Chaucer and Everyday Death: The Clerk's Tale, Burial, and the Subject of Poverty

Chaucer and Everyday Death: The Clerk’s Tale , Burial, and the Subject of Poverty Kathy Lavezzo Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Volume 23, 2001, pp. 255-287 (Article) Published by The New Chaucer Society DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/sac.2001.0018 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/586994/summary Access provided at 1 May 2019 21:48 GMT from The University of Iowa Libraries Chaucer and Everyday Death: The Clerk’s Tale, Burial, and the Subject of Poverty Kathy Lavezzo University of Iowa I n the prologue to his version of the Griselda story, Chaucer’s Clerk distinguishes Petrarch for his literary achievements only to render the ‘‘lauriat poete’’ just another mortal: ‘‘But Deeth, that wol nat suffre us dwellen heer, . . . hath slayne’’ Petarch, ‘‘and alle shul we dye’’ (CIP 31, 36–38).1 By dint of a universal mortality that nullifies all distinctions between persons, the singularly accomplished Petrarch becomes one of ‘‘us’’; the man whose ‘‘rethorike sweete’’ glorified Italy ‘‘is now deed’’ as we all will be (lines 33, 29). Not only does the Clerk foreground the idea of a leveling death in his Prologue, but he also underscores that notion when he, following Petrarch, has the Italian people of Saluzzo tell their Marquis Walter that ‘‘deeth manaceth every age, and smyt / In ech estaat’’ (ClT 122–23). With the Clerk’s emphasis on death as the supreme leveler, Chaucer points to one of the most common conceptions of mortality in the Middle Ages. Along with other ideas of death (in which, for example, it is a thief that strikes suddenly, or a shadow that always trails man) the notion of a universal death was a late-medieval commonplace that appeared in everything from funerary inscriptions, homiletic statements, and elegies to poems such as Piers Plowman, whose twenty-second passus describes Death overcoming ‘‘Kynges and kny9tes kayseres and popes; / Lered ne lewed he let no Versions of this essay were delivered to audiences at Florida State University, Georgetown University, and the University of Iowa; many thanks belong to the remarks of these auditors, in particular David Hamilton and Patrizia Palombo. I am also grateful to Louise Fradenburg and Harry Stecopoulos, who read earlier drafts of the essay. I would also like to thank my anonymous readers at SAC for their helpful comments. 1 All quotations are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), with line references in parentheses. 255 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER man stonde.’’2 Most importantly, perhaps, the medieval image of a leveling death emerged in the representation in sculpture, the visual arts and literature of the Dance of Death, in which a homogenous group of rotting and sexless corpses summon a heterogeneous gathering of people of all ages, genders, and ranks to join them in their morbid dance.3 While it spoke to the demise awaiting all medieval persons, the rhetoric of death-as-leveler also performed other social functions. Among them was the promotion of what E. P. Thompson calls the ‘‘Christianity of the Rulers,’’ the appropriation, that is, of religious feeling to solicit consent to secular and spiritual authorities.4 As David Wallace points out, Boccaccio offers us a medieval theorization of this repressive use of Christianity in his political tract Trattatello in laude di Dante, when he writes of princes who ‘‘began to stoke up religious sentiment and to use the resultant faith to frighten their subjects, and to secure by oaths the obedience of those that they would not have been able to constrain by force.’’5 Boccaccio refers specifically to tyrants’ efforts to liken themselves (with the help of poets) to God.6 In the more insidious case of the great leveler, however, the powerful manage their subjects by promising them a more egalitarian existence in the afterlife.7 Given the emphasis 2 William Langland, Piers Plowman: An Edition of the C-Text, ed. Derek Pearsall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). p. 366. 3 The danse macabre most famously (and probably first) appeared in a mural at the cemetery and charnel of the Innocents in Paris. John Lydgate translated into English a poem inscribed on a wall at the Innocents representing the dance; see Eleanor Prescott Hammond, English Verse between Chaucer and Surrey (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1927), pp. 124–42. Two extant examples of the danse macabre in England are murals in Hexham Priory in Northumberland and in the Parish church of Newark on Trent. 4 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1963), p. 4. 5 See Wallace’s translation of Trattatello in laude di Dante, red. I.134–36, in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 117. Wallace discusses Boccaccio’s theory of the relationship between tyranny, rhetoric, and religion in his Trattatello on pages 271 and 285 of Chaucerian Polity. 6 Thompson, English Working Class, p. 4. The Christ ‘‘of the rulers,’’ is only one of the ‘‘two Christs’’ discussed by Thompson, the latter being the Christ ‘‘of the toilers’’ (p. 4). This latter, progressive form of Christianity (as exemplified in the 1381 Rising and twentieth-century liberation theology) constitutes in a sense the flip side of the oppressive Christian discourse analyzed in this essay. 7 The paradoxical fusion of an ostensibly democratic Christianity ‘‘with the continuing institutions of unfreedom and injustice’’ has been analyzed by such materialist scholars as Thompson, Marcuse, Marx, Engels, and Kautsky: Herbert Marcuse, ‘‘The Ideology of Death,’’ in Herbert Fiefel, ed., The Meaning of Death, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1959), pp. 66–67; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, On Religion (Atlanta: Scholar’s 256 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH on the ‘‘democracy’’ of death in The Clerk’s Tale, it may well appear that Chaucer endorses an oppressive application of religious thinking. The Petrarchan moral of the tale, after all, states ‘‘that every wight . . . Sholde be constant in adversitee’’ and ‘‘Receyven al in gree that God us sent,’’ in the same manner that Griselda submits to the Marquis Walter, even when obedience requires the murder of her two children (ClT 1145–46, 1151). Yet while at one level The Clerk’s Tale seems to identify with the ‘‘Christianity of the Rulers,’’ at another level it reveals Chaucer’s concern for the downtrodden. Specifically, close examination of Griselda’s story suggests that Chaucer raises the idea of a universal death only to undermine it. ‘‘Patient’’ Griselda, of course, is notorious for her sufferance.8 Yet as Press, 1982), pp. 83–84, 317; Karl Kautsky, Foundations of Christianity: A Study in Christian Origins (New York: International 1925); Thompson, English Working Class). 8 Critical emphases on Griselda’s identity as the epitome of a patience, humility, and/or submission endorsed by Chaucer include George Lyman Kittredge, ‘‘Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage,’’ MP 9 (1911–12): 435–67; James Sledd, ‘‘The Clerk’s Tale: The Monsters and the Critics,’’ MP 51 (1953–54): 78–79; Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning, (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1966); Ian Robinson, Chaucer and the English Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 154–71; Charlotte C. Morse, ‘‘The Exemplary Griselda,’’ SAC 7 (1985): 51–86; C. David Benson, ‘‘Poetic Variety in the Man of Law’s and the Clerk’s Tales,’’ in Benson and Elizabeth Robertson, eds., Chaucer’s Religious Tales, Chaucer Studies 15 (Cambridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1909), pp. 137–44; Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, Feminist Readings Series (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1991), pp. 146–64; Linda Georgianna, ‘‘The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent,’’ Speculum 70 (1995): 793–821. Figuring prominently in these and other essays is the need for the twentieth-century reader to empathize with a uniquely medieval perspective that will render palatable Griselda’s disturbing behavior. Georgianna perhaps offers the most extreme example of this tendency when, in an essay contending that Griselda’s steadfastness evokes the ‘‘radical demands’’ of Christian numinous experience, she claims that ‘‘Griselda’s sublime assent . . . asks us for once to forgo critical judgment in favor of wonder and sympathy, themselves forms of assent’’ (‘‘Grammar of Assent,’’ pp. 807, 817). Cf. Dolores Frese’s play upon Harry Bailey’s words to the Clerk in the Prologue to the Tale when she writes, in an essay that reads the Tale as an allegory of obedience of the vowed religious, ‘‘Obviously the problem of ‘entrying’ the Clerk’s Tale lies in the difficulty of assenting to the tale’s narrative and aesthetic propositions’’; ‘‘Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: The Monsters and the Critics Reconsidered,’’ ChauR 8 (1973): 133, 134; and Charlotte Morse’s invocation of Anne Middleton’s reference to the Tale’s ‘‘tax[ing]’’ of the modern reader’s ‘‘capacit[y] to re-enter with sympathy and informed understanding the values . . . of an age insistently different from their own’’ as she points to ‘‘the demands that texts like Griselda make . . . to address imaginatively and sympathetically [its] alterity,’’; Middleton, ‘‘The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,’’ SAC 2 (1980): 121; Morse, ‘‘Exemplary Griselda,’’ p. 54). What is perhaps most disturbing about these references to a particularly medieval way of understanding the problem of Griselda to which the reader must consent is the fact that this viewpoint is, by and large, that of a privileged and literate male reader/translator such as Petrarch or Chaucer. By encouraging readerly consent to such patriarchal discourses, such critics 257 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER feminist critics have taught us, Griselda’s endurance of the maternal torments inflicted upon her by her aristocratic spouse is deceptive. Troubling the traditional view of Griselda as a Job-like ‘‘creature’’ who is ‘‘Disposed . . . the adversitee of Fortune al t’endure,’’ these critics either have identified moments when Griselda exerts her own will in defiance of Walter or have shown how the very thoroughgoing nature of Griselda’s submission paradoxically subverts Walter’s authority (lines 755– 56).9 These readings specifically emphasize forms of gender resistance. For example, according to David Wallace, among the five ways in which Chaucer criticizes his Petrarchan source is his restoration ‘‘of the female body to itself,’’ whereby Griselda ‘‘contains the effects of Walter’s gaze, and later of his acts, within herself.’’10 In what follows, I make the case for another, more material type of resistance.11 As an indigent peasant problematically duplicate the rhetoric of consent played out in the Tale each time Griselda submits to Walter and, moreover, run the risk of, as Louise Fradenburg puts it, ‘‘confusing ‘the Middle Ages’ with the ways in which the Middle Ages (mis)represented itself to itself.’’ Further, by ‘‘taking hegemonic positions—part of the whole—for the whole itself, we risk taking for a ‘‘reality’’ the ways in which powerful elites, spiritual or temporal, justified their claims to eternity and superreality’’ (‘‘Criticism, Anti-Semitism, and the Prioress’s Tale,’’ Exemplaria [1989]: 75). 9 Keith M. Booker, ‘‘ ‘Nothing that is so is so’: Dialogic Discourse and the Voice of the Woman in the Clerk’s Tale and Twelfth Night,’’ Exemplaria 3.2 (1991): 519–37; Lars Engle, ‘‘Chaucer, Bakhtin, and Griselda,’’ Exemplaria 1 (1989): 429–59; Natalie Grinnell, ‘‘Griselda Speaks: The Scriptural Challenge to Patriarchal Authority in ‘The Clerk’s Tale,’ ’’ Critical Matrix 9.1 (1995): 79–94; Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992); Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. 10 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 291. 11 Carol Falvo Heffernan also points to class resistance at work in the Tale when she contends that ‘‘by refusing to capitulate to Walter’s indignities,’’ Griselda demonstrates how the masses may combat absolutism through ‘‘passive resistance’’; ‘‘Tyranny and Commune Profit in the Clerk’s Tale’’ ChauR 17.4 (1983): 338. While he does not read Griselda’s own actions specifically as acts of peasant resistance, Wallace emphasizes how the commons ‘‘is recognized as part of a complex political equation’’ both in The Clerk’s Tale and elsewhere in Chaucer’s literary corpus (Chaucerian Polity, p. 291). David Aers in Chaucer (Sussex: Harvester, 1986), Stephen Knight in Geoffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), and Larry Scanlon in Narrative, Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) each offer materialist readings of The Clerk’s Tale. Aers argues that the Tale demonstrates how absolute rule ruins the moral state of both the ruler and ruled, whereby Griselda’s ‘‘servile obedience to her ruler’’ leads her into ‘‘unambiguously evil actions’’ (p. 34). Similarly, Knight reads Griselda as an example of ‘‘peasant endurance and obedience’’ (p. 110); however he also notes Griselda’s identity as exploited female peasant laborer who, through her marital trials, is separated ‘‘from her own conscious productivity in her children’’ and later is ‘‘abandon[ed] when unproductive’’ (p. 110). Scanlon, challenging oppositional readings of the Tale made by such scholars as Anne Middleton and David Wallace, argues that Chaucer appropriates clerical authority in the Tale for distinctly conservative ends, whereby the ‘‘very distance between Griselda’s patience and Walter’s 258 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH woman, Griselda registers, through her Christian piety, the anguished connection between the fatal maternal losses she experiences and her own identity as a subject of poverty. As it did most medieval peasants, death visits Griselda repeatedly in the tale, each time her lord and husband seizes her children. But these evocations of death hardly constitute moments of social leveling. Rather, with each loss, Griselda recalls her own material oppression. Griselda’s attention to her poverty in such moments—an emphasis that sets The Clerk’s Tale apart from its sources—thus offers us a powerful vantage point from which the very forms of material domination that the Christian ideology of death seeks to occlude become visible.12 Above all, the narrative indicts the oppression of the poor through its female protagonist’s concern over the care of her children’s dead bodies, the interment of which Griselda fervently desires, yet cannot secure. Burial, as we shall see, functions as a retroactive signifier of medieval peasant poverty in The Clerk’s Tale. Griselda’s inability to protect her children’s corpses parallels the precariousness of her own everyday indigent existence. By analyzing the tale’s careful attention to the politics of burial, I aim to demonstrate how this text realizes, despite its apparent ideology of death as leveler, that the treatment of the poor peasant in death intimately relates to the treatment of the poor peasant in life.13 privilege will ironically but inevitably demonstrate the necessity of Walter’s power’’ and affirm the status quo (pp. 178–79). I seek to complicate these readings of the Tale by examining both those moments that suggest Griselda’s agency and Chaucer’s unique emphasis on Griselda’s material insufficiency. 12 Chaucer’s sources (both Petrarch’s version of the Griselda story as well as the fourteenth-century anonymous French Livre de Griseldis) appear in W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, eds., Chaucer: Sources and Analogues (1941; rpt., New York: Humanities Press, 1958), which I cite by page number. The two texts are also edited by J. Burke Severs in The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale, Yale Studies in English, no. 96 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1942). 13 By connecting the problems of poverty and peasant life in this essay, I do not mean to suggest that the notion of poverty was only applied to members of the peasantry. But while ‘‘the poor’’ could refer to members of any social class in the Middle Ages, as Michel Mollat puts it, ‘‘the frequent association of pauper [with] agricola or laborator, the one being used at times as a synonym for the two others, says a great deal about the origins of the poor, many of whom were drawn from the ranks of men who worked the earth’’; The Poor in the Middle Ages: An Essay in Social History, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press), p. 4. Cf. Chaucer’s own equation of poverty and humble rank in The Clerk’s Tale and elsewhere throughout The Canterbury Tales (cf. Wife of Bath’s Tale 1063 and 1100–11). On the multiple meanings of poverty that existed during the Middle Ages, see Mollat, The Poor, pp. 1–11; and Bronislaw Geremek, Poverty: A History, trans. Agnieszka Kolakowska (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 18–52. Implicit throughout this essay is the claim that The Clerk’s Tale speaks to a problematically low standard of living among the peasantry during the 259 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The Clerk’s Tale thus points to a certain medieval instance of the phenomenon that Thomas Laquer has ascribed to the nineteenth century: the ‘‘disposal of the bodies of the poor as an expression of their vulnerability.’’14 Ultimately, I hope to show how, through the connections Griselda plots between the quotidian spaces of peasant life and death, Chaucer indicates the potential transformation of these linked sites of everyday oppression into locales of everyday resistance. In an effort to shed new light on the question of Chaucer’s attitude toward the commons, I suggest how, if we attend more to his representations of the quotidian, we find a ‘‘social Chaucer’’ interested not only in the lived problems of the medieval subaltern but also in the possibility of peasant agency.15 The Rhetoric of the Leveler The rhetoric of universal death has a long history. It extends as far back as Horace’s famous statement that ‘‘Pallida mors aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas / Regumque turris’’ (‘‘Pale death with equal force knocks on the hovels of the poor and the halls of kings’’) and continues to proliferate after the Middle Ages well into the Enlightenment.16 There is no denying that death strikes everyone, and critical work on death tends to emphasize its universality. As David Field, Jenny Hockey, and Neil late fourteenth century, despite the increase in living standards after the plague. As Steven Justice puts it, ‘‘While everyone acknowledges that the countryside enjoyed a higher standard of living after the plague, it is not clear that the exigencies of subsistence were much relaxed, or (to the extent that they were) that they felt much relaxed’’; Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 174. For an overview of ‘‘the competing and contradictory claims about standards of living in the countryside’’ made by scholars, see pp. 174–75 n. 122. 14 Thomas Laquer, ‘‘Bodies, Death, and Pauper Funerals,’’ Representations 1 (1983): 124. See also R. C. Finucane’s examination of how death in the Christian Middle Ages elaborates ‘‘the anthropological axiom that the manner of disposing of the dead reflects social or cultural norms and ideals. In the Middle Ages as in other epochs, death ritual was not so much a question of dealing with a corpse as of reaffirming the secular and spiritual order by means of a corpse’’; ‘‘Sacred Corpse, Profane Carrion: Social Ideals and Death Rituals in the Later Middle Ages,’’ in Joachim Whaley, ed., Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death (London: Europa, 1981), pp. 40–41. 15 I take the phrase ‘‘social Chaucer’’ from Paul Strohm’s important book Social Chaucer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989). 16 Carmina 1.4.13–14 For other classical and biblical references to death as leveler, see Edelgard Dubruck, The Theme of Death in French Poetry of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (The Hague: Mouton, 1964), p. 41 n. 14. On the perpetuation of the theme of death’s universality into the enlightenment, see Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981). 260 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH Small have noted in their revisionist account of mortality, critical work on death tends to emphasize its universality.17 Moreover, in the case of the Middle Ages, scholars often link this universality directly to the period’s massive lethal disasters. Thus, Colin Platt claims that ‘‘contemptuous of rank and wealth, Death was the guest of every late-medieval household ‘in pestilence time.’ ’’18 Yet the relationship between the medieval idea of the leveler and death as medieval reality is much more complicated than such scholarly evocations of universality suggest. In the case of the danse macabre, for example, Paul Binski, Johan Huizinga, Theodore Spencer, and Phoebe Spinrad have all shown that the ‘‘democracy’’ of death imagined by the genre made it a potentially oppositional form for emergent social groups.19 As Binski puts it, ‘‘the Dance might be regarded as an ‘anticipative representation’ by means of which hierarchy was . . . subverted in the interest of social liberation and some future hope for a social utopia.’’20 By taking the hand of both potentes and humiles, the powerful and the weak, Death’s dance thus engages in satiric work not unlike the 1381 Rebellion adage ‘‘When Adam delved and Eve span . . . who was then a gentleman?’’21 Through recourse to the beginning of human history on one hand, and to the end of all human life on the other hand, both the dance and the lyric chasten the privileged by reminding them of a time when rank is irrelevant. At the same time, the ‘‘ ‘leverage’ [of the dance] as a theme of social comment was ambivalent.’’22 If the discourse of the leveler satirized the 17 David Field, Jenny Hockey, and Neil Small, eds., Death, Gender, and Ethnicity (New York: Routledge, 1997). 18 Colin Platt, King Death: The Black Death and Its Aftermath in Late Medieval England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1996), p. vii. Other examples of this universalizing tendency include Christopher Daniell, who writes in Death and Burial in Medieval England, 1066–1550 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997) that ‘‘Plagues were also a regular feature of medieval life after 1350, and the presence of the body in the home, and the funeral processions and services, meant that living with death was a common experience for all’’ (p. 2); and Patrick Geary, who claims in Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1994) that in ‘‘those regions of Europe under direct influence of the Frankish political and cultural traditions, death was omnipresent . . . in the sense that persons of all ages could and did die with appalling frequency and suddenness’’ (p. 2). 19 Paul Binski, Medieval Death: Ritual and Representation (Ithaca: N.Y. Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 156–58; J(ohan) Huiziniga, The Waning of the Middle Ages (New York: Anchor, 1954), pp. 138–50; Theodore Spencer, Death and Elizabethan Tragedy (New York: Pageant, 1960), 31; Phoebe S. Spinrad, The Summons of Death on the Medieval and Renaissance English Stage (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), p. 9. 20 Binski, Medieval Death, p. 156. 21 See Walsingham, Historia anglicana, 2:32–33, cited in R. F. Dobson, The Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, 2d ed. (London: Macmillan, 1983), p. 374. 22 Binski, Medieval Death, p. 157. 261 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER proud and wealthy, it also fostered complaisance among the poor. When life is but a journey to an end where goods and status do not signify, the problems posed by poverty evaporate. Poverty becomes not only endurable but preferable. In his Testament, François Villon, for example, writes that when he grumbles at poverty (‘‘De povreté me grementant’’), his heart tells him, ‘‘Mieulx vault vivre . . . pouvre, qu’avoir esté seigneur / Et pourrir soubz riche tumbeau’’ (‘‘Better to live . . . poor, than to have once been a lord / And now to rot in a rich tomb’’). ‘‘Mort saisit’’ all, Villon continues, ‘‘Nobles, villains, larges et chiches (‘‘Nobles, peasants, the liberal and mean’’), and ‘‘Quicunques meurt, meurt a douleur’’ (‘‘Whoever dies, dies in pain’’).23 While Villon uses a leveling death to transform his personal indigence from an affliction into a kind of boon, the English sermon writer Myrc offers a similar solution to the material troubles of an entire congregation of persons ‘‘where,’’ as G. R. Owst puts it, ‘‘noble birth and pageantry are not.’’24 In a sermon for a common man, Myrc emphasizes that ‘‘all we schul dyon’’ as he exhorts each peasant bystander to mimic the exemplary submissiveness of the deceased, whose ‘‘corse’’ is ‘‘browth to 3e chyrch . . . to schewon vs 3at he was meke and buxom in hys lyue to . . . holy chyrch.’’25 By graphically embodying the morbid demise that awaits the bodies of all Myrc’s parishioners, the corpse urges the commons to take on a holy meekness that will ensure their souls’ redemption. Thus, even as the image of a universal death could help peasants attack the hierarchical world in which they lived, it also could stifle peasant discontent by encouraging a dismissal of worldly triumphs (or contemptus mundi) and a mindfulness of an afterlife that rewards humility. 23 François Villon, Complete Poems, ed. and trans. Barbara N. Sargent-Baur (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), pp. 72–75. On Villon’s ultimate querying of the notion that ‘‘social categories indeed [are] abolished by death,’’ see Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘‘Metonymy, Montage, and Death in François Villon’s Testament,’’ New Medieval Literatures 2 (1998): 146. Other work on the representation of a leveling death in Le Testament includes Kenneth Varty, ‘‘Villon’s Three Ballades du Temps Jadis and the Danse Macabre,’’ in D. A. Trotter et al., eds., Littera et sensus (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1989), pp. 73–93; Jane H. M. Taylor, ‘‘Villon et la Danse Macabré: ‘Défamiliarisation’ d’un myth,’ ’’ in L. Harf-Lancer and D. Boutet, eds., Pour une mythologie du moyen âge (Paris: École Normale Supérieure, 1988), pp. 179–96; and Jean Delumeau, Le péché et la peur: La culpabilisation en Occident, XIII–XVIII siècles (Paris: Fayard, 1983), pp. 57–97. 24 G. R. Owst, Preaching in Medieval England (Cambridge, 1926), p. 268. 25 John Mirk, Mirk’s Festial (London: Early English Text Society, 1905), pp. 297, 294. The discourse of a leveling death frames this sermon, which begins with Myrc identifying the corpse as ‘‘a myrroure to vs alle’’ and ends with the reminder ‘‘alle we schul dyon and we wyte note ow sone.’’ 262 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH Indeed, as yet another strand of recent scholarship has shown, the ideology of the great leveler cannot be assigned any direct relation to medieval people’s actual experience with death. While death did ultimately afflict people of all ages, ‘‘how’’ and ‘‘when’’ death took place varied enormously. For example, in the case of medieval ‘‘outsiders’’ such as women, Jews, and the poor, an early death was intimately connected with the numerous other afflictions that accompany disenfranchisement. In her work on the Black Death in late medieval Florence, Ann Carmichael demonstrates just such a connection between mortality and indigence. In the fourteenth century, the flight of wealthy Florentines left the urban poor ‘‘unemployed and destitute.’’26 Concern over the poor’s plight led to the construction of lazaretti, or plague hospitals, for sick indigents. Over time, this originally charitable housing of the unprovided in the name of Christian goodwill contributed to the association of the poor with plague and death, a linkage that led to their uncharitable segregation, often in lazaretti, as a preventative public health measure. The isolation of the dispossessed with plague sufferers in the lazaretti only worsened the overall rate of infection within such spaces and heightened mortality rates. This account of the reciprocal intensification of death and poverty starkly contrasts with the universal images of death found in medieval culture and modern scholarship. Far from asking all persons indiscriminately to join in her dance, death had a special ‘‘preference’’ for the poor in plague-time medieval Florence. Other scholars have emphasized the particularity of death for the medieval disenfranchised, rather than its universality: Megan McLaughlin in her treatment of the humiles’ cult of death; John Henderson on Florentine women, their children, and the plague; Barbara Hanawalt on peasant guild culture and death; and Robert Chazan on the European Jewry.27 Such intersections between death and political categories like rank, gender, and ethnicity forcefully expose 26 Anne Carmichael, Plague and the Poor in Renaissance Florence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 102. 27 Megan McLaughlin, Consorting with Saints: Prayer for the Dead in Early Medieval France (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 113–25; John Henderson, ‘‘Women, Children and Poverty in Florence at the Time of the Black Death,’’ in Henderson and Richard Wall, eds., Poor Women and Children in the European Past (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 160–79; Barbara Hanawalt, The Ties That Bound: Peasant Families in Medieval England (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 240–42; Robert Chazan, European Jewry and the First Crusade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), and Daggers of Faith: Thirteenth-Century Christian Missionizing and Jewish Response (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989). 263 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the fictive nature of the idea of Death as leveler. Contrary to its longstanding construction as the Great Leveler that ‘‘spareth neyther poure ne rych,’’ death in the Middle Ages was not universal.28 Thus, Myrc’s warning that ‘‘all we schul dyon’’ not only authorizes his efforts to enlist peasant consent to church authority but also hides the grim reality that each medieval peasant’s death constituted only the final manifestation of the oppressions she endured in life. In a similar vein, the Dance of Death’s elision of the role of oppression in producing death for the disadvantaged undermines its liberatory valences. Indeed, through its apparent message of social equality, the dance of death encourages consent to death as a meaningful inevitability, hence not only disregarding but also contributing to what Herbert Marcuse describes as ‘‘the insoluble connection between death and unfreedom, death and domination.’’29 Despite its potential for social criticism, the rhetoric of death-as-leveler is profoundly challenged by the social renunciations it entails, renunciations that culminate in the ultimate sacrifice, of life itself. ‘‘Povre’’ Griselda In The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer will use his continual focus on the actual conditions of the poor to dramatize this challenge. Despite her seeming 28 Thomas Wimbledon, Wimbledon’s Sermon, ed. Ione Kemp Knight (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1967), p. 108; cited and discussed by G. R. Owst in Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1961), p. 532. 29 Marcuse, ‘‘The Ideology of Death,’’ p. 67. Cf. the construction of death as an act that releases the agricola from his arduous labor in life in Lydgate’s Dance of Death: Hammond, English Verse, p. 140): Thou laborer which in sorwe and peine • Hast lad 3i life in ful greet trauaile • Thou moste eke daunce and perfore not dideyne • ffor if 3ou do it may 3ee not availe • And cause why 3at I 3ee assaile • Is oonly 3is from 3ee to disseuere • The fals worlde 3at can so folke faile • He is a fool 3at weneth to lyne euere. The labourer answerith I haue wisshed aftir deeth ful ofte • Al be 3at I woulde haue fled hym now • I had leuere to haue leyn vnsofte. • In winde and reyn & haue gone at plow • With spade & pikoys and labourid for my 3row • Dolve and diched and at 3e carte goone • ffor I may seie and telle pleinly howe • In 3is worlde here ther is reste none. 264 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH transformation by Walter into ‘‘another creature,’’ ‘‘norissed in an emperoures halle,’’ Griselda never relinquishes her identity as a ‘‘povre womman’’ (lines 406, 399, 724). From their first meeting to their temporary separation and beyond, both Griselda and Walter consistently stress the distance between her ‘‘poverte’’ and his aristocratic ‘‘magnificence’’ (lines 815–16).30 Remarkably, a full-scale analysis of the figure of poverty in The Clerk’s Tale has yet to appear in Chaucer studies, this despite the fact that the Clerk’s particular interest in privation distinguishes his tale not only from Chaucer’s sources but also from the other tales told by the Canterbury pilgrims.31 While the mere fact that the adjective ‘‘povre’’ appears in The Clerk’s Tale with greater frequency than it does in any other tale offers us quantitative evidence of the narrative’s emphasis on scarcity, further proof obtains in the Clerk’s realistic descriptions of Griselda’s rustic shelter, agrarian labor, and ragged clothing before her marriage.32 My claim that the tale accurately describes peasant life may appear to contradict the pastoral image with which the Clerk describes the ‘‘povre folk’’ to which Griselda belongs (line 200). The earthly abundance available in Griselda’s village ‘‘of site delitable’’ connotes a Virgilian golden era akin to that evoked in Chaucer’s poem The Former Age (lines 199–213). But the lines that follow the Clerk’s 30 Echoing the elaboration by ‘‘Le livre Griseldis’’ of Griselda’s description of herself as ‘‘indignam’’ in Petrarch, the Clerk has Griselda respond to Walter’s proposal by describing herself as ‘‘undigne and unworthy’’ (ClT 359; Bryan and Demptster, Sources and Analogues, pp. 306–7). As Winfried Schliener points out, Chaucer’s decision to have Griselda tell the Marquis when he abandons her, ‘‘I woot, and wiste alway, / How that bitwixen youre magnificence; And my poverte no wight kan ne may maken comparison’’ (lines 814–16), displays the medieval poet’s unique emphasis on Griselda’s poverty. While Petrarch’s Griselda refers only to her ‘‘humilitatem,’’ the French source ‘‘adds the notion of poverty: ‘mon humilité et povreté.’ Chaucer limits her argument to the latter’’; ‘‘Rank and Marriage: A Study of the Motif of ‘woman willfully tested,’ ’’ CLS 9 (1972): 368; cf. Bryan and Demptster, eds., Sources and Analogues, pp. 320–21). Harriet Hawkins notes Walter’s emphasis on Griselda’s poverty: ‘‘Himself secure in birth and wealth through ‘favour of Fortune’ (line 69), Walter continually reminds his wife that she is a being of a lower order who owes everything she has, everything she is in life, to him’’; ‘‘The Victim’s Side: Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Webster’s Duchess of Malfi,’’ Signs 1.21 (1975): 346. 31 Schleiner briefly analyzes how Chaucer stresses poverty more than his Latin and French sources do (‘‘Rank and Marriage,’’ pp. 365–75). While Schleiner contends that Chaucer emphasizes poverty because, for the medieval writer, the difference in rank between Griselda and Walter is crucial to ‘‘the pleasureableness and persuasiveness of the exemplum’’ (p. 369), I am interested in how that emphasis demonstrates Chaucer’s engagement with poverty itself as a social problem, as a source of material hardship and spiritual anxiety for the medieval indigent peasantry. 32 Larry D. Benson, ed., Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer, vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1993), s.v. povre. 265 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER portrayal of Griselda’s village comment ironically on this initial idyllic image. Expanding upon his sources, Chaucer offers a realistic account of how medieval rural life was filled with labor and devoid of proper sustenance and suitable housing. Griselda and Janicula’s diet of boiled cabbages and leafy vegetables (a detail Chaucer takes from his French sources) resembles the ‘‘comounly’’ food of ‘‘bred, herbis, frute’’ described in John Capgrave’s life of St. Norbert, a repast even more ‘‘sklendre’’ than the bread, bacon, and occasional egg eaten by the ‘‘povre wydwe’’ of The Nun’s Priest Tale.33 Griselda’s ‘‘bed ful hard and nothyng softe’’ (line 228) elaborates on Petrarch’s durum cubiculum and evokes the discomfort of the poorest peasants, who slept on straw pallets with a log for their pillow.34 Finally, in the key final lines of two stanzas of this section, Chaucer departs from his sources by stressing how Griselda ‘‘knew wel labour but noon ydel ese’’ (line 217), and ‘‘wolde noght been ydel til she slepte’’ (line 224). With this near refrain of a life defined by incessant labor, the Clerk well describes the extension from dawn to dusk of a workday that was far from idyllic for the impoverished peasant woman.35 While the pleasing image of her ‘‘throop’’ suggests that Griselda enjoys a ‘‘blisful lif,’’ the realistic representation of her everyday life suggests otherwise.36 33 ClT, 226–27; John Capgrave, Life of St. Norbert, unpublished ed. by W. H. Clauson, cited in Middle English Dictionary, s.v. herbe; NPT 2832–45; 2821. On the peasant diet, see H. S. Bennett, Life on the English Manor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 234–35; Hanawalt, Ties, pp. 52–60; Mollat, The Poor, pp. 194–95. 34 Bryan and Demptster, eds., Sources and Analogues, p. 302; Hanawalt, ibid., p. 48; Bennett, ibid., p. 233. 35 Griselda’s work ‘‘spynnynge’’ of course, was a task traditional to peasant women, and the split in Griselda’s work day between labor ‘‘on feeld’’ and ‘‘whan she homward cam’’ corresponds to Barbara Hanawalt’s observation that the ‘‘distinct tasks’’ assigned to the sexes among the poverty-stricken ‘‘cannot be divided between field and home with easy facility’’; ClT 223–28; Barbara A. Hanawalt, ‘‘Childrearing among the Lower Classes of Late Medieval England,’’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977): 8. The bulk of the peasant woman’s tasks, however, were performed at home (Hanawalt, Ties, p. 145). Cf. the leisurely and carefree life led by Walter (ClT 80–82). 36 The Former Age, line 1. Wallace discusses Griselda’s ‘‘throop’’ in the section of his essay on The Clerk’s Tale that demonstrates how Chaucer ‘‘restores the commons’’ to Petrarch’s Griselda story (Chaucerian Polity, p. 289). He suggests provocatively how reading the moment as a version of The Former Age indicates Chaucer’s celebration of the commons and his criticism of tyrants, whereby, for example, ‘‘Griselda’s life of moral, economic, and dietary simplicity evidently has a longer pedigree than Walter’s life at the palace’’ (p. 290). In contrast, I am suggesting the manner in which Chaucer ‘‘restores the commons’’ not through golden era idealism but through realistic description. Thus in my reading Walter’s interruption of Griselda’s life signifies less ‘‘the original, ruinous disruption of the life of ‘peples in the former age’ ’’ than the problematic vulnerability of the poor, a vulnerability emphasized by Chaucer throughout the tale (p. 266 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH To argue that the tale realistically reflects the conditions facing the underprivileged may seem to contradict the seemingly fantastic events that characterize Griselda’s married life, above all Walter’s extreme tests of Griselda’s wifely obedience. Yet the most monstrous and seemingly unrealistic aspect of Walter’s tests (i.e., his murder of Griselda’s two children) in fact reflects a peasant reality, insofar as the death of children was perhaps the greatest affliction the indigent endured. As a result of disasters such as the Hundred Years’ War, the famine of 1315–17, and the plague of 1349–50, mortality among all English children during the fourteenth century stood between 30 and 50 percent.37 But due to close quarters, an inadequate diet, and improper hygiene, the peasant child suffered death disproportionately when such disasters fell. The exigencies of everyday peasant life, moreover, rendered very young indigent children, such as Griselda’s baby boy and girl, particularly vulnerable to accidental deaths. Their straw floors and straw pallets, for example, made peasant houses highly flammable.38 Moreover, the need for all able-bodied members of a household to work at field could lead to parental neglect of infants and toddlers, whose accidental demise from crib fire, animal bites, and drowning, among other things, figures prominently in the coroners’ rolls analyzed by Barbara Hanawalt.39 Surely the particular susceptibility of the peasant child to death during ordinary life as well as during times of disaster accounts for the fact that, on average, prosperous families had more than twice and even three times the number of children possessed by peasants.40 The peasant 290). In particular, the Clerk’s reference to no door but only an opening, a ‘‘thresshfold,’’ when the Marquis arrives at Griselda and Janicula’s ‘‘litel oxes stalle’’ suggests the lack of protection offered by their impoverished peasant home, a defenselessness that in turn emphasizes Janicula’s utter powerlessness as an indigent man in the matter of his daughter’s marriage to his powerful lord. Cf. Schleiner, ‘‘Rank and Marriage,’’ p. 368. 37 E. A. Wrigley, Population and History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1969), pp. 116–31. 38 Hanawalt, ‘‘Childrearing,’’ p. 7. 39 In the Northhampshire rolls and Bedfordshire inquests studied by Hanawalt, 31 percent of accident victims in rural households were children (ibid., p. 5). 40 Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 121; John Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance (New York: Pantheon, 1988), p. 412. Above all, the Black Death, the ‘‘proletarian epidemic’’ that frames Boccaccio’s account of the Griselda legend in the Decameron, devastated poor children (Mollat, The Poor, pp. 193– 97). Among the 50 percent of all English people who died during the Black Death, 60 to 70 percent were children, while peasant children were most susceptible. See Carmichael, Plague, p. 93; Platt, King Death, p. 181; John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the 267 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER mother, it appears, could hardly count on seeing her child into adulthood. For her, the peasant child constituted an elusive object in the Middle Ages, ever vulnerable to death. The particular susceptibility of the dispossessed medieval child to death demonstrates the fact that when an impoverished peasant parent such as Griselda lost her child, that event signified less the universality of death than its close connection to the other hardships the poor faced. That connection between death and material want is made manifest in The Clerk’s Tale by Griselda herself, in a complex gesture she performs before the Marquis’s agent seizes her first child, a baby girl. In an episode in which Chaucer expands upon his Old French and Latin sources, Griselda enacts a kind of pietà by placing her baby upon her lap, kissing her, signing her with the cross, and telling her, ‘‘Fareweel my child! I shal thee nevere see. But sith I thee have marked with the croys Of thilke Fader—blessed moote he be!— That for us deyde upon a croys of tree, Thy soule, litel child, I hym bitake, For this nyght shaltow dyen for my sake.’’ (lines 555-60)41 Griselda’s pious response to the loss of her daughter may appear to return us to an oppressive ideology of death. By describing Christ as the father of both her and her baby, Griselda posits a Christian kinship whose universality levels all Christians as brothers in Christ. Indeed, the divine adoption Griselda imagines her daughter will receive in exchange for her death specifically recalls the discourse of a spiritual lineage initiated by the Marquis Walter, who tells his subject earlier in the tale that ‘‘Bountee comth al of God, nat of the streen / Of which they been engendred and ybore’’ (lines 157–58). Its separation of virtue from rank English Economy, 1348–1530 (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp. 21–23. The susceptibility of the young emerges in the very terming of the second outbreak in 1361–62 ‘‘pestis puerorum’’ or ‘‘mortalité des enfants,’’ a name that in turn reflects high death rates in places such as the Suffolk parish of Walsham-le-Willows, where at least 64 percent of the children died (Platt, King Death, pp. 10, 15). These medieval statistics, unfortunately, correlate with recent assessments that low income children in the United States are two times more likely to die from birth defects, four times more likely to die in fires, and five times more likely to die from infectious diseases. See Arloc Sherman, Wasting America’s Future: The Children’s Defense Fund Report on the Costs of Child Poverty (Boston: Beacon, 1994), p. xvii. 41 Cf. Bryan and Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues, pp. 312–13. 268 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH makes Walter’s Christian rhetoric potentially disruptive, yet the Marquis uses it to assert his own authority over his disgruntled subjects, who desire to remedy Walter’s bachelorhood by finding him the ‘‘gentilleste’’ wife in the land (lines 131–32). The marital pageant of class mobility the Marquis displays when he weds Griselda testifies to this ruler’s investment less in a democracy of grace than in using that notion to endow himself with the authoritative identity of a ‘‘prudent man’’ before his people (line 427). When Griselda reiterates Walter’s ideology of divine inheritance while facing her daughter’s murder, it would appear that we witness perhaps a still more disturbing example of how an ostensibly ‘‘democratic’’ religiosity can be placed in the service of oppression. Griselda’s faith in her dead child’s divine adoption portrays how a rhetoric of spiritual genealogies enables the poor to sustain the very horrors imposed upon them by authority figures such as Walter. By imagining her daughter’s death as a scene of heavenly adoption, and by, moreover, imagining her final moment with her baby as a type of the pietà (in which she figures Mary and her baby figures Christ), Griselda endures the loss of her baby by imbuing it with spiritual significance. Most important for my purposes, these Christian meanings appear to transcend the problem of Griselda’s peasant identity by emphasizing her status not as a daughter of Janicula (and thus part of the ‘‘povrest’’ of the ‘‘povre folk’’) but as a daughter of Christ or a type of the Virgin (lines 204–5). Through her own invocation of typology and ideas of Christian fraternity, then, Griselda occludes her own material hardship in the same manner that the rhetoric of the leveler ignores the particular problems suffered by the underprivileged. Yet perhaps this is not the whole story. Griselda, I contend, also articulates her own peasant identity in this pathetic farewell. A look at what John Boswell has taught us about the actual practices of child abandonment in the Middle Ages shows how Griselda keenly attends to her indigence when she leaves her daughter. According to the literary and historical sources analyzed by Boswell, medieval parents who abandoned their children left with them material objects such as ‘‘ring[s], ribbon[s], painting[s], [and] article[s] of clothing to signify to future caretakers the child’s socio-economic status’’ (where ‘‘expensive tokens indicated lofty birth’’ and so forth).42 Griselda, significantly, leaves no physical token with her child but instead has ‘‘marked’’ her girl ‘‘with the croys.’’ 42 Boswell, Kindness, p. 126. 269 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER While medieval parents of means signified their abandoned children’s status through physical tokens, Griselda uses a blessing to represent her doomed daughter’s peasant heritage. Of course in many respects this gesture signals yet again Griselda’s transcendence of her own indigent status. For one thing, the sign of the cross points to the baby’s spiritual family, since the cross is that of Christ her ‘‘fader.’’ Moreover, the very symbolic nature of Griselda’s gesture suggests her emphasis not on this life but on an afterlife where physical objects do not signify. However, the repetition of ‘‘croys’’ in this episode suggests otherwise. The ‘‘croys of tree’’ to which Griselda refers two lines later brings us, significantly, back to the material world, to the wood upon which Christ died. Griselda’s mere signing of her child with the cross—the fact that she does not give her baby even a wooden crucifix—points to the material want that defines her as a woman ‘‘in povre estaat ful lowe’’ (line 473). Far from occluding the material lacks that render her powerless in the face of Walter’s demands, Griselda has ‘‘marked’’ them out and poignantly inscribed them upon her daughter. The extent to which this episode underscores Griselda’s poverty becomes even clearer when we consider it in light of a similar moment in The Man of Law’s Tale. In a scene original to Chaucer, the lawyer’s pathetic heroine, Custance, figures the pietà upon her ejection from England. Believing, like Griselda, that her husband will kill her baby, Custance covers his eyes with her own ‘‘coverchief ’’ (line 837), or handkerchief, and asks Mary, whose ‘‘blisful eyen sawe al’’ Christ’s ‘‘torment,’’ to take pity on Maurice (line 845). Notably, while both Custance and Griselda share certain burdens, among them their maternal anguish and the constant threat of their own abandonment, at least one thing separates the two women: their rank and the material wealth it affords. And just as Custance’s possession of an ample dowry (the ‘‘certein tresor’’ she bears with her on her travels) and Griselda’s lack thereof point to the material disparity between these female sufferers, so too do the tokens with which they mark their doomed children distinguish the imperial princess from ‘‘povre’’ Griselda (line 442). While the emperor’s daughter leaves her child with a physical object—the ‘‘coverchief ’’ (and no doubt a fine one at that)—the dowerless Griselda can only bless her baby. In Fragment 4, then, Chaucer recreates the pietà he fashioned in Fragment 2, but with a crucial material difference, one that points to the depth of his understanding of what it means to be unprovided. To return to the specific example of Griselda, the peasant mother 270 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH signifies the relationship between her maternal loss and her own indigence not only through her blessing but also when she tells her daughter, ‘‘this nyght shaltow dyen for my sake.’’ In part, Griselda’s words appear to echo the reasoning Walter offers her when he claims that he must kill her daughter to appease his ‘‘gentils,’’ who cannot tolerate ‘‘to be subgetz’’ to a woman ‘‘born . . . of a smal village’’ (lines 482–83). Walter’s nobles, perhaps aware of the duplicitous ends to which Walter put forth his rhetoric of ‘‘god’s bountee,’’ resist the idea that ‘‘under low degree / Was ofte vertue hid’’ (lines 425–26). Because of her mother’s indigent status, and the noble dissent it prompts, Griselda’s daughter must die. Yet Griselda’s words here, I would argue, relate less to aristocratic discontent than to peasant vulnerability. After all, she does not state, as Walter suggests, that her daughter perishes for the sake of the ‘‘peple,’’ but instead makes that sacrifice inexorably personal (line 490). You must die, she tells Christ-like baby, ‘‘for my sake’’ (my emphasis). As a Marquess taken ‘‘in povre estaat ful lowe,’’ Griselda is always vulnerable to the whims of her lord and husband (line 473). Because of an impoverishment signified by the insubstantial nature of her blessing, Griselda states, she must abandon and sacrifice her daughter to ward off her own abandonment and sacrifice.43 To be sure, throughout The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer situates Griselda within an oppressive Christian discourse that hides the anguished historical reality of medieval peasant everyday life through the transcendental logic of typology, whereby Griselda’s mangerlike home renders her a type of Mary, and her nakedness throughout the tale makes her a figure of Job.44 Yet he also imagines how the peasant consumers of Christianity can use its religious practices for their own everyday survival. Somewhat like the oppressed groups analyzed by Michel de Certeau, ‘‘users’’ who at once remain within and escape the dominant order by adapting its discourses ‘‘to their own interests and their own rules,’’ Griselda remakes the Christian economy of suffering.45 Griselda lacks the power to 43 Of course Griselda’s identification with her child as potential abandoned object is far from unfounded, since the Marquis does eventually send his wife back to her father’s house. 44 Among the readers who have suggested that the Christian plot of the tale at times competes with other, more secular narratives is Peggy Knapp, who claims that Griselda’s links to the Virgin Mary ‘‘are overwhelmed’’ in section five ‘‘by another familiar and completely human story line—the seduction and disgrace of a simple girl at the hands of a fickle nobleman’’; Chaucer and the Social Contest (New York and London: Routledge, 1990), p. 137. 45 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. xiv. 271 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER save her daughter, yet she does manage to undermine the meanings her lord claims for her daughter’s death. While Walter uses Christian rhetoric to bolster his own authority as a ‘‘prudent man’’ and thus to manage a disgruntled populace, Griselda insinuates herself and her unique history as a poor peasant woman into the religious rhetoric she employs and thus makes it ‘‘habitable,’’ in de Certeau’s definition of the term.46 Above all, by leaving with her daughter no object, but only an immaterial Christian gesture, Griselda registers the intimate connection between the problems of impoverishment, child abandonment, and infanticide. Burial and Indigent Vulnerability While Griselda’s polyvalent pietà qualifies her identity as a ‘‘sad stidefast’’ (line 564) acquiescer to infanticide, the greatest challenge to the notion that Griselda faces her children’s deaths with unfeeling submission obtains with regard to the issue of her dead babies’ interment. Indeed, while Griselda responds in a largely stoic manner to her babies’ presumed deaths, the question of their burial plainly makes her anxious. When she gives her daughter to Walter’s henchman, Griselda asks him to ‘‘atte leeste / Burieth this litel body in som place / That beestes ne no briddes it torace’’ (lines 570–72). Griselda repeats her concern over the beastly consumption of her dead children when she later requests that Walter’s sergeant ‘‘in erthe grave’’ her son’s ‘‘tendre lymes . . . Fro foweles and fro beestes’’ (lines 681–83). Griselda’s desire to shield her babies’ corpses from beasts and birds through burial receives special attention from Chaucer, who elaborates upon Petrarch and his French source by having Griselda specifically request that the girl and boy be buried.47 Chaucer, moreover, departs from his sources by having Griselda reiterate her fears upon her reunion with her children. Once aware that her son and daughter are alive and well, Griselda tells them ‘‘Youre woful mooder wende stedfastly / That crueel houndes or som foul vermyne / Hadde eten yow’’ (lines 1094–96). This third reference to the children’s vulnerable bodies is especially noteworthy, due to its ironic deployment of the very modifier used to represent Griselda’s endurance of her ordeals. That is, by having Griselda identify herself as a ‘‘woful 46 47 Ibid., p. xxi. Bryan and Dempster, eds., Sources and Analogues, pp. 312–13, 316–17. 272 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH mooder . . . stedfastly’’ concerned over the exposure of her babies’ corpses, Chaucer implies how, with the very ‘‘stedefastnesse’’ that characterizes her submission to her children’s deaths, (line 699) Griselda worries throughout those trials about safety of her babies’ dead bodies. As we shall see, Griselda’s woe over her dead babies’ exposure forms a crucial component of the Tale’s undermining of the idea of a leveling death. Griselda’s anxiety over her children’s corpses’ being consumed by animals may seem to contradict the very Christian doctrine she uses to withstand Walter’s torments. As Augustine puts it, ‘‘a pious faith . . . holds to the belief that not even ferocious wild beasts would hinder those bodies at the time of resurrection.’’48 The ‘‘time of resurrection’’ to which Augustine refers, of course, is the Second Coming, the final step in salvation history. And despite eschatological claims made by Augustine and others that on Judgment Day the Lord would reconstitute any body, no matter how fragmented, the deceased’s corporeal corruption continued to trouble medieval believers, particularly during the late Middle Ages. On Christian notions about death, spirituality, and the body during the Middle Ages, Ariès writes that ‘‘there was an unstated relationship between the preservation of the body and that of the soul’’ to which the miraculous preservation of ‘‘the bodies of certain saints’’ attested.49 Carolyn Bynum has explained how the medieval Christian linkage of body and soul was accompanied by a specific concern over the treatment of the dead in preparation for the Second Coming, an event that became ever more important to the faithful during the latter half of the Middle Ages.50 The many visual representations of figures 48 ‘‘The Care to be Taken for the Dead,’’ 2.4, Writings of Saint Augustine, vol. 27 (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1955), p. 354. See also Enchiridion, ch. 23, and The City of God, book 22. 49 Philippe Ariès, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Helen Weaver (New York: Knopf, 1981), p. 261. 50 See Carolyn Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995). On the replacement of the Apocalypse with the Last Judgment as an object of concern for medieval Christians during the Middle Ages, culminating in the thirteenth century, see Arıès, ibid., pp. 99–106. Bynum (Resurrection) and Elizabeth A. R. Brown (‘‘Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse,’’ Viator 12 [1981]: 253; and ‘‘Authority, the Family, and the Dead in Late Medieval France,’’ French Historical Studies 16.4 [1990]: 803–32) offer excellent and thorough analyses of the complex relationship between the care of the dead and the body’s eventual resurrection during the Middle Ages. My claims regarding the vulnerability of indigent corpses is indebted to Bynum’s work in Resurrection; ‘‘Bodily Miracles and the Resurrection of the Body in the High Middle Ages,’’ in Thomas Kselman, ed., Belief in History: Innovative Approaches to European and American Religion (Notre Dame, Ind., and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991), pp. 68–106; and Fragmentation and 273 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER rising from tombs in medieval art, for example, present a very literal imagining of the connection between the dead’s interment and their bodies’ resurrection, as does the fact that Christian corpses were buried with their feet, often with shoes on, facing east, ready to rise and walk toward their Maker as He arose from the Orient.51 While the buried and shod deceased were ready to meet their Maker, the exposed and fragmented dead were ill prepared for the Last Judgment, as both ecclesiastical and more popular sources attest. Gervase of Mt.-St.-Eloi, a master of theology at the University of Paris, called the bodily partition of royal corpses ‘‘horrible and inhuman,’’ and argued that bodies of the dead ideally should be kept intact ‘‘so they were ready for the sound of the trumpet.’’52 And the obsessive imaging both of ‘‘the reassembling of body parts for burial’’ in The Golden Legend as well as the disgorging of human bodies from lions, tigers, and a griffon at an angel’s behest in the Resurrection of the Dead at the Torcello cathedral testifies to a popular anxiety over the division of the dead so intense as to require imaginative resolution.53 Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone, 1991). 51 For the images of the dead rising, see T. S. R. Boase, Death in the Middle Ages: Mortality, Judgement and Remembrance (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), pp. 35–36, 108. On the positioning and clothing of the corpse, see Finucane, ‘‘Sacred Corpse,’’ p. 43; and Durandus of Mende, Rationale divinorum officiorum, 7.25. 39–43, cited and discussed in Geoffrey Rowell, The Liturgy of Christian Burial (London: S.P.C.K, 1977), p. 66. 52 Brown, ‘‘Authority, the Family and the Dead.’’ Lactantius, for example, declared in his Divine Institutes that Christians not allow ‘‘the image and workmanship of God to lie as a prey for beasts and birds,’’ but to return it ‘‘to the earth whence it sprang’’ (6.12; cited in Rowell, Liturgy, p. 18). Intense papal concern over the fragmentation of the body was expressed by Boniface VIII in his bull of 1299, Detestande Feritatis, banning the division of corpses, in which he refers to the practice as ‘‘an abomination in the sight of God and horrifying to the minds of the faithful’’ Les registres de Boniface 8, cited in the Catholic Encyclopedia s.v. Cremation). As Brown has shown, this legislation had marked effects in England. During the fifty years following the appearance of the legislation in 1300, the amount of separate burials of different parts of the body ‘‘declined radically’’ in England (‘‘Death and the Human Body,’’ p. 253). See also the concerns of Godfrey of Fontaine and Henry of Ghent as discussed by Brown in ‘‘Death and the Human Body,’’ p. 239. 53 On James of Voragine’s Golden Legend, see Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 310–15, esp. p. 311 n. 118. For a reproduction of the mosaic in the cathedral at Torcello, near Venice, see Boase, Death, p. 37, and Bynum, Resurrection, detail of plate 6. Underscoring the notion that bodily fragmentation was antithetical to redemption is the image of hell as a mouth (see Bynum, Resurrection, pp. 148, 293; plates 28, 32). Of course, the practice of partitioning the Christian dead certainly occurred during the Middle Ages, most obviously in the case of the cult of relics; yet the division of holy bodies was also an object of concern. Prudentius, for example, described the return of martyrs in visions to order that their bodies, fragmented in various shrines as relics, be united in preparation for the resurrection (see Binski, Medieval Death, p. 66). 274 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH The late medieval emphasis on the material continuity of the body, whereby, as R. C. Finucane puts it, ‘‘refusal of Christian burial could cause considerable anxiety—even terror—in medieval society,’’ indicates how the prospect of Griselda’s babies’ consumption by animals would, in her mind, seriously jeopardize their final adoption by Christ, a prospect that, as we have seen, figures for the peasant woman as a comforting compensation that helps her endure Walter’s tests.54 More important, Griselda’s efforts at obtaining for her children a burial that she can by no means guarantee speaks to the fact that, among medieval Christians, the subaltern were least likely to obtain the proper interment they desired. Burial technically was available to all Christians, even the neediest members of the faithful such as Griselda, since church law demanded the poor’s gratis interment in consecrated ground.55 The ostensibly democratic allocation of a free burial to all Christians by the church supports the notion of death as a moment of social leveling, when the earthly hierarchies that divide the living give way to a spiritual brotherhood in death. Yet church practice belied Christian doctrine. While the compendium of canon law known as Gratian’s Decretum defined burial as ‘‘a spiritual affair not subject to financial transaction,’’ the payment of mortuary fees became customary in parishes.56 In effect, by the fourteenth century burial had become a business, and one that affirmed rather than erased social distinctions. Upon their death, kings and saints were embalmed, dressed according to their station, and placed as close as possible to the altar ‘‘in the sacred eastern sanctuary,’’ where they could, as Finucane puts it, ‘‘be among the first to greet’’ the ‘‘King of Kings’’; the Christian commoner, however, was first buried outside in the churchyard and later transported to the charnelhouse or ossuary; and laymen who did not pay tithes could be refused burial at all.57 Not Finucane, ‘‘Sacred Corpse,’’ p. 54; cf. Bynum, Fragmentation, p. 269. Richard Burn, The Ecclesiastical Law, vol. 1, 9th ed. (London: S. Sweet, V. & R. Stevens and G. S. Norton, 1842), pp. 257–58. 56 Binski, Medieval Death, pp. 55–56; Burn, Ecclesiastical Law, p. 258. 57 Dictionary of Middle Ages, vol. 4, s.v. Death and Burial, in Europe; Finucane, ‘‘Sacred Corpse,’’ pp. 44–49, 60, 56. In addition to making the believer’s preparedness for the Second Coming a matter of his or her social status, death also occasioned the final material distancing of the Christian community from social outsiders, since ‘‘Christian burial was refused unrepentant heretics, pagans, Jews, excommunicates and unbaptized infants’’ (Finucane, ‘‘Sacred Corpse,’’ pp. 54–58). While ‘‘chesting’’ always constituted a funereal privilege for Christians in the Middle Ages, during the plague interment alone commanded a price. The Brut claims that in 1348 only ‘‘grete men of state’’ avoided the ‘‘grete diches and puttes’’ into which most bodies were thrown (The Brut or the Chronicles of England, ed. Friedrich W. D. Brie, pt. 2, Early English Text Society [hereafter EETS], o.s., vol. 136 [London: Oxford University Press, 1908], p. 301), and 54 55 275 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER only the place but also the manner of burial reiterated social hierarchies. While elaborately decorated sarcophagi and tombs enclosed the bodies of the wealthy, no such receptacle, not even a modest coffin, was allotted the interred corpse of an indigent person. Ariès, for example, writes that ‘‘people who were too poor to pay the carpenter were carried to the cemetery in a common coffin designed only for transport. The gravedigger removed the body from the coffin, buried it, and saved the coffin for further use.’’58 And Bertram Puckle describes how ‘‘in early days in England the bodies of the poor were committed to the grave practically naked’’ while ‘‘the prosperous were allowed to be ‘chested.’ ’’59 The privileged status of burial and, in particular, burial within a coffin in medieval Christian culture surely produced the most anxiety for members of the indigent peasantry. As at once the most likely category of person to die in the Middle Ages and a member of the group least likely to receive a proper burial, the unprovided Christian peasant—above all, a parent such as Griselda—was harmed the most, both materially and spiritually, by the stratification of medieval society under the Christian rituals of death. The notion that, of all Christians, it is the poor who most require help in ensuring their dead’s preparation for the Second Coming, arises in the emphasis that literature on the works of mercy places on burial, the seventh work of corporeal mercy. For example, the praise tendered the apocryphal biblical figure Tobit in the lay instruction manual, The Book of Virtues and Vices, ‘‘3at biried 3e pore . . . bisiliche,’’ points to Christian awareness of the uncertain material fate of the dead poor.60 Religious concern over the indigent corpse is even more visible in the Domesday play that ends the N-town cycle. While the Judgment Day play has God mention all of the bodily deeds of mercy before the risen dead, its literal staging of the Second Coming, whereby the dead rise from under the ground and demand that the ‘‘clodes of clay’’ above them ‘‘cleave asunder,’’ renders the Lord’s criticism of the those who fail ‘‘to bery the deed pore man’’ particularly salient.61 a sixteenth-century document on the plague describes ‘‘those who by poverty are wont to be exposed in public without burial’’ during plague time (Ariès, Hour, p. 57). 58 Ariès, ibid., pp. 169–70. 59 Bertram Puckle, Funeral Customs: Their Origin and Development (London: Werner Laurie, 1929), p. 37. 60 The Book of Virtues and Vices, ed. W. Nelson Francis, EETS, o.s., vol. 217 (1942; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 211. 61 The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, vol. 1, ed. Stephen Spector EETS, s.s., vol. 11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 374–77. 276 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH Although a benevolent Christian concern for the indigent dead appears in discourses about the bodily works of mercy, in the imagined world of The Clerk’s Tale, no such help is forthcoming, as Griselda seeks for her children a burial that she can in no way secure. Underscoring the correlation between Griselda’s anxiety over her children’s interment and her own material positioning are the many occasions in which the Clerk associates, on the one hand, the peasant Griselda with images of exposure and, on the other hand, privileged men, namely Walter and Petrarch, with images of enclosure. Her abrupt undressing by the Italian ladies before her marriage, her constant liability to abandonment by Walter throughout the tale, and her disrobing for her journey back to her father’s house all serve to identify the impoverished Griselda with a nakedness that parallels the exposure she fears for her babies’ corpses (lines 372–75, 894–96).62 While Griselda decidedly lacks the power to bury in The Clerk’s Tale, the Clerk explicitly attributes the privilege of protection within the space of the coffin to the upper classes. Walter, for example, instructs his servant to transport ‘‘pryvely’’ Griselda’s baby girl to Panico within ‘‘a cofre,’’ a chest or basket, well hidden from the eyes of others (lines 582, 585).63 Although Chaucer takes this detail from Petrarch’s Latin version of the Griselda story, in which the Marquis places the child in a ‘‘ciste,’’ he is unique in having the Clerk refer in his Prologue to the fact that his source, the ‘‘worthy clerk’’ Petrarch, ‘‘is now deed and nayled in his cheste’’ ClkP 26–29). In part, the Clerk’s reference to Petrarch’s deceased status attests to Chaucer’s desire to ‘‘kill’’ the literary father of his Griselda story; but the image of Petrarch and his ‘‘cheste’’ conjured by the Clerk points to a crucial means by which Chaucer makes his own original contribution to the Griselda literary tradition.64 For the coffin in which the dead ‘‘lauriat poete’’ Petrarch (ClkP 31) lies emphasizes 62 Note also the exposed quality of Griselda and Janicula’s ‘‘litel oxes stalle,’’ where the Marquis arrives early in the tale to claim Griselda as his bride (line 207; cf. Schleiner, ‘‘Rank and Marriage,’’ p. 368). 63 In this context ‘‘cofre’’ most likely means a basket; yet the capacity of the word to refer to a coffin in Middle English also signifies in the passage, given both the allusion to Petrarch’s ‘‘chest’’ in the Prologue and, moreover, the fact that the Marquis’s orders follow closely on Griselda’s plea for her daughter’s burial. 64 In referring to Chaucer’s anxious and burdensome relationship to his literary ancestor, Petrarch, I am of course invoking the critical work on that topic by W. Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970) and Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). 277 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Chaucer’s specific interest in using The Clerk’s Tale to expose, through the figure of burial and chesting, the material disparity between the privileged and the oppressed. Both the Clerk’s reference to Petrarch’s ‘‘chest’’ and the ‘‘cofre’’ in which the Marquis’s servant transports the child offer images of aristocratic power and security that poignantly contrast with the images of peasant vulnerability registered each time Griselda fears for the exposure of her children’s dead bodies.65 The relationship between the coffin images and questions of privilege becomes even more striking when we consider the range of definitions for both ‘‘cheste’’ and ‘‘cofre,’’ which include ‘‘coffin,’’ ‘‘strongbox,’’ and ‘‘treasure chest’’; and their Latin equivalents, cista and cophinus, which connote a container of everything from corpses, clothes, sacred utensils, and electoral votes to money.66 By dint of these various Latin and vernacular meanings, the coffins represented in The Clerk’s Tale perform a kind of condensation, bringing together the issues of burial, disrobing, and enrobing, religion and social governance that are crucial to the Tale. Above all, the fact that some coffers contain cash or other valuables underscores how images of enclosure signify material wealth in Chau65 The gendered lines into which the figures of privilege and privation largely fall in The Clerk’s Tale (excepting of course the representation of Janicula) raises the question of how Griselda’s femininity relates to her poverty. The problem of the relationship between woman and poverty in the medieval West is too vast to explore fully in this essay. However, I would like to note briefly some of the ways in which poverty (and neediness generally) was especially linked with woman during the period. On the one hand, various masculinist discourses of the period constructed woman as the weaker sex and therefore always already in a position of need (as the constitution of women and especially widows as primary objects of knightly aid in chivalric discourse demonstrates). On the other hand, due to the very patriarchal biases of medieval occidental culture, the construction of the needy woman mirrored the peasant woman’s actual economic disadvantages during the period. Because they received lower pay than men and usually worked in the lowest-paying sectors of the economy, female dependent laborers were at greater risk than their male counterparts of descending into extreme poverty. No doubt as a result of the discourse of the needy woman and woman’s historical material positioning, relief agencies in preindustrial Europe tended to give a higher percentage of their charity to women than to men. On the attitude of medieval charitable organizations toward poor women, see Sharon Farmer, ‘‘Down and Out and Female in Thirteenth-Century Paris,’’ American Historical Review 103 (1998): 353–54, and the extensive list of works cited in n. 32 (pp. 353–54) of Farmer’s essay. On the economic disadvantages faced by working women in the Middle Ages, see the same essay, pp. 354–55 and the works cited in n. 35, in particular (for the case of medieval England) P. J. P. Goldberg, Women, Work and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 82 and ff. 66 See MED s.v. chest and cofre; A New Latin Dictionary, rev. Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short (New York: American Book Company, 1907), s.v. cista, ae and cophinus, i. Cf. Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources, ed. R. E. Latham (London: Oxford University Press, 1980), s.v. cista and coffinus. 278 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH cer’s narrative. The meaning of ‘‘cofre’’ as money box, interestingly enough, appears in the portrait of the Clerk himself, who possessed ‘‘but litel gold in cofre’’ (GP 298). The Clerk’s empty coffer is the primary sign of his poverty, an aspect of this pilgrim that, as Jill Mann points out, contributes to his status as ‘‘an ideal representative of the life of study.’’67 The linkage of the Clerk’s poverty to a philosophical exemplar may appear to be mutually constitutive with his explicit interpretation of Griselda as spiritual model at the end of his tale (ClT 1142–46). Yet the intertextual relationship that obtains between the image of the Clerk’s empty ‘‘cofre’’ in his portrait and the multiple images of ‘‘cofres’’ and ‘‘chests’’ in his Tale undermines this overt idealism and instead only contributes to Chaucer’s linkage of enclosure with questions of privilege. Indeed, the privilege that chesting references in The Clerk’s Tale reveals how the ‘‘poor’’ scholar’s possession of even an empty coffer gives him a degree of power denied his poor heroine.68 Everyday Death and Guild Culture Through his singular representation of a series of men—including even the poor Clerk himself—possessed of the power to ‘‘chest,’’ and through his equally original emphasis on an impoverished woman’s anxiety over the burial, let alone chesting, of her children, Chaucer points, however inadvertently, to a contradiction in a religious ideology intended to manage the peasantry. Even as the Christian ideology of death encouraged the medieval poor to consent to their oppression by promising them an afterlife that erased earthly power assymetries, Christian burial practice reiterated those very imbalances; far from occluding the prob67 Jill Mann, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire: The Literature of Social Classes and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), p. 74. As Mann notes, the ‘‘feature most firmly associated with the clerk’s estate in medieval literature was his poverty,’’ a trait that at times is extolled by medieval writers as a ‘‘necessary condition for scholarship’’ and at others ‘‘is the subject of complaint or cynical rejection’’ (p. 79). Bert Dillon, in ‘‘A Clerk Ther Was of Oxenford Also,’’ in Chaucer’s Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, ed. Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood, 1996), pp. 108–15, also claims that the portrait idealizes academic life. 68 Cf. the Clerk’s preference for books over other fine things in lines 293–96, a comment that may also attribute a kind of material wealth (i.e., many expensive books) to the scholar. The extent to which the Clerk’s mere possession of a coffer qualifies his identity as an idealized figure may go toward those other moments in the portrait, noted by such readers as Mann, that introduce an element of ambiguity in this otherwise commendatory portrait. See Mann, Estates Satire, pp. 76, 83. 279 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER lem of poverty, burial reminded peasants of the material hardships they endured in life. By representing this inconsistency between eschatological theory and eschatological practice, Chaucer thus imagines the limit of the subaltern’s capacity to perform the role of loyal subject in medieval Christian society. Griselda can consent to her children’s deaths, but not to their bodies’ exposure. Moreover, insofar as Griselda’s desire for her children’s interment contests the hierarchizing effects of Christian burial, Chaucer also indicates how the contradictions that inhere around the Christian rituals of death can allow for the transformation of those otherwise oppressive acts into opportunities for minor, yet significant, opposition. Admittedly, Griselda does not resist her oppression in the manner some readers of the Tale wish she had, i.e., by killing or at least castrating her husband.69 Yet the anxiety Griselda iterates over the treatment of her dead offspring testifies to not only her fears over their spiritual welfare but also her dissatisfaction with a social structure that leaves her materially and spiritually bereft. Indeed, if we consider the history of peasant response to the Christian rituals of death, we may speculate that there is even more at stake in Chaucer’s Griselda story. By imagining that even the most pious medieval peasant’s capacity to submit to her lot breaks down over the problem of burial, Chaucer represents in The Clerk’s Tale a phenomenon with striking social parallels. For it was precisely an anxiety over the care of the dead that served as a constitutive element in the proliferation in late-medieval rural England of guilds, religiosocial, self-governing, and highly flexible peasant organizations not unlike the trade unions of modernity.70 The question of how the guilds might relate to The Canterbury 69 The castration of Walter, for example, is imagined by a Columbia graduate student described in Lynn Sharon Schwartz’s novel Disturbances in the Field (Toronto: Bantam, 1985), p. 80, cited by Judith Bronfman in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated (New York: Garland, 1994), p. 3. 70 Long present in medieval England, guilds enjoyed a massive efflorescence during Chaucer’s life. Recent accounts of the guilds include Alan Krieder, English Chantries: The Road to Dissolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979); Barbara Hanawalt, ‘‘Keepers of the Lights: Late Medieval English Parish Guilds,’’ Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 14 (1984): 21–38. Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (London: Methuen, 1984); Ben R. McRee, ‘‘Religious Gilds and Regulation of Behavior in Late Medieval Towns,’’ Joel Rosenthan and Colin Richmond, eds., in People, Politics, and Community in the Later Middle Ages (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1987), pp. 108–22; Gervase Rosser, ‘‘Communities of Parish and Guild in the Late Middle Ages,’’ in S. J. Wright Parish, Church, and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350–1750 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), pp. 29–56; and Virginia Bainbridge, Guilds in the Medieval Countryside Studies in the History of Medieval Religion 10 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell, 1996). 280 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH Tales itself, with its establishment of a temporary association in some ways akin to those historical peasant corporations, has been taken up by Chaucerians such as Carl Lindhall and, most recently and elaborately, by David Wallace.71 In support of his overall claim that guilds offer a ‘‘form of consciousness’’ that illuminates many aspects of the Tales, Wallace draws several analogies between the guilds and Chaucer’s work: for example, how the pilgrims’ gathering in a tavern recalls the guilds’ emphasis on drinking, how their destination echoes the guilds’ interest in pilgrimages (and the dedication of a number of them to Thomas à Beckett), and how the Marian piety and anti-Semitism of the Prioress’s and Second Nun’s tales are shared by many guilds.72 Wallace ends his series of correspondences with ‘‘one last aspect of guild culture’’ that he links ‘‘somewhat more tentatively’’ to the Tales: its abiding interest in caring for its deceased members.73 In his provisional effort to connect guild emphasis on death to The Canterbury Tales, Wallace points specifically to the Pardoner and Summoner’s respective exploitations of fear of death, as well as the mixing of the living and the dead in The Friar’s Tale. Yet perhaps The Clerk’s Tale, with its unique emphasis on a peasant woman’s desire to ensure the burial of her children, offers us our most powerful link between the Tales and this key feature of medieval guild culture. By representing through Griselda how the vulnerable positioning of the dead could leave a peasant dissatisfied and anxious, Chaucer points to what may well have been the very impetus behind the establishment of many guilds in the fourteenth century. A remarkable concern for the care of the dead is registered in the guild descriptions solicited by Richard II in 1389. Indeed, as Barbara Hanawalt notes, after the celebration of their patron saint’s feast, funeral services and prayers for the dead were the next important guild function.74 In return after return, guilds spend a great deal of space delineating the duties owed to deceased brothers and sisters. These duties included retrieving the bodies of the 71 Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. 72 Wallace, ibid., p. 76. For the analogies, see pp. 91–99. 73 Ibid., pp. 98–99. 74 Hanawalt, ‘‘Keepers of the Lights,’’ p. 31. Cf. the guild reports listed in Toulmin Smith and Lucy Toulmin Smith, eds., English Guilds, EETS, o.s., vol. 40 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963). As Hanawalt has observed, ‘‘seventy-four percent of guilds’’ who responded to Parliament’s order in 1388 that the masters of all guilds and brotherhoods inform the Chancery of their foundation, statutes, and property ‘‘told the royal government that funerals for members were of primary importance’’ (Ties, p. 235). 281 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER dead (often even when a member perishes far from a town or parish), attending the ‘‘dirige’’ or funereal service, making offerings on behalf of the dead, arranging requiem masses, and paying for the burial of indigent members. This last duty is described, for example, by the Holy Trinity Guild of Norfolk, whose return states that ‘‘qwat brother or sustre die, and he may noughte be broughte to the hergdes [earth] wyt his owne catelle, he sal be broughte wyt the broderhedes.’’75 Many critics have suggested that the Black Death of 1349–50 lies behind the preoccupation of the guild returns with death.76 Yet we need not search for a single historical event to account for guild investment in the care of the dead. As we have seen, burial was a business that placed certain material burdens on the medieval peasantry; in fact, as Hanawalt points out, Christian burial and other funereal rites constituted one of two major expenses for the medieval laborer.77 During a time when interment and other rituals of death posed one of the greatest economic challenges to the peasant family, guild membership provided muchneeded financial aid that inadvertently acknowledged social inequities. If a ‘‘Griselda-like’’ dissatisfaction with plight of the peasantry within Christian burial practice prompted peasants to form burial clubs, the problems faced by living peasants also concerned the guilds, problems not unlike those faced by modern trade unions.78 Among other things, for example, guilds maintained a collective pool of quality livestock, established free schools, and enjoined members to aid ‘‘anny broyer or syster [who] fallyth in pouerte.’’79 Guild interest in aiding peasants both in this world and the next hardly surprises. As Chaucer’s Griselda suggests, the oppression of their dead was of a piece with the inequities that Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, p. 110. Cf. Platt, King Death, p. 214; Kreider, English Chantries, p. 86. 77 Hanawalt, Ties, pp. 240–41. 78 Black, Guilds and Civil Society, pp. 167–81; Lujo Brentano, ‘‘On the History and Development of Guilds and the Origin of Trade-Unions,’’ in Toulin Smith, ed., English Guilds, pp. xlix–clxv; Sidney and Beatrice Webb, The History of Trade Unionism (London, 1920), pp. 12–21. While it is clear that guild valuation of, as Black puts it, ‘‘brotherhood, and the corporate protection of producers’’ renders them at the least analogues to the unions (p. xii), the question of whether a more precise relationship between medieval guilds and modern unions may be established has led to disagreement among scholars. For two recent overviews of this controversy, see Black, Guilds and Civil Society, pp. 167–81; and esp. Bainbridge, Guilds in the Medieval Countryside, pp. 3–7. 79 Gild of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, in Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, p. 59. On guild livestock, see Hanawalt, ‘‘Keepers of the Lights,’’ p. 36, and Ties, p. 264. On guild education and charity, see Hanawalt, ‘‘Keepers,’’ p. 33; and Rosser, ‘‘Community,’’ pp. 37–38. Guild members also assisted one another juridically, promising to stand by and advise members charged with crimes (see Rosser, ibid., p. 37). 75 76 282 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH governed peasants’ lives. That connection appears in the intertwining or contiguity of descriptions of burial duties and charitable works in guild returns.80 While such formal alignments in part suggest how death urged guild members toward benevolent acts that secured their own spiritual well-being, they also point to the material burdens that connected the living and the dead. Such connections made interment a natural extension of concern for the living, as a Beverly guild return makes clear when it follows an injunction that members ‘‘give . . . as they think right out of the gild stock’’ to poor ‘‘bretheren and sisteren’’ with the instruction that ‘‘if any of those poor bretheren dies, or any other of the gild who is not well off, he shall be buried at the cost or the gild, and have all becoming services.’’81 As the guild returns demonstrate, medieval peasants were keenly aware of how death reasserted rather than leveled the material distinctions between the privileged and the disadvantaged. Unearthing Chaucer’s Object Lessons While we can only conjecture about the significance of a historical parallel between the guilds and the subject of burial in The Clerk’s Tale, the very possibility that Griselda’s anxieties indicate a certain Chaucerian sympathy with the aims of these proto-unionizing burial clubs affords us an opportunity to rethink, to borrow Paul Strohm’s phrase, the social Chaucer. The traditional image of Chaucer, of course, is that of a poet detached from the upheavals that marked late medieval life.82 A growing body of criticism after Kittredge, however, has appeared over the last century to challenge the notion of Chaucerian detachment.83 In clos80 See, for example, the following excerpt from an Oxenburgh guild return: ‘‘And if any brother or sistre falle at meschief, he sal hauen gilde, houereday a farthyng, and on Sunday a halpeny, be 9eire, wille that he his at meschief. And if any brothren or sistren be ded, a mile about, the brethren and sistren sul ben at placebo and dirige an at masse, of peine of a pounde of wax’’ (Toulmin Smith, English Guilds, pp. 122–23). 81 Ibid., p. 15. 82 Cf. George Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (1914; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946); D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer: Studies in Medieval Perspectives (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1962); and the body of work cited by R. H. Loomis in ‘‘Was Chaucer a Laodicean?’’ in Essays and Studies in Honor of Carleton Brown (New York: New York University Press, 1940), pp. 129–48. 83 Recent books on the ‘‘social Chaucer’’ include Peter Brown and Andrew Butcher, The Age of Saturn: Literature and History in the Canterbury Tales (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991); Strohm, Social Chaucer; Aers, Geoffrey Chaucer; Knapp, Social Contest; Knight, Chaucer; Paul Olson, The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986); Scanlon, Narrative, Authority, and Power; and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. 283 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ing, I want to turn to this important scholarship and use the example of Griselda to suggest some new directions it might take. If we take seriously the prospect that Griselda points to a certain Chaucerian affinity with the aims and needs of guilds, Chaucer emerges as what we might anachronistically call a traditional intellectual possessed of certain protoliberal impulses.84 To be sure, several Chaucerians already have claimed that the medieval writer’s literary engagement with sociopolitical issues may have at times taken a potentially liberal or progressive turn. When, for example, Peggy Knapp terms The Canterbury Tales a ‘‘boundary text,’’ Strohm likens Chaucer’s poetry to a ‘‘carrefour,’’ and Stephen Knight refers to the ‘‘conflicted life’’ of Chaucer’s texts, these scholars each identify Chaucer’s literary work as encompassing multiple discourses, some of them liberatory.85 On the specific question of Chaucer’s attitude toward the oppressed masses who made up over 90 percent of the medieval English population, readers such as R. S. Loomis, Margaret Schlauch, Harriet Hawkins, and Carol Falvo Heffernan have all affirmed Depression-era critic Howard Patch’s point that ‘‘the total evidence of Chaucer’s concern for the oppressed is considerable, to say the least.’’86 But to suggest that Chaucer cares about the commons is one thing; to claim that he supports peasant agency is another.87 84 By traditional intellectual, I refer to an educated person who, while not a direct participant in the management of his/her society, is in a position to address powerfully public issues through written and oral communication. As Steven Justice has noted, Chaucer ‘‘begins the Canterbury Tales by announcing that he has moved himself and his poetry outside of London, that his address now extends beyond the court and its satellites’’ Writing and Rebellion, p. 231). Chaucer’s intellectual work is rendered possible by a number of factors, including the writer’s movement away from London to Kent during the time he began work on The Canterbury Tales, his domestic and international government employment, and his powerful and socially engaged intended audiences. The term intellectual is a fraught one, and the scholarship is vast. On the medieval intellectual, see Jacques Le Goff, Intellectuals in the Middle Ages, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993). Two good introductory volumes on the topic are George B. de Huszar, ed., The Intellectual: A Controversial Portrait (Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1960) and Bruce Robbins, ed., Intellectuals: Aesthetics, Politics, and Academics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990). 85 Knapp, Social Contest, p. 8; Strohm, Social Chaucer, pp. xi–xii; Knight, Chaucer, p. 4. 86 R. Howard Patch, ‘‘Chaucer and the Common People,’’ JEGP 29 (1930): 382; Loomis, ‘‘Laodicean?’’; Margaret Schlauch, English Medieval Literature and Its Social Foundations (Warszawa: Panstwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1956), p. 276; Hawkins, ‘‘Victim’s Side’’; Heffernan, ‘‘Tyranny.’’ 87 A growing number of scholars—among them John Ganim, Heffernan, Peggy Knapp, Lee Patterson, and David Wallace—do claim that Chaucer allows the disgruntled peasant to speak in The Canterbury Tales. See John Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990); Heffernan, ‘‘Tyranny’’; Knapp, Social Contest; Lee Patterson, ‘‘ ‘No Man His Reason Herde’: Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer’s Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales,’’ in Patterson, ed., Literary 284 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH One way of locating that agency in Chaucer, I have suggested, is by looking at his representation of the quotidian. Over the last decades, scholarly work on everyday life has urged the benefits of earnest engagement with the ordinary spaces, subjects, and objects we have all too often taken for granted.88 Their routine, repetitive, and habitual nature makes everyday places, persons, and things so familiar as to be insignificant; yet analysis of this surprisingly elusive arena offers us an important means of thinking about power and disenfranchisement. In the case of Chaucer, while the routine temporality, domestic spatiality, and feminine subjectivity typically associated with the quotidian all figure crucially both in The Clerk’s Tale and elsewhere in his literary corpus, above all it is the familiar objects of the everyday that merit our critical attention. Primarily through his depiction of material goods, Chaucer reveals his own investment in peasant agency. By, on the one hand, depicting the inadequate physical articles that define ordinary peasant existence and, on the other hand, subtly alluding to those precious items whose absence vexed peasant everyday life and death, Chaucer offers us important quotidian object lessons. From the absent coffin that Griselda desires to, say, the ‘‘newe panne’’ defiantly rejected by the poor widow in The Friar’s Tale (line 1614), Chaucer teaches us how it is through Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Wallace, Chaucerian Polity. See also ‘‘The Writing Lesson 1381, in which Susan Crane provocatively suggests how Chaucer’s emphasis on ‘‘the voicelessness of suppressed’’ constitutes an important ‘‘first recognition that those outside literate culture may indeed have something to say’’ in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992], p. 217). For quite different views, see Strohm’s claim in Social Chaucer (p. 174) that peasant dissent ‘‘is effectively erased within the Canterbury Tales,’’ and Justice’s contention in Writing and Rebellion (pp. 227–31) that the portraits that initiate the Tales foreclose the possibility of articulating any class interests whatsoever. In a similar vein, Knight tracks a ‘‘lower class self-destruction’’ at work in Fragment 1 of the Tales (Chaucer, pp. 90–95). 88 For a fine reading of The Canterbury Tales that uses a specifically Bakhtinian notion of the everyday, see Knapp, Social Contest. Historical scholarship on medieval everyday life includes Michel Pastoureau, La vie quotidienne en France et en Angleterre au temps des chevaliers de la table ronde (Paris: Hachette, 1976); and Christopher Dyer, Everyday Life in Medieval England (London: Hambledon Press, 1994). Important work on everyday life outside medieval studies includes Agnes Heller, Everyday Life (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984); Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (New York: Transaction, 1984); de Certeau, Practice; Alice Kaplan and Kristen Ross, eds., Everyday Life, special issue of Yale French Studies 10 (1987); Mike Featherstone, ‘‘The Heroic Life and Everyday Life,’’ Theory, Culture and Society 9 (1992): 159–82; Alf Lüdke, ed. The History of Everyday Life (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Rita Felski, ‘‘The Invention of Everyday Life,’’ New Formations 39 (1999–2000): 13–31. 285 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER material goods (or the lack thereof ) that peasants engages in subtle, yet important, acts of resistance. To be sure, Griselda hardly escapes the anxiety that, as such critics as John Ganim, Lee Patterson, and Wallace point out, attends Chaucer’s representation of peasant agency, an anxiety that looks toward the inconsistent character of contemporary liberal intellectual interest in the disadvantaged.89 If certain material objects point to what we may call, with Henri Lefebvre, a quotidian medieval past to read in tandem with The Clerk’s Tale, that past is a secret one, hidden in the history of those goods, and ‘‘buried’’ beneath the more conservative Christian discourses that dominate that text.90 Yet such dominant meanings should in no way deter us from engaging in literary-critical disinterments of The Canterbury Tales, from finding, that is, the ordinary peasant woman who lies behind the exemplary Griselda. While Chaucer’s representation of everyday peasant life and death may not offer us an image of the writer as a vehement supporter of a rebellious peasantry, it does shore up his interest in how the disadvantaged can point to contradictions within a powerful and oppressive Christian culture of death. For it is routine lived problems—the need for work and shelter; the need for items such as food, clothing, and coffins—that both justified peasant dissent in medieval England and even inspired subtle, yet significant, forms of everyday peasant resistance. Those structures of quotidian opposition were realized in medieval culture each time gild members, in solidarity, contested 89 While Ganim argues that Chaucer ‘‘dilute[s] the sense of threat’’ embodied by the Miller’s performance, Patterson contends that ‘‘peasant self-assertiveness’’ ultimately is ‘‘registered as threatening . . . contain[ed], and appropriated’’ by Chaucer, and Wallace acknowledges that the ‘‘commons is not celebrated as a political force in Chaucer’’ (Ganim, Chaucerian Theatricalty, p. 117; Patterson, ‘‘No Man,’’ p. 123; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, p. 291). 90 Here I am applying Lefebvre’s term, which he applies specifically to the modern period, to premodernity. However, Lefebvre himself acknowledges the fact that the history of the everyday (and in particular the reiterative nature of the quotidian) extends well beyond modernity: Everyday life has always existed, even if in ways vastly different from our own. The character of the everyday has always been repetitive and veiled by obsession and fear. In the study of the everyday we discover the great problem of repetition, one of the most difficult problems facing us. The everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical . . . and the linear. . . . The everyday implies on the one hand cycles, nights and days, seasons and harvests, activity and rest, hunger and satisfaction, desire and its fulfillment, life and death, and it implies on the other hand the repetitive gestures of work and consumption. (‘‘The Everyday and Everydayness,’’ translation of ‘‘Quotidien et quotidienneté’’ Encyclopaedia Universalis, by Christine Levich with Alice Kaplan and Kristen Ross for Everyday Life, [Yale French Studies 10 (1987)], p. 10. 286 CHAUCER AND EVERYDAY DEATH the inadequacies of peasant life and death; they are imagined by Chaucer each time Griselda contests the exposure of her children’s corpses. Through his sensitive imagining of a peasant woman’s fraught and complex relationship to quotidian objects and spaces, Chaucer reminds us that the ordinary spaces inhabited by the disenfranchised, living and dying, have been, and remain, sites of social contestation. 287