrast with male impatience, rapacity and betrayal. The seeming contrast between attitudes suggests an opposition, but in fact the stories are centered in what Oresme would term extreme behavior on both sides. Women give their love too freely. They love too passionately and give prodigally. Men are all too eager to take what is offered, sexually and materially, and to leave when pleasure pales, either from ennui or in contrast to better prospects. To receive is to suffer, as Aristotle says, and the men of the Legend are largely either wary of receiving or cavalier about taking. Some flee, as does Aeneas; some, like Theseus, Demophon and Jason, slip the bonds of obligation by abandoning their benefactors. None willingly submits to being subject to the power of a loving 43 44

Ibid., Bk IX, ch 9, pp. 475–6. On this theme, see FranT, pp. 151–3.

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woman. Chaucer does not directly criticize the excesses he creates. Rather, under the guise of affirming the utmost fidelity of women, he interweaves moments that focus on the desirability of moderation, the virtue of the mean and the idea that balance and equalization are ideals worth struggling to achieve, for in their absence lives, loves, families, kingdoms fall apart. These concepts, central to the Ethics, shadow the action of the Legend and appear in the way Chaucer narrates and organizes his stories. Never a moralizer, always equivocal about entente and motive, he reveals his interest in the kinds of topics Aristotle discusses through his narrative emphases and the way he structures his sequence of stories. As Joel Blanchard writes of Christine as a compiler, a selector of narratives to fit her design (see p. 71), so Chaucer, too, is a compiler who makes a mosaic of pieces and shapes them into a design of his own invention. The first two legends tell stories of women’s faithful love set against other compelling obligations, to family and to polity, that displace fidelity as the central matter of their action. Obedient to the God of Love’s command, Chaucer begins with the relatively unknown story of Antony’s love for Cleopatra, which he presents as an ostensible example of female devotion. In this brief legend Chaucer introduces a number of important themes that will recur in his subsequent narratives. Much of the action of the legend takes place at sea, introducing a location Chaucer will use skillfully to symbolize overwhelming and unstable emotions in the Legend, as he does in the Troilus when Troilus uses a Petrarchan conceit to compare his own state as a lover to a ship tossed on a restless sea. In this story love is a matter of value perceived. Antony’s extreme love for Cleopatra flourishes at a significant price: he has betrayed his marriage, his wife’s family and his obligation to the Roman empire. He is an example of a man who loves too much. In loving Cleopatra, Antony becomes a thrall: But love hadde brought this man in swich a rage And hym so narwe bounden in his las, Al for the love of Cleopataras, That al the world he sette at no value. Hym thought there nas nothing to hym so due As Cleopataras for to love and serve. (LGW, ll. 599–604)

The actual union between Antony and Cleopatra is introduced in a matter-of-fact couplet: ‘And for to make shortly is the beste,/ She 95

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wex his wif, and hadde hym as hire leste’ (LGW, ll. 614–15). Beyond suggesting Antony’s total capitulation to Cleopatra as the result of a disastrous exchange with wide-ranging consequences, the brevity of the idea of marriage expressed in the couplet signals that Chaucer’s interests lie elsewhere. In this swiftly paced, brief narrative, Antony’s fortunes soon change; the sea battle of Actium marks the downfall of both Antony and Cleopatra and the ascent of Augustus Caesar, ushering in a new imperial Roman age and the disappearance of the Republic. Seeing Cleopatra flee the scene of his imminent defeat, Antony commits suicide, described in a tight couplet that leaves little room for emotional response: ‘for despeyr out of his wit he sterte/ And rof himself anon thourghout the herte’ (LGW, ll. 660–1). After his death, Cleopatra becomes a character rather than just a name, an agent in her own right, and out of love builds for him a tomb whose ‘value’ may not equal that of all the world, but which is nevertheless extraordinary. As a sign of her love, says Chaucer, she matches his splendid tomb with her own, a pit full of vipers. The two tombs – one overly elaborate, the other horrible and dark – seem to exist in opposition, but actually fail to create a mean, because they are essentially two versions of the same thing: houses of death fashioned out of deadly desires. These two lovers end with two demonstrations of excess: Antony’s philosophy of the world well lost and Cleopatra’s dramatic end among the vipers. The legend cannot be dismissed this simply, however, for Cleopatra’s dying words articulate a powerful Chaucerian theme about covenants and equalization – ‘right … as ye felten the same wolde I fele’ – and selfimposed obligations assumed by women. Unlike his brief descriptions of Antony and Cleopatra’s marriage, and of Antony’s death, Chaucer elaborates this event by describing it in a series of clauses and ­modifying phrases: And in myself this covenaunt made I tho, That right swich as ye felten, wel or wo, As fer forth as it in my power lay, Unreprovable unto my wyfhod ay, The same wolde I fele, lyf or deth – And thilke covenant whil me lasteth breth I wol fulfille, and that shal ben wel sene, Was nevere unto hire love a trewer queen. (LGW, ll. 688–95)

At the end of the legend we have a story of two kinds of will – Cleopatra’s steadfast will to prove her love and Antony’s equally 96

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strong will to possess her. It is hardly a great love story, especially as it ends with such an equivocal term as quene – Middle English for queen as well as harlot. But it is a cautionary tale about the dangers of disregarding the public world, the threat of unrestrained emotion and a perceived need to constrain extreme emotion by embracing the strict terms of covenants. In contrast, the second legend, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, is a story of perfect reciprocity of action throughout. Although a tale of two lovers, it models amistié between them in a narrative rhetoric that continually pairs the lovers by action and grammar: Unto this clyft, as it was wont to be, Com Piramus, and after com Thysbe. And plyghten trouthe fully in here fey That ilke same nyght to stele awey, And to begile here wardeyns everichon, And forth out of the cite for to goon, And, for the feldes ben so brode and wide, For to mete in o place at o tyde. (LGW, ll. 776–83)

The phrasing mirrors the perfect parallelism of their early love, ‘as they wexe in age, wex here love … And bothe in love ylyke sore they brente … And tolden whil that they stode in the place,/ Al here compleynt of love and al here wo,/ At every tyme what they durste so/ Upon that o syde of the wal stod he,/ And on that other side stod Thesbe’ (LGW, ll. 727–51). The flight into the woods changes everything, for their unity is broken by the chance action of the bloody-mouthed lion that frightens Thisbe into fleeing into a cave, letting her wimple fall to the ground. When Pyramus finds the bloody wimple he rashly and hastily assumes the worst, and attempts to restore the almost perfect balance of their relationship by offering his body to be treated as he supposes hers was; lamenting that he came late to the meeting place, he seeks ‘what lyoun that be in this forest/ My body mote he renten or what best/ That whilde is, gnaw mote he now myn herte!’ (LGW, ll. 842–4). Kissing her bloody wimple, he says, ‘thou shalt feele as wel the blod of me/ As thow hast felt the bledyng of Thisbe!’ (LGW, ll. 848–9), and stabs himself to his heart. When Thisbe comes out of the cave where she has been hiding and finds Pyramus’s body, she, too, seeks to restore the balance of their relationship, lamenting and promising: 97

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women And thogh that nothing, save the deth only Mighte thee fro me departe trewely, Thow shalt no more departe now from me Than fro the deth, for I wol go with thee. (LGW, ll. 896–9)

Once more their love is expressed through almost chiastic poetic phrasing: ‘mighte thee fro me departe … no more departe now from me’. And while a hint of the haste that Gower stresses in the tale appears in Pyramus’s actions in the forest, the tale ends with an assertion that both men and women can be ‘trewe and kynde’ (LGW, ll. 921). Boccaccio’s emphasis on inter-generational conflict is transformed into inter-generational jealousy when, in a final address to their parents, ‘ye wrechede jelos fadres oure’, Thisbe asks that she and Pyramus be buried in the same grave. The story ends with her cautionary words to young gentlewomen not to put themselves in danger such as that which she has encountered. In this she echoes Pyramus’s own earlier lament that ‘My biddyng hath yow slayne … Allas, to bidde a woman gon by nyghte/ In place there as peril falle myghte!’ As much as the tale validates the equal and proportionate exchange of love between Pyramus and Thisbe, considered together, the first two legends provide disheartening conclusions for both the adulterous Antony and Cleopatra and the chaste Pyramus and Thisbe. When men and women dare to love, and defy the larger expectations of polity and family, they come to unhappy ends. The God of Love may be powerful, but Thanatos, not Venus, triumphs when immoderate desire overwhelms lovers. As we saw in chapter 2, the legends of Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Ariadne and Phyllis form a collocation of tales in several late medieval works Chaucer surely knew. The women in these stories are no strangers to Chaucer. He pictures them on the walls of the House of Fame and Parliament of Fowls and recalls them in the Legend, where he raises a new set of questions about love and the negotiations lovers engage in in a search for the kind of unity of purpose and feeling Pyramus and Thisbe manifest. In the Legend these familiar stories approach love, exchange and equalization from a different perspective. Chaucer begins this group with the story of Dido and Aeneas, a story he tells quite differently in the House of Fame where he announces that love is not his subject. In imagining the images painted on the walls of the Temple of Glass – so like the painted 98

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triumphs of Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione – Chaucer places the story of Dido and Aeneas within a meta-narrative of Troy and of Rome (HF, 145–220). In this telling Aeneas’s refuge in Carthage is a diversion, fatal to Dido who was imprudent in trusting him, during a brief interlude on his way to found a great city. Compressing his narrative,45 Chaucer rejects the idea that their story is essentially one of love in favor of stressing Aeneas’s Roman destiny, and so moves quickly through their attachment in order to get to the main plot: And shortly of this thing to pace, She [Venus] mad Eneas so in grace Of Dido, queen of that contree, That, shortly for to tellen, she Becam hys love and let him doo Al that weddynge longeth too. What shulde I speke more queynte, Or peyne me my words peynte To speke of love? Hyt wol not be; I kan not of that faculte. And eke to telle the manere How they aqueynteden in fere, Hyt were a long process to telle, And over-long for yow to dwelle. (HF, ll. 239–52)

But somehow Chaucer never does return to the Trojan-Roman paradigm. Although he protests his reluctance to create an ‘overlong’ narrative, he goes on at length about Aeneas’s betrayal and Dido’s grief, limning a moral along the way about women’s trust and male perfidy that anticipates the Legend of Good Women in its warning about the difference between appearance and reality, and evokes associations with Boccaccio’s warnings about the female gaze: Ther sawgh I grave how Eneas Told Dido every caas That hym was tyd upon the see. And after grave was how shee Mad of hym shortly at oo word Hyr lyf, hir love, hir lust, hir lord, And dide hym al the reverence 45

It is worth noting that the Legend is not the only text in which Chaucer truncates stories for his own narrative and thematic purposes.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women And leyde on hym al the dispence That any woman myghte do, Weynyge hyt had al be so As he hir swor; and herby demed That he was good, for he such semed. Allas! what harm doth apparence, Whan it is fals in existence! For he to hir a traytour was; Wherefore she slow hirself, allas! (HF, ll. 253–68)

Chaucer spends the next twenty-four lines expatiating on the theme of appearance and reality, and then finally writes, ‘But let us speke of Eneas’, only to say, ‘How he betrayed hir, allas’, making clear that the dual focus of his story is Dido’s destruction through the mistaken assumption that appearance is reality and the destructive power of Aeneas’s deception. Chaucer then, at last, returns to Aeneas’s travels – by narrating Dido’s response to his leaving for Italy: she reflects on male fickleness that seeks the new in love. Using Aristotle’s terms for the reasons people come together in love or passion, she acknowledges that men desire women who help them gain fame (HF, l. 306); they desire women ‘for frendshippe’ (amistié) (HF, l. 307); and men desire women for what Oresme terms utile and delectation, ‘That shal be take for delyt,/ Loo, or for synguler profit’ (HF, ll. 309–10). From this version of the story of Dido and Aeneas we see that even as ‘early’ as the House of Fame Chaucer is interested more in female psychology than in the paradigm of the heroic male. Certainly in the Legend, although the men in the group of tales introduced by the narrative of Dido and Aeneas generally demonstrate more agency and a wider variety of commitments, the women who love them – Dido, Hypsipyle, Medea, Ariadne, Phyllis – are more active psychologically. The motivations attributed to the men are largely imposed on them – Aeneas fated to found Rome, Jason maneuvered into the search for the Golden Fleece, Theseus given as a sacrifice to the Minotaur; the women’s motivations are more complex and personal. In the Legend the women of these stories are powerful in their own right, queens, daughters of kings, of superior status in relationship to the men they love. These women offer help, aid and comfort unrestrainedly, in part because custom demands generosity to noble strangers beset by misfortune, but also because in each case the women find the men physically attractive. Desire drives their 100

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choices for love and against the demands of filial obligation and sovereign responsibility. The women of the Legend of Good Women are exemplars of fidelity, steadfast in their commitment to the men they love, even when betrayed or abandoned. But before they have occasion to demonstrate their fidelity they are also traders and dealers who strategize to gain and keep the men they desire. Keen negotiators, they attempt to construct the terms of their love through discussions of exchange that reveal the value they place on themselves, their wealth and the men they desire. These women negotiate to obtain what they want – physical union within marriage. Their negotiations aim to reduce the distance between them and the men they would love, and to achieve a proportionate exchange in which the women’s wealth and the men’s distress can be equalized through a sense of equivalent value symbolized by promises of commitment by one party and the gift of material goods from one to the other. In the Legend Chaucer develops the examples that he cites in the House of Fame to a different purpose: to depict the dynamics of love, desire and inequality, to show how the strains between those who give and those who receive work to destroy what the women have built. In the Legend Chaucer’s story of Dido and Aeneas turns initially on the distance between the two. Dido is the queen of a city she has founded, an exceptional woman, ‘holden of alle queenes flour/ Of gentillesse, of freedom, of beaute … She stod so wel in every wightes grace’ (LGW, ll. 1009–14). Aeneas appears as a refugee from Troy, sailing toward Italy ‘as wolde his destine’; ‘So long he saylede in the salte se/ Tyl that in Libie unnethe aryveded he … And glad was he to londe for to hy/ So was he with the tempest al to shake’ (LGW, ll. 958–62). Seeing a mural depicting the destruction of Troy on the wall of a Carthaginian temple, Aeneas falls into despair. Chaucer uses the moment as an instance of the mutability of fortune, and as a means of underscoring the distance between Aeneas’s state and Dido’s at the moment when the power of fortune becomes manifest: ‘We, that weren in prosperite, Ben now desclandred, and in swich degree, No lenger for to liven I ne kepe’. And with that word he brast out for to wepe So tenderly that routhe it was to sene. This fresshe lady, of the cite queene, Stod in the temple in her estat real,

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women So rychely and ek so fayr withal, So yong, so lusty, with her eye glade, That, if that God, that hevene and erthe made, Wolde han a love, for beaute and goodnesse, And womanhod, and trouthe and semelynesse, Whom shulde he loven but this lady swete? (LGW, ll. 1031–42)

This is the moment when Aeneas’s fortune begins to improve – he finds his lost shipmates, safely arrived and having come to the temple to petition the queen for help. Dido recognizes Aeneas and, in a typically Chaucerian parataxis designed to indicate deep emotion, she falls in love with him, because he attracts her desire. The grammar of the description, dependent on the emphatic recurrent ‘And’, suggests the overwhelming nature of her emotions and recognition of a rush of desire: And in hire herte she hadde routhe and wo That ever swich a noble man as he Shal ben disherited in swich degre; And saw the man, that he was lyk a knyght, And suffisaunt of persone and of might, And lyk to been a verray gentil man; And wel his wordes he besette can, And hadde a noble visage for the nones, And formed wel of braunes and of bones. For after Venus hadde he swich fayrnesse That no man myghte be half so fayr, I gesse; And wel a lord he semede for to be. And, for he was a straunger, somewhat she Likede hym the bet, as God do bote, To some folk ofte new thing is sote. Anon hire herte hath pite of his wo, And with that pite love come in also. (LGW, ll. 1063–79)

Dido’s reaction to the sight of Aeneas is an overpowering combination of pity and love, and a third element: a desire to redress the imbalance that so noble a man should have fallen into such a state of distress. Dido determines that ‘Refreshed moste he been of his distress’ – his status must be restored. Thus she begins the extreme, prodigal gift-giving (LGW, ll. 1115–24), reciprocated by Aeneas (LGW, ll. 1130f), that marks the start of their courtship in which her goal is delectation and his is utile, a matter of profit, to use Oresme’s lexicon for unequal friendship. Each sees the other as a means of 102

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gratification, a problem compounded by the disproportion in their relative estates. Soon this self-interested kind of friendship, sustained by the exchange of gifts, evolves into what Oresme terms fol amour. Planning a hunt the next day, Dido confides to her sister Anne that she wishes to marry Aeneas (LGW, ll. 1178f). The erotic tension in Aeneas and Dido’s relationship permeates the description of the hunt scene: ‘this amourous queene chargeth hire meyne/ The nettes dresse, and speres brode and kene;/ An hunting wol this lusty freshe queene/ So priketh hire this new joly wo’ (LGW, ll. 1189–92); it is apparent in the horses Dido and Aeneas ride – highly strung, alert, responsive. When a storm breaks they flee to a cave for shelter from thunder and lightning, where ‘… began the depe affeccioun/ Betwixe hem two; this was the first morwe/ Of hire gladnesse, and gynning of hire sorwe’. The economy of phrasing suggests the evanescence of Aeneas’s love, which is already waning as Chaucer begins to describe his wooing: For there hath Eneas ykneled so, And told hire al his herte and al his wo, And swore so depe to hire to be trewe For wel or wo and chaunge her for no newe; And as a fals lovere so wel can pleyne, That sely Dido rewede on his peyne, And tok hym for husbonde and becom his wyf For evermo, whil that hem laste lyf. (LGW, ll. 1232–9)

Immediately Dido begins to suffer reverses of her own fortune – the rumor of her tryst, but not her intended marriage, raises her neighbor and suitor Yarbas’s anger. Chaucer laments the way that innocent women are taken in by men who lie, who feign love by performing the conventions of love service and then rob the women who love them. He underscores Dido’s great pity and overwhelming generosity to the refugee Trojans, Aeneas above all. His lack was balanced by her extreme generosity. He who was ‘in peril for to sterve/ For hunger, and for myschef in the se,/ And desolate, and fled from his cuntre … She hath hire body and ek hire reame yiven/ Into his hand …’ (LGW, ll. 1277–82). But it was not enough. Chaucer tells the reader that Aeneas, beneficiary of Dido’s love and generosity, but a subordinate recipient nonetheless, becomes bored with Dido and Carthage (‘was wery of his craft within a throwe’, LGW, 103

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ll. 1285–9), and lies to Dido that he has dreamed that his destiny demands his leaving. In spite of Dido’s pleas, he slips away one night, back to the sea which brought him to Carthage, on his way to Rome. The legend ends with Dido’s lament, beautifully adapted from the Heroides: ‘For thilke wynd that blew youre ship awey,/ The same wynd hath blowe awey your fey’ (LGW, ll. 1364–5). But, in fact, in this telling Aeneas was never faithful; he begins his vows of love under a cloud of falseness and he leaves Carthage under the same cloud. While the story ends with Dido abandoned, about to commit suicide, ‘the white swan’ singing at the moment of her death, the story is actually not about steadfast love, but about the failure of negotiation and exchange to secure love. Here, as in Boccaccio’s Amorosa visione, human love, represented by the imperious God of Love, is revealed to be a powerful and dangerous emotion that threatens stability and lineage, individuals and whole nations – Carthage is exposed because of Dido’s passion and the existence of Rome itself is hostage to the passion Dido and Aeneas share. The warning is against excess and imprudence, especially imprudent trust. Love, with its conventions of loss of self-control and languishing desire, is the site and women are the means through which this topos can be explored. Chaucer’s interest in the nature and consequences of ‘feyned loves’, his topic at the end of the Troilus, reappears in the next legend, which tells of Jason’s deceptive dealings with Hypsipyle and Medea. The preface to the twin stories of deception introduces the idea of the false lover as the ‘sly devourere and confusioun’ of ‘gentil wemen’ (LGW, ll. 1369–70). Intentional deception, without even the excuse of a call of destiny, is the theme of this story in which devouring appetite appears early on in a metaphor of exchange value, a simile of the false fox who eats the capon while the ‘good man’ who has paid, and has a right to the capon, goes without. Jason, it seems, is as false a lover and thief, as was Aeneas.46 Both are ready to take what is not theirs, and both are wary of playing the role of beneficiary. Moreover, Jason enjoys deceiving by performing virtue. The plot of the legend begins in Pelleus’s proposal to Jason to win the Golden Fleece, a means of ridding himself of the nephew whom he fears may come to rival him for power. How to get rid of him honorably is the question, and the answer is to propose the 46

LGW, ll. 1389–95.

