Chaucer's Poetic Alchemy

A Study of Value and its Transformation in The Canterbury Tales

Sheila Fisher

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000682946
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Originally published in 1988. The economic changes and the growth of commerce in fourteenth century England precipitated both social changes and a preoccupation with material wealth. This book examines Chaucer's treatment of economic and ethical value in The Canterbury Tales within the context of contemporary economic and social change and in relation to the scholastic economic theory that attempted to formulate ethical standards for commercial conduct. The importance of value and its determination and transformation is evident from the two enterprises that Chaucer defines as the motivating principles for his poem. The pilgrimage to St. Thomas's shrine should effect a transformation of their spiritual value. The story-telling competition that produces the tales themselves is established to judge the value of the pilgrims' literary productions. In the Middle Ages, economic value and ethical value were not perceived as unrelated phenomena. Chaucer's concern with the interrelationship of material and moral value is apparent in the number of pilgrims who are interested in material value at the obvious expense of moral value. This book examines this along with a discussion or money's growing importance in the late Middle Ages and the determination of its value.

Chapter IV

Chaucer and the “‘Slidynge Science’”: Value and its Alchemical Transformation in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale

In The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, Chaucer presents, for the last time in the Canterbury sequence, a study of the desire for profit and its influence upon ethical values and human relationships. The tale’s “Secunda Pars” describes a premeditated confidence game designed, like Alison’s badgering of her old husbands and the business contract between Don John and the wife, to promote personal profit. Like The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and The Shipman’s Tale, the “Secunda Pars” underlines the importance of language, its persuasiveness, and its duplicity to the acquisition of profit, at the same time that it reveals the moral bankruptcy behind the deceptive use of language. In fact, this last of The Canterbury Tales to treat the desire for material profit may be read as an example of the commercial mentality gone mad. The alchemical enterprise, were it successful, would produce unlimited profit, unlimited return on a minimum investment. It would endow its practitioners with the Midas-touch. The Canon’s Yeoman, as he introduces his master to the pilgrims, says:

“. . . al this ground on which we been ridyng,

Til that we come to Caunterbury toun,

He koude al ciene turne it up-so-doun,

And pave it al of silver and of gold.”¹

This ability to transmute base metal into gold and silver would constitute a form of wish-fulfillment for many of the Canterbury pilgrims and for the characters in their tales: for the young Wife of Bath, for the Merchant and January, for the Physician, the Shipman, and the commercially astute Harry Bailley who shows a marked interest in the Canon’s enterprise. The acquisition of the Philosopher’s Stone would end the quest for riskless profit that has motivated many of the Canterbury characters.

But the presentation of alchemy in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale is more complex than an emphasis on its commercial profitability would suggest. At the heart of the alchemical enterprise is the desire to increase value through a process of transmutation that would turn base metals into gold. Because alchemy attempts to revalue the elements of the material world, it provides an appropriate culmination for Chaucer’s interest in value and its transformation throughout The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer’s depictions of the quest for profit, for the increase of material value that is the essence of profit present his concern with the ethical values associated with commercial relationships. But Chaucer also uses commercial relationships to figure the artistic and ethical problems posed by his own poetic enterprise. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale allow Chaucer to present his case for the redefinition and revaluation of prior literary conventions; through the credit relationships of the monk and the wife, The Ship-man’s Tale explores the question of language’s reliability.

1. The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, VIII. G, 623-26. All quotations from The Canterbury Tales in this chapter refer to F. N. Robinson’s The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, second edition (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), and will be cited by fragment and line number within the body of the text.

In The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, Chaucer not only discusses the influence of potential profit upon the individual’s perception of his world. Alchemy is an appropriate enterprise for Chaucer to study at the end of a work that has been concerned with ambivalence and with the instability of economic, ethical, and linguistic value. Foralchemy is a science which confronts its practitioners with ambivalence, that is, with the possibility that one substance can have several different valuations. Alchemy looks at lead and sees beneath its surface the possibility of gold. In its effort to transform intrinsic worth, alchemy removes the possibility of stable referentiality. Lead should signify lead, but, through alchemical intervention, lead may also signify gold. Alchemy thus provides an extended metaphor for the intellectual, artistic, and moral concerns of Chaucer’s literary quest as he nears the end of the Canterbury pilgrimage and of his own artistic career.²

2. Like many scholars and critics, I read The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale as late productions in Chaucer’s literary career. The textual evidence (the reference to Boughton-under-Blee, for example) shows that The Prologue and Tale belong late in the Canterbury sequence. Moreover, the style of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, as E. Talbot Donaldson has pointed out, also indicates that they came late in Chaucer’s career: “As Chaucer approached the end of his literary activity his interests apparently became increasingly dramatic, a tendency that is itself dramatized by this disruption of the symmetry of the original plan,” Chaucer’s Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader (New York: The Ronald Press Co., 1958), p. 945. See also Edgar H, Duncan, “The Literature of Alchemy and Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale: Framework, Theme, and Character,” Speculum, 43 (1968), 634, for a similar opinion about the lateness of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale.

The interruption of the Canon and his Yeoman into the established Canterbury group serves Chaucer’s dramatic and poetic purposes.³ It recalls the structural and spiritual framework of the pilgrimage itself, whose goal has often been obscured by the subjects of the pilgrim’s tales. As Paul Taylor points out, in The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue, “[w]e have the first direct reference to the direction and goal of the pilgrimage with the mention of Canterbury (VIII, 624) since the General Prologue”⁴. By interrupting the plan of his tales, Chaucer makes us more aware of his art, its scope, and its purpose. Moreover, by allowing the Canon and his Yeoman to disrupt the pilgrimage, Chaucer also calls attention to them. Their sudden approach and their dishevelled appearance accentuate their status as curiosities among the Canterbury pilgrims. The Canon and his Yeoman are unknown quantities that must be explained and interpreted before they can be integrated into the plan of the pilgrimage. The Yeoman’s hints about the nature of his master’s craft and the mystery surrounding the Canon’s flight virtually demand that the Yeoman’s contribution to the story-telling competition (of whose terms, of course, he is unaware) explain his art and his hostility toward his master. The Yeoman’s Tale attempts to provide such an explanation as he tries to integrate himself into the company of pilgrims.⁵

3. The textual problems within The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale have caused considerable critical controversy while producing several different readings of the poem. In “The Literature of Alchemy and Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” Edgar Duncan summarizes the results of investigations into these textual problems (such as the presence of two canons and the Yeoman’s address to the canons), 633-34. Albert E. Hartung’s article, “‘Pars Secunda’ and the Development of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” ChauR, 12 (1977), 111-28, offers a detailed discussion of these textual problems. See also Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style and Meaning (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1973), p. 214. It is, of course, impossible to determine whether the Yeoman’s performance was an afterthought which Chaucer inserted into The Tales or whether it was part of Chaucer’s original plan. After reviewing the textual problems presented by The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, I am not convinced that the unit does not operate as a coherent poetic whole. My reading of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale is based on the assumption that we can read it as such a coherent whole.

4. Paul B. Taylor, “The Canon’s Yeoman’s Breath: Emanations of a Metaphor,” ES, 60 (1979), 382. Taylor also writes: “His entire performance brings the significance of the procession to Canterbury as a rehearsal of the soul’s progress toward God back to the surface of the pilgrim’s attention. With his and his Canon’s arrival, we are jolted out of a conceptual and back into a perceptual setting, and this for the first time since the Pardoner’s laconic reference to the ‘alestake,’” 381-82.

In response to Harry Bailley’s questions, the Canon’s Yeoman delivers a confession as professionally detailed and as personally revealing as those of the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner.⁶ He describes the experiments in their laboratory and his participation in them; he presents the alchemical elements and the failure of their occupation; he stresses the hostility toward his master that he manifested in his Prologue. But while the Canon’s Yeoman’s confession answers some questions, it raises others which he does not address in either part of his Tale, He does not reveal why he and his Canon accosted the pilgrims. He does not explicitly define his Canon’s motives, or his own, a definition that would allow an assessment of the morality of their enterprise. Most important, however, is the question, raised throughout the Tale itself, concerning his own ability to abandon the “slidynge science” which he has pursued for seven years. Some critics have suggested that the Yeoman finds among the Canterbury pilgrims the human fellowship from which his craft has excluded him.⁷ But other critics, unconvinced by the Yeoman’s repeated cursing of alchemy and his Canon, have wondered if he will reach the shrine at Canterbury.⁸ That both possibilities are likely at the end of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale demonstrates the Yeoman’s profound ambivalence toward alchemy, an ambivalence central to the appropriateness of alchemy as a metaphor for Chaucer’s own art.

5. A. V. C. Schmidt comments on the Yeoman as an outsider in his introduction to his edition of The Gen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Series Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Acknowledgments
• Table of Contents
• INTRODUCTION
• I. “AL HAVE I NAT SET FOLK IN HIR DEGREE”: THE QUESTION OF VALUE IN THE WORLD OF THE CANTERBURY TALES
• II. WHAT WOMEN MOST DESIRE: VALUE AND ITS DETERMINATION IN THE WIFE OF BATH’S PROLOGUE AND TALE
• III. “‘WE MAY CREAUNCE WHIL WE HAVE A NAME’”: TAKING IT ON FAITH IN THE SHIPMAN’S TALE
• IV. CHAUCER AND THE “‘SLIDYNGE SCIENCE’”: VALUE AND ITS ALCHEMICAL TRANSFORMATION IN THE CANON’S YEOMAN’S PROLOGUE AND TALE
• EPILOGUE: CHAUCER’S POETIC ALCHEMY AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF THE CANTERBURY TALES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY