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The Open Access Companion to the Canterbury
Tales
A new way to learn about old books
The Clerk’s Tale
Authority (Familial, Political, Written) in
the Clerk’s Tale
Susan Nakley (snakley@sjcny.edu)
An essay chapter for The Open Access Companion to
the Canterbury Tales (September 2017)
The Clerk’s Prologue confronts the social politics of translation and
accessibility (ClP 1-56). There, the Host demands a jargon-free tale that all
may understand from the learned Clerk, who cites as his source Francis
Petrarch: the Italian poet crowned laureate in Rome for his Latin verse in
1341. Petrarch had encountered Dioneo’s tale of Griselda as Giovanni
Boccaccio’s original Italian finale to his Decameron. Petrarch addresses his
authoritative Latin translation to the younger Boccaccio with a letter that
essentially admonishes Boccaccio for making such a story accessible to the
rabble yet also praises the narrative itself and announces Petrarch’s own
desire to make it accessible to learned men who read Latin but no Italian.[1]
The Clerk’s Tale pivots to translate Griselda’s story into English. Chaucer’s revernacularization dares to make it accessible to a politically and culturally
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diferent set: English commoners who used the vernacular in his own
linguistically stratified society (Wallace 286). While the Decameron’s
storytellers and immediate audience are all young, unmarried nobles,
Chaucer’s Canterbury-bound pilgrims represent a more diverse range of
classes, ages, and— arguably— genders. By invoking Petrarch’s laureate
status while setting him in scholarly Padua rather than imperial Rome before
this English translation, the Clerk intimates the twin concepts of translatio
imperii and translatio studii. Literally “translations” or “transfers” of “rule”
(imperii) and “learning” (studii), these concepts undergird a medieval
understanding of history as the interdependent transfer of political power
with cultural knowledge across time, space, and communities. Chaucer
carefully and politely erases Petrarch’s move to hoard such power and
knowledge in Latinate circles, which tended toward male and aristocratic
homogeneity and ultimately toward political tyranny and cultural hegemony.
His English translation progresses instead toward class and gender
accessibility insofar as it satisfies the Host’s request for jargon-free language
that not just kings but all— including commoners— might understand.
Indeed, the story addresses the politics of tyranny and class more directly
than any other contribution to the Canterbury collection.[2] It pursues these
matters through the marriage of Walter, a ruler atop a social and political
hierarchy, and Griselda, the daughter of his lowliest, poorest subject. Griselda
must serve as both the ruler’s consort, translated from poverty to power, and
an inconvertible, untranslatable exemplar of the lower class. Her peculiar
class identity periodically reinscribes the prologue’s urgency: the stipulation
that commoners have access to authoritative meditations on political theory
and practice like this tale of class, rule and oppression— and, in their own
language. Whether Walter is a master of authoritative discourse, a tyrant, an
eminently eicient sovereign, an allegorical figure for God, or a whimsical
brat, he stars in a tale that invites all English language users to consider the
lines between sovereignty, tyranny, and perhaps even totalitarian rule –as
well as their chilling intersections. This chapter shows how the Clerk’s Tale
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compares these forms of rule expressly through its own shifting attitudes
toward class and authority. The first section surveys the roles of class and
authority in concepts of sovereignty, tyranny and totalitarianism; the second
presents close readings of key textual moments; the third suggests avenues
for further inquiry.
Tools
Theoretically, medieval sovereignty is a hierarchical mode of shared
ownership and judgment that is never absolute, always measured. Practically,
such sovereignty’s application varies with those who inhabit the sovereign
role, and it generally exceeds or fails expectation. In ideal communities
governed by sovereignty, authority inheres in diferent classes both limiting
freedoms and encouraging collaborations that pool strength and resources
across hierarchies. Chaucer, building on the authoritative structure Walter’s
people perform in Petrarch’s telling, begins this Tale explicitly with
sovereignty, which indicates shared ownership and judgment and operates as
a hierarchical, though negotiable and afective political authority throughout
the Canterbury Tales.[3] Five of Chaucer’s six total uses of the term occur in
domestic contexts describing relationships between lovers and/or husbands
and wives that themselves stress sovereignty’s afective nature, if not always
its negotiability. The Parson’s Tale, however, explicates sovereignty as a
divinely ordained power that regulates greed and abolishes thralldom, yet
ensures class stratification (ParsT 769-780) (Scanlon 15-22). Like authority
in the twentieth-century thinker Hannah Arendt’s view, Chaucerian
sovereignty never means to abolish freedom, only to limit or restrict it,
securing both communal hierarchies and a modicum of freedom for all
(Arendt 404-405). In every Chaucerian instance, sovereignty also mediates
relationships among free adults holding uneven power and bound by
afection.
The Clerk’s Tale invokes sovereignty and excludes the words tyranny and
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tyrant, which appear elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales. David Wallace
nevertheless reads the tale as a critique “of Lombard tyranny,” the absolutist
despotism Chaucer observed in Lombardy; indeed, it reflects tyranny insofar
as Walter tortures Griselda and manipulates public opinion extending to the
functions of class across his society to serve his individual whims over shared
interests (294). In a sense, tyranny, as Wallace identifies it here, boldly
refuses sovereignty (including its conventional hierarchies), yet aggressively
retains the authority that depends upon such hierarchies. Walter’s tyranny
efectively refuses to share ownership and judgment. He hoards authority by
breaking his own laws, traditions, and promises; his tyranny intensifies as a
drive to take authority exclusively unto itself.
“If lawfulness is the essence of non-tyrannical government and lawlessness
is the essence of tyranny, then terror is the essence of totalitarian
domination,” observes Arendt (464). The term totalitarian, from the Italian
totalitario, emerges in the twentieth century to reflect the theories of jurist
Carl Schmitt and the dictatorial regimes that Benito Mussolini and Adolf
Hitler led. The Clerk’s Tale includes no analogous term, but it does feature
sixteen instances of words denoting terror or fear (most often dred), which
may represent a confluence of Arendt’s and Chaucer’s concerns (ClT 69, 134,
181, 358, 455, 462, 508, 532, 634, 636, 838, 865, 1052, 1107, 1155, 1201).[4]
Totalitarian terror, Arendt writes,
aims at abolishing freedom, even at eliminating human spontaneity in
general, and by no means at a restriction of freedom no matter how
tyrannical. Technically, this absence of any authority or hierarchy in the
totalitarian system is shown by the fact that between the supreme power
(the Fuehrer) and the ruled there are no reliable intervening levels, each
of which would receive its due share of authority and obedience. (404-5)
Walter’s rule both inspires fear and purges spontaneity from Griselda’s
repertoire, granting him her share and more: he has total freedom to behave
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according to the tyrannical whims that Wallace’s reading emphasizes.
However, we shall see that fear also serves as an impetus toward his
government, which flagrantly alleges that it limits freedoms authoritatively.
Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in the wake of two twentiethcentury world wars, the Nazi death factories, and mass exile: unprecedented
pain, homelessness and destruction. I do not mean to suggest that
totalitarianism originated in fourteenth-century political realities or even
that Chaucer, Petrarch, or Boccaccio proleptically imagine totalitarianism in
their artful narrations of Griselda’s legend. Yet, we should note that Boccaccio
tells Griselda’s story in the aftermath of the Black Death, while Chaucer
rewrites it in English having lived through the Rising of 1381, sometimes
called the Peasant’s Revolt, late medieval England’s greatest popular
uprising. I do want to consider how Arendt’s conceptions of totalitarianism
enlighten the dynamics of class and authority in the Clerk’s Tale and how that
tale, which also responds to experiences of social and political upheaval and
human sufering, might in return complicate Arendt’s interrelation of class,
authority, fear and freedom.
Before proceeding to the tale itself, I want briefly to address authority’s
particular intricacies in the Chaucerian tradition. Larry Scanlon, who
examines authority centrally there, recognizes its interdependence with
power and explains that authority “is a cultural and ideological structure,”
one “that must be produced and maintained” (15, 26). Authority corroborates
power by embodying legitimacy, yet it also involves the manipulation of
power. We might consider authority a performance of power that enacts a
stable legitimacy and reinforces hierarchies. As Scanlon’s reading shows,
authority also manages to expose the negotiability of class and other
hierarchies in the Clerk’s Tale, which claims both political and moral authority
for lay culture (179).
Text
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Chaucer’s Clerk tells the story of Walter and Griselda in six parts. The first
sets the scene in Saluzzo, introduces Walter as its marquis, and presents an
active, classed society that operates as if it holds the authority to compel
Walter to marry and produce an heir to his sovereign seat. Walter’s “peple”
come to him, “flokmeele” (distinctly in groups), but also with a spokesman
who stands above yet for these masses, endowed with some ambiguous
authority (ClT 85, 86). Is it that the spokesman “wisest was of loore,” was the
one “that the lord best wolde assente,” or perhaps he who “koude . . .shewe
wel swich mateere” (ClT 87, 88, 90)? Raising these possibilities, the Clerk
suggests that not gentility and lineage alone, but teaching, learning,
knowledge, and rhetorical finesse might each shape authority— and even
sovereignty itself. Stipulating that he has no more personal interest in
Walter’s marriage than any other group member, the spokesman highlights
the organized and hierarchical structure of authority that the people must
produce and maintain in order to exercise their power within sovereignty’s
sphere.
The spokesman’s medieval vision of sovereignty emphasizes this iteration’s
theoretical flexibility. He ofers an injunction: “Boweth youre nekke under
that blisful yok/ Of soveraynetee, noght of servyse,/ Which that men clepe
spousaille or wedlok. . .” (ClT 113-15). Here, the people are ostensibly telling
their sovereign what to do and simultaneously elaborating their political
philosophy. Their sovereignty parallels marriage: both structures yoke
sovereign with subject such that the ruler must coordinate with the ruled to
make movement possible. In section one, the people’s sovereignty functions
much as their metaphor describes; it is a yoke that limits freedom and allows
movement in both directions. Walter indeed stresses that marriage will
curtail his freedom (ClT 143-47, 171), while also acquiescing to it of his “free
wyl,” decisively retaining some freedom even as he accepts his people’s
authority (ClT 150).
The people make their request expressly to secure political stability,
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demonstrating, moreover, that they understand how realms of love and
politics, private and public, interpenetrate via the domestic in marriage. Their
spokesman specifies that the people will “in sovereyn hertes reste,” where
they currently fret in “bisy drede,” only when Walter produces an heir to
preclude any “straunge successour” (ClT 112, 134, 138). Walter responds by
complicating conventional class hierarchies and their desire to escape fear:
two defining characteristics of the social world they imagine, which Arendt’s
totalitarianism also frustrates. The people promise Walter a wife “Born of the
gentilleste and the meeste/ Of al this land,” but he discards the social and
political tradition their promise assumes (ClT 131-32). Echoing Dante’s
Purgatario VII, Walter circumvents hereditary class’s conventions and appeals
directly to God, who knows that children “ofte been / Unlyk hir worthy
elders;” he entrusts his marriage and his “estaat,” his ultimate status, to
“Goddes bountee,” a stable source of authority seemingly beyond cultural
tradition (ClT 155-56, 160, 159). Walter thus begins to destabilize social
hierarchies in his idiosyncratic submission to the authority that his
hierarchically organized people have just performed and promoted. Given
that sovereignty theoretically ensures social hierarchies just as it abolishes
thralldom in the Parson’s Tale, Walter’s move, though it looks progressive,
shakes the underpinnings of shared ownership and judgment as it appears
elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales and throughout medieval culture. He
explicitly agrees to limit his freedom and his people limit their power,
accepting that Walter will choose his own wife. However, that arrangement
perpetuates the fear that he might not marry after all (ClT 181-82). Together,
they maintain a sovereign realm that resembles the yoke metaphor on the
surface but already contains deep fissures in the foundations of class and
authority. Part one closes with a classed, hierarchical community (including
“oiceres” as well as “privee knyghtes and squieres”) preparing for a state
wedding with conventional authority, while the bride’s anonymity weakens
social tradition and perpetuates fear (ClT 190-95 at 190, 92). This section
asserts sovereignty only to subvert the social hierarchy on which its authority
rests; still, tyranny’s selfish whimsy remains hidden.
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Part two also evinces a hierarchical society and ignores tyranny as Walter
manipulates the relation between class and authority more forcefully. The
Clerk associates Griselda and other poor village folk closely with work (ClT
197-231) and then contrasts them with “roial markys” Walter and his
“richely arrayed” retinue of lords, ladies, and bachelor knights (ClT 267-73
at 267). However, the Clerk erases the familial authority shielding the ruled
(Griselda) from the supreme political ruler (Walter). Walter begins his
conquest of Griselda politely, informing Janicula, “If that thou vouche sauf,
what so betide, / Thy doghter wol I take, er that I wende,/ As for my wyf, unto
hir lyves ende” (ClT 306-08). But Walter then preempts Janicula’s response
and his paternal authority by assuming his subject’s love, faith, and
compulsory compliance with “al that liketh me,” thus emphasizing Janicula’s
impotence (ClT 309-15 at 311). Janicula admits, “my willynge/ Is as ye wole,
ne ayeynes youre likynge/ I wol no thyng,” conceding that any authority he
might claim lacks autonomous power (ClT 319-21). Between Walter (the
ruler) and the ruled (including Janicula and Griselda) “there are no reliable
intervening levels, each of which would receive its due share of authority and
obedience,” as Arendt writes (405). Part two suggests that ruler and ruled no
longer coordinate as if yoked together, for Janicula and Griselda utterly lack
autonomy. Walter is no longer a sovereign in accord with the metaphor his
people ofer: not quite yet a tyrant, he appears rather as a cattle herder, his
own neck free of any yoke.[5]
This part also shows that despite— or perhaps because Griselda conforms
entirely to Walter’s desires and will— she temporarily transcends the visible
class structure to rule in Walter’s stead. This marriage grants Walter’s
lowliest subject’s daughter authority to judge “gentil men or othere of hire
contree”: “So wise and rype wordes hadde she,/ And juggementz of so greet
equitee,/ That she from hevene sente was, as men wende” (ClT 435, 438-40).
Walter’s marital choice thus disorders the hierarchical structure of authority
that his people invoke with sovereignty in part one. Here, he siphons
authority away from his gentlefolk, drawing it closer to himself, circuitously
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through the nadir of the class hierarchy— through Griselda.
Accordingly, in the following two sections, local authorities of gentility and
estate remain operative only insofar as Walter manipulates them rhetorically
to terrorize Griselda, resurrect her class diference, and abduct her children
(ClT 467-83, 632). Walter crucially cites his “gentils” among his “peple” as
the motivation for removing Griselda’s daughter, though we hear nothing
from them directly (ClT 480, 490). He thereby continues to accrue authority
to himself. His decision to test Griselda by pretending to kill her children,
moreover, derives not from Dante, Petrarch or any other learned authority,
but only from “merveillous desire” within Walter’s “herte”: tyrannically
solipsistic whimsy (ClT 454, 451). Here Walter plainly performs the tyranny
Wallace notes. Simultaneously, class hierarchies relocate from Saluzzo to
Panico for all practical purposes; there the countess and earl, Walter’s sister
and her husband, raise Griselda’s children “in alle gentillesse” (ClT 593).
Walter’s own people grumble about his missing children, growing to hate
their once beloved marquis (ClT 729-31). These masses of “rude peple” do
nothing, yet somehow eclipse the organized social hierarchy that
authoritatively instigated Walter’s marriage, eloquently demanded an heir,
and carefully prepared his wedding feast in part one (ClT 750). Even as these
noisy masses temporarily overwhelm, overshadow and blur distinctions
between social and political classes, Griselda carries and represents the
underclass’s burden.[6] The Clerk describes parts three and four’s most
active agent, a “sergeant” who removes Griselda’s children, thus:
“Suspecious was the difame of this man,/ Suspect his face, suspect his word
also;/ Suspect the tyme in which he this bigan” (ClT 519, 540-42). Walter’s
oicer embodies terror in abstract and concrete ways from reputation to
physical appearance. Now fear, inarticulate masses, and Walter’s police
exercise power, though their authority is dubious. As in Arendt’s totalitarian
model, classes transform into masses, supplanting legitimate authority and
the “social, legal, and political traditions of the country” with new
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institutions; meanwhile, “the center of power [shifts] from the army to the
police” (460). The Clerk’s Tale never mentions Walter’s army, but his
sergeant emerges as a police force and Griselda, who complies completely
with his murderous orders sweetly releasing her children for slaughter, as the
ideal totalitarian subject. Medieval queens were typically intercessors and
dispute settlers; although Griselda proves duly adept earlier, she appears to
be suited “equally well for the role of executioner and the role of victim” in
parts three and four (Arendt 486).
Nevertheless, as Walter’s rule grows more absolute, Griselda shatters the
molds of executioner and victim. The end of part four sees Walter
manipulating Church authority, specifically its auctoritee, or written
authority, by counterfeiting papal edicts that would authorize him to divorce
and remarry a higher-class woman (ClT 631-37).[7] Beyond written
authority, auctoritee suggests a gendered and classed authority, since upper
class men were far more literate than others in Chaucer’s England. Auctoritee
might inhere in an individual and be derived from erudition in reading and
writing, from being an auctor. Pieces of writing themselves could also be
taken to have their own auctoritee. Auctoritee is perhaps Chaucer’s most
critical form of authority; he compares it with experience—or lived
authority— in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (WBP 1-3). Experience and auctoritee,
together again, shape the Clerk’s Tale’s ending.
Class reemerges with new force in part five, when Walter breaks his promise
to Janicula and returns Griselda to her original station in her father’s house:
the space of her lower-class life experience. All manner of society reappears
in part six. Most significantly, Griselda speaks, not as a victim or executioner
among the masses, but eloquently with the experience— the lived authority—
of Saluzzo’s poor, its lowest class. She simultaneously fulfills the queenly role
of intercessor. In response to Walter’s inquiry about her own daughter,
masquerading as his new wife in his final test, Griselda ofers these words:
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O thyng biseke I yow, and warne also,
That ye ne prikke with no tormentynge
This tendre mayden, as ye han doon mo;
For she is fostred in hire norissynge
Moore tenderly, and, to my supposynge,
She koude nat adversitee endure
As koude a povre fostred creature. (ClT 1037-43)
Here Griselda asserts the underclass’s sheer strength, while also shielding
her daughter (unbeknownst to her) from Walter’s absolute and tyrannical
tormenting. Where Janicula failed to exercise familial authority strong
enough to protect Griselda, Griselda wields class-based experience. Her lived
political authority is powerful enough to unmask Walter’s bogus auctoritee,
his forged papal annulment documents, and to redeem familial authority, if
inadvertently. Griselda’s words force Walter to drop his charade, and the
Clerk claims that everyone lives happily ever after. However, he begins his
envoy by declaring Griselda every bit as dead and buried as Petrarch is.
Griselda’s death gives the Clerk full liberty to interpret her legacy, which he
expounds as proof that wives must have the authority to govern and to speak
out proudly. Indeed, as he insists, feminine voices and control will contribute
to the “commune profit” (ClT 1194). Via the envoy, Griselda’s story becomes
a largely negative example that asserts the authority of women and of all the
classes that comprise political communities.
Transformation
We should question whether any living happily is possible here after all, but
this essay’s scope turns us now to four major questions of authority,
freedom, and sovereignty as well as some suggestions for comparison with
related characters and situations from the Canterbury Tales.
1. The Clerk’s Tale troubles familial, political, and written authority by
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critiquing the ways that family, state, and church institutions intersect.
Walter essentially usurps all authority for himself: Griselda’s familial
authority over her children and Janicula’s over Griselda, the people’s
political authority to approve their sovereigns, and the Church’s written
authority over marriage. Arendt suggests that there is no authority
without reliable hierarchy. Might Walter’s horded power be understood as
legitimate authority in a Canterbury Tales context? Compare Walter with
Arthur of the Wife of Bath’s Tale, Arveragus of the Franklin’s Tale, Virginius
of the Physician’s Tale, and Melibee of the Tale of Melibee. How do these
masculine characters make decisions and wield their power? How do their
governing styles and their tales’ outcomes reshape the question of horded
power and legitimate authority?
2. In hoarding power, Walter appears to abolish freedom at least temporarily.
Does he? If so, might Griselda redeem freedom with her pointed
admonition of Walter’s bogus marriage? How does Walter use the
language of freedom in each section of the Clerk’s Tale? Compare Walter’s
sense of freedom with freedom as it appears in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and
the Franklin’s Tale.
3. As noted above, the Wife of Bath begins her prologue by juxtaposing
auctoritee, written authority, and experience, which I suggest we read as
lived authority. How does the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale relate these
distinct forms of authority with class? Might Griselda ofer her experience
as evidence that lived authority outperforms all other authority (familial,
political, written)— or perhaps that lived authority is impervious to the
forces that would abolish both class and freedom with fear? Compare the
Wife of Bath and the Clerk on the roles class should play and ultimately
play in political community.
4. Beyond Arendt’s, which critical theories of sovereignty and authority can
you relate to those we find in the Clerk’s tale or in other pilgrims’ tales?
Spend a little time researching late medieval ideas of sovereignty such as
those laid out in the following fourteenth century treatises: Dante
Alighieri’s De monarchia, Marsiglio of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, and Jean of
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Paris’s De potestate regia et papali. Alternatively or in addition, you might
consider more recent concepts such as those Thomas Hobbes ofers in
Leviathan (1651), Frantz Fanon presents in The Wretched of the Earth (1961),
or those Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri explicate in their Empire trilogy
(2000-2009). How do these ideas complicate Chaucer’s views? How might
Chaucer complicate these ideas? What values or ethics are at stake in the
various theories you are examining? How do fictional representations of
such political concepts compare with their representations in plainly
expository and theoretical writing?
WORKS CITED AND SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING:
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. Reprint: Orlando:
Harcourt, 1994.
Ganim, John M. “Chaucer and the Noise of the People.” Exemplaria: A Journal
of Theory in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2.1 (1990): 71-88
Green, Donald C. “The Semantics of Power: ‘Maistrie’ and ‘Soveraynetee’ in
‘The Canterbury Tales.’” Modern Philology 84 (1986): 18-23
Grudin, Michaela Paasche. “Chaucer’s ‘Clerk’s Tale’ as Political Paradox.”
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11(1989): 63-92.
McClellan, William. “Ful Pale Face: Agamben’s Biopolitical Theory and the
Sovereign Subject in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale.” Exemplaria 17 (2005): 103-34.
Nakley, Susan. “Sovereignty Matters: Anachronism, Chaucer’s Britain, and
England’s Future’s Past.” The Chaucer Review 44.4 (2010): 368-96
Scala, Elizabeth. Desire in the Canterbury Tales. Columbus: The Ohio State
University Press, 2015.
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Scanlon, Larry. Narrative, Authority and Power: the Medieval Exemplum and the
Chaucerian Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Thomas, Susanne Sara. “The Problem of Defining Sovereynetee in the Wife of
Bath’s Tale.” Chaucer Review 41 (2006): 87–97.
Wallace, David. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in
England and Italy. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.
Yager, Susan. “Chaucer’s Peple and Folk.” Journal of English and Germanic
Philology 100 (2001): 211-23
Notes:
[1] In Robert P. Miller, Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 136-52.
[2] Particularly helpful on the Clerk’s Tale’s political nature are Grudin and
Scala (pp. 123-52).
[3] For more on sovereignty in the Canterbury Tales, please see Nakley
(especially pp. 368-79), Green, and Thomas. Let us note that Boccaccio
presents Walter’s people’s desire for his marriage simply and briefly, while
Petrarch emphasizes their community’s hierarchical structure, authority,
and eloquence. Chaucer’s significantly more extensive treatment of the
people’s agency hinges on political language including sovereignty.
[4] I include expressions like oute of drede, yet exclude expressions and
images that suggest widespread social and personal fear in this count.
[5] For an alternative reading of sovereignty in this tale, please see McClellan.
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[6] On the noise and character of the masses, see Ganim and Yager. Yager’s
reading registers an important moral distinction between Chaucer’s uses of
folk and peple, despite the fact that both words indicate masses.
[7] By the end, even the Church is superfluous. However, Scanlon suggests
that the hierarchies that Water’s rule maintains are at the heart of the
common good from the beginning, as they ensure authoritative order.
Scanlon, 186-91.
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