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quest and to offer to pay for it (LGW, l. 1447). Thus Pelleus proposes the first self-interested exchange of the legend. Jason assembles the Argonauts, they set sail and, tempest-tossed, driven by a storm at sea, arrive in Lemnos where ‘The faire younge Ysiphele, the shene’ is queen (LGW, l. 1467). It is ‘hire usaunce/ To fortheren every wight, and don plesaunce/ Of verrey bounte and curtysye’ (LGW, ll. 1476–8), and so she sends a messenger to the men to ask if they need help. They reply that they are weary and have put to shore to wait for a better wind for their voyage. As it happens, Hypsipyle sees Jason and Hercules while her messenger is speaking to them, and she soon realizes they are noble men and invites them to her palace, eventually discovering who they are and what they seek. In Chaucer’s version Hercules becomes Hypsipyle’s confidant, to whom she bares her heart, and he, in return, praises Jason without reserve, part of a deliberate plot he and Jason have concocted to seduce Hypsipyle to their will. Jason’s part is to seem coy and innocent, and to give freely to her household officers, pretending to be what he is not. His plot works, and he marries the queen. Chaucer’s succinct narration of the success of the plot and Jason’s subsequent betrayal belies the timeline of the marriage, which lasted at least the length of one pregnancy (in other versions she gives birth to twins) and resulted in the prodigal exchange of Hypsipyle’s wealth for two of Jason’s children. Chaucer’s summary description of the marriage and Jason’s flight appear within five lines of one another: The somme is this: that Jasoun wedded was Unto the queen and took of hir substaunce What so him leste unto his purveyaunce, And upon hir begat he children two And drogh his sail and saw hir never mo. (LGW, ll. 1559–63)

The point of the legend is not the marriage; it is the pretense, and the final despoiling of Hypsipyle who loses her wealth to the feyned scheming of the two friends. That she remains true to Jason all her life, as Chaucer says, is beside the real point of the story: that gentil women stand in peril not of their virtue but of their goods and their agency, through the machinations of predator men who are willing to make the most solemn vows only to break them at will. When Jason leaves Hypsipyle, he continues to search for the Fleece and lands at Colcos, where he encounters King Oetes and his daughter Medea, who unlike Hypsipyle is not a complete innocent. 105

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But she is just as susceptible to Jason’s appearance and general demeanor, which Chaucer tells us are everything they should be in a courtly society. His leonine countenance (‘of his look as real as a leoun’) indicates his predatory nature, but his ‘goodly’ speech and his knowledge of the ‘craft and art’ of love without a book mitigate the threat implied in the comparison (LGW, ll. 1605–8). Medea initiates a conversation in which she lays out the dangers he faces, sure to be deadly if she does not offer the aid that will protect him. The marriage agreement they forge is an exchange: her knowledge for his life. The accord they shape is based on legal and economic terms in which they establish their covenant in turn, sealed with a physical consummation of their pledge: They been accorded ful betwixt hem two That Jason shal hir wedde, as trewe knight, And term set to come sone at night Unto hir chamber and make there his ooth Upon the goddes that he for leef ne loth Ne sholde hir nevere falsen nyght ne day To been hir husbonde whil he liven may As she that from this deeth him saved here. And hereupon at night they mette yfere, And doth his oth, and goth with hir to bedde. And on the morwe upward he him spedde. (LGW, ll. 1635–45)

In Chaucer’s version Jason succeeds in his quest and sails home for Thessaly with Medea and a great treasure he has taken with her from her father. Chaucer’s narration links his coming betrayal directly with his present success: ‘To Tessaly with Duk Jasoun hir lef,/ That afterward hath brought hir to mischef./ For as a traytour he is from hire go’ (LGW, ll. 1654–6), leaving her and their two children to marry yet a third woman, Creusa. The legend ends with Medea’s wondering why she valued his ‘yelwe her … More than the boundes of myn honestee/ Why lykede me thy youthe and thy fairnesse/ And of thy tonge the infynyt graciousnesse?’ (LGW, ll. 1672–4). Jason’s betrayal is thus a matter of his deception and of Medea’s failure to value him correctly. Boccaccio blames her uncontrolled gaze as the cause of her distress, but Chaucer suggests that she, like all the other betrayed women, succumbs to the deception of the man she desires. The exchange she made with him, seemingly one of mutual advantage, turns out to have meant everything to her and nothing to him. Both Christine and Boccaccio make a similar point in their writing about 106

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the care women must take in entering any sort of promise with men. Boccaccio writes, ‘… nothing is more foolish than to ruin oneself so as to aggrandize another’.47 Such hard-headed realism is the moral of this double narrative in which a woman’s fidelity seems secondary to male perfidy and trust betrayed. A break occurs in the thread of stories of failed exchanges when the tales of Dido, Hypsipyle and Medea are followed by the contrasting story of Lucrece, which had a venerable history as a political tale of how one woman’s resistance to a form of royal tyranny created the circumstances in which Rome threw off the shackles of monarchy and proclaimed itself a republic. Given the emphatic use of the adjective feyned in the two preceding stories, the stress Chaucer puts on Lucrece’s ‘verray wifhod’ creates a balancing narrative; the deficit of honor in the stories of Jason and Aeneas is balanced by the superhabondaunce of honor in Lucrece’s behavior. A superhabondaunce of pretense is balanced by the power of the authentic – a woman whose words and deeds align perfectly. Chaucer makes it quite clear that he is not telling the story of Lucrece as a political exemplum, that it is her steadfastnesse of honorable purpose – a sharp contrast to the shifting ruses of the men in preceding legends – that attracts his narrative attention. The story begins in the Roman camp at the siege of Ardea where Tarquin, son of the king, a young man ‘lyght of tonge’ (LGW, l. 1699), proposes a means of passing the time by praising wives. Colatyn suggests that instead of exchanging words they look at deeds and proposes to go to Rome to see what their wives are doing. In this way the idleness of men leads to the destruction of a busy and good woman. Lucrece is found to be spinning within a prosperous, industrious and well-ordered household. Chaucer emphasizes her authentic virtue –­ ‘Hyre countenaunce is to hire herte digne/ For they accord bothe in dede and sygne’ (LGW, ll. 1738–9) – and that ‘by no crafte hire beautee nas nat feyned’ (LGW, l. 1749): she is authentic and true in all things; word, deed, looks are in perfect alignment. In a foreshadowing of the plot of ‘The Clerk’s Tale’, Lucrece’s perfection both captivates and obsesses Tarquin, who cannot stop thinking about her: Al this conseit his herte hath now y-take. And as the se with tempest al toshake, 47

Famous Women, p. 177.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women That after, whan the storm is al ago, Yet wol the water quappe a day or two, Right so thogh that hir forme were absent The plesaunce of hir forme was present. (LGW, ll. 1764–9)

Unable, or unwilling, to control his extreme emotions, sword in hand, he steals back to her house, gains access to her chamber and announces himself as ‘the kynges sone’ (LGW, l. 1789), threatening to murder her if she cries out. Like a wolf with a lamb (LGW, l. 1798), he overpowers her and further threatens her with disgrace if she resists, saying he will claim that he found her with a servant in her bed. He comes like a thief, to steal her virtue and her peace of mind. Overwhelmed, but not compliant, she faints; he rapes her, and the scene shifts to the next morning when she emerges from her chamber as if for a funeral, moving into the public space of the hall before her family. When she tells what has happened, her family support her and say that they ‘foryeve it hyr’ (LGW, l. 1848). But Lucrece will not accept forgiveness. She insists on reciprocity and balance: a shame has been perpetrated and it must be atoned for, ‘I wol not have noo forgyft for nothing’ (LGW, l. 1853). The line is understood to mean no forgiveness no matter what, but given the theme of exchange that appears in so many of these legends it may also mean that she will not accept forgiveness without some sort of atonement. And with those words, she draws out a knife and commits suicide. Chaucer links the suicide with love for her husband, her ‘love so trewe’, but complicates the simple association with the next two lines, displacing that moral with an allusion to the Gospels, to Matthew 6. 21,48 ‘ne in hir wille she chaunged for no newe/ And for the stable herte, sadde and kynde,/ That in these wymmen men may alday finde;/ Ther as they caste hir herte ther it dwelleth’ (LGW, ll. 1874–6). In its contrast to the preceding legends, this tale emphasizes stability and triumph over the shifting desires of self-will. Lucrece’s story is central as a structural mean that Chaucer builds into his series of narratives: not only within individual legends but also within the meta-structure of the sequence he shapes examples of disproportion and of balance. Within the collection, as within individual narratives, a principle of balance and equalization is at work. In contrast to the preceding legend, the story of Ariadne and 48

‘For where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.’ Douay version, Matthew 6. 21.

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Theseus picks up the thread of betrayal and unequal exchange with a vengeance. Beginning with the backstory (LGW, l. 1918), a theme of broken obligations and inter-generational discord is firmly established. After his son is slain in Athens, Minos requires a reciprocal sacrifice in exchange, and demands that annually Athens send a young man in tribute. As it happens, Theseus, the son of the Egeus, king of Athens, has the bad luck to have been selected for sacrifice to Minos’s monster, the Minotaur. Locked in a prison dungeon, Theseus voices complaints about his woebegone situation which travel from his cell through a privy to the ears of Minos’s daughters Ariadne and Phedra, who hear his lamentations as they stand upon the walls of Crete. They are moved to compassion: ‘A kynges sone to been in swich prisoun/ And be devoured thoughte hem greet pitee’ (LGW, ll. 1975–6). Together the sisters devise a plan that will enable Theseus to defeat the Minotaur, and instruct the jailer to bring Theseus to them. Apprised of their plan, Theseus is voluble in his protestations of gratitude and offers an exchange by vowing to serve Ariadne: ‘For everemo til that myn herte sterve Forsake I wol at hom myn herytage And, as I seyde, ben of youre court a page … I prey to Mars to yeve me swich a grace That shames deth on me ther mote falle And deth and poverte to my frendes alle, And that my spirit by nyghte mote go After my deth and walke to and fro That I mote of traytour have a name, For which my spirit go to do me shame! And if I evere cleyme other degre, But if ye vouche-sauf to yeve it me As I have seyd, of shames deth I deye! And mercy, lady! I can nat elles seye.’ (LGW, ll. 2035–73)

But Ariadne knows the value of her gift and prefers a more lucrative exchange: marriage with Theseus for her and with Theseus’s son Hippolyte for her sister Phedra. Theseus readily acquiesces and to sweeten the deal professes to have loved her ‘This seven yeer … Now have I you, and also have ye me,/ My dere herte, of Athenes duchesse!’ (LGW, ll. 2121–2). Ariadne is delighted at the bargain, whispering to her sister, ‘Now be we duchesses, bothe I and ye/ And sekered to the regals of Athenes/ And bothe hereafter lykly to be quenes’ (LGW, ll. 2127–9). The exchange agreement, based on 109

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mutual utility, is quickly settled – ‘This Theseus of hir hath leve y-take/ And every poynt performed was in dede/ As ye han in this covenaunt herd me rede’ – on both sides, by the sisters and by Theseus, who, when he is successful, sets sail for home with Ariadne. He abandons Ariadne in mid-course, ‘in an yle amyd the wilde se … For that hire syster fayrer was than she’ (LGW, ll. 2163–72). The point of this story seems to center in caution about relationships built on self-interest, particularly those based on the utile. Exchanges formed under pressure of unequal power for personal gain are very likely to fail once the terms of the relationship alter. When Theseus is no longer a captive but a victor, he changes his mind, and specifically breaks a covenant. Chaucer concludes the tale focused on Ariadne’s grief, performed as devotion mixed with recognition that she has bargained poorly. After recounting her faithful sorrow for about ten lines, Chaucer escapes into Ovid and asserts that she has been metamorphosed into one of the stars in Taurus. He tells the story ostensibly to celebrate her fidelity, but he does not spend nearly as much time on her fidelity as he does recounting her failed bargaining, which occupies almost a hundred lines of the tale. The legend of Philomela picks up the thread developed in the story of Lucrece, for it is a tale of the abuse of power by a man who is both a king and a husband, as well as of betrayal of the most basic human ties of family. Tereus, the king in question, is described as kin to Mars (LGW, l. 2244), and, like Tarquin, he will have what he wants (LGW, l. 2291). When his wife requests to see her sister, for whom she longs, Tereus travels to his father-in-law’s house to request that Philomela be allowed to visit Progne. After some hesitancy, Pandion, the father of the two sisters, allows Philomela to go, but not without grief and anxiety. Tereus swears to protect Philomela, but instead, consumed by lust, betrays that promise when he takes her to a cave in a Thracian forest where he ravishes her. Predatory imagery links him to the theme of the false deceivers of the other stories: Ryght as the lamb that of the wolf is biten Or as the culver that of the egle is smiten And is out of his clawes forth escaped Yet it is afered and awhaped Lest it be hent eft-sones, so sat she. (LGW, ll. 2318–22)

Tereus rapes her by brute force and, when she cries out for her sister, cuts out her tongue. The rape is described as a theft, ‘That he hath reft 110

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hir of hir maydenhed’, and Tereus as ‘this false theef’ (LGW, l. 2330). Chaucer frequently invokes a trope of theft to describe the betrayals of various men in the legends. Here he suggests that the theft of rape is itself a kind of forced exchange. Tereus proceeds to imprison her, ‘And kepte hire to his usage and his store’ (LGW, l. 2337), reducing her to the level of a commodity which he has appropriated and taken possession of. Philomela, however, outsmarts Tereus and manages to tell her story through art, by weaving it into a tapestry she then sends to her sister, who immediately comes to her side. The legend ends with the two sisters embracing, the narrator deprecating Tereus and averring that no man can be trusted to remain true. But the larger message is one of a kind of triumph – art and sisterly love over power and cruelty. The narrative achieves a mean-like balance as Tereus’s lies and perfidy are met by Philomela’s quietly woven truth, his lust by Progne’s love. At the end of her story Lucrece is revered as a seynt in the Roman calendar; here, too, a kind of apotheosis takes place as Philomela transcends the world of pain she has been forced to inhabit. Both women escape the material world that betrayed their goodness and we see them at the end, together, unified in loving embrace. Like the story of Philomela, the legend of Phyllis and Demophon comes close to the sensational – stories ostensibly told for moral ends, but more memorable for the events and details they convey than the messages they impart. In these stories excess takes the form of manic predation. Demophon, the false son of Theseus, a conqueror of Troy, comes riding a broken ship driven by a storm, advised to seek the help of the queen. In a short narrative Chaucer spends a great deal of time describing the sea and the storm, both metaphors for Demophon’s unstable nature – so different from Lucrece’s stable heart – and the emotional havoc he will create: Byhynde hym come a wynd and ek a reyn That shof so sore, his sayl ne myghte stonde; Hym were lever than al the world a-londe, So hunteth him the tempest to and fro. So derk it was, he coude nowher go. And with a wawe brosten was his stere. His ship was rent so lowe in swich manere, That carpenter ne coude it nat amende. The se by nyghte as any torche it brende For wod, and possith hym now up now doun,

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women Til Neptune hath of him compassioun, And Thetis, Thorus, Triton, and they alle, And made hym upon a lond to falle, Whereof that Phillis lady was and queene, Ligurges doughter, fayrer on to sene Than is the flour ageyn the bryghte sonne. Unnethe is Demophon to londe ywonne, Wayk and ek wery, and his folk forpyned Of werynesse and also enfamyned; And to the deth he almost was ydriven. (LGW, ll. 2411–30)

Laying out the by-now familiar plot of male perfidy and womanly generosity, Chaucer seeks a swift means of narrating the essentials of his tale, admitting ‘But for I am agroted herebyforn’ (LGW, l. 2454), he passes ‘shortly in this wyse’ (LGW, l. 2458) to link Demophon to Theseus’s behavior toward Ariadne: Ye han wel herd of Theseuys devyse In the betraysyng of fair Adryane That of her pitee kepte him from his bane. At shorte wordes, right so Demophon The same wey, the same path hath gon That dide his false fader Theseus. (LGW, ll. 2459–64)

In this truncated version of his story the structural elements stand out in clear relief: Demophon pledges his fidelity and proceeds to rob Phyllis of her goods, material and immaterial: ‘And piked of hire al the good he mighte,/ Whan he was hol and sound and hadde his reste/ And doth with Phillis what so that hym leste’ (LGW, ll. 2467–9). The tale contains a salient example of a transaction that fails its purpose. Promising to return after preparing for their wedding in his own land, he simply does not come. Using a metaphor based on monetary exchange, Chaucer says that Phyllis suffered for the loss of ‘that hath she so harde and sore abought’ (LGW, l. 2483). Chaucer refuses to waste any more ink on Demophon (LGW, ll. 2490–1), showing how little he values him, but he focuses on Phyllis’s letter, which repeats the mercantile metaphor of exchange, blaming Demophon that ‘Over the terme set betwixe us tweyne/ That ye ne holden forward as ye seyde’ (LGW, ll. 2499–500). As Troilus does, waiting for Criseyde, she measures the time that has passed since his expected return – ‘Or that the mone wente ones aboute’ (LGW, l. 2503) – and the four moons which have marked his absence, lamenting his failure to keep his date, both an affliction 112

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to a lover and another hint at the contractual nature of sexual relationships in this poem: ‘And if that ye the terme rekene wolde/ As I or other trewe lovers sholde,/ I pleyne not, God wot, byforn my day’ (LGW, ll. 2510–12). Phyllis’s lament recalls the immoral inheritance Demophon claims from his father Theseus, and places him within the context of his lineage, which both defines and also defies his perfidy – the gallery of his ancestors’ images. A final exchange concludes the legend, that of Phyllis’s dead body floating to the harbor of Athens, symbol of their unfulfilled contract and the poison of Demophon’s deception. The fragmentary legend of Hypermnestra plays off the legend of Thisbe as well as the sensational elements of the two preceding tales. Here the parent is an active alternative to the husband, not just an impediment. In many ways an unnatural tale, it sends the bride not to bed with her bridegroom, but to her father (LGW, l. 2624). His love for her is expressed in terms that echo Antony’s extreme passion for Cleopatra: ‘…doughter, I love thee so/ That al the world to me nis half so lef’ (LGW, ll. 2635–6). Echoes of Tarquin, too, appear in her father’s warning, ‘That, but thou do as I shal thee devyse/ Thou shalt be deed, by him that al hath wrought’ (LGW, ll. 2641–2), suggesting the similarity of male attitudes and actions that unite the various stories. Hypermnestra’s great achievement is her Griselda-like commitment to honor her vow as wife over self-love, over devotion to her father, and over fear of her father. Saving her husband’s life, she is abandoned, doomed to prison, after he escapes via the gutter pipe outside their chamber. The nine legends that comprise Chaucer’s poem for modern readers reveal their cultural affinities as well as Chaucer’s brilliant syncretic imagination, which taps multiple topical cultural issues. Echoes of Boccaccio’s concern for family relationships and his anxiety about women’s misjudgments appear intermingled with Christine’s warnings to women to be prudent in loving and Gower’s construction of human relationships as exchanges. Aristotle’s ideas about the mean and about exchange appear throughout the nine stories alongside a theme which is not in Aristotle, but which figures as crucially important in Chaucer’s poem: the breaking of covenant. His faithful women are faithful because they find themselves betrayed by men who have broken promises, in many cases in the form of exchanges that are contracts, covenants to perform certain deeds in return for certain payments. The covenants that are broken are social in 113

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nature, focused on promises to be true, to be faithful, to act honorably. They represent the hard work of weaving the complex fabric of human society, so easily rent by feyned behavior and failure to honor trouthe. Aristotle identifies and Oresme describes the kinds of problems that arise from unequal relationships, but Chaucer focuses on their collapse. In this he reflects what Richard Green termed a ‘crisis of trouthe’ in late fourteenth century English court culture. But Chaucer goes further: he is interested in why people break faith, why exchanges are not honored, covenants broken. The ending of the Troilus directly addresses this question, for in the same passage in which he refers to Alceste’s fidelity, Chaucer also addresses the subject of men’s betrayal of women: ‘Thorugh false folk … That with hir grete wit and subtilte/ Bytraise yow’ (Tr V, ll. 1781–3), raising the subject of deception that appears in so many of the narrative plots of the Legend. Chaucer concludes the stanza in which he expresses this sympathy by saying he is moved to speak further, and prays all the women who read his text, ‘Beth war of men, and herkneth what I seye’ (Tr V, ll. 1772–85), a sentiment and phrase very like his comment in the Legend, ‘And trusteth as in love no man but me’ (LGW, l. 2561). The Legend follows the Troilus not as a contrast, but as an extension of themes, tropes and ideas laid out in Chaucer’s careful description of the strains Troilus and Criseyde endure and that contribute to their broken promises. In many ways the figure of Criseyde models the kind of restraint that the women of the Legend often do not achieve in their dealings with the men they desire, and that restraint, coupled with skillful negotiation, yields the kind of unity and joy they seek but fail to find. Like the Legend, Troilus is a poem heavily influenced by the Ethics in several ways: the friendship of Pandarus and Troilus; the immoderate love Troilus suffers; Criseyde’s careful, prudent decisions about whether or not to love and her recognition of the exchanges involved in her decision to love. At the beginning of Book III Pandarus maneuvers her and Troilus together with the lie that it is rumored she has favored Horaste. This is the opening to a long, specifically courtly agreement in which Troilus begs to serve her as his lady, and she initially resists, ‘Avysyng hire and hied nought to faste/ With nevere a word’ (ll. 157–8). When she does speak, she negotiates. She agrees to receive him into her service so long as her honor is not blemished. She goes on from that initial point to recognize the disproportion in their relationship and to avow that 114

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although he may be a king’s son, he ‘shal namore han sovreignete’ of her in love than ‘right in that case is’, and that in fact if he does ‘amys’ she will rebuke him, and if he does well, she will cherish him (Tr III, ll. 159–82). At that point she takes him in her arms and kisses him. He, of course, agrees and they come to an accord that makes it possible for them to achieve a kind of perfect unity in their love, described later in Book III. Although they had to be careful and strategic about meeting, they were nonetheless completely unified in mind and thought: But thilke litel that they spake or wroughte, His wise goost took ay of al swych heede, It semed hire he wiste what she thoughte Withouten word, so that it was no need To bidde hym ought to doon, or ought forbeede; For which she thought that love, al come it late Of alle joie hadde opned hir the yate. (Tr III, ll. 463–9)

At the end of Book III, Chaucer describes the joy they achieve in Aristotelian terms, as a perfect mean of happiness and woe, a point of stasis in a poem set against a background of war and defeat. ‘And passed wo with joie contrepeise’ (Tr III, l. 1407) – their past woe is balanced by their current joy, at least for the moment. Although Troilus is a tragedie it contains this theme of unity in love and these scenes which the Legend, ostensibly a celebratory poem, never achieves. Criseyde is wiser than the good women of the Legend; she is prudent, careful, aware of the dangers of disparity of rank, and she is rewarded for a careful negotiation. But in the end the fact that Troilus is a true lover makes all the difference.

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Chapter 4 Women in Love: on the Unity of the Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde

The Legend of Good Women is arguably Chaucer’s most problematic poem. Critics have wrestled with its uncertain tone, its oddly elliptical relation to its classical sources and its fragmentary nature. While few would still argue that the unfinished state of the poem we have now testifies to the author’s having abandoned a boring project, there has been little effort to imagine the completed project Chaucer envisioned and its place in his poetics. Working on the assumption that what we have today is a truncated version of an original text likely much richer, longer and more directly related to Troilus and Criseyde in respect to theme and language, this chapter explores a group of thematic tropes and figures present in both the Troilus and in the Legend as a means of understanding Chaucer’s project in the Legend. My argument is that the poem, as Robert Frank Jr argued so persuasively in his Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women, is not a literary failure: rather that even in its current incomplete state it is a work of Chaucer’s full literary maturity, a story of women’s vulnerability in love, grounded in the tragic story of Troilus and looking toward the comedic narratives of the Tales.1 A trail of evidence for the existence of a longer, likely complete version of the Legend appears in Chaucer’s own work and in medieval readers’ responses to the Legend. It is a reasonable inference that Chaucer continued to work on the poem we now call the Legend of Good Women after writing the Man of Law’s Prologue, because of the  1

Frank Jr, Chaucer and the Legend of Good Women.

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partial nature of its catalogue of narratives (fifteen of the twenty-five he mentions in the Prologue) and because the work was extended beyond the nine tales we now have, and the thirteen named in the Prologue. The existence of a collection of twenty-five stories of good women by Chaucer is implied by Edward, duke of York, in his translation of Gaston Phoebus’s Livre de la chasse (c. 1387–9) in the early fifteenth century Master of Game (c. 1406–13). As a translator of an extensive store of hunting knowledge, Edward invokes Chaucer’s authority about the value of preserving ancient knowledge in writing, paraphrasing Chaucer’s text, suggesting his familiarity with it: ‘And as I would not that his hunters nor yours that now be or that should come hereafter did not know the perfection of this art, I shall leave for these this simple memorial, for as Chaucer saith in his prologue of “The 25 Good Women”: “By writing have men mind of things passed, for writing is the key of all good remembrance.”’2 In The Fall of Princes Lydgate describes the Legend as a collection of nineteen narratives (ll. 332, 1801).3 While the number of legends that comprised the medieval version of the work is variously stated, all medieval accounts exceed the number of legends that comprise the work for us. This fact calls into question the persistent notion that the poem we have is as Chaucer left it. Other, longer versions were read, in royal circles and by his literary heirs, as texts worthy of citation and invocation. While the Legend of Good Women can claim the influence of multiple sources and literary conventions – the fashionable popularity of narratives of pagan women in the major vernaculars of Europe, an expanding recognition of the value of classical exemplary narratives in exploring ethics, Chaucer’s immense debt to Machaut – any discussion of the meaning or the poetics of the Legend logically begins with the Troilus, for the Legend is specifically cast as a palinode to that work,4 a poem commanded by the God of Love The Master of Game by Edward, Second Duke of York: the Oldest English Book on Hunting, ed. W.A. and F. Baillie-Grohman (New York, 1909), p. 2. On the textual connections between Edward, duke of York’s work and Chaucer’s see J. McNelis, ‘Parallel Manuscript Readings in the Canterbury Tales Retraction and Edward of Norwich’s Master of Game’, The Chaucer Review 28 (2001), 87–90.  3 John Lydgate, Fall of Princes, ed. H. Bergen (Washington, 1923–27), no. 22.  4 On this topic, see J. Fumo, ‘The God of Love and Love of God: Palinodic Exchange in the Prologue of the Legend of Good Women and the “Retraction”’,  2

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in compensation for the perceived insult the Troilus has posed to his reign and majesty (LGW F, ll. 320–35). But rather than being a simple recantation, the Legend bears a more complex relationship to the Troilus. Even as Chaucer moves from a story of a man’s fidelity and a woman’s betrayal to stories of faithful women betrayed by faithless men, he continues to work within the template of the Troilus’s narrative of desire, exchange and loss. He has proposed a distinction that does not constitute a difference. Chaucer was well acquainted with Aristotle’s discussion of apparent and real oppositions in the Ethics. Prudence invokes precisely this distinction in ‘The Tale of Melibee’ when she criticizes Melibee’s idea of vengeance: For certes, wikkedness is nat contrarie to wikkednesse, ne vengeaunce to vengeaunce, ne wrong to wrong, but they been semblable/ And therefore o vengeaunce is nat warrished by another vengeaunce, ne o wroong by another wrong. (*2475– 80)

Like Melibee’s plan for vengeance, the Legend is not contrary but similar to the poem to which it responds. In the Prologue to the Legend, Chaucer protests that his ‘entente’ in the Troilus was to ‘forthren trouthe in love and yt cheryce;/ And to ben war fro falsnesse and fro vice/ By swich ensample; this was my meynynge’ (LGW F, ll. 471–4). In this protest he lays the foundation for the unity of the two poems. Alceste’s commands in lines 436–41, and again in 485, to write of truth in love direct him to re-engage his former subject, albeit from a different perspective. Faithful to Alceste’s direction (l. 486), Chaucer couples women’s faithfulness in love with male betrayal, creating an almost mirror meta-plot of the love-story in the Troilus. His new poem is not an opposite but a similar text in which he explores and develops themes begun in the earlier work, but now much more focused on exchange values and on the vulnerability of women in love. The figurative tropes and themes that tie the two poems together focus on the radical instability of human love, on its betrayal and its aftermath. Chaucer announces that the subject of the Troilus is the double sorrow of its eponymous hero in loving and in losing Criseyde. But any reader of the poem recognizes Chaucer’s sympathy for Criseyde and his reluctance to blame her for her betrayal; he goes to great lengths to explain all the reasons in The Legend of Good Women: Context and Reception, ed. C. P. Collette (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 157–75.

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why Criseyde finally turns from Troilus to Diomede, preparing the ground early in the second book.5 In the Legend he turns once more to women in love, and warns once more about the dangers that they face. Like Christine de Pizan’s Le livre du duc des vrais amans, his tale is a cautionary one for women, and his wry admonition, ‘trusteth as in love no man but me’, may not be so ironic as it seems at first, for he is the author who celebrates women’s faithfulness while exposing its excessive cost.

The Back Story of Troy The mental geography of the Legend is constructed in reference to mythical Troy, a fallen city which endures as an imagined site of love and loss. It is the city in which Helen lives with Paris, not so much a victim as a partner in Paris’s desire.6 The connection between the Ovidian heroines’ plaints and Troy may reflect Chaucer’s awareness of a French tradition that links the two. A. Colville7 describes a fifteenth-century manuscript, Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal 3326, associated with Jean de Créquy, the court of Philippe le Bon in Burgundy and Jean’s wife, Loyse de la Tour.8 In that manuscript a collection of Ovidian narratives is placed between Guy de Corompres’s Livre de la destruction de Troies and Le roman de Troilus et Criseida, a French translation of Boccaccio’s Filostrato by Pierre de Beauvau. Titled ‘Cy commencent les espitles que les Dames de Grece envoierent á leurs maris qui estoient devant Troies au siege et les responces d’icelles’, For the argument of Criseyde’s cautious awareness of her circumstances and reluctance to jeopardize her status by loving, see McAlpine, ‘Criseyde’s Prudence’; C. P. Collette, ‘Criseyde’s Honor: Interiority and Public Identity in Chaucer’s Courtly Romance’, in Literary Aspects of Courtly Culture, ed. D. Maddox and S. Sturm-Maddox (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 47–55; A. Minnis and E. J. Johnson, ‘Chaucer’s Criseyde and Feminine Fear’, in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain, Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. J. Wogan-Browne et al., Medieval Women Texts and Contexts Series 3 (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 199–216.  6 See William Caxton, The Destruction of Troy (1473?; reprint, London, 1670), Book III, chapter iii, pp. 17–24.  7 A. Colville, ‘Les Epistles que les dame de Grece envoient a leurs maries qui estoient devant Troies et les responses d’icelles’, Academie des inscriptions & belles lettres, Comptes rendus des séances (Paris, 1940), pp. 98–109.  8 Ibid, p. 109.  5

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the narratives occupy thirteen leaves of the manuscript (87 to 100).9 The letters, Colville says, recount little about the battles of the siege; they are almost always ‘plaintes passionnées d’épouses et d’amantes qui réclaiment le retour ou la fidélité de ceux qui les ont quittées et qui paraissent les abandonner; elles rappellent les promesses qui leur ont été répétées’.10 Three earlier French manuscripts (BN nat. fr. 301, BN nat. fr. 254, Grenoble Bibl. Munic. 860) contain a series of stories from the Heroides interspersed in the Troy narrative of the histoire ancienne. In the cases of Theseus and Demophon, these French versions depart from Ovid’s narrative and connect both Greeks directly with the siege of Troy.11 Just as Thebes and Theban betrayal shadow the narrative of the Troilus (II, ll. 84, 100, 107; V, ll. 602, 937, 1486, 1490), so Troy shadows the action of the Legend, providing both geographical and chronological structure. Events occur in relation to the fall of Troy, as in the legend of Dido (an extended and polished telling of the story of Aeneas and Dido) and in the legend of Hypsipyle and Medea, where Chaucer ‘casually’ drops Troy into the narrative as a point of reference to the geography of Colcos (LGW, l. 1426). In the legend of Phyllis, Demophon is introduced as returning from Troy, a warning of his coming betrayals. This French tradition and Chaucer’s deliberate interweaving of Troy into the stories of Ovid’s heroines invites reading the narratives of the Legend and the Troilus as Chaucer’s continuing exploration of a single topic.

Imagining Love A marked difference in style is likely the chief reason that the thematic and metaphorical unity of the two poems has been overlooked.12 In the G-Prologue Chaucer promises to tell ‘many a story’ directly and without ornamentation – ‘the naked text in English to declare’ (LGW, ll. 86–7). At the end of the F-Prologue he creates and ‘accepts’ the God of Love’s charge to abbreviate the tales he will tell:

 9 10 11 12

Ibid, p. 98. Ibid, p. 101. L. Constans, ‘Une Traduction Française des Heroides D’Ovide au XIIIe Siècle’, Romania 43 (1914), 177–98 (p. 181). On the registers of the Prologue to the Legend, see H. Phillips, ‘Register, Politics and the Legend of Good Women’, The Chaucer Review 37 (2002), 101–28.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women I wot wel that thou maist nat al yt ryme That swiche lovers diden in hire tyme; It were too long to reden and to here. Suffiseth me thou make in this manere: That thou reherce of al hir lyf the grete … For whoso shal so many a storye telle, Sey shortly, or he shal to longe dwelle. (LGW, ll. 570–7)

The self-imposed challenge of brevity and plain speaking in the Legend stands in marked contrast to the expansive stanzas of the Troilus where emotion and interiority are explored at length. How do the subtle poetics of Troilus’s rhyme royal stanzas relate to the often abrupt couplets of the Legend? One answer may lie in Chaucer’s continual explorations of narrative voice through his various personae. Chaucer’s odd persona in the Legend functions as one of the varied personalities he adapts, each one appropriate to its specific poem – the faithful historian of the storial narrative of Troy, the eager but clueless seeker of auctoritee who achieves the House of Fame only to discover the mutability of reputation, the good-fellow pilgrim, eyes and ears open, a medieval version of Christopher Isherwood’s ‘I am a camera.’13 In the Legend he takes on the role of the outraged conveyer of brutal stories of deception, abandonment and rape. This persona is created by the style and tone of the legends, through shifts of register and through emphatic rhymes that often grate on the ear. While Chaucer employs some of the French rhymes that he uses throughout the rhyme patterns of the Troilus, more typically in the Legend he uses pronouns, monosyllables and modifiers as rhyme words in lines markedly different in tone from those based on abstractions of French origin. The narrator’s abrupt style arises from a series of lines which are units of information and

13

From the opening page of Christopher Isherwood’s novel Goodbye to Berlin: ‘I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.’ Chaucer’s personae, of course, are not simple creatures. Each of them seems to struggle with his task: the narrator of the Troilus struggles with the plot he must narrate and his obligation to ‘history’ in telling how Criseyde forsook Troilus, ‘Or at the leeste, how that she was unkynde’ (IV, ll. 15–16), warning his audience that if they think poorly of Criseyde, they will be the ones to bear reproach. Similarly in the General Prologue to the Tales the narrator undertakes to be a faithful reporter of others’ words, no matter of what register or vulgarity, excusing himself on account of his ‘short’ wit (ll. 725–46).

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virtually end-stopped, very different from the stanzas of the Troilus which often explore one idea in depth. We can see this mixture in the legend of Ariadne: A semely knight was Theseus to se, And yong, but of a twenty yer and thre. But whoso hadde yseyn his countenaunce, He wold have wept for routhe of his penaunce; For which this Adryane in this manere Answerde him to his profre and to his chere: ‘A kinges sone and ek a knight,’ quod she, ‘To ben my servaunt in so low degre, God shilde it for the shame of wemen alle, And leve me never swiche a cas befalle!’ (LGW, ll. 2074–83)

The steady iambic beat of most of these largely monosyllabic lines stands in contrast to the comparatively more sensual and less obviously rhythmic couplet ‘But whoso hadde yseyn his countenaunce,/ He wold have wept for routhe of his penaunce’, where back voweldiphthongs mix with the sibilance of ‘ce’. Two styles mingle in this short passage, not out of inattention but as a result of artistic deliberation. A similar intentionality governs the odd use of rhyme in the Legend. Consider Chaucer’s use of shove in the Legend and the Troilus. Derived from the Old English scufan, it is a term which in Middle English denotes the state of being expelled or banished from an honored status, in effect rejected.14 Here Chaucer uses it in a passage from the legend of Thisbe: This yonge man was cleped Piramus, Tysbe hight the mayd, Naso seyth thus; And thus by report was her name yshove That, as they wex in age, wex hir love. (LGW, ll. 724–7)

The harsh ‘v’ sound and the grammar that creates enjambment here both serve to emphasize shove, a word that overpowers its rhyme, love. Chaucer uses the same shove/love rhyme in the word’s modern sense of ‘pushed’ in Book III of the Troilus, l. 1026, where it is part of an internal rhyme: ‘For that o greyne of love is on it shove’, itself part of the rhyme scheme of the stanza expressing Criseyde’s anxiety: 14

This word also occurs in its modern sense of ‘pushed’ in l. 1281 of ‘The Franklin’s Tale’.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women Ek al my wo is this, that folk now usen To seyn right thus, ‘Ye jalousie is love!’ And wolde a bushel venym al excusen, For that o greyn of love is on it shove. But that woot heighe God that sit above, If it be likkere love, or hate, or grame; And after that, it oughte bere his name. (Tr III, ll. 1023–9)

Shove is still a strong rhyme, a key word that carries a heavy stress, but as part of the triple B rhymes of the stanza – love, shove, above – its verbal force is mitigated by its role as one of seven rhymes in a stanza in which Criseyde considers what love is in a grammatically complex series of clauses that depend on the proposition that jealousy is love. Shove recurs in the opening of the legend of Hypsipyle and Medea where Chaucer excoriates Jason as a ‘sly devourere and confusioun/ of gentil wemen’. Here a passage replete with French abstractions, seemingly summoned to convey a sense of moral outrage as well as Jason’s own honeyed language and deceptive wooing, abruptly changes register. Chaucer vows to make Jason’s perfidy notorious in English, and as he vows this, his register and his language change completely to a plain, simple, poetically unadorned style in which the shove/love rhyme is markedly strong and abrupt, matching the state of mind of the narrator who professes to be so outraged he will act decisively to ‘cut off’ his own character from further attention. Here is the opening of the legend: Thou rote of false lovers, Duk Jasoun, Thou sly devourere and confusioun Of gentil wemen, tendre creatures, Thow madest thy recleymyng and thy lures To ladyes of thy statly aparaunce, And of thy wordes farced with plesaunce, And of thy feyned trouthe and thy manere, With thyn obesaunce and humble cheere, And with thy countrefeted peyne and wo. There othere falsen oon, thow falsest two! O, often swore thou that thou woldest dye For love, whan thou ne feltest maladye Save foul delyt, which that thou callest love! Yf that I live, thy name shal be shove In English that thy sekte shal be know! Have at thee, Jasoun! Now thyn horn is blowe! (LGW, ll. 1368–83)

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In the poetics of the Legend, as in the Prologue, Chaucer is consciously deploying a variety of registers, testing the capacity of the iambic couplet to do his bidding as he imagines the tone and style appropriate for a narrator of stories of brutal betrayal and utter hopelessness. While the poetic registers of the two poems differ markedly, the images and tropes15 in both poems constitute a unified sub-textual commentary on Chaucer’s proclaimed intentions and explicit narrative lines. They form a literary descant that provides Chaucer the opportunity of singing two songs, celebrating love while calling attention to its evanescence and sorrowful aftermath. Though they are hardly surprising, or unfamiliar, the importance of the collocation of thematic tropes lies in their testimony to the imaginative unity of the two poems and to Chaucer’s continuing interest in using women to explore the circumstances which encourage and destroy human love. In both poems tropes of strong walls and the private spaces of love yield to tropes of breached defenses, traps and vulnerability; celebration of sexual passion is expressed in a poetry of predation also used to describe the intentions of seemingly fair but wickedly false lovers. Exchanges of love tokens and vows are replaced by changes of mind and severed relationships symbolized by littoral and liminal spaces. The transformative power of loving devolves into displacement and alienation, from self and others. Chaucer’s Criseyde is an entirely different woman from Boccaccio’s Creseida. Much of Book II of the Troilus is devoted to her sense of autonomy and her strategic thinking, qualities absent in Boccaccio’s Filostrato.16 She is acutely aware of her precarious social position in Troy as the daughter of a traitor. No wonder then that she articulates a trope of faith in protective, encompassing male strength when she asks Pandarus ‘how Ector ferde,/ That was the townes wal and Grekes yerde’ (Tr II, ll. 153–4). Her love for Troilus increases as her admiration for his discretion and his strength increases; in the third book of the poem Chaucer says, 15

16

In general the tropes discussed here are more subtly deployed in the Troilus than in the Legend, which is much more directive about how a reader should regard action and character. In this regard, McAlpine’s essay, ‘Criseyde’s Prudence’, cited in note 5 above, is an analysis of essentially Aristotelian nature; Criseyde’s prudence enables her to escape extreme emotional responses.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women That wel she felt he was to hire a wal Of stiel, and sheld from every displesaunce; That to ben in his goode governaunce, So wis he was, she was namore afered— I mene, as fer as oughte ben required. (Tr III, ll. 479–83)

But the walls of Troy are neither solid nor stable, for walls, like promises, can be breached. In spite of Ector’s and Troilus’s strength, Criseyde is exchanged for Antenor, passed through the gates of walled Troy. Criseyde equates chivalric strength with the towers of Troy, but also acknowledges that the walls of the city are permeable when she reassures Troilus that she will be able to come and go through them as she wishes, even if she is in the Greeks’ camp, because the gates of the city are often opened. Criseyde’s father, Calkas, foretells their coming destruction, in part a legacy of ancient wrongs returning to afflict succeeding generations: ‘For certein, Phebus and Neptunes bothe/ That makeden the walles of the town,/ Ben with the folk of Troie alwey so wrothe/ That they wol brynge it to confusioun’ (Tr IV, ll. 120–3); and Troilus himself fears the future of a vulnerable city: ‘And that th’assege nevere shal aryse/ For-whi the Grekis han it alle sworn/ Til we be slayn and down oure walles torn’ (Tr IV, ll. 1480–2). As the poem approaches its climax, Troilus walks on these uncertain walls (Tr V, ll. 604, 1112, 1194), plagued by anxiety about whether Criseyde will be true. And she for her part, exiled in the Greek camp, seeing the distant walls of Troy, thinks of the lost happiness they now signify, recalling ‘the plesance and the joie … ich had ofte withinnne yonder walles’ (Tr V, ll. 731–3). The same trope of protective walls easily breached, of defense destroyed by will or passion, recurs in the Legend where it is more consistently negative. In the story of Ariadne, Nisus defends his city of Alcathoe behind strong walls until his own daughter, Scylla, falls in love with Minos, who lays siege to the city, and betrays him. She … caste her herte upon Mynos the king, For his beaute and for his chyvalrye, So sore that she wende for to dye. And, shortly of this proces for to pace, She made Minos wynnen thilke place (LGW, ll. 1911–15).

Minos repays Scylla ‘wikkedly … [for] hir kyndenesse/ And let her drenche in sorwe and distresse’ (LGW, ll. 1918–19). Dido, the great builder of Carthage (LGW, l. 1007), succumbs to love for Aeneas, 126

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pouring out the wealth her city contains on him, and he leaves her, vulnerable to ‘These lordes which that wonen me besyde’, who, she fears, ‘Wole me distroyen only for youre sake’ (LGW, ll. 1317–18). In the legend of Pyramus and Thisbe, love overcomes the strength of the walls of Babiloyne, built by Queen Semiramis – as well as the domestic walls that contain them. The lovers steal outside the walls of the city to the fields beyond and to love, only to find death.17 In these stories women are ‘translated’ from a state of control18 and happiness to one of powerlessness and sorrow. Chaucer’s descriptions of enclosed spaces invoke the conventional power of walls to insure privacy and safety while simultaneously belying that hope. In the courtly world of the Troilus love must be hidden from the destructive power of the public eye. The consummation of Troilus and Criseyde’s love is set in a series of closely confined spaces in Pandarus’s house; Troilus awaits Criseyde in a ‘stewe’ where he has been enclosed for hours (Tr III, ll. 600–2). A storm rages so fiercely that Criseyde is easily persuaded to spend the night at Pandarus’s house where he assures her she shall sleep in a ‘litel closet’ (Tr III, l. 663), close to Pandarus and to her women. Once Troilus and Criseyde come together, Pandarus seems to withdraw, but only to the chimney corner (‘And bar the candel to the chymeneye’, Tr III, ll. 1141, 1189–90), so that the love scene takes place in a space tightly enclosed by walls but not entirely distant from the public world. The details of this scene are Chaucer’s own addition to Boccaccio’s Filostrato, so it is all the more significant that Chaucer invokes the same elements in the love scene in the legend of Dido. It may be that Dido’s brief reference in the Heroides to the ‘sudden downpour’ and the ‘lofty grot’ in which she and Aeneas took shelter and pledged love19 inspired him to recreate similar details of weather and space in the Troilus. Or it may have been that Chaucer’s own creation of wind, weather and enclosed space in the Troilus helped him imagine the rich hunting scene during which 17

18 19

The cave motif in the legend of Philomela (LGW, ll. 2311, 2312, 2362), as well as in the story of Dido and Aeneas, is also invoked in this narrative when Thisbe flees to a cave from the lion. As in the other two stories, the cave offers no real protection to a woman. Control, of course, is a relative term; in the context of this literature it refers to status, reputation and an ability to retain both. Heroides VII, ll. 90–5; translation from Ovid, Heroides Amores, trans. G. Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA, 1977).

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Dido and Aeneas separate from the hunting party, taking shelter in a ‘little cave’ offering protection and privacy, where they consummate their love and pledge their fidelity: … this was the first morwe Of hire gladnesse, and gynning of hire sorwe For there hath Eneas ykneled so, And told hir al his herte and al his wo, And swore so depe to hire to be trewe, For wele or wo and chaunge hire for no newe. (LGW, ll. 1231–5)

In the very moment of Dido’s gladness, she is vulnerable to sorrow, for the walls of a cave are no guard against the kind of destruction that comes under the guise of falsehood. Dido’s world, like Troy, falls through guile. In spite of a rhetoric of rapturous new beginnings, love scenes in both poems hint at a duplicity that lies at the heart of love, in the Troilus through the plotting and lies that bring the lovers together, and in the legend of Dido, more openly, as the narrator continues to characterize Aeneas ‘as a fals lovere [who] so wel can pleyne’ (LGW, l. 1236) – not so much a hero as a sadly familiar type. In these poems human love is of its very nature essentially unstable. One of the most memorable metaphors in the Troilus is the one Chaucer uses to describe how Criseyde comes to forget Troy and Troilus: ‘For bothe Troilus and Troie town/ Shal knotteles thorughout hire herte slide’ (Tr V, ll. 768–9). Love, promises, happiness all slip away. To express this idea Chaucer uses water as a symbol of emotional turmoil as well as impermanence. In the consummation scene of Book III of the Troilus he introduces a trope that links even Troilus’s faithful and passionate love to flowing water’s constantly shifting, unstable movement when Pandarus says the prince has come ‘In thorugh a goter, by a pryve wente,/ Into my chaumbre come in al this reyn’ (Tr III, ll. 787–8). The same kind of reference to water flowing through a gutter occurs in the Legend of Hypermnestra when her distraught plans to save her husband Lino’s life turn into abandonment: he awakes, realizes his danger and goes his way ‘Out at this goter or that it be day’ (LGW, l. 2705). In the Legend the ocean becomes the great symbol of male instability and confused, transient desires.20 Many of the narratives are stories of men at sea, struggling 20

The sea is a recurrent symbol and metaphor in Chaucer’s sources, but the

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to survive, cast up on the shores of rich and prosperous kingdoms, ruled by women to whom they pledge fidelity, only to return to the sea and the wandering from which they had sought what turns out to be only temporary relief. Demophon, Theseus’s son in deceit as in blood, one of the most callous of the men in the Legend, epitomizes this connection: fleeing Troy, trying to reach Athens, he and his men are driven on by a violent storm – ‘Byhynde hym com a wynd and ek a reyn/ That shof so sore, his sayl ne mighte stonde’ (LGW, ll. 2411–12). Using Ovid’s trope of the sea to signify the instability of men’s promises and the constant change of male desire, Chaucer departs from his source and articulates what is only implied in Ovid: the connection between the powerful tempest that breaks his ship, leaving it rudderless, and his own falseness. Faithless men come from the constantly shifting sea, and Demophon’s arrival, driven by overpowering wind, rain and waves, signals his extreme perfidy and the turmoil it will bring to Phyllis. Love is uncertain, unstable and dangerous, especially to women who risk being consumed by its insistent and unstable power. Like the storm that drives Demophon to Phyllis, love is a force of nature that alters planned trajectories, that overcomes reason, will and resistance. Troilus employs the same trope of the lover as at the mercy of a violent and hostile nature when he laments his state, comparing it to that of a sailor on a sea of sorrow. Chaucer’s metaphor here is original to his version as he transforms Boccaccio’s more general lament about Troilus’s sorrow into a dark song of blind struggle that casts the sea as both a symbol of his emotional turmoil and a predator: That evere derk in torment, nyght by nyght, Toward my deth with wynd in steere I saille; For which the tenthe nyght, if that I faille The gydyng of thi bemes bright an houre, My ship and me Caribdis wol devoure. (Tr V, ll. 640–4)21

When Pandarus leaves the two lovers, Chaucer self-consciously undertakes to ‘tellen hire gladnesse’ (Tr III, l. 1196) as he has previously told of their sorrow. Yet he begins with a metaphor of

21

fact that he builds on it so frequently is significant, given how much he compresses other elements of his source narratives. The comparison of a lover’s state to that of a ship at sea is also part of the Petrarchan sonnet conventions which Chaucer adapts in Book I, ll. 400f, Canticus Troili.

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predation, ‘What myghte or may the sely larke seye,/ Whan that the sperhauk hath it in his foot?’ (Tr III, ll. 1191–2), and writes of Criseyde as a captured prey, who ‘felte hire thus itake’ (Tr III, l. 1198). The metaphor soon shifts to the more conventional one of the lady surrendering as a besieged castle surrenders (Tr III, ll. 1205–10), and the shock of the predatory metaphor fades when Criseyde quietly asserts, ‘Ne hadde I er now, my swete herte deere,/ Ben yolde, ywis, I were now nought heere!’ (Tr III, ll. 1210–11). Yet the violent power of love shadows Criseyde who is less in control than she tries to be. She dreams in Book II of how an eagle ‘Under hire brest his longe clawes sette,/ And out hire herte he rente, and that anon,/ And dide his herte into hire brest to gon’ (Tr II, ll. 927–9).22 Chaucer is less subtle in using this predatory trope in the Legend, more ready to characterize by description than metaphor or dream.23 In the Legend Jason is the great devourer of women (LGW, ll. 1369, 1581), linked by language and lack of pity with the Minotaur in the legend of Ariadne, another monstrous devourer of youth (LGW, ll. 1937, 1947, 1976). In the legend of Phyllis, Demophon is described as a wily and cunning predator, a fox, who is by nature ‘fals of love’ having inherited this trait from his father Theseus; he has taken to lying and betrayal like a duck to water, ‘as can a drake swimme/ Whan it is caught and carried to the brimme’ (LGW, ll. 2446–51). Troilus’s ecstatic possession of Criseyde is different from Tereus’s hideous obsession to possess Philomela but not entirely distinct, united by a trope of desire as predation. Philomela, carried to a cave, finds no succor but faces Tereus’s lust: And quok for fere, pale and pitously, Ryght as the lamb that of the wolf is bitten; Or as the culver that of the egle is smitten, And is out of his clawes forth escaped, Yet it is afered and awhaped, Lest it be hent eft-sones; so sat she. (LGW, ll. 2317–22)

Considered together, these interwoven themes and recurrent figures support an over-arching vision of how love dislocates, 22

23

On images of violence in the poem, see F. Zeitoun, ‘The Eagle, the Boar and the Self: Dreams, Daydreams, and Violence in Troilus and Criseyde’, Cercles 6 (2003), 43–53. The Heroides is full of predatory imagery which may have inspired Chaucer’s recurrent tropes.

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changes and reduces women to a state of unhappiness. Dwelling briefly on the happiness of love fulfilled, in both poems Chaucer departs from the French courtly tradition which idealizes love as the fulfillment of earthly happiness to explore the darker side of love, broken covenants, the consequences of infidelity. What happens when passion is satisfied and love fades? At the end of the Troilus Chaucer has a new word for that state of unhappiness to which both Troilus and Criseyde, each in a different way, come. He terms their story a tragedye, a term that was new in both French and English, appearing in the mid to late fourteenth century in the lexicon of both languages. In English the term is first recorded in Chaucer’s translation of the Consolation of Philosophy where it is clearly a vernacular neologism he takes the trouble to define: ‘Tragedye is to seyn a dite of a prosperite for a tyme that endeth in wrecchidnesse.’24 The story of the double sorrow of Troilus has a tragic plot – two lovers who lived for a time in prosperity experience change and dislocation, and end in wretchedness. Destabilization and transformation lay at the heart of medieval theories of earthly love. A mere vision could bring on lovesickness, loss of initiative and will, and a growing sense of depression. Troilus’s first vision of Criseyde de-natures him, rendering him a victim of lovesickness so profound that the great prince of Troy takes to his bed and must rely on his friend to be his stay and support. Male lovesickness is widely anatomized and represented in medieval literature, but women’s suffering is relatively rarely depicted outside of romances. Chaucer is one of the first to represent women in love, a subject Christine de Pizan engaged repeatedly in her works.25 Criseyde, who is initially in no danger of lovesickness, anticipates much of what Christine will record about 24 25

Consolation of Philosophy, II, pr. ii, l. 70. This definition appears as a gloss. In both the Livre des trois vertus (Treasury of the City of Ladies), and in Le Livre du duc des vrais amans (Book of the Duke of True Lovers), Christine de Pizan lays out her contention that women who choose to love of their own will, and especially outside of marriage, risk reputation, status, happiness and home, for in loving clandestinely they put themselves in the power of potential enemies who might discover their secret and spread gossip that will destroy their good names, their social standing and their marriages. Christine’s warnings are strategic and practical, not primarily moral, very much like Criseyde’s musings on the gains and potential losses for women in love. Her writing appeared approximately fifteen to twenty years after it is thought Chaucer wrote the Troilus and the Legend. Clearly both authors were drawing

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women’s vulnerability in love; she knows that she will be subject to radical change, and not necessarily for the better, if she loves Troilus. In the second book Criseyde worries continually about the change that entering a love affair may bring to her precarious status as the daughter of Calcas, a traitor to his own city. But the sight of Troilus returning from a skirmish intoxicates her, and she asks ‘who yaf me drynke? (Tr II, l. 651), implying the loss of self-control that women suffer in love. Aware of her plight, yet powerless to resist, she is caught in a game with serious consequences, one that holds her in jupartie. Troilus and Criseyde eventually exchange rings, jewels and vows of fidelity, but Criseyde’s fears are realized and she herself is exchanged for Antenor (a future traitor to the city), exiled to the Greek camp, as Troilus stands helplessly by. She might have been true to her word, she might have been faithful, but her anxieties about her vulnerability as a single woman, a Trojan and the daughter of an exile are too strong. Succumbing to Diomede’s repeated, persuasive rhetoric about her need for a strong support, she betrays Troilus. As she anticipated, and as Christine de Pizan warned in Le livre des trois vertus, the woman who loves can never love freely or safely, because she is never truly the independent mistress of her own fate. For Criseyde the joy of love quickly gives way to radical change and loss of status as others plan her future for her. For Troilus the recognition and acceptance of loss take longer but are no less a matter of falling from high estate into wretchedness, described in excruciating detail in the fourth and fifth books of the poem. The relatively fast pace and compressed nature of the nine narratives in the Legend render the Troilus’s exquisite anatomization of how love fails in much simpler stories. But Chaucer’s interest in the theme of changed status and loss of prosperity continues, returning in the very first story, the legend of Cleopatra, a story little known to Chaucer’s audience and commanded by the God of Love as the place where Chaucer must begin. It is a story of multiple dislocations and declines from happiness to wretchedness. In the story of Cleopatra, Antony appears first as a conqueror (LGW, l. 585), but within thirty lines he is subordinate to Cleopatra (LGW, l. 615). Cleopatra herself descends from her status as queen into the pit of from common cultural conceptions not original to either. See Laird, ‘Good Women and Bonnes Dames’.

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the ‘shrine’ she builds for Antony, lying with snakes in their joint tomb.26 In the legend of Dido, Aeneas is the exile fleeing fallen Troy, arriving in Libye (LGW, l. 960), storm-tossed and separated from his men. Seeing the story of Troy painted on the walls of Dido’s city, he laments his changed status, a result of his brother Paris’s love for Helen. Altering his source, Chaucer creates Aeneas’s response as one of sorrow at his loss and change of status rather than of pleasure that the story of Troy is well known: ‘Allas, that I was born!’ quod Eneas; ‘Thourghout the world oure shame is kid so wyde, Now it is peynted upon every side. We, that weren in prosperite, Been now desclandred, and in swich degre, No lenger for to liven I ne kepe!’ (LGW, ll. 1027–32)

Dido’s love begins with pity for his changed state. In a textbook example of the excess Christine warns women against, she showers Aeneas with gifts, and he responds, abandoning his desperation: ‘This Eneas is come to paradys/ Out of the swolow of helle and thus in joye/ Remembreth him of his estat in Troye’ (LGW, ll. 1103–5). Dido, too, is transformed by the fire of love which Aeneas’s presence creates. But the wheel of fortune continues to turn and their prosperite wanes. He thinks of other places and other times, while she thinks only of ‘hire newe gest’ (LGW, l. 1158), to such an extent that ‘she hath lost hire hew and ek hire hele’ (LGW, l. 1159). By the end of the narrative, Dido, builder of cities, queen of Carthage, worries about her reputation, her status and her safety. As Aeneas announces his departure, she assumes his earlier role of the formerly prosperous, now ruined: ‘Allas, what woman wole ye of me make?’ (LGW, l. 1305) she asks him, and worries that her very life will be endangered because she has chosen to love Aeneas and he has chosen to leave her (LGW, l. 1318). The narrative ends with an excerpt from the Heroides, Dido’s letter, with which Chaucer concludes this story on the theme not of love but of instability, symbolized by wind and water: ‘For thilke wynd that blew youre ship awey,/The same wynd hath blowe awey youre fey’ (LGW, ll. 1364–5). The transformation, loss and dislocation of formerly powerful 26

One of the registers Chaucer uses in narrating his stories of good women is that of religious discourse. Note ‘shrine’ here, shrift and fey in Thisbe.

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women dominate the plots of the next four narratives. The story of Hypsipyle and Medea begins with betrayal as Jason’s uncle seeks to destroy him by sending him on the quest for the Golden Fleece. Jason sails to Lemnos where Hypsipyle is queen and, Didolike, is generous to the exiled questors who arrive on her shore. Chaucer breaks with his sources to include Hercules as Jason’s close companion, a shadow reconstruction of Pandarus and Troilus. Together they plot to seduce Hypsipyle, who appears first in the poem as ‘lady … and quene/ The fayre yonge Ysiphele the shene … in hir pleying/ And, romynge on the clyves by the se’ (LGW, ll. 1466–70). Jason marries Hypsipyle, then robs her of her wealth and leaves her an abandoned mother, faithful to her faithless husband for the rest of her life (LGW, ll. 1560–79). Jason proceeds to inflict virtually the same sequence of events on Medea, whose enchantments he ‘steals’ to gain the Golden Fleece. Using the same false promises of marriage and love, he succeeds and then abandons her and their two children; ‘And evere in love a chef traytour he was’, he goes on to marry a third wife (LGW, ll. 1659–60). Central elements of this plot recur in the stories of Ariadne, giver of advice and life, yet ultimately victim to Theseus’s honeyed words, abandoned on a deserted island, and in the story of Queen Phyllis who succors Demophon only to find herself betrayed in love and robbed of her wealth. Chaucer links the two stories as tales of inherited wickedness in the male line of Athens. The ultimate story of dislocation and transformation is of course the tale of Philomela, at the heart of which is her loss of family, voice and freedom, all a result of Tereus’s uncontrolled desire. Such hope as the stories offer directs human attention away from physical desire. In spite of catastrophe, the story of Philomela ends with the reunion of the two sisters, Philomela and Progne, and with the triumph of Philomela’s art over evil, at an enormous price. Lucrece’s tale is a story of dislocation and loss but it also contains elements of hope, centered not in the power of art or sisterly love but in the power of the Church. The tale begins with Tarquin and Colatyn’s conversation about praising good wives, and thus with a theme of female domesticity as opposed to the world of war. Tarquin, the predator, is himself transformed by his lust, entering the world he affects to despise as worthless; he compares the lull in the siege of Ardea to the world of women in which little happens: ‘it was an ydel lyf;/ No man dide there no more than his wyf’ (LGW, 134

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ll. 1700–1). The story of this narrative renders the domestic world Lucrece inhabits an active stage of battle, courage and will, and renders Tarquin’s military bluster subject to the power of his sudden passion to possess Lucrece. By the end both are transformed and dislocated from their original selves: Tarquin is exiled from Rome where he had formerly reigned as king and Lucrece is dead by her own hand but proclaimed ‘A seynt, and ever hir day yhalwed dere/ As in hir lawe’ (LGW, ll. 1871–2). Chaucer ends by praising Lucrece for her steadfastness: ‘I tell hyt for she was to love so trewe,/ Ne in hir wille she chaunged for no newe,/ And for the stable herte, sad, and kinde’ (LGW, ll. 1874–6).

Suppressing Desire and Choosing Love As we have seen in chapter 3, the women of the Legend appear elsewhere in Chaucer’s writing, painted on murals that adorn the walls of temples in the House of Fame and the Parliament of Fowls. In the Legend they leave the walls, but not their two-dimensional form, for they and their stories are ultimately told not for love but for common profit – minatory stories of immoderate desires and broken trouthe. The very end of the Troilus, with its question ‘What nedeth feynede loves for to seke?’ (Tr V, l. 1848), offers the contrast of stability and certainty to be found in spiritual love exemplified by Christ, who ‘nyl falsen’ (Tr V, l. 1845) anyone. Yet the question of what compels humans to love remains unanswered as Chaucer draws a clear line between human and spiritual love. He may have intended to place Alceste at the end of the Prologue to the Legend as a move to offer a female representative of the kind of love Christ showed, a steadfast human love that transcends and conquers death, but we can only guess about how the Legend did end, or might have ended.27 What we do know is that Chaucer, who introduced the idea of tragedy into English literature, critiques the form and offers comedye as the genre he aspires to work in (Tr V, l. 1788). In The Canterbury Tales, when the Monk’s serial catalogue of loss and dislocation becomes too much for him, the Knight offers an alternative to the tragic plot: 27

The backstory in the Greek myth of Alceste is one of unwilling sacrifice, a fact Chaucer seemingly ignores.

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women ‘I seye for me, it is a greet disese, Whereas men han been in greet welthe and ese, To heeren of hire sodeyn fal, allas! And the contrarie is joye and greet solas, As whan a man hath been in povre estaat, And clymbeth up and wexeth fortunat, And there abideth in prosperitee’ (NPT Prol, ll. 2771–7).

The plot the Knight describes is essentially comic. It is this comic movement into happiness that Carol Gilligan explores in The Birth of Pleasure28 where she asks why the great narratives of the West are tragedies and not comedies, and why the young women she works with have internalized a tragic paradigm of expectation in their own contemporary lives. Chaucer leaves the Legend and works on another collection of stories, told in couplets, that contain multiple examples of ‘comic’ endings. Robert Payne has argued that the G revision constituted Chaucer’s valedictory to his previous poetics and the beginning of a ‘fifteen year attempt to realize a still different form, the large framed narrative collection’.29 This chapter suggests that not only the prologue(s) but also the entire project of the Legend represents a transition from his earlier poetics of the dream visions, and even of the Troilus. The Legend echoes a great deal of the theme and metaphors of the Troilus, but in it Chaucer seems to be working to a different end than telling stories of love betrayed. His use of women to make ethical and spiritual points raises the question of Chaucer’s relation to early humanist story-telling alongside Christine de Pizan, Boccaccio and Petrarch, all creators of exemplary narratives based on the lives of exemplary women, mythical and historical. Was Chaucer moving toward a humanist interest in the ultimate worldly benefit of virtues both spiritual and secular? Did he see the comic ending as a better conclusion because it was more social, better able to multiplye earthly happiness because it told of desires for happiness beyond the self-centeredness of love poetry? The figurative and thematic continuities that unite the Troilus, the Legend and the Tales invite us to consider Chaucer’s continual revisiting and refining of the topics, language and modes of narrative. The Legend of Good Women grows out of Troilus, in which its poetic 28 29

C. Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure: A New Map of Love (New York, 2003). R. O. Payne, ‘Making His Own Myth: The Prologue to Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women’, The Chaucer Review 9 (1975), 197–211 (p. 197).

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language and its themes are deeply rooted. But the Legend also looks forward to the Tales, where multiple voices will speak, and to the fiction that the narrative persona is not entirely in control of the stories he recounts. Unlike the historian-poet of the Troilus, who is duty-bound to tell a well-known story without altering it, the narrator of the Legend puts himself at some distance from his task and his subjects. In the Legend Chaucer has not quite determined how to integrate the role of a narrator into a series of stories, especially stories of antiquity and auctoritee. But even in its extant abbreviated version, when read in conjunction with the Troilus and the Tales, the Legend of Good Women, with all its odd phrasing and striking rhymes, is not a failed or dismissible text. Rather it offers a unique and informative perspective on the growth of Chaucer’s poetic imagination and the intertwined development of his poetics and his narrative voice.

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Chapter 5 A New Paradigm: Comedy and the Individual

Chaucer’s women in The Canterbury Tales do not suffer, are not betrayed and usually prevail, even if at great cost. The Tales are the site of comedy, a collection where rough justice, as in the Miller’s and Reeve’s fabliaux and the Merchant’s tale, prevails; where suffering and struggle are rewarded, if only in part, by a degree of happiness, as in the Man of Law’s and Second Nun’s tales; where tragedie is repudiated in favor of tales of ‘joye and greet solas’. These are comic tales in the tradition of medieval comedy, which Lee Patterson has argued focuses on character: ‘it seeks to represent men and women not in terms of their social existence but as individuals’.1 The women of the tales represent a wide variety of personalities, dilemmas and triumphs. Alisoun in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ is the only character at the end of the tale to escape injury or insult. Maleyne in ‘The Reeve’s Tale’ is described as so happy with the adventures of the previous dark night that as the dawn begins she gives her father’s ‘treasure’ of a ‘cake of half a bushel’ of meal, stolen from the clerks, to Aleyn. Custance, besieged by mothers-in-law, false charges, rapists and single motherhood, finds her way home to her husband, her father and to Rome. In ‘The Shipman’s Tale’ the merchant’s wife not only finds the sexual satisfaction her husband seems to have been too busy to provide, but also gains the money that circulates between her husband and the monk. Prudence in ‘The Tale of Melibee’ advises her husband so well that she succeeds in persuading him to follow her advice; by the end of the tale he ‘conformed hym anon

 1

Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, 1991), p. 242.

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and assented fully to werken after hir conseil, and thonked God … that hym sente a wyf of so greet discrecioun’ (Mel, ll. 3060). Cecilia in ‘The Second Nun’s Tale’ similarly succeeds in instructing her husband, promising that if he forgoes physical love, he will experience an even greater pleasure: I have an aungel which that loveth me. … And if that ye in clene love me gye, He wol you loven as me, for youre clennesse, And shewen yow his joye and his brightnesse. (SNT, ll. 152–61)

A brief negotiation ensues in which Valerian stipulates, ‘If I shal trusten thee,/ Lat me that aungel se and hym biholde;/ And if that it a verray angel bee,/ Thanne wol I doon as thou has prayed me’ (SNT, ll. 163–6). Valerian, his brother Tiburce and Maximus, among others, are converted and saved. The tale ends with Valerian and Tiburce’s ascension to heaven (SNT, l. 402) and Cecilia’s triumphant three-day martyrdom (SNT, ll. 533–46). Her death is presented as a victory in a tale in which the physical reality of heaven and the power of flesh to supersede pain and destruction permeate its multiple settings. Less clearly a triumph, but nonetheless a victory, is Virginia’s plight in ‘The Physician’s Tale’, where she gives her life to preserve her chastity and her death leads to political revolution. This tale, like the Second Nun’s, is not a story of what Patterson terms individuals, but rather an example of Chaucer’s creation of stories in which the women represent abstract concepts – faith, the strength of chaste virginity to oppose corruption, even at the cost of death – stories in which abstractions are transformed into exemplary praxis. In The Canterbury Tales, stories centered in women’s challenges and how they meet them, elicit a variety of emotional and rational responses as they unfold, a very different experience from the emotional myopia of the Legend where action and motivation run in deep troughs of dysfunction. Chaucer returns to women whose voices, whose strength and whose emotions are central to some of the most powerful stories he tells. From the Book of the Duchess through the story of St Cecilia, his poetic imagination turns to women as sources of moral instruction and protagonists beset by a variety of pressing circumstances which they meet with varying degrees of equanimity and virtuous response. This chapter focuses attention on a group of Chaucer’s good women – Dorigen, Griselda and Cecilia 140

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– as well as on the Wife of Bath, his outspoken and overtly resistant creation. In their stories we see a Chaucerian poetic imaginary that shaped Criseyde and the women of the Legend carried over into new settings and to new conclusions. I have argued that negotiation and bargaining are central to the affective relationships, truncated as they may be, in the legends. Women desire men, and are not shy in articulating their wishes and working to turn wish into reality. In creating the Wife of Bath Chaucer takes this line of thinking about women, desire and union to what seems to be the fullest, boldest articulation of the tactics and strategies of sex. Based on the character of the old woman, the duenna, of the Romance of the Rose, Alisoun of Bath emerges as a strident, shrewd voice for the importance of negotiation in human affairs. Chaucer goes further, however, and constructs her Prologue on two meta-tropes of disproportionality, her relationship with her older husbands and her relationship with her younger husbands. Both sets of relationships require negotiation, and the Prologue divulges a great deal of her putative thinking as well as her words. In describing her relationships with her first three husbands she admits that she took advantage of the marriage bargain and of them, pursuing what Oresme would term the utile: ‘They had me yeven hir lond and hir tresoor;/ Me neded nat do lenger diligence/ To wynne hir love, or doon hem reverence’ (WBT, ll. 204–6). She is shameless about her tactics: ‘For half so boldely kan ther no man/ Swere and lyen, as a woman kan’ (WBT, ll. 227–8). She famously employs a rhetoric of bargaining and trade to describe male female relations – ‘Til that she fynde som man hire to chepe’ (WBT, l. 268), ‘The flour is goon; ther is namoore to telle;/ The bren as I best kan, now moste I selle’ (WBT, ll. 477–8) – and she boasts about her skill as a bargainer, using sex as her currency: Atte ende I hadde the bettre in ech degree, By sleighte, or force, or by som maner thyng, As by continueel murmur or grucchyng. Namely abedde hadden they meschaunce … Thanne wolde I suffer hym do hys nycetee. And therfore every man this tale I telle, Wynne whoso may, for al is for to selle; With empty hand men may none haukes lure. For wynnyng wolde I al his lust endure. … (WBT, ll. 404–16)

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In describing her relationship with her fifth husband she continues to employ the rhetoric of trade: ‘Greet prees at market maketh deere ware,/ And to greet cheep is holde at litel prys;/ This knoweth every woman that is wys’ (WBT, ll. 522–4). Once she has married Jankyn, whom she chose for delectation – having admired his legs at her fourth husband’s funeral (WBT, l. 598) – the scene and terms of her Prologue shift to their domestic hearth, where the twenty-year-old Jankyn introduces his forty-year-old wife to exemplary women. To the Wife of Bath the canonical history of women seems very much as it did to Christine, a misogynist mélange of fabricated female failures, distortion and disproportionate male outrage. Jankyn tells her of Symplicius Gallus who left his wife because he once saw her looking out the door of their house bare-headed (WBT, ll. 643–6), and of another Roman who left his wife because she went to a ‘someres game’ without his knowledge (WBT, ll. 648–9).2 The Bible and proverbs confirm the need to keep a close watch on one’s wife. But Jankyn’s ‘book of wikked wyves’ (WBT, l. 685), which represents the learned clerkly world of medieval classicizing – Jerome, Jovinian, Valerius, Theophrastus, Ovid – arouses her to challenge the tradition of exemplary stories that praise only holy women: Who peyntede the leon, tel me who? By God, if women hadde written stories, As clerkes han withinne hire oratories, They wolde han written of men moore wikkednesse Than al the mark of Adam may redresse. (WBT, ll. 692–6)

Characteristically, she thinks of the literary tradition as a site of vengeance which can best be corrected by a direct, equal response. Stories of bad women can be contested by stories of bad men. The Prologue then goes on to recount all the tales that she endured, from mythology and Roman tradition, spiced with several choice proverbs about the wickedness of wives. The ensuing struggle, in which she tears three leaves from his book, he strikes her on the ear, deafening her, and she strikes him on his cheek (WBT, ll. 790–808), is yet one more instance of literal payback. If the story ended here we could foresee years of such struggles, but Chaucer finesses the ending. He  2

Here, as in the catalogue of faithful but doomed wives Dorigen recounts, the phrasing and listing suggest Chaucer’s amusement, and perhaps derision, in response to the canon of misogyny.

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and she ‘hide’ the means, but Alisoun and Jankyn manage to extricate themselves from a world of retaliatory equal exchange to one of proportionate and satisfactory exchange, and, as the well-known conclusion to her own story attests, this exchange, sealed by a verbal promise, leads to happiness: But ate laste, with muchel care and wo, We fille acorded by us selven two. He yaf me al the bridel in myn hond, To han the governance of hous and lond, And of his tonge, and of his hond also; And made hym brenne his book anon right tho. And whan that I hadde geten unto me, By maistrie, al the soveraynetee, And that he seyde, ‘Myn owene trewe wyf, Do as thee lust the term of al thy lyf; Keep thy honour and keep eek myn estaat’— After that day we hadden never debaat. God helpe me so, I was to hym as kynde As any wyf from Denmark unto Ynde, And also trewe, and so was he to me. (WBT, ll. 812–25)

The term maistrie here clearly implies its chief denotation, power or control, but another meaning for the word centers in the idea of selfassertion and pride (MED, late 14thc). Line 818 might well read ‘By self-assertion, al the soveraynetee’, and still make sense within the larger context Chaucer has created. The Wife of Bath pushes back on the master narrative of women, asserts herself over that narrative, destroys it and then reaches a mutual bargain with her clerk husband in which she promises she will be chaste and honorable and he gives up all the markers of mastery in the literal sense, those elements of property and culture that support male governance. He surrenders land, money, speech and access to the learned misogynist tradition. Through the Wife of Bath Chaucer establishes women’s perspective and justifies women’s desires as part of a culture of exchange. She is a successful negotiator who knows what she wants; she is willing to trade on her husbands’ delectation for her own utile ends. She challenges not only the paradigm of male authorship, but also the literary paradigm of women who are faithful, strong and betrayed by men and male culture. The Wife of Bath represents the extreme evolution of qualities that appear in Criseyde’s thoughtful assessment of whether she will 143

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enter into a love affair, what is to be gained for her and what lost. The Wife is also a distant cousin to the women in the legends – typified by Ariadne and Medea – who see marriage as a deal, a negotiation in which there are buyers and sellers, people who have something of value and those who desire to possess it. The relationships that grow out of such exchanges are almost always relationships of delectation and utile, the result of urgent needs absent in ideal amistié. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is the quintessential exchange story, laden with recognition of the power and weakness in a series of unequal relationships. Money, sexual potency and power circulate continually in the history of her various marriages and loves, expressed through metaphors of exchange. But, in the words of the Shaker song, it all ‘comes down right’ and in this ending Chaucer moves beyond the Wife’s source in The Romance of the Rose, a representation of a stereotype, and creates a new individual, a process he repeats in his literary imagination of women in the Tales. Griselda in ‘The Clerk’s Tale’ originates as the creation of early humanist writers. She emerges first in the last tale of the last day of the Decameron in rather different circumstances from her later appearances. Dioneo, the narrator, praises Griselda’s cheerful endurance of the ‘cruel and unheard of trials that Gualtieri imposed upon her’, but goes on to say, ‘perhaps it would have served him right if he had chanced upon a wife, who, being driven from the house in her shift, had found some other man to shake her skin-coat for her, earning herself a fine new dress in the process’.3 Petrarch was so moved by the story that he freed it from both the vernacular and Dioneo’s sardonic moral, adapting it to Christian purposes, proposing it should be read as an allegory of the soul’s relationship to God. From Petrarch it was translated into French by Philippe de Mézières who includes it in his Livre de la sacrament du marriage, where it is a tale of exemplary female behavior, the culmination of a series of cautionary tales of women’s weakness and proclivity to evil. De Mézières’s version aligns with other French versions which similarly propose it as a model for wifely comportment. In contrast, Chaucer’s version is rendered equivocal not only by the envoi ‘sung’ ‘for the Wyves love of Bath’, which proclaims that Griselda and her pacience are both dead, replaced by women who are talkative, proud,  3

Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (New York, 2003), p. 795.

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strong and fierce (ClT, ll. 1170–212), but also by the Clerk’s continual critical commentary directed at Walter’s acts. The tale is highly adaptable to multiple moral purposes and templates, because Walter’s and Griselda’s behavior is so incredible that the story virtually requires interpretation beyond its literal narrative. Among the possible ways to read it is as an example of extreme behavior met by virtuous moderation. Walter has all the hallmarks of the lord whose extreme will has known no constraint; he has been a good lord, but resistant to marriage. His subjects urge him to marry: ‘Boweth youre nekke under that blisful yok/ Of Soveraynetee noght of servyse,/ Which that men clepe spousaille or wedlok’ (ClT, ll. 114–15). The rhyme of yok/lok, however, belies the sentiment they express, suggesting that marriage will indeed curb his freedom. Walter’s response, with its self-reflexive construction, emphasizes his independence: ‘Wherfore of my free wyl I wole assente/ To wedde me, as soone as evere I may’ (ClT, ll. 150–1) – he will dispose himself of his own free will, and expects not so much to marry someone else, as to control himself in marriage, ‘I wole assente/ To wedde me’. He does defer to God’s greater power, thanking his subjects but refusing to have them select his bride; he says he trusts in ‘Goddes bountee’ and will trust his marriage to God’s will (ClT, ll. 159–61), a statement both humble and yet not entirely so. Rather than talk to his subjects Walter prefers to converse with God. Griselda, the bride he selects, is a model of moderation and virtuous restraint. The Clerk praises her abstinence, purity and diligent care for her father, with whom she shares a diet of ‘wortes or othere herbes’ (ClT, l. 226). Together they live in ‘glad poverty’, a state of material sufficiency without any kind of excess, enjoyed in equanimity and peace. The section of the tale where Griselda is introduced contains at least two oblique references to the Virgin Mary by the invocation of an ‘oxes stalle’ (ClT, ll. 207, 291), and the introduction of what will be a recurrent rhyme pattern in the tale, the rhyme of stille and wille used in ll. 293–4 to refer there, as later in the tale, to Griselda’s calm, centered certainty. The promise Walter extracts from her is typical of his will to control – that she will never by thought, word, deed, or even facial expression, contradict his will and his desires (ClT, ll. 344–64), in effect rendering her totally incapable of the self-assertion denoted by the term maistrie. Griselda agrees, they marry, she proves to be an exceptionally able 145

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wife and partner, consistent, a woman whose words and deeds align perfectly: For though that evere virtuous was she, She was encressed in swich excellence Of thewes goode, yset in heigh bountee, And so discreet and fair of eloquence, So benigne and so digne of reverence, And koude so the peoples herte embrace, That ech hire lovede that looked on hir face. (ClT, ll. 407–13)

About the time their first child, a daughter, is born, Walter becomes obsessed, in the manner that Tarquin in the story of Lucrece, Tereus in the story of Philomela and, more benignly, the love-sick Troilus are also obsessed. He cannot stop thinking about her, in his case about whether she really is as good as she seems: he ‘ne myghte out of his herte throwe/ This merveillous desir his wyf t’assaye’ (ClT, ll. 451–4). He tells Griselda that their child is disturbing the political and social peace of Saluzzo by her very existence and that he must satisfy his subjects rather than follow his own will. Griselda agrees with steady countenance and demeanor, never betraying pain or fear or grief, and in the scene where she must surrender her child to the shady henchman Walter sends (‘Suspect his face, suspect his word …’ (ClT, l. 541)) she is quiet and calm. Nevertheless the scene is full of pathos and emotion as Griselda gently blesses the child who is described as a martyr, even Christ-like, ‘For this nyght shaltow dyen for my sake’ (ClT, l. 560), and she asks the sergeant to bury the child’s body so that it will be safe from animals (ClT, ll. 570–4). The thematic rhyme wille/stille appears three times in this brief scene, providing the emphatic, culminating ‘c’ rhyme of three rhyme royal stanzas. It is used twice to describe Griselda: ‘And whan this sergeant wiste his lordes wille/ Into the chamber he stalked hym ful stille’ (CkT 524–5); ‘And as a lamb she sitteth meke and stille,/ And leet this crueel sergeant doon his wille’ (ClT, ll. 538–9). It appears a third time, describing Walter: ‘But nathelees his purpose heeld he stille,/ As lordes doon, whan they wol han hir wille’ (ClT, ll. 580–1). The common rhyme indicates that both he and she are similarly determined and underscores their unity even in their unequal positions. Four years later, after the birth of a son, Walter becomes similarly obsessed: he ‘caught yet another lest/ To tempte his wyf yet ofter, if he may’ (ClT, ll. 619–20). She once more 146

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acquiesces, responding, ‘When I first cam to yow, right so … Lefte I my wyl and al my libertee’ (ClT, ll. 655–6). The Clerk offers the opinion that it seemed they had but one will, which is really for the best because ‘A wyf, as of hirself, nothing ne sholde/ Wille in effect, but as her housbonde wolde’ (ClT, ll. 720–1). Once more Griselda models the marital unity the Clerk invokes. So far from opposing Walter’s will and from asserting her own in a desperate situation, she does not explicitly express any emotion. But hints about her emotional state are implicit in her tender blessing of the child and her request that its body be buried securely. Walter’s third test comes when he pretends to repudiate her in favor of a new, younger wife and sends her back to her father (ClT, ll. 799–812). Asking only for a shift decently to cover her body as she leaves Walter’s palace, she goes ‘home’ and lives quietly with her father. The Clerk at this point says it was no wonder because when she was in ‘grete estaat/ Hire goost was evere in pleyn humylitee … Discreet and pridelees, ay honorable’ (ClT, l. 925, l. 938). Walter recalls Griselda to prepare his palazzo for the new bride and after Griselda has praised the young woman who is really her own daughter, but she warns Walter not to test her because she may not be so strong as Griselda has been, for the young woman has been ‘moore tenderly’ (ClT, 1041) fostered than she ever was. That comment recalls the opening of the tale where Griselda’s virtue, symbolized by her diet of herbs and water, and her humility are closely tied to class in general and to ‘glad poverty’ in particular. The theme of class, however, is not engaged as the plot shifts to how Walter, in response to Griselda’s cautionary advice, relents and says, ‘This is ynogh’, explaining that the supposed new bride is their daughter and that he never intended to hurt his children or ­repudiate her as his wife. The rest of this scene focuses on Griselda’s reception of the ‘good’ news. Griselda faints, hugging her children, and eventually rises up ‘from her traunce’ with joy and thankfulness that Walter has been so good (ClT, ll. 1080–110). Chaucer describes Griselda’s responses in this scene as a series of re-awakenings from a trance, a state of apprehension or dread so severe it creates a suspension of consciousness (OED). When Walter speaks she is unable to comprehend his meaning: ‘And she for wonder took of it no keep;/ She herde nat what thyng he to hire seyde;/ She ferde as she had stert out of a sleep,/ Til she out of hire mazednesse abreyde’ (ClT, ll. 147

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1057–61). When he goes on to elaborate his explanation, that he had tested her to assay her ‘wommanheede’, she falls into a swoon ‘For pitous joye’, and on awakening from the swoon she calls her children to her. Weeping, she embraces them, kisses them and thanks Walter. At this point she expresses the fears that must have haunted her, that ‘crueel houndes or som foul vermyne/ Hadde eten yow’ (ClT, ll.1095–6), and faints yet once more, holding so tightly to her children that it is very difficult to free them from her embrace. She rises up once more ‘abaysed’ from her traunce and her sorrow eases (ClT, l. 1107). She and Walter are perfectly reconciled and the women of the court reclothe her in a ‘clooth of gold that brighte shoon,/ With a couroune of many a riche stoon/ Upon hire heed, they into halle hire broghte/ And ther she was honored as hire oghte’ (ClT, ll. 1115–120). What are we to make of this? Griselda and Walter begin with a negotiation of sorts, one in which the disproportion of status means that she has no real power to bargain, only to accede. From the start of the tale she is the poster child for the state/plight of the beneficiary, the one who suffers, is patient, endures (all meanings of sofrir/soufrir in Old French) at the hands of her benefactor. Walter’s compulsion is obsessive and beyond reason, as the Clerk says repeatedly. As a couple they model calm stability and nervous anxiety, but neither can meet the other until Walter is satisfied, literally cured, by her steadfast calm. Griselda appears at the end of the tale as if a saint in heaven, clothed in splendor with a crown of her martyrdom. Walter is clearly a figure of excess and extreme emotions he cannot control. He has a will to power and exercises that will to his own ends, because of his rank. Until the end of the story Griselda seems spineless, but at the end it becomes clear that she has struggled with suppressed emotions that she has fought to control and with haunting fears.4 We have no sense of any of this during the course of the narrative. Of all the women who appear in the Legend, or the Tales, she is the most self-controlled, and perhaps the strongest. Her story, though fraught with difficulty, ends ‘happily’, and the Clerk’s version emphasizes the marital concord in which she and Walter live and their lineage  4

On the high moral value given to Griselda’s humility and patience in fourteenth-century Italian culture, see Victoria Kirkham, ‘The Last Tale in the “Decameron”’, Medievalia 12 (1989 for 1986), 205–33.

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which carries their union forward in time. The Clerk dismisses any idea that the story is an example to be taken literally, but aligns himself with Petrarch, saying that its meaning is that everyone should study to be constant in adversity. Griselda passes Walter’s test, and God’s test, too, as she never wavers, in part because she is supremely able to control her emotions. In that ability she exemplifies virtue, the rational moderation of extreme emotions and deeds that Aristotle praises; Oresme emphasizes that point in his note 14 to Chapter 7 of Book II of the Ethics, that virtue centers in passions and actions: ‘Car passions et operaciouns sont matiere de vertu; et environ ells et vers ells et en ells est vertu’ [Because passions and deeds are the matter of virtue; and through them lies virtue].5 The moderation of virtue does not come easily or naturally to humans. Even in English the word virtue implies strength, a residual connotation from its etymological roots. In Aristotelian philosophy virtue arises from the elusive mean, where excess and default are balanced. Aristotle compares the achievement of the virtuous mean to changing the direction in which a crooked twig grows: it literally goes against the grain.6 To be virtuous is to control oneself, a difficult challenge: … est ce forte chose d’estre vertueus; car en toutes choses c’est fort de prendre le moien et de assener au moien … Et ceci faire bien et a point n’est pas chose legiere ne commune et est bonne et loable. Pour ce est il mestier a celui qui vault actaindre et conjecturer au moien de vertu, qui il ait aucunes regles et enseignemens. Premierement, il convient departir soy et traire loing et resister a plus grant effors au vice …7 [… it is a hard thing to be virtuous; because in everything it is hard to take the middle and to strike in the middle … And this makes it clear that it is not a light thing, nor common, but a good one and worthy of praise. For this reason it is necessary for one who wishes to attain and achieve [guess, estimate] the mean of virtue, that he have several rules and instructions. First of all it is necessary to remove oneself, retreat far from, and resist vice through great effort …]

At this point Aristotle advises how to be virtuous when one is confronted with two vices: one should choose the lesser vice. Following this line of thinking, the story implies that Griselda’s Le livre de Ethiques, ed. Menut, p. 162. Ibid., p. 173.  7 Ibid., pp. 172–3.  5  6

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obligation to her husband, and to her own word, is more compelling than her obligation to resist his direction, even if it means the death of her children. This is of course absolutely contrary to how we see her choices, even if it is true that in the intellectual, hypothetical world of the tale the Clerk constructs the children are Walter’s not hers and, like her, his to do with as he chooses. The fact that the Christian Church condemned infanticide also suggests that this story is an intellectual conundrum more than an exemplary narrative. The point of reading the tale within the context of Aristotle’s thinking about virtue and vice is that one sees Griselda as an individual whose self-control and ability to navigate between two vices lead her finally to a comic ending. Unlike the women of the legends, she is neither abandoned nor betrayed, and she is not dead – she rises from her ordeal, phoenix-like, entirely owing to the steady force of her own will. Of all the married women in The Canterbury Tales the one most like the heroines of the Legend is Dorigen, who faces separation from her husband with desperate anxiety. But in her case, the man who promised her love returns and grants her will and allows her her own self-direction in dire circumstances. Although modern critics may cavil at the way the tale concludes, within the world of Aristotelian ethics the ending is an example of liberality, disinterested friendship and perfect trust. The tale begins with disproportion: Arveragus loves a woman of a different social station, of ‘heigh kynrede’, for whom he performs ‘many a greet emprise’ before he wins her pity and her love on account of his worthynesse, obeysaunce and penaunce (FranT, ll. 732–40). Chaucer says that they agreed on the terms of their marriage, laying out their contract as a series of parallel and equal clauses: she takes Arveragus ‘for her housbonde and hir lord/ Of swich lordshipe as men han over hir wyves’ and he ‘Of his fre wyl he swoor hire as a knight/ That nevere in al his lyfe, he, day ne nyght,/ Ne sholde upon hym take no maistrie/ Agayn hir wyl’ and that he will obeye her and follow her will as a lover should follow his lady’s desires, except that he will assume the sovereignty in the marriage, as befits his station (FranT, ll. 741–51). She then thanks him and promises to be his ‘humble trewe wyf’ without contention or strife (FranT, ll. 758–9), and at that point they are ‘bothe in quiete and in reste’ (FranT, l. 760). The Franklin them embarks on his own speech about how foreign to love the idea of maistrie is; he cites the importance of 150

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patient self-governance (FranT, ll. 773–86) and then concludes with another description of the balanced relationship Arveragus and Dorigen have achieved: And therfore hath this wise, worthy knight, To lyve in ese, suffrance hire bihight, And she to hym ful wisly gan to swere That nevere sholde ther be defaute in here. (FranT, ll. 787–90)

The balanced style of this passage is echoed in the following twelve lines which constitute a virtual anthem celebrating the wisdom and nature of their relationship: Heere may men seen an humble, wys accord; Thus hath she take hir servant and hir lord – Servant in love, and lord in mariage. Thanne was he bothe in lordshipe and servage. Servage? Nay, but in lordshipe above, Sith he hath bothe his lady and his love; His lady, certes, and his wyf also, The which that lawe of love acordeth to. And whan he was in this prosperitee, Hoom with his wyf he gooth to his contree, Nat fer from Pedmark, ther his dwellying was, Where as he lyveth in blisse and in solas. (FranT, ll. 791–802)

The recurrence of the word accorde throughout the opening of the tale underscores the balanced nature of this relationship achieved through negotiation. The two agree on the terms of their relationship and each relinquishes any claim to leverage power over the other. They model a form of ideal marital amistié – disinterested, mutual regard in which neither seeks gain from the other but each delights in pleasing the other. In the Legend one couple exemplifies that kind of unity and devotion, Pyramus and Thisbe, whose unfortunate end in Chaucer’s story has not so much to do with haste, or lust, but everything to do with a desire to be together. Dorigen’s strength and inner peace depend on this union and on the presence of Arveragus. Early in the marriage their accord is tested when he leaves to seek honor in arms on a distant shore. Unlike Griselda, Dorigen displays strong, extreme emotions that lead her to a kind of obsessive desperation as she becomes increasingly isolated in her fear of the rocks of Brittany and the danger they might pose to Arveragus’s home-coming. In turn this desperation 151

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makes her vulnerable in her grief. The normal patterns of aristocratic life in exquisite gardens near shady woods and waters offer no pleasure. Distraught and unsocial as she becomes, her beauty nevertheless attracts the attention of the young squire Aurelius who has ‘loved her best of any creature’ (FranT, l. 939) for two years. He approaches her and speaks his love, but she responds to him much as Criseyde initially responds to Diomede, dismissing his suit at first and then offering a conditional term of acceptance predicated on what is to her an unimaginable future – in this case a world in which the rocks of Brittany disappear. Aurelius’s love-sickness is so strong it impels him to seek the aid of a magician in Orleans who does in fact succeed in creating the impression that the rocks have disappeared, by manipulating the famous tides along the coast of Brittany. When Aurelius announces this fact to Dorigen, who is ‘astoned wood’ (FranT, l. 1339), the world of the Legend of Good Women opens before her. At the news she turns homeward where she weeps and bewails the evil fortune that has led her to this pass, which she sees as a choice between death and dishonor (FranT, ll. 1360–5). She then proceeds to recount to herself a long series of classical stories of women who preferred death to dishonor – including a sensational tale of ‘thritty tirauntz’ who, having slain the Athenian Phidon, commanded his daughters to dance in their father’s blood; the daughters drowned themselves rather than face the ultimate sacrifice of their virginity. The canon of Western stories of heroically doomed women offers exemplary instances of preferring death to dishonor which Dorigen goes on to reference in citing the stories of Mecene, Lacedomye, the tiraunt Aristoclides, of the widow of King Hasdrubales of Carthage, of Lucrece, Demociones’ daughter, Cedasus’s daughter, Alceste, Penelope, Laodamya, Portia. She calls up a virtual encyclopedia of stories of chaste women who sacrificed their lives for their honor, very much in line with the approbation Boccaccio offers such women in his Famous Women. This is the master narrative of female virtue, and it is repudiated by Arveragus’s return. He sees her distress, asks why she is distraught and she tells him. After swearing her to secrecy he says she must keep her word to Aurelius because ‘Trouthe is the hyeste thyng that man may kepe’ (FranT, l. 1479) – and woman, too. What good are her vows to him if she refuses to honor her word in general? Where does true honor exist except in alignment of word and deed? Not death but life gives the chance to practice and perfect honor. 152

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Dorigen goes to meet Aurelius who, hearing the circumstances that bring her to the meeting, refrains from exercising his ‘right’, says that it would be wrong of him to ‘departe the love bitwix yow two’ (FranT, l. 1532) and so releases her from her obligation. She returns to her husband whose joy she shares and the Franklin once more employs the balanced rhetoric that has characterized their happy relationship: Arveragus and Dorigen his wyf In sovereyn blisse leden forth hir lyf. Nevere eft ne was ther angre hem bitwene, He cherisseth hire as though she were a queene, And she was to hym trewe for evermoore. Of thise two ye get of me namoore. (FranT, ll. 1551–6)

The story does not end there, however, for the multiplication of gentillesse continues to the magician who refrains from pressing his right to payment. At the end of the tale the Franklin asks which of the three was the most fre or generous, but that question begs another more basic one: why think of what has happened as a contest or in hierarchical terms? What enables everyone in the story to move away from maistrie? Dorigen is saved from the standards of the master narrative of female virtue by Arveragus’s love for her, his respect for her word and her individual right to pledge it (FranT, ll. 1476–9), as well as by Arveragus’s ability to control his own sense of grievance (FranT, ll. 1480–6). Aurelius, seeing Dorigen’s distress and recognizing Arveragus’s generosity in not forbidding his wife to honor her word, refrains from insisting on his ‘right’ to hold Dorigen to her word. In this as a squire he follows the example of a knight (FranT, 1543–4). The magician, learning of this virtuous circle of generous disinterest, seeks to join it, avowing that class is no impediment to gentility (FranT, 1610–12). Most important of all, a virtuous woman lives in love and happiness with her husband. The story of Dorigen and Arveragus almost fits the plot of the stories of the Legend. After establishing a balanced relationship in which neither is dominant (FranT, ll. 738–52), Arveragus leaves by sea and Dorigen becomes obsessed by fear of the rocks and waves that symbolize her fear of losing her lover. But this story is different from those in the Legend. When Arveragus leaves his wife their balanced relationship is temporarily unbalanced, and she is vulnerable to melancholy. But unlike all the faithless men of 153

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Ovid’s narratives, he returns, loving his wife, faithful to his wife. The Legend’s sad stories make it possible to read ‘The Franklin’s Tale’ more optimistically than is usually the case. Through love and forbearance both Arveragus and Dorigen avoid catastrophe and live to achieve a comic ending, a twist on the plots of the Legend and a model of how steadfast love and willingness to sacrifice selfish desires can lead to prosperity.

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EPILOGUE

This book has put the case for reading the Legend of Good Women within a series of contexts that suggest its close ties to major intellectual and artistic developments in late fourteenth century European culture. A fragmentary text at once clear about its theme and yet often seemingly at odds with its announced purposes, the poem is a challenge to reconcile with the success of its apparent predecessor Troilus and Criseyde and its putative successor The Canterbury Tales, with which it has strong links.1 As I said in my introduction to this volume, the purpose of this book is not to argue for one or another interpretation of the Legend, but rather to suggest lines of inquiry that lead to a richer understanding of how the poem fits into the pattern of Chaucer’s artistic development and how it reflects the styles, modes and themes of the time in which it was created. What I have tried to show is how Chaucer’s persistent interest in women in love, marriage and polity not only shapes the canon of his work but also links him to the larger literary culture of late medieval court poetry. In the Legend of Good Women Chaucer has created his own version of a major fourteenth-century literary genre: the collection of exemplary tales of women told for moral and ethical purposes. In its very conception this genre is drawn from books, particularly from histories of the classical past. In The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt distinguishes the classicizing of earlier medieval culture from early humanism by observing that while the humanists mistakenly asserted they had rediscovered classical literature, what they had really discovered was its alterity, discovered that ‘something that had seemed alive was really dead’.2 He describes The matter of dating Chaucer’s works is far from settled, as K. Lynch has shown in ‘Dating Chaucer’, The Chaucer Review 42 (2007), 1–22.  2 S. Greenblatt, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (New York, 2011), p. 120.  1

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late medieval interest in the classics, particularly manifested by Petrarch and Poggio Bracciolini, as qualitatively different from the classicizing of earlier medieval literature, such as that of the Romance of the Rose. While much of what Greenblatt writes seems to deny the breadth and depth of medieval classicism, of which early humanism might be regarded as a natural evolution, it is true that the age in which Chaucer wrote, with its recurrent descriptions of translatio studii as the transfer of learned classical culture to the European West, cited classical texts as representatives of a different and not entirely familiar culture, and valued them for what they might offer the present, particularly in regard to moral and ethical conduct. Chaucer writes within this moment of rediscovery; attempting to mine the classical past to provide examples for the present, he unites medieval courtly love conventions with classical stories of excess and deception that treat more complex themes than their ostensible subject, fidelity in love. In Chaucer and the Subject of History, Lee Patterson identifies late medieval courtly interest in the classics with aristocratic self-definition and privilege.3 And it certainly was a mode of recollection and narrative favored by the aristocracy, but aristocrats came to the classics through learned clerks, civil servants and bibliophiles. Translation and dissemination grew out of the bibliophilia articulated by men like Petrarch, Richard de Bury and Oresme, men who lived among, but were not themselves, aristocrats. Like Chaucer, whose devotion to books was similar, they prized knowledge of the classical past as a guide to praxis largely, but not exclusively, for gentry and nobility. Richard de Bury referred to books as ‘mines of deepest wisdom’,4 and celebrated their capacity to generate new perspectives as well as daughter texts. Chaucer, while sharing this love of books, was, as I have argued in these pages, more qualified in his enthusiasm about the wisdom of books and more interested in the ways in which both books and people might deceive. In the Troilus and the Legend Chaucer works with the twin concepts of respect for authority and license to transform or even to deny his sources. Books may lie, but authors are always true to themselves. The book that Chaucer cites most often and to which he is most faithful is the book of his own imagination which shows that the Legend is not an orphan text in  3  4

Patterson, Subject of History, p. 236. Philobiblon, trans. Taylor, p. 10.

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Epilogue

the canon of his works, but a link between the Troilus and the Tales. The book of Chaucer’s creative imagination gives rise to linguistic and thematic parallels that unite the Troilus and the Legend as well as to the re-inscription of major themes, and the re-conceptualizing of modes of relationship that both distinguish the Legend from and link it to the Tales. A significant challenge remains: the challenge of the unknown – just what was Chaucer’s conception of the poem we call the Legend of Good Women but which he refers to as either the book of ‘the Seintes legende of Cupide’ (MlT, l. 61) or the ‘book of xxv. Ladies’ (ParsT, l. 1085)? What did he mean it to be? That it grew out of his interest in women is certain, for that interest is inherent in its purpose. We can see this interest flourish in his creation of Criseyde as a fuller, more psychologized and more sympathetic character than he found in his source, and that interest continues into the Tales where women, their voices and their deeds, are central as subjects in a majority of the tales. The trajectory of his art, as it comes to us, is a movement away from the tragedie of the Troilus to the comedye of the Tales. Earlier in this book I referred in passing to Carol Gilligan’s The Birth of Pleasure, a text which begins with her recognition that in Western culture, ‘The tragic story where love leads to loss and pleasure is associated with death was repeated over and over again, in operas, folk songs, the blues, and novels. We were in love with a tragic story of love. It was “our story”.’5 Recognizing that the ‘foundational stories we tell about Western civilization are stories of trauma’,6 she hopes to find a map to discover ‘where pleasure is buried and where the seeds of tragedy are planted’.7 In Chaucer and the Subject of History, Patterson cites medieval attitudes toward tragedy and comedy that derive from ancient categories which classify tragedy as concerned with storie – history, truth, public issues. Comedy was seen as the private, the ‘mores hominum’, a lesser subject.8 This is the judgment and the distinction that vexes Gilligan: the cultural hegemony of tragedy as more serious, of more worth, than comedy. Comedy has the capacity to affirm and unify. The old theatrical tradition that at the end of a performance of a comedy Gilligan, The Birth of Pleasure, pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 6.  7 Ibid., p. 5.  8 Patterson, Subject of History, p. 242.  5  6

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the characters join hands and dance is a symbol of this capacity to affirm, even in the face of the folly and self-delusion that often drive the plots and create the themes of comedy. Chaucer’s books included Dante’s Divine Comedy, a paradigm of affirmation that, in spite of the cruel, the stupid, the venal, the tragic, the universe turns on an axis of love which, even after great suffering, can produce a happy ending. The Tales, for all their various revelations of hypocrisy, selfpromotion and human failing, are the site on which Chaucer creates a comedy, and the Legend of Good Women is the link between the tragedy of Troilus and the comedy of the Tales where he works out his purpose by rethinking the major thematic elements of the Legend: constancy, negotiation, virtue, prudence and the exemplary strength of women. I have argued that it is also the site where he refines his poetics and explores his narratorial voice. The stripped-down narrative of the legends, often expressed in monosyllabic lines that end in strong rhymes, are indeed different from the lush rhymes and carefully developed rhyme royal stanzas of the Troilus. The Legend of Good Women is a palinode to the Troilus in more than theme and language; it is a stylistic palinode as well. In the same way the Tales are a palinode to the Legend in regard to style, plot and narrative. In them Chaucer embraces a vision of multiple voices speaking from many perspectives. In his comedye of a spectrum of late medieval pilgrims women do not always thrive, but they thrive more often than in either the Troilus or the Legend. The comic conception of the Tales offers a site where the stories of Cecilia, Custance, Alisoun, Maleyne, May, the unnamed wife of the Shipman’s tale, the Wife of Bath, Griselda and Dorigen all achieve their desired goals because of the different kinds of strength each woman exhibits.

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Bibliography Oresme, N., Le livre de Ethiques d’Aristote, ed. A. D. Menut (New York, 1940). ——, Maistre Nicole Oresme le livre de Politiques d’Aristote (Philadelphia, 1970). Ormrod, W. M., ‘The King’s Secrets: Richard de Bury and the Monarchy of Edward III’, in War, Government and Aristocracy in the British Isles, c. 1150–1500: Essays in Honour of Michael Prestwich, ed. C. Given-Wilson, A. Kettle and L. Scales (Woodbridge, 2008), pp. 163–78. Ovid, Heroides Amores, trans. G. Showerman, rev. G. P. Goold, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge MA, 1977). Palmer, R. Barton, ‘The Metafictional Machaut: Self-Reflexivity and SelfMediation in the Two Judgment Poems’, in Chaucer’s French Contemporaries, ed. Palmer, 23–39. Palmer, R. Barton, ed., Chaucer’s French Contemporaries: The Poetry/Poetics of the Self and Tradition, special issue of Studies in the Literary Imagination 20 (1987). Patterson, L., Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison, 1991). Payne, R. O., ‘Making His Own Myth: the Prologue to Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women”’, The Chaucer Review 9 (1975), 197–211. Percival, F., Chaucer’s Legendary Good Women (Cambridge, 1998). Petrarca, F., Rerum familiarium Libri I–VIII, iii.1, trans. A. S. Bernardo (Albany, 1975). Phillippy, P. A., ‘Establishing Authority: Boccaccio’s De Mulieribus Claris and Christine de Pizan’s Le Livre de la Cité des Dames’, Romanic Review 77 (1986), 167–93 Phillips, H., ‘Register, Politics and the Legend of Good Women’, The Chaucer Review 37 (2002), 101–28. Piaget, A., ‘La Cour Amoureuse: Dite de Charles VI’, Romania 20 (1891), 417–54. Poirion, D., Le Moyen Age II: 1300–1480 (Paris, 1971). Powicke, F. M., The Medieval Books of Merton College (Oxford, 1931). Quinn, W., ‘The Legend of Good Women: Performance, Performativity, and Presentation’, in Legend, ed. Collette, pp. 1–32. Remy, P., ‘Les “cours d’amour”: légende et réalité’, Revue de l’Université de Bruxelles 7 (1954–55), 179–97. Rickert, E., ‘King Richard’s Books’, The Library, 4th s. 13 (1933), 144–7. Sanok, C., ‘Reading Hagiographically: the Legend of Good Women and its Feminine Audience’, Exemplaria 13 (2001), 323–54. Scattergood, V. J., ‘Literary Culture at the Court of Richard II’, in English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Scattergood and Sherborne, pp. 29–43. Scattergood, V. J., and J. W. Sherborne, eds., English Court Culture in the Later Middle Ages (New York, 1983). Simpson, J., ‘Chaucer as a European Writer’, in The Yale Companion to Chaucer, ed. S. Lerer (New Haven, 2006), pp. 55–86. Smalley, B., English Friars and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford, 1960). Stratford, J., The Bedford Inventories: The Worldly Goods of John, Duke of Bedford, Regent of France, Society of Antiquaries (London, 1993).

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INDEX

Aeneas  42, 48, 53, 62, 73 and Troy  121, 128, 133 as recipient/sufferer  133 in HF  26, 98–100 in LGW  94, 101–04, 121 Alceste  28, 30, 31, 47, 56, 135 and books  56 and courts of love  55 fidelity 59 moderation/restraint 78 Antony  44, 95–8, 132 Aristotle  4, 16 Amistié  87, 89–91; in marriage, 92 and Chaucer  21–2, 79–80, 95, 113, 114, 149–50 Ethics  4, 6, 15, 21–22, 77–115, passim cited by Richard de Bury  21–2, 32, 79 cited in Mel  119 concept of the mean  81, 82, 83, 85–6, 149 cultural moment and  77, 78, 79 in LGW 95–115 passim in Tr  80, 114 on gifts and exchanges  87, 88, 94 on intent 21–22 on women and true friendship 92 relativism in  86 virtue and passions  49 betrayal, theme of  6, 8, 40, 48, 53, 65–7, 72, 74, 81, 85, 94, 99, 105, 106, 110, 114, 119, 121, 125, 134 bien commun  1, 78 Blanchard, Joel  16, 71, 75, 95 Boccaccio, Giovanni  4–5

Amorosa Visione 44–49 and LGW  44–48, 106 and Aristotle  78 and Christine de Pizan  69–71, 106, 107 and Giotto  46 De Mulieribus Claris (Famous Women)  35–44, 136, 152 exemplary narrative  16, 33, 34–44, 136 moral purpose  152 Book of the Duchess  11, 24, 25 on language and translation  29 books, power of  Boccaccio on  52 Chaucer on  23–32, 51, 55–6, 155–6, 158 Richard de Bury on  11–24, 31, 156 transcend time and space  31 Bradwardine, Thomas  4, 14, 15 Burley, Walter  4, 14, 15 Bynum, Caroline  8 Cavanaugh, Susan  13 Christine de Pizan  Cité des dames (City of Ladies) 68–75, 136 defense of women  69 Le livre des trois vertus (The Book of the Three Virtues) 36 Jean de Castel, son  58 women in love  131, 132 Cleopatra  44, 47–8, 59 and exchange value  95–6 and Hypermnestra  132 cost of defying society  113

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women Clerk’s Tale  4, 8, 16, 113, 140, 144–151, 158; see also Walter and Griselda Chaucer  and translation  4, 28–30, 50 English language  29, 30 images and tropes in Tr and LGW  broken covenants  131 change of status, condition  132–4 power of love  5 predation  130 tragedye 131 walls 125 water 128 wind and weather  127–9 poetics LGW, 122–4 comedy 156–7 comedy  and The Canterbury Tales  8, 139 capacity to affirm  157 courts of love  55–9 and women  69 connection to puys 57–9 cour amoureuse  57, 58 covenants  63–4, 96, 106, 109, 110, 112, 113; see also ‘exchanges’ Criseyde  anxiety in love  132 female psychology  100, 143, 157 prudence, 115 de Bury  see Richard de Bury Demophon  48, 59, 94, 111–13 and Troy  121 deceiving predator  129–30, 134 desire  1, 5, 16, 19, 22, 36–7, 65, 119, 141 and knowledge  19, 63 and power  36, 39, 44, 65, 66, 100, 146 hidden  22, 67 immoderate 98 metaphor of  129, 130 negotiation of  100–01 restraint of  47, 62 sexual  3, 36, 37, 38, 40, 42, 62, 66, 80, 102, 104, 120, 151

Dido  41, 47, 48, 53, 133 and desire  99, 102–04, 121, 127, 128 and sloth  62 and strength  72–3, 100 and Troy  133 in HF 98 Dorigen  escapes the fate of women in LGW 150–3 marriage 151–3 Edward III and books  3, 12, 13, 14 and Richard de Bury  4, 12 and de Bury’s circle  14, 79 exchange  60, 109, 113, 119; see also ‘covenants’ and negotiation  101, 104, 106, 112, 113, 143–4 and sex  6, 36, 38, 141 in Ethics  6, 77–81, 86 in relationships  6, 8, 64, 65, 67, 86, 87, 89, 96, 98, 103, 108, 109 in Tr  119, 132 unequal  86–7, 88, 93, 105, 106, 109 exemplary narratives  4, 33, 34, 118, 136; 33–75 passim; see also ‘master narrative’ extreme emotions  81, 94, 95, 110 and the mean  87, 149 Cleopatra  95, 97 Dido 102–3 Dorigen 151 God of Love  78 Hypermnestra’s father, 113 Tarquin  68, 108 Walter’s  145, 148 eyes  lust of  40–42 sense  19; see also ‘sight’ father(s)  38, 39, 40, 41, 43, 64, 67, 68, 69, 72, 106, 110, 113, 126, 130, 139, 145, 147 (see also ‘mothers’ and ‘parents’) Fleet, John  13–14

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Index Frank, R.W.  7, 117 Franklin, Margaret  35–6 Froissart, Jean  13, 81 Geoffoi de Charny  37 Gilligan, Carol  136, 157 Gower, John  exemplary women in Confessio Amantis  5, 33, 41, 50, 59, 59–68, passim; 98, 136 Green, R. F.  1, 58, 114 Griselda  16, 144–50, 158; see “Clerk’s Tale” Holcot, Robert  4, 14–16 House of Fame  26, 45, 80, 98, 100–01, 122, 135 Humanism  3–4, 11–32 passim early  4, 45, 50, 155–6 English  3, 12 Huot, Sylvia  48 Hypermnestra  and father  38–9 and Thisbe  113 and Tr  128 Hypsipyle  39, 47, 48, 72, 98, 100, 104–05, 107, 121, 124, 134 Isabella, Queen  and new Italian style  13 Library 12–13 Jason  39–41, 53, 59, 62–5, 72, 100, 104–07 deception  104–7, 134 predator  124, 130 Jean de Castel  58, 69 Kaye, Joel  ix, 6, 79 Legend of Good Women  78, 98–113 passim, 117–137 passim, 141 and European culture  155, 156–58 cautionary tales  120 reception of  117 tie to Tr  114, 117–37 passim and Troy  120–1

Machaut, Guillaume  Jugement dou roi de Navarre 50–9 passim literary similarities to Chaucer  5, 51, 118 and LGW  53–4, 56, 75 persona of narrator  51–2, 54–5 male deception  75, 77, 99, 106 master narrative of women’s history 35–49 Passim and misogyny  142–3 rejected in FranT  152 Medea  40–2, 47, 48, 53, 59, 61–5, 72, 98, 100, 104–07, 121, 124, 134 and Wife of Bath  144 Merton College library  14 Middleton, Anne  3, 16 mother(s)  42, 64, 134, 139 old age, jealousy of  38, 98 Oresme, Nicole  79–115 passim Charles V  79 Ethics 78–115 passim and 14thc culture  81 and the mean, 82, 86 and translation  28, 31, 81 on deception 85 on habitus and virtue  84 new lexicon of  81–2 Ormrod, Mark  12 parents  34, 38, 39, 61, 98 and inter-generational tension  37 Parliament of Fowls  common profit  24 exemplary women  98, 135 love of books  24 Patterson, Lee  139, 156–7 Payne, Robert O  3, 136 Petrarch  and Griselda story  144 and Richard de Bury  15, n. 12, 18–9 exemplary narratives  136, 144, 149 influence of  4, 17, 45, 156 Philomela  61, 66–8, 110–11, 134, 146 and Criseyde  130

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Rethinking Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women Philippa of Hainault  13, 14 Phyllis  26, 48, 59, 98 psychology of  111–2, 121, 129, 130, 134 Poirion, Daniel  16 Proigne 134 Pyramus  37, 48, 59, 61–2, 72, 97–8, 151 and cost of defying society  98 Richard de Bury  11–32, passim and Chaucer  17, 21 and Edward III  12 and Petrarch  15, n.2, 18–9 and translatio studii  4, 7 his circle  4, 12 love of books  11–32, 156 Romance of the Rose  3, 46, 69, 156 and Wife of Bath  141, 144 sea metaphor  95, 111 sight  dangers of  38, 39, 41, 63, 66, 102, 132; see also ‘eyes’ Smalley, Beryl  4, 14, 16 Streuver, Nancy  17 temperance  allegorized as female  83 and the mean  3, 84–5 14thc ideas of  6, 83

in Navarre 52 Lucretia and  73 Tereus  66–7, 110–11 and Tarquin  68 and Walter  146 Thisbe  37–9, 48, 54, 59, 61–2, 72, 97–8, 113, 123, 127, 151 Tragedy  new genre  131, 135, 157–8 translatio studii  4, 7, 20, 15 Troilus and Criseyde  and Boccaccio  35 and books  24–5 and Jugement dou roi de Navarre 50 and LGW  7, 114, 117–37 passim; 157 poetic similarities  95, 121–3, 155–7 and tragedie 115 Criseyde’s autonomy  125 exchange 6 Troy and Ovidian narratives  120 true and false love  59, 114, 135 male friendship in  80 suffering in love  5, 80, 132 Vale, Juliet  13 Walter 4 immoderate behavior toward Griselda 145–48 negotiation with Griselda  148

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YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS: PUBLICATIONS

God’s Words, Women’s Voices: The Discernment of Spirits in the Writing of LateMedieval Women Visionaries, Rosalynn Voaden (1999) Pilgrimage Explored, ed. J. Stopford (1999) Piety, Fraternity and Power: Religious Gilds in Late Medieval Yorkshire 1389–1547, † David J. F. Crouch (2000) Courts and Regions in Medieval Europe, ed. Sarah Rees Jones, Richard Marks and A. J. Minnis (2000) Treasure in the Medieval West, ed. Elizabeth M. Tyler (2000) Nunneries, Learning and Spirituality in Late Medieval English Society: The Dominican Priory of Dartford, Paul Lee (2000) Prophecy and Public Affairs in Later Medieval England, Lesley A. Coote (2000) The Problem of Labour in Fourteenth-Century England, ed. James Bothwell, P. J. P. Goldberg and W. M. Ormrod (2000) New Directions in Later Medieval Manuscript Studies: Essays from the 1998 Harvard Conference, ed. Derek Pearsall (2000) Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145–1229: Preaching in the Lord’s Vineyard, Beverly Mayne Kienzle (2001) Guilds and the Parish Community in Late Medieval East Anglia, c. 1470–1550, Ken Farnhill (2001) The Age of Edward III, ed. J. S. Bothwell (2001) Time in the Medieval World, ed. Chris Humphrey and W. M. Ormrod (2001) The Cross Goes North: Processes of Conversion in Northern Europe, AD 300–1300, ed. Martin Carver (2002) Henry IV: The Establishment of the Regime, 1399–1406, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs (2003) Youth in the Middle Ages, ed. P. J. P Goldberg and Felicity Riddy (2004) The Idea of the Castle in Medieval England, Abigail Wheatley (2004) Rites of Passage: Cultures of Transition in the Fourteenth Century, ed. Nicola F. McDonald and W. M. Ormrod (2004) Creating the Monastic Past in Medieval Flanders, Karine Ugé (2005) St William of York, Christopher Norton (2006) Medieval Obscenities, ed. Nicola F. McDonald (2006)

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The Reign of Edward II: New Perspectives, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (2006) Old English Poetics: The Aesthetics of the Familiar in Anglo-Saxon England, Elizabeth M. Tyler (2006) The Late Medieval Interlude: The Drama of Youth and Aristocratic Masculinity, Fiona S. Dunlop (2007) The Late Medieval English College and its Context, ed. Clive Burgess and Martin Heale (2008) The Reign of Henry IV: Rebellion and Survival, 1403–1413, ed. Gwilym Dodd and Douglas Biggs (2008) Medieval Petitions: Grace and Grievance, ed. W. Mark Ormrod, Gwilym Dodd and Anthony Musson (2009) St Edmund, King and Martyr: Changing Images of a Medieval Saint, ed. Anthony Bale (2009) Language and Culture in Medieval Britain: The French of England c.1100–c.1500, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (2009) The Royal Pardon: Access to Mercy in Fourteenth-Century England, Helen Lacey (2009) Texts and Traditions of Medieval Pastoral Care: Essays in Honour of Bella Millett, ed. Cate Gunn and Catherine Innes-Parker (2009) The Anglo-Norman Language and its Contexts, ed. Richard Ingham (2010) Parliament and Political Pamphleteering in Fourteenth-Century England, Clementine Oliver (2010) The Saints’ Lives of Jocelin of Furness: Hagiography, Patronage and Ecclesiastical Politics, Helen Birkett (2010) The York Mystery Plays: Performance in the City, ed. Margaret Rogerson (2011) Wills and Will-Making in Anglo-Saxon England, Linda Tollerton (2011) The Songs and Travels of a Tudor Minstrel: Richard Sheale of Tamworth, Andrew Taylor (2012) Sin in Medieval and Early Modern Culture: The Tradition of the Seven Deadly Sins, ed. Richard G. Newhauser and Susan J. Ridyard (2012) Socialising the Child in Late Medieval England, c. 1400–1600, Merridee L. Bailey (2012) Barking Abbey and Medieval Literary Culture: Authorship and Authority in a Female Community, ed. Jennifer N. Brown and Donna Alfano Bussell (2012) Christians and Jews in Angevin England: The York Massacre of 1190, Narratives and Contexts, ed. Sarah Rees Jones and Sethina Watson (2013)

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Reimagining History in Anglo-Norman Prose Chronicles, John Spence (2013) Henry V: New Interpretations, ed. Gwilym Dodd (2013)

York Studies in Medieval Theology I  Medieval Theology and the Natural Body, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (1997) II  Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and A. J. Minnis (1998) III  Religion and Medicine in the Middle Ages, ed. Peter Biller and Joseph Ziegler (2001) IV  Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy, ed. Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller (2002)

York Manuscripts Conference Manuscripts and Readers in Fifteenth-Century England: The Literary Implications of Manuscript Study, ed. Derek Pearsall (1983) [Proceedings of the 1981 York Manuscripts Conference] Manuscripts and Texts: Editorial Problems in Later Middle English Literature, ed. Derek Pearsall (1987) [Proceedings of the 1985 York Manuscripts Conference] Latin and Vernacular: Studies in Late-Medieval Texts and Manuscripts, ed. A. J. Minnis (1989) [Proceedings of the 1987 York Manuscripts Conference] Regionalism in Late-Medieval Manuscripts and Texts: Essays celebrating the publication of ‘A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English’, ed. Felicity Riddy (1991) [Proceedings of the 1989 York Manuscripts Conference] Late-Medieval Religious Texts and their Transmission: Essays in Honour of A. I. Doyle, ed. A. J. Minnis (1994) [Proceedings of the 1991 York Manuscripts Conference] Prestige, Authority and Power in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts, ed. Felicity Riddy (2000) [Proceedings of the 1994 York Manuscripts Conference] Middle English Poetry: Texts and Traditions. Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall, ed. A. J. Minnis (2001) [Proceedings of the 1996 York Manuscripts Conference]

Manuscript Culture in the British Isles I Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England, ed. Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (2008) II Women and Writing, c.1340–c.1650: The Domestication of Print Culture, ed. Anne Lawrence-Mathers and Phillipa Hardman (2010)

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III The Wollaton Medieval Manuscripts: Texts, Owners and Readers, ed. Ralph Hanna and Thorlac Turville-Petre (2010) IV Scribes and the City: London Guildhall Clerks and the Dissemination of Middle English Literature, 1375–1425, Linne R. Mooney and Estelle Stubbs (2013)

Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations, L. J. Sackville (2011) Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Medieval Quercy, Claire Taylor (2011)

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RethinkingChaucer PPC_PPC 27/01/2014 10:46 Page 1

PROFESSOR ROBERT HANNING, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY.

T

CAROLYN COLLETTE is Emeritus Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College and Research Associate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of York. Front cover: Pyramus and Thisbe. © The British Library Board. Royal MS 16 GV, f. 15r.

CAROLYN P. COLLE TTE

he Legend of Good Women has perhaps not always had the appreciation or attention it deserves. Here, it is read as one of Chaucer's major texts, a thematically and artistically sophisticated work whose veneer of transparency and narrow focus mask a vital inquiry into basic questions of value, moderation, and sincerity in late medieval culture. The volume places Chaucer within several literary contexts developed in separate chapters: early humanist bibliophilia, translation and the development of the vernacular; late medieval compendia of exemplary narratives centred in women's choices written by Boccaccio, Machaut, Gower and Christine de Pizan; and the pervasive late fourteenth-century cultural influence of Aristotelian ideas of the mean, moderation, and value, focusing on Oresme's translations of the Ethics into French. It concludes with two chapters on the context of Chaucer's continual reconsideration of issues of exchange, moderation and fidelity apparent in thematic, figurative and semantic connections that link the Legend both to Troilus and Criseyde and to the women of The Canterbury Tales.

RETHINKING CHAUCER’S LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN

‘Professor Collette’s approach to this challenging and provocative poem reflects her wide scholarly interests, her expertise in the area of representations of women in late medieval European society, and her conviction that the Legend of Good Women can be better understood when positioned within several of the era's intellectual concerns and historical contexts. The book will enrich the ongoing conversation among Chaucerians as to the significance of the Legend, both as an individual cultural production and an important constituent of Chaucer's poetic achievement. A praiseworthy and useful monograph.’

RETHINKING CHAUCER’S LEGEND OF GOOD WOMEN

YORK MEDIEVAL PRESS

an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF (GB) and 668 Mt Hope Ave, Rochester NY 14620-2731 (US) www.boydellandbrewer.com

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CAROLYN P. COLLETTE