Chaucer's Clerk's Tale

The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated

Judith Bronfman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367357269
• eBook ISBN: 9781000681253
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1994. This surveys the origin and development of one of Chaucer's most problematic characters, Griselda, who through the centuries has challenged the horizon of expectations of many an audience. Starting with Boccaccio's Decameron and suggesting in turn its precursors in whole or in part, Bronfman goes on to summarize the reigning opinions of Chaucer's heroine and her situation.

The advance of feminist perspectives on medieval literature had the result that for many the Clerk's Tale has political overtones where the Walter-Griselda marriage may serve as a metaphor for, among other things, the state or right order. This study looks at the story from a long view, from its sources to the flood of critical interpretations - the creative reception of Chaucer's story, outlining the many rewritings of Griselda from Chaucer to the twentieth century. A special chapter considers the Griselda story as represented in illustrations as well.

Chapter One
The Story Before Chaucer

The oldest written form of the Griselda story is as the final story of Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron in 1353. In the Decameron, ten young Florentines who have fled to a country villa to escape the plague entertain themselves by telling stories based on a topic selected for each day. The topic of the tenth and last day is magnanimity, generosity; the Griselda story should therefore be an example of magnanimity. But the teller of the last tale is Dioneo, who has consistently reinterpreted the daily topics, often giving them ironrc.twists. A straightforward reading of the tale must be tempered with speculation about its true meaning.

Briefly, the story that Dioneo told is this:

Gualtieri, the marquis of Saluzzo, is urged by his court to marry so that his throne will have an heir. He agrees on the condition that the court will accept his choice of a bride.

For some time Gualitieri had admired a beautiful virtuous village girl named Griselda; he now summons her father, Giannucole, to the palace and asks for Griselda’s hand. Giannucole consents, and Gualtieri orders wedding preparations, including beautiful clothing for the bride, although the bride’s identity is unknown. On the day of the wedding, Gualtieri and his court go to the village where they meet Griselda returning from a fountain. The marquis goes to her cottage and in the presence of her father asks her to promise to obey him in all things and to be uncomplaining no matter what he does. She promises, and the marquis orders that she be stripped naked and clothed in the beautiful garments he has prepared.

The marriage goes well; Griselda’s behavior, which matches her royal clothing, earns her renown throughout the marquisate.

In time Griselda bears a daughter. Seized by a desire to test his wife, the marquis tells Griselda that his subjects are grumbling about her low birth. A messenger arrives with orders to take the baby away; he implies that the child will be killed. Griselda willingly relinquishes her daughter, only asking that the body not be exposed to wild beasts unless such are the marquis’s specific orders. Secretly, the marquis sends the child to a kinswoman to be reared as befits its noble birth.

Six years pass, and Griselda bears a son. Again the marquis tells Griselda that his subjects are unhappy; again a messenger takes the child away. Griselda still does not complain.

Again time passes; this time the marquis tells Griselda that he is making arrangements with the Pope to divorce her so that he can remarry. He orders her to return home with nothing that belongs to him. Since she arrived naked of possessions, she asks permission to wear a shift through the village. The court ladies beg the marquis to lend her a dress to wear. He consents to the shift, but refuses the dress; Griselda returns home barefooted, bareheaded, wearing only an old shift. Her father had saved her old clothing, for he had never trusted the marriage.

The marquis announces his second marriage. He sends for Griselda to prepare the palace for the festivities. She sweeps, she cleans, she orders arrangements. The lovely twelve-year-old bride and her six-year-old brother arrive; still in her shabby clothing, Griselda attends the welcoming feast. When the marquis asks her what she thinks of the bride, Griselda praises her warmly, but she adds that she hopes the marquis will not test his second wife as he has tested the first, for the new bride is too young and too tenderly reared to withstand such tests.

The marquis is finally convinced that Griselda is indeed faithful to her pre-marital promise and that her patience is unfailing. The tests, he announces, were “volendoti insegnar d’esser moglie e a Ioro di saperla tenere, e a me partorire perpetua quiete mentre teco a vivere avessi.”¹ [to show you how to be a wife, to teach these people how to choose a wife, and to guarantee my own peace and quiet.]²

The marquis reinstates Griselda, embracing and kissing her; he introduces the bride and her brother as the children who were taken away. The court ladies dress Griselda again in her beautiful clothing. The marquis’s subjects feel that he is indeed very wise, but Griselda is even wiser.

Then, Dioneo, Boccaccio’s narrator, suggests, perhaps with a shrug, a wider application of the tale:

Che si potra dir qui? se non che anche nelle povere case piovono dal cielo de’ divini spiriti, come nelle reali di quegli che sarien piu degni di guardar porci che d’avere sopra uomini signoria.³ [What more needs to be said, except that celestial spirits may sometimes descend even into the houses of the poor, whilst there are those in royal palaces who would be better employed as swineherds than as rulers of men?]⁴

Dhoneo adds that only Griselda could endure such tests, and furthermore, it would have served the marquis right if she had taken a lover during her banishment. The seven women in the frame story begin a lively discussion of the tale, some praising the story, some criticizing it. Dioneo cuts their talk short to discuss plans for returning to Florence.

From Boccaccio’s version, this story goes backward into the mists of folklore and forward into the very solid Latin translation by Petrarch.

Before Boccaccio

Where did Boccaccio get his story? As a general rule, medieval writers saw little value in inventing new stories; rather, they reworked earlier materials, gaining authority from the quality of their sources or simply finding depth in drawing upon their audience’s knowledge of the material. Indeed, Boccaccio himself speaks of his method in the epilogue to the Decameron, implying that his stories are known ones:

Se io quelle della Ior forma trar non avessi voluto, altramenti raccontar non poterlo.⁵ [I could not have related (my material) in any other way without distorting it out of all recognition.]⁶

But he defends the writer’s freedom to change that material:

Sanza che alla mia penna non dee essere meno d’auttoritá conceduta che sia al pennello del dipintore, il quale senza alcuna riprensione, o almen giusta, lasciamo stare che egli faccia a san Michele ferire il serpente con Ia spada o con Ia lancia e a san Giorgio il dragone dove gli piace ... quando con un chiovo e quando con due i pié gli [Cristo] conficca in quella [la croce].⁷ [No less latitude should be granted to my pen than to the brush of the painter, who without incurring censure, of a justified kind at least, depicts St Michael striking the serpent with his sword or his lance, and St George transfixing the dragon wherever he pleases ... and fixes to the cross, sometimes with a single nail, sometimes with two, the feet of (Christ).]⁸

Later in the epilogue, he writes:

Ma se pur prosuppor si volesse che io fossi stato di quelle e Io ‘nventore e Io scrittore, che non fui⁹ [Even if one could assume that I was the inventor as well as the scribe of these stories (which was not the case)]¹⁰

These comments show clearly that Boccaccio expected his readers to recognize the stories he was using, and he expected them to accept changes in details when these changes served an aesthetic purpose. However, the changes are indeed details; there is no suggestion that artistic license might cover letting the dragon transfix St. George. Finally, Boccaccio specifically states that he did not invent his material, although characterizing himself as merely a scribe is surely too modest.

For well over a hundred years, scholars have been convinced that the Griselda story does have a source and they have sought it. D.D. Griffith’s brilliant work, The Origin of the Griselda Story,¹¹ gives a detailed summary of the search that began with Reinhold Kohler’s speculations in 1870 and ended with Griffith’s own theory that the tale was a version of the Cupid and Psyche myth. Although the original story is told by Apuleius in The Golden Ass,¹² probably the best known example of the story is the Scandinavian fairy tale, “East of the Sun and West of the Moon.”

In this story, the woman is an ordinary mortal (although she has an extraordinary aspect, beauty), while her husband is non-mortal, a being from another world. The marriage, which is accompanied by great riches for the mortal, is conditional, depending for its continuance upon the mortal’s obedience to a tabu that is irrational by ordinary standards; Psyche is forbidden to know what her husband looks like. The husband, in spite of his superiority to his wife, is helpless to remove the tabu, for he is subject to some higher authority. The mortal breaks the tabu and everything related to the marriage disappears. Sometimes the story ends here, but most often, the mortal is deeply repentant and performs a series of difficult tasks to atone for having broken the tabu. When the tasks are completed, the marriage is restored and is insoluble. In some versions of the myth, the ones that Griffith depended upon for his major proof, the tabu is that the mortal may not weep; to test her, her children are taken away and presumably killed. In these versions, the children are restored when the marriage is restored.

Griffith’s Cupid and Psyche theory in its general outlines, now referred to as the “folkloric apology” for the Clerk’s Tale,¹³ was for many years accepted as Griselda’s source. The vast social difference between a marquis and a peasant seemed to correspond to the difference between a mortal and an other-world being. Griselda was extraordinarily virtuous; her marriage brought her riches—beautiful clothing to replace rags, a castle to replace a hut. Her promise to the marquis as a condition of the marriage paralleled the myth’s tabu; the testing of her promise exceeded rational limits. Griselda’s banishment erased all material evidence of her marriage. When she had satisfactorily proven her patience, everything—husband, children, wealth—was returned to her. But the most important aspect of Griffith’s myth theory was that it solved some of the uncomfortable or puzzling aspects of the Griselda tale: seeing the marquis as an other-world being made his inhumanity more acceptable; motivating the testing by an irrational tabu was better than not motivating the testing at all.

J. Burke Severs’s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Frontispiece
• Table of Contents
• Illustrations
• General Editors’ Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Story Before Chaucer
• Chapter Two: The Marriage Group and the Allegorical Griselda
• Chapter Three: The Clerk’s Tale as Religious Tale and Political Commentary
• Chapter Four: Chaucer’s Tale Rewritten
• Chapter Five: Griselda Illustrated
• Conclusion
• Appendix: A most pleasant Ballad of patient Grissell
• Bibliography: Primary Sources
• Bibliography: Secondary Sources
• Index