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LIBRARY
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This is to certify that the
dissertation entitled

Language, Knowledge, and Power:
The Politics of Chaucer’s Translation

presented by

lnchol Yoo

has been accepted towards fulfillment
of the requirements for the

PhD degree in English

 

an M Miflw

Major Professor’s Signature
Lister M. Matheson

December 16, 2009

MSU is an Affirmative Action/Equal Opportunity Employer

 

 

 

 

 

 

PLACE IN RETURN BOX to remove this checkout from your record.
TO AVOID FINES return on or before date due.
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DATE DUE DATE DUE DATE DUE

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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ABSTRACT

LANGUAGE, KNOWLEDGE, AND POWER:
THE POLITICS OF CHAUCER’S TRANSLATION

By
lnchol Yoo

This dissertation is a study of Chaucer’s translations, seeking to situate
them in political contexts. Spurred by the political roles of the Wycliffite Bible and
Trevisa’s translations, this dissertation attempts to suggest political implications
of Chaucer’s translations during his lifetime.

As the topoi of the translatio studii and the translatio imperii have long
suggested, translation involves not only the transfer of language and knowledge
from one culture to another but also reconfiguration of power relations. Living in
an "Age of Translation” in the late fourteenth century, Chaucer was actively
participating in contemporary cultural movements by translating The Romaunt of
the Rose and The Boece. However, Chaucer’s two prose translations were by no
means politically neutral: they were his own responses to current political
situations. What is more remarkable about his two translations are their changing
fortunes: under specific historical conditions, the two translations could have had
political implications directly opposite to those originally intended by their author.
In translating The Romaunt of the Rose, Chaucer was not only a faithful student
imitating French culture but also a resister of prevailing French culture and, by
extension, France. However, during the last decade of the fourteenth century,
when a quest for peace was undertaken in both England and France,

Chaucer’s translation may have served to promote peace between the two

 

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countries.

Chaucer’s Boece may have been motivated by Chaucer’s royalist concerns
about king Richard's excessive attempts to empower himself. However,
Chaucer’s translation may have had resonance with the concerns of the
magnates, about the possible misuse of royal power during their antagonistic
confrontation with the king from the mid-1380s to the end of 1390s.

In the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer shows more directly the politics of translation: he
exemplifies how translation could serve power by consolidating it. The motive
and the process of Walter’s creative translation of Griselda show that his
translation, which includes the invention of a new Griselda, is performed for the
purposes of political propaganda, aimed at strengthening his governing power

over his land.

Copyright by
lNCHOL YOO
2009

To my wife, Hwajung,

With love and respect

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is both a great pleasure and an honor to have a chance to express my
deep gratitude to my teachers who have led me to the study of medieval English
literature. Above all, I appreciate my guidance committee members from the
bottom of my heart. Professor Lister Matheson has directed me as a major
advisor, making every effort for me. I will keep in my mind his exceptional
kindness and tolerance he has shown to me not to mention his scholarly
teachings. Professor Tess Tavormina has been a source of my scholarly
inspiration and a model that I would wish to imitate as a medievalist. Working
under her direction, I have widened and deepened my understanding of Chaucer
and medieval culture. Professor Jyotsna Singh and Professor Joseph Snow will
also be long remembered for their continued support of my dissertation writing
and their kind encouragement as I proceeded with my graduate work.

My sincere appreciation is also due to my teachers at Yonsei University, who
invited me to the wonderful world of literature. With the guidance of Professor
Sung-ll Lee, I began to learn the beauty of medieval literature, and his zeal for
literary study and translation inspired in me an ardent interest in Chaucer and
translation. Professor Chul Kyu Lim helped me to broaden my perspective in
studying literature as well as to gain a better understanding of society and history.
Professor Sungkyun Kim supported me in my graduate study at Yonsei, and his
affectionate encouragement was vital to me at a difficult time.

My growth as a student of medieval English literature is also indebted to the

vi

 

two medievalists at Northern Illinois University. Professor Nicole Clifton not only
gave me excellent teaching in medieval English literature but also taught me Old
French literature, thus making me better prepared for the study of medieval
literature. Professor Susan Deskis kindly introduced me to Old English literature
and also helped me to settle down securely in my first semester in the US.

Just as important as the support from my teachers has been that given to me
by my family members, for which I am most grateful. My father and mother gladly
supported much of my graduate study in the US, praying for my better future. I
cannot thank my parents enough for their devotion to, and their sacrifice for, me.
My younger brother, Youngchol, and his family have also been supportive of my
study, and I am especially thankful for his support of my parents on my behalf.

I am very pleased that I can now express my deep gratitude to my two sons and
my wife for their invaluable patience and support. If I am fortunate, that is

because I am father of Woojong and Heejong, and husband of Hwajung.

vii

 

 

 

I

CHAPTER C
CHAUCER A

CHAPTER T
THE ROMA'L

CHAPTER T
THE BOECE,

CHAPTER F
THE POLITIC

CHAPTER Fl
CONCLUSIO
CHAUCER A

BIBLIOGRA;

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAUCER AND LATE MEDIEVAL TRANSLATION ............................................... 1
CHAPTER TWO

THE ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE .......................................................................... 37
CHAPTER THREE

THE BOECE, THE KNIGHT’S TALE, AND TROILUS AND CRISEYDE .............. 79
CHAPTER FOUR

THE POLITICS OF TRANSLATION IN THE CLERK’S TALE ............................ 127
CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION:

CHAUCER AS POLITICAL AND RADICAL TRANSLATOR ............................... 167
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................. 184

viii

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CHAPTER ONE

Chaucer and Late Medieval Translation

1. Translation and Chaucer Studies

Translation remains at the margins of Chaucer scholarship. A widespread
negative view of translation among Chaucer scholars seems to be mainly
responsible for relatively little scholarly interest in translation. For many Chaucer
scholars, I suppose, translation is at best a copy of the original text and as the
famous Italian saying Tradultore traditore (“The translator is a traducer”) has long
misguided people, it falls short of the artistry and'emotional impact of its original.1
Far from being neglected as a marginal subject, however, I believe that
translation should be an essential part of Chaucer studies because it lies at the
heart of his lifetime and his career as translator and poet.

Chaucer’s lifetime was marked by three major historical incidents or
changeszz the abrupt eruption and rampant spread of the Black Death, which
“reshaped England, along with most of Europe and Asia, and contributed...to
some reshaping of the mentality of the age” (Pearsall, Life 24); the Great Revolt

of 1381, which challenged “the legitimacy of current legislation, systems of justice,

 

1 For further discussion of the phrase “Traduttore traditore,’ see Douglas Robinson’s observation
in paraphrasing Kenneth Burke's discussion of the necessity of translation:
...in mainstream Western theories of translation traditore is intrinsic to the idea of traduttore.
Translation is by definition a betrayal or traduction of the original. Translation always distorts,
always fails in its presumptuous attempt to become original, as the builders at Babel failed in
their presumptuous attempt to become gods. (Translator’s Turn 59-60)
2 Chaucer was once thought not to have made any serious social or political observations in his
works. However, recent studies on him have emphasized his extensive concerns about historical
realties in his time. For example, in his attempt to connect the Nun ’s Priest’s Tale to the massacre
of the London Flemings in 1381, Derek Pearsall argues that the Tale “provides a superlative
example of Chaucer’s readiness to allow his poetry to flow in the ideological currents of his age
and to ‘literaricize’ its nasty realities” (“Chaucer and Englishness” 286).

taxation and other imposition...[and] aimed to reform a system of authority
experienced as corrupt” (Aers, “Vox Populi' 434); and, on a larger scale, “the
transition from feudalism to capitalism” (Strohm, Social Chaucer x) which
brought the rise of the middle class like Chaucer and his family.3 In the literary
world, however, Chaucer’s lifetime - roughly from 1340 to 1400 — can justly be
labeled as an “Age of Translation” because of an unprecedented “flood” of
translations from Latin, French, Italian, and other vernacular languages into
English.4

For Chaucer studies, however, translation is crucial not merely because he
lived in an “Age of Translation.” More “importantly, besides being a courtier,
soldier, diplomat, and public servant, not to mention a poet, Chaucer himself was
also a translator of long and short pieces. In the late 1360s, he translated the
Roman de la Rose into The Romaunt of the Rose, which gave the contemporary
_ French poet Eustache Deschamps an occasion to laud him as “Grant translateur"
(“Great translator”).5 Around 1381-86, he also rendered The Boece, an English

prose version of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae (On the Consolation of

 

3 Chaucer's immediate forefathers belonged to the merchant class. According to Lister M.
Matheson’s study of Chaucer‘s ancestry, Robert Malyn, Geoffrey Chaucer’s grandfather and the
apprentice of John le Chaucer, “adopted” the name of his master John le Chaucer who was “a
prosperous London mercer,“ as well as his master’s vocation (“Chaucer’s Ancestry" 17980).
John Chaucer, Geoffrey’s father, was “a London wine merchant” as well (Pearsall, Life 14).

‘ For the extent and variety of late medieval translations, especially during Chaucer's lifetime, see
the following books. Popular and Practical Science of Medieval England edited by Lister M.
Matheson (East Lansing: Colleagues Press, 1994), provides information about scientific
translations; The Idea of the Vernacular? An Anthology of Middle English Literary Theory, 1280-
1520 edited by Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et al. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1999), gives diverse theories of translation during the later Middle Ages; and most recently,
The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 1: To 1550 edited by Roger Ellis
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), discusses comprehensively subjects of translation as
well as theories of translation.

5 For further discussion of Chaucers translation of The Romaunt of the Rose and Deschamps's
poem in relation to Chaucer, see Chapter Two of this dissertation.

Philosophy).‘5 At the beginning of the 13903, he completed his translation of The
Treatise on the Astrolabe, rendered from Latin for his son Lewis.7 In addition to
the long translations of The Romaunt of the Rose, The Boece, and The Treatise
on the Astrolabe, Chaucer's translations also include two shorter verse works: An
ABC and The Complaint of Venus. Made'at the request of Blanche Duchess of
Lancaster as a prayer for her private use, An ABC is a translation from Guillaume
de Deguileville’s Pelen'nage de la Vie Humaine (Minnis, Shorter Poems 462).
Often presented as a composite work, The Complaint of Mars and Venus, The
Complaint of Venus was translated from three ballades by Oton de Graunson
(Phillips, “Complaint of Venus” 86).8 I.

More importantly, however, translation should be an indispensable part of
Chaucer studies because studying his translations may serve as a key to
understanding his whole canon as a writer. When he suggests that “Chaucer’s
translations are in fact central to his theory and practice of writing,” Tim William
Machan correctly points out how important it is to understand the nature and the
significance of his translations in the context of his entire works (“Chaucer as
Translator“ 55). By studying Chaucer’s often-neglected translations, as Machan
further suggests, we may encounter “Chaucer the writer” as an integrated

personality, not a Chaucer with “separate personalities,” either of “Chaucer the

 

6 For further discussion of Chaucer's translation of the Boethius’s work, see Chapter Three of this
dissertation.

7 The approximate years of translations of The Romaunt of the Rose, The Boece, and The
Treatise of the Astrolabe are from “Appendix II: Chronological Table" in Pearsall’s The Life of
Chaucer 306-13.

8 Chaucer's changes in his translation of Oton’s balades are remarkable: Chaucer chose only
three of Oton’s five balades to make a new set, changed the speaker from a male lover to a
woman, and added his own envoy, addressing princes in his own voice (Phillips, “Complaint of
Venus" 86-87).

 

 

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translator” or “Chaucer the poet”:

Chaucer’s translation techniques seem but distantly related to those in his

narrative poems, and so Chaucer the translator and Chaucer the poet

often remain separate personalities of Chaucer the writer. Chaucer need
not stay schizophrenic, however, for it is possible, I believe, to reintegrate
his personalities in a number of potentially significant ways. (“Chaucer as

Translator" 59)

However, the centrality of translation in Chaucer studies is most evidently
supported by the late medieval notion of translation, which calls for modification
in our concept of Chaucer as translator. What Machan fails to notice in his
arguments on “Chaucer the writer” is that his distinction of “Chaucer the poet”
and “Chaucer the translator” is largely based on misinformed ideas of the nature
of translation and the translator in the late fourteenth century. Contrary to the
modern prevailing differentiation of a translator from an original writer, what
Machan seeks to reintegrate in “Chaucer the writer” - “Chaucer the translator”
and “Chaucer the poet” — were basically undifferentiated in Chaucer’s time.
Chaucer was a “translator,” whose “translation” encompassed not only his
translations but also his poetical works as defined by modern distinctions. A brief
discussion of the development of the ideas of translation in the Middle Ages will
show how a late medieval writer’s works, which are distinguishable as
translations and original works by modern standards, all enjoyed wide currency

as works of “translation” in a broader sense in the late fourteenth century.

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2. The Development of the Theory of Translation in the Middle Ages9

It would be right to say that any discussion of the ideas of translation in
medieval England should begin with references to Cicero (106—43 BCE) and
Jerome (c. 342-420 CE), the two prominent Roman theorists of translation. This
is so chiefly because it is from their conflicting models of translation, along with
their common translation method, using the “binary concept of verbum verbo/
sensum sensu” (“word for word/ sense for sense”) (Hosington 9), that medieval
translators inherited their notion of translation:

Long identified as ‘medieval translation theory' is the distinction made in

many texts between ‘word-for-word’ and ‘sense-for-sense’ translation,

the language of which derives from Horace’s Ars Poetica on the one

hand and the Church Fathers, especially Augustine and Jerome, on the

other. (Watson 73-74)10

In discussing his translation of the famous speeches of the Greek orators, Cicero

 

9 It is discouraging in our attempt to understand the ideas of medieval translation that the
prologues or prefaces of translations, the only sources from which we hear the translator's direct
speech, are far from reliable. Those prologues or prefaces attached to medieval English
translations, in which the translator addresses his "immediate audience or patron" about his own
intent and translation method (Wogan-Browne 316), must be valuable sources of our
understanding of what medieval translation is. However, as the brief following survey of the
historical development of the idea of medieval translation will indicate, those direct statements of
translator are so few that they are not enough to give us a general view of medieval translation.
The main difficulty in understandingthe nature of translation in late medieval England, however,
is that, as Karen Pratt points out, there are considerable discrepancies between translation
methods stated in the prefaces and practices in the translation itself.

However, although the clerical tradition of translating Christian subject-matter has clearly

influenced the vernacular theory of translation as expressed in prologues, it is questionable

that these pronouncements offer the key to the adaptor’s activity in practice. (14)
1° Though Nicholas Watson does not mention Cicero’s name at all, Cicero was the one who made
many observations about translation from which Horace (65-8 BCE) derived many of his ideas
about translation: ”His [Horace’s] call for the original imitation...extends to the poet Cicero’s
admonitions to the orator-in-training. His impulse, like Cicero’s...is toward originality: toward a
personal revitalization of a public text that has become well-wom with use." (Robinson, Western
Translation Theory 14)

articulated a translation principle, later often called the formula “non verbum pro
verbo” (“not word for word”), proposing that a translator’s task was not to
translate word for word but to preserve the general force of the language:
I did not hold it necessary to render word for word, but I preserved the
general style and force of the language....The result of my labor will be '
that our Romans will know what to demand from those who claim to be
Atticists and to what rule of speeches, as it were, they are to be held. -
(qtd. by Copeland, Rhetoric 33)11
It is vital to notice in this passage, however, that more of Cicero’s conception of
translation is implied than just the formula “non verbum pro verbo.” In the latter
part of the passage, he suggested that, having “a seminal status for future
students [of orationsl,” his translations from the Greek orators would eventually
“replace and hence displace the Greek speeches as reference points for Atticist
style in Latin oratory” (Copeland, “Fortunes” 18). Like inventio (“invention”), part
of the discipline of rhetoric, Cicero’s theory of translation is characterized by an
aggressive displacement of a source by means of textual transgression, or
“active differentiation from the original text” (Copeland, “Fortunes” 18).
However, in Jerome, well-known as the translator of the Latin Vulgate
Bible from the Hebrew,12 we come across not only the resonance of Cicero’s

formula “non verbum pro verbo,” but more importantly, a quite opposing attitude

 

'1 The original Latin is from Cicero’s De Optimo Genera Oratomm 5.14-15 in De Inventions, De
Optimo Genera Oratorum, Topica, edited and translated by H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1949). The English translation is Hubbell’s.
‘2 Although Jerome’s name is usually attached to the Vulgate Bible, his contribution to the Bible is
confined to Old Testament since he participated little in rendering the New Testament:
Jerome's name is attached to the Vulgate. In reality, he is the author-translator of specific Old
Testament books in the Vulgate, but he contributed little to the New Testament other than

 

 

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towards translation. To begin with, just like Cicero, Jerome defended his
translation method of “not word for word but sense for sense” in his letter to
Pammachius, # 57:

Now I not only admit but freely announce that in translating from the

* Greek -except of course in the case of Holy Scripture, where'even the

syntax contains a mystery -I render, not word for word, but sense for

sense. (Jerome 25)13
In opposition to Cicero, however, for Jerome translation meant carefully
subordinated service to a source text, by seeking textual fidelity and trying to
keep the meaning of an original source. Referring to Hilary the Confessor as
translator in the same letter, Jerome clearly described the best kind of translator:
“Neither did he [Hilary] bother himself with the sleepy letter, nor did he wrench
himself with an unnatural rendering of vulgar matters; rather, by right of victory he
led away the sense captive into his own language” (qtd. by Copeland, “Fortunes”

28-29).“ For Jerome, “the translator’s conquest is his servitude, but it is,

 

perhaps moderate revisions for the Old Latin Gospels. Nevertheless, he is popularly seen as

simply the author of the entire Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, including the Apocrypha, in Latin

translation. And because of the domination of Christian Scriptures over Hebrew Bible, the New

Testament is still, incorrectly, in popular speech and belief, read and heard as “Jerome’s

translation" (Barnstone 193).

3Unlike his secular translations, in his scriptural translations, Jerome advocated“ a strict
Iiteralism so as to preserve the very mystery of the divine logos" (Copeland, Rhetoric 50). For his
theoretical writings on translation, conventionally Jerome is identified as Ciceronian but “this
identification with Cicero is appropriate for Jerome’s own practice in translating non-scriptural
texts” (Copeland, Rhetoric 45). For more details about the different ideas of translation between
Jerome and Cicero, see Copeland's “The Fortunes of “Non Verbum Pro Verbo’: Or, Why Jerome
Is Not a Ciceronian," in The Medieval Translator: The Theory and Practice of Translation in the
Middle Ages, ed. Roger Ellis (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1989), 15-35. The crucial difference
between Cicero's and Jerome's ideas of translation is, among others, their different views of the
source: while Cicero saw it as a means to create a new vernacular version, Jerome understood it
as being supplemented or explained by an additional version.

1“The original Latin is from Jerome' s Epistula 57, Corpus Scn'ptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum
54, 512. The English translation is Copeland’ s.

 

 

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however, a service to meaning which is perceived to be exempt from rhetorical
power over intention and'ieffect” (Copeland, “Fortunes” 29).15
The appropriation of the Roman theory of translation in England began by
. inheriting both Jerome’s translation method of “not word-for-word but sense-for-
sense” and his concept of translation as a service or supplement to asource:
The influence of St Jerome’s conception of translation on medieval
translation theory is well-known. In medieval England, the distinction
between word—for-word and sense-for-sense translation is noted by writers
as early as lElfric and as late as Gavin Douglas, and Jerome’s advocacy of
the. priority of a sense-for-sense correspondence between translation and
source was also echoed by many medieval English translators. (Machan,
“Chaucer as Translator" 55—56)
In the Old English period, the most significant vernacular statements on
translation appeared in two of King Affred's translations in the later ninth century,
which exemplified Jerome’s idea of translation. In a letter prefixed in his English
version of Gregory the Great’s Cura Pastoralis (“Pastoral Care”), King Alfred
noticed that textual fidelity was his translation principle:
...oa ongan ic ongemang 66mm mislicum ond manigfealdum bisgum

disses kynerices oa boc wendan on Englisc be is genemned on Laden

 

‘5 The contrasting views of translation expounded by Cicero and Jerome are helpful in
understanding the Roman ideas about the differences of translation from imitation, a term closely
related to it. According to Copeland, there are clear differences between them not only because
"Ideas about translation emerged within the larger context of theories of imitation," but also
because imitation is "in intralingual terms," while translation is "in interlingual, intercultural terms"
(“Fortunes' 17). However, the main difference between the two must be their attitude towards the
source: unlike translation (both Cicero’s and Jerome's), the source of imitation is a model, an
object to follow, which calls for reverence of it, which is lacking in Ciceronian translation, and the
impulse to rival it, which is not found in Jerome's idea of translation.

Pastoralis, ond on Englisce ‘Hierdeboc', thlum word be worde, hwilum

andgit of andgiete... (Whitelock 7)

The same translation principle, clearly stated in the proem, was also applied to
his translation of Boethius's De Consolatione Philosophiae: .

lElfred kuning wees wealhstod disse béc' ond hie of Bdcladene on Englisc

wende, swa hTo n0 is gedon. Hwilum he sette word be worde, hwilum

andgit of andgite, swa swa he hit pa sweotolost ond andgitfulficast

gereccan mihte... (Whitelock 8-9)

Jerome’s idea of translation as serving to illuminate the meaning of a
“source was the core of Alfred's translation method, and Jerome's influence on
ideas of translation extended to the twelfth century. As is suggested by the
epithet “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance,”16 the century saw the great
advancement of the study of Roman classics by “a florescence of monastic and
other ecclesiastical schools”:

The quality of readings in ancient Latin poetry was enriched by the era’s

interest in science, cosmology, and history; and its impact was

broadened by the increasing role of Latin writing and documents as
governance slowly became more centralized, especially in northwestern

Europe. (Baswell, “Marvels of Translation” 31)

However, it is in this vigorous scholarly period that the Ciceronian notion of

 

‘6 For further discussion of “The Twelfth-Century Renaissance,” see Rodney M. Thomson,
England and the Twelfth-Century Renaissance (Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998). In his discussion of
“the relative places of England and France in the intellectual and cultural history of twelfth-century
Europe,” Rodney attempts “a more positive interpretation of England’s place in the twelfth-century
renaissance“ by reviewing “four ‘distinctively English’ contributions to European intellectual life, in
the (more or less literary) fields of historiography, science, wonders (in particular the Miracles of
the Virgin), and the practice of secular government” (3-4).

translation, quite contrasting to Jerome’s, was burgeoning. A translation which
openly employed the Ciceronian concept of translation was Thomas of Kent's
Roman de Toute Chevalen'e (1170-85), “an Anglo-Norman version of the
Alexander romance...based largely on the Latin Zacher Epitome” (Damian-Grint
352).17 Just as King Alfred's preface‘and proem did, Thomas's preface to his
translation noted Jerome’s idea of “not word-for-word but sense-for-sense” as a
translation formula. Moreover, his preface also put an emphasis on the
importance of the faithful reproduction of the meaning in the translation by
rejecting “the literalist word-gloss model of the Psalter,“ which was “one
contemporary model for Old French translations” (Damian-Grint 352).

Thomas's ideas of translation, however, departed substantially from
Jerome's since Thomas’s ideas were focused “not on the accurate transmission
of meaning” but more on “the adaptation of a text for an audience...[through] a
rhetorical transformation involving stylistic improvements” (Damian-Grint 353). It
is remarkable that, as Thomas demonstrated, during the Twelfth-Century
Renaissance, the Ciceronian idea of translation as rhetorical invention began to
gain popularity among translators, thus weakening the hitherto overwhelming
influence of Jerome’s idea of translation as a supplement to a source.

The prevalence of Jerome’s and Cicero’s concepts of translation as
dominant theories of translation, however, continued in the fourteenth- and

fifteenth century. The fourteenth century witnessed both the persistence of

 

‘7 Thomas’s Anglo-Norman version, of about 8,000 lines, was first translated into Middle English
as Kyng Alisaunder, “a 400-line fragment of which survives in the Auchinleck manuscript.” (Field
316) '

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Jerome’s notion of translation and the growing popularity of the Ciceronian
concept of translation. Jerome’s formula “not word for word but sense for sense”
and his idea of the textual fidelity still reverberated in translations as “one of the
most common themes” of translation, typically asserting that “the translator has
rendered [the translation] faithfully, adding and omitting nothing” (Pratt 11). For
example, in the mid-fourteenth century, Richard Rolle echoed Jerome’s ideas of
translation in the prologue to his translation, The English Psalter.

In this werke, l seke na straunge Ynglis, bot lyghtest and comonest and

swilk that is mast lyke til the Latyn....ln the translacioun l folow the lettere

als mykyll as I may; and thare l fynd na propire Ynglis, l folow the wit of the
worde, swa that thai that sall red it thaim thare noght dred errynge.

(Wogan-Browne 246: 62—66)

It is Chaucer’s works, however, that provide fuller ideas of translation,
originating from Jerome, in the fourteenth century. Just like Jerome underlining
the fidelity of a translation to a source, Chaucer's foremost concern about
translation was its accurate transference of the source both in words and in
“sentence” (“meaning”). In the introduction to the Canticus Troili in Troilus and
Criseyde, the narrator says of Troilus’s song that his task is to reproduce “the
sentence” and “every word” just as the author (“Lollius”) wrote:

And of his song naught only the sentence,

As writ myn auctour called Lollius

But pleinly, save oure tonges difference,

I dar wel seyn, in al, that Troilus

 

‘g' c.“ ‘v ‘-

 

E

Similarl
reprodu
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0

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Seyde in his song, loo, every word right thus. (I. 393-97)18
Similarly, the main purpose of the narrator in the Second Nun's Tale is also to
reproduce “the wordes” and “sentence” of its source:

For bothe have I the wordes and sentence

Of hym that at the seintes reverence

The storie wroot, and folwen hire legende,

And pray yow that ye wole my werk amende. ([6] 81-84)

Well into the fifteenth century, Jerome’s notion of translation still
resounded in vernacular translations. In the early fifteenth century, John Walton's
Prefacio Translaton’s, prefixed to hisiverse translation of Boethius's De
Consolatione Philosophiae, acknowledged the same translation method as
Jerome’s:

As fro the texte that Y ne varye noght

But kepe the sentence in his trewe entent,

And wordes eke as nyhe as may be brought

Where lawe of metre is not resistent. (Wogan-Browne 36: 17-20)

What is striking, however, is that from the late fourteenth century on, the
Ciceronian concept of rhetorical invention and the ultimate displacement of the
source appeared more broadly in vernacular translations. Discussing the works
of Chaucer and Gower, Copeland lucidly indicates the emergence of “redefined”

ideas of vernacular translation in the late fourteenth century:

 

1" All quotations from Chaucer are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. General Ed. Larry D.
Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). Line number(s) of quotations from The Canterbury
Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Legend of Good Women appear parenthetically in the text.

12

These texts [Legend of Good Women and Confessio Amantis] carry out

the prescriptions of the artes poetriae by turning the techniques of

exegesis into techniques of topical invention. In this way they also
redefine (the terms of vernacular translation itself: they use the
' techniques of exegetical translation to produce, not a supplement to the

original, but a vernacular substitute for that original. (Rhetoric 179)
Although she doesn’t mention the names of Cicero and Jerome openly,- her
differentiation between translation as a substitute for source and translation as a
supplement to source is reminiscent of the very difference between Cicero’s and
Jerome’s ideas of translation, which we have already discussed.19 Hence, in her
argument, the emergence and popularity of the Ciceronian model of translation in
the late fourteenth century is substantiated.

More important in her argument, however, is her dubbing the writings of
Chaucer and Gower, usually understood as literary works, as translations: she
seems to break down the boundary demarcating the scope of a translation from
that of an original literary work which most modern Chaucer scholars
conventionally take for granted. Though seemingly provocative and innovative,
however, Copeland’s categorizing Chaucer’s Boece, a translation in conventional
modern terms, and his Legend of Good Women, traditionally understood as a
literary work, under the same rubric of translation cannot be her unique way of
understanding the word “translation” because it is preceded by Chaucer, who

already suggested in his works the same kind of dissolving of the border between

 

‘9 See Chapter One, pp. 5-8.

I3

translation and original work.

At the end of the Parson’s Tale, in the passage commonly known as the
“Retraction” of The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer classifies his entire literary works
into two types of translation. One type includes his “translacions” of The Boece,
legends of Saints, and other religious writings:

But of the translacion of Boece de Consolacione, and othere bookes of

legendes of seintes, and omelies, and moralitee, and devocioun, that

thanke l oure Lord Jhesu Crist and his blisful Mooder, and alle the

seintes of hevene.... (X 1087-88)

What is unusual, however, is Chaucer’s description of the rest of his works -

works which we usually assign to the “literary” category as “translacions” and

“enditynges” (“writings”):
...and namely of my translacions and enditynges of worldly vanitees, the
whiche l revoke in my retracciouns: as is the book of Troilus; the book also
of Fame; the book of the xxv. Ladies; the book of the Duchesse; the book
of Seint Valentynes day of the Parlement of the Briddes; the tales of
Caunterbury, thilke that sownen into synne;l the book of the Leoun; and
many another book...and many a song and many a leccherous lay.

(X 1084-86)

F rom these two passages in the Retractions, it seems clear that Chaucer does
not set apart his translations from original writings in a modem sense, and more
importantly, when he refers to “translation," it can mean both “translacions” and

“enditynges":

I4

Against the background an intertextual medieval culture, the boundaries
between ‘translacions’ and ‘enditynges’ therefore tend to blur across
the range of Chaucer’s work... .for him “translacions” went beyond the
translation of mere words alone, so as to embrace his transformative
adaptation of whole stories and characters, his transvaluations into
English of borrowed patterns and motifs. (Windeatt, “Geoffrey Chaucer

145)

As Copeland argues and Chaucer suggests, it is obvious that in the late
fourteenth century, there were two kinds of translation under the universal term of
“translation” in a broader sense. Copeland’s distinctions between primary. and
secondary translations will lead us to a better understanding of the differences
between the two types of translation.

According to Copeland, primary translations “exhibit a close alliance with
the aims and methods of exegetical practice, and, like exegesis, define their
purpose in terms of service to a source text” (Rhetoric 6-7). More specifically,
primary translations have the following traits in common:

...the [primary] translations announce themselves as translations by

calling attention to their dependence upon - and service to -— the

original text. They typically also foreground their reliance upon

exegetical materials, thus proposing to serve the text through enarratio

as well as through their interlingual translation. (Rhetoric 94)

For their emphasis on service to the original, primary translations are almost

equivalent to Jerome’s notion of translation.

15

 

 

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In contrast, secondary translations are more like Cicero’s model of
translation since inventiveness is a principal element in these translations:
“[secondary translations] do not define themselves through exegetical models of
service or supplementation, but rather through rhetorical models of invention”
(Rhetoric 7). Furthermore, secondary translations achieve displacement of the
source text through “rhetorical reinvention,” thus assuming a certain “authority”:

...[secondary translations] tend to define themselves as independent

textual productions...[and] to suppress the exegetical character of these

moves by integrating them into a larger program of textual reinvention.

Rather than representing themselves as translations In the service of

authoritative sources, these texts tend to claim for themselves...a kind of

originary discursive status, as if the translation, once achieved, displaces
the source by assuming a certain canonical authority of its own. (Rhetoric

94-95)

With all the convincing theorization and discernment of primary and
secondary translations, however, it should be also noted that the two modes of
translation are not precisely distinguishable,20 because, as Copeland points out,
primary and secondary translations have “only a relative value” (Rhetoric 6), and
“can serve, at best, as an approximate framework” since “few translations

constitute pure instances of either model” (Rhetoric 95). Besides, an exact

 

2° The invalidity of modern distinctions between translation and original work during the later
medieval period is further supported by medieval conception of “author” which allowed scribes,
translators, and poets alike to assume the role of an “author": “Authorship in the Middle Ages was
more likely to be understood as participation in an intellectually and morally authoritative tradition,
within which” .a writer might fill one of several roles, copying, modifying, or translating, as well as
composing" (Wogan-Browne 4-5).

16

distinction between primary and secondary translations is even harder to make
' since they both commonly include “recourse to commentaries themselves or,
frequently, interpolations on the part of the translator that take on an exegetical

or even editorial character” (Rhetoric 9495).21

3. Scholarship on Chaucer’s Translation

From the survey of the concept of translation in the Middle Ages,
especially Copeland’s arguments and Chaucer’s ideas on translation, it is
obvious that in the late fourteenth century, there were two kinds of translation
under the universal term of “translation” in a broader. sense: Hieronymian and
Ciceronian translation. It is no wonder, then, that since Chaucer's ideas of
translation embraced both kinds of translation, modern studies on his works have
diverged into two directions: one for his Hieronymian translations, and the other
for his Ciceronian translations. Scholars interested in Chaucer's Hieronymian
translations, focusing on The Boece and The Romaunt of the Rose, have
discussed three main issues: Chaucer's faithfulness to his sources, his
translation techniques or art, and analyses of his language in his translations.

Studies of Chaucer assessing the degree of faithfulness in his translations
have compared his translations with their sources, deciding and commenting on
which parts are accurately reproduced in English and which parts are not. In his

extensive study of Boethian influences on Chaucer's works, although admitting

 

2‘ As a representative example of primary translation, Copeland mentions “the work of Notker III
of St. Gall,” while she designates as “[tlhe best concrete examples of this type [of secondary
translationsl” Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, the Knight’s Tale, and Gower‘s Confessio
Amantis (Rhetoric 6, 94).

I7

the overall merits of Chaucer’s Boece as a translation, Bernard L. Jefferson
points out its shortcomings of inaccuracy and faulty syntax”:

Chaucer’s translation of the Consolation of Philosophy, although it is

diffuse and sometimes inaccurate and blundering, although it contains

many awkward and faulty English sentences, yet on the whole is

painstaking, faithful, poetic, and spirited. (1)

Moreover, Jefferson attributes Chaucer's inaccuracy in the translation to his
incompetence as a translator: Chaucer's misunderstandings of, or his following
mistakes already existing in, the French version of Boethius’s work (16)”; or his
“inaccurate scholarship” and “careless or hasty methods” (25). For Jefferson,
Chaucer is not equal to the task of being a competent, faithful translator.

In recent years, however, there has been a radical change in scholarly
attitudes towards the differences between Chaucer’s translations and his sources,
which is directed towards uncovering positive values in the “inaccuracies” in his
translations. Caroline Eckhardt is one of those who see “inaccuracies” in
Chaucer’s translations more neutrally, as “departures” from the source.
Discussing The Romaunt of the Rose, she argues that “the issue of accuracy per
se is of limited value. It is more important to observe, where the translation is
accurate, how that accuracy is achieved, and where it is not, what the value of

the departures might be” (“Art of Translation” 46).24

 

22 Chapter Five of Jefferson’s book provides detailed information about the lines and passages
showing Boethian influence in Chaucer’s works.

Jefferson suggests that for his translation of The Boece, Chaucer used a French translation
and the commentary of Nicholas Trivet as well as a Latin text (1 ).
2‘ More recently, "incorrectness," understood now as “discontinuity,“ has begun to serve not as a
sign of the translator’s incompetence as translator but as having special value, thus becoming the
center of translation studies beyond the scope of medieval period. See for example, A. E. B.

18

One more remarkable recent development of scholarship on the
faithfulness of Chaucer's translations depends largely on renewed interest in
medieval manuscript culture, which also intensifies the positive view of the
differences between. his translation and source. What Machan has shown
persuasively is that a closer examination of manuscripts of Chaucer's source and
his translation leads to a new awareness not only of Chaucer's source but also of
his translation conditions. In a comprehensive study of the sources of The Boece,
Machan claims that Chaucer’s translation was based not on a single source but
on a collection of previous works that he himself was creating“:

In fact, Chaucer was translating from what might be called the Consolation

tradition which accrued to Boethius’s original text. ..[and] Chaucer himself,

as he was translating, in effect created his source by selectively combining
portions of the tradition he called ‘Boece de Consolacione’ in order to
represent the content of Boethius as he understood it. ("Editorial

Method" 190)

Machan’s contention that Chaucer was translating not from a single source but
from multiple sources, or even a collection of sources of his own making,
undermines any attempts to demonstrate the incompleteness of, or translation

errors in, his translation. Differences between Chaucer’s translation and source

 

Coldiron’s article, “Translatio, Translation, and Charles d’Orléans’s Paroled Poetics,” Exemplaria
8 (1996): 169-92, which argues that “[l]ike Copeland, cultural and poststructural theorists tend to
assume discontinuity rather than equivalence in translation, and instead of defining and judging
the terms of equivalence, tend to perceive their task as analysis of discontinuity” (175).

25 In line with Machan’s argument, A. J. Minnis suggests that Chaucer's Latin source includes not
only Boethius’s Latin version but also glosses in Latin source texts: “We should therefore regard
the primary Latin source of the Boece as being not solely and simply the ‘Vulgate’ version of what
Boethius had written but rather that text together with a medieval apparatus of glosses”
(“’Glosynge" 108).

I9

can no longer be taken as an indication of Chaucer as an incompetent translator.
Recent scholarly assessment of the differences between Chaucer‘s source
and translation as positive, however, has not only rescued him from a previous
dishonorable title of an “inaccurate” or “incompetent” translator; it has also
provoked us to see the differences as expressions of his creative use of the
source with a view of making them available to his audience effectively and
- correctly. When she conjectures why Chaucer's Boece is in prose, while its major
source Boethius‘s De Consolatione Philosophiae belongs to the genre of the
prosimetrum, “a text composed in alternating sections of prose and verse” (“The
Medieval Prosimetrum” 21), Eckhardt asserts Chaucer's creative recreation of his
prosimetrum source into a prose-only version:
It would be tempting to apply this distinction26 to Chaucer - to say that his
Boece is entirely in prose because, following Isidore and extending
Boethius’ own principle to its limit, Chaucer believed that prose alone was
fully suitable to the work’s argumentative, ratiocinative subject-matter.
(“Medieval Prosimetrum" 23)
In addition to Eckhardt, Helen Phillips also draws our attention to Chaucer‘s
creative change of gender of the speaker in “The Complaint of Venus,” his
translation from de Graunson’s French version:
...the changes Chaucer made as translator. ..may have something to do

with skarsete of rhyme in English, but they appear to have at least as

 

26 Examining the ideas of verse and prose both Isidore of Seville and Boethius expounded,
Eckhardt concludes that in the Consolatio, while verse is “limited in [its] ability to move towards
metaphysical understanding,” prose is “the proper medium of rational thought“ (“Medieval
Prosimetrum“ 22).

20

 

 

 

 

 

 

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his treat:
translalio

to articula

 

translator
of the rig
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Chaucer
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Alo

much to do with the process, for a male translator, of reconceiving what de

Graunson had written for a male speaker as the expression of a woman's

feelings. (“Complaint of Venus” 88)

As scholarly interest in the faithfulness of Chaucer's translation has
progressed from concerns with Chaucer's accuracy or inaccuracy as translator to
his creative differentiation from source, studies of Chaucer's techniques of
translation are now mainly focused on how his techniques of translation are used
to articulate his own creativity. For example, Eckhardt contends that Chaucer's
translation art in The Romaunt of the Rose is demonstrated in its skillful display
of “the right balance between familiarity and distance” (“Art of Translation” 50)...
By making “near minimal change,” Eckhardt continues, Chaucer's translation
remains faithful to its source but as an expression of the translator's creativity,
Chaucer brings “a fresh new narrative voice” into his translation, creating “a slight
but pervasive alteration in tone“ and "heightening the narrator‘s presence in the
poem" (“Art of Translation” 48, 60, 51, 52). Similarly, examining Chaucer's
translation techniques in The Boece by analyzing the words, syntax, and style of
the translation, Machan identifies Chaucer's use of such translation techniques
as "doublets, claques, lexical and syntactic derivatives, glosses and double
translations” and concludes that Chaucer uses these techniques to render "a
close but intelligible translation" (Techniques 112). As Machan maintains,
Chaucer’s use of various translation techniques serves to enhance his creativity
in making the translation “intelligible.”

Along with studies on the faithfulness of Chaucer's translation and his

21

translation techniques, language study in Chaucer's translation is another major
area of scholarship, which addresses the question of how Chaucer as translator
“experiment[s] with the new words" (Elliott 160). Defining Chaucer as wordsmith,
Morton Donner analyzes the innovative uses of many nonce words in The Boece,
thus suggesting that the new words “which look like a direct consequences of the
translation process” make up “better than one-eighth of the whole”: “Out of about
2,700 different words that appear in Boece, some 200 are new adoptions from
French or Latin and more than 150 are new derivations formed on contemporary
English patterns” (187). Studying a restricted group of words in Chaucer's The
Romaunt of the Rose, specifically those words "designating articles of dress and
fabrics used for dress" (89), Merete Smith concludes that "only six of a total
number of thirty nine Old French loan words in the Middle English translation are
in any likelihood new words, and that four of these were nonce-borrowings" (92).
Interested in philosophical terms in The Boece, Olga Fischer compares Alfredian
and Chaucerian philosophical terms in their translations of Boethius's work, and
asserts that "many of the loan-words used by Chaucer were unfamiliar to his
contemporaries" (637).

However, in spite of common interests in the faithfulness, techniques, and
language of Chaucer's Hieronymian translations, major scholarship on Chaucer's
Ciceronian translations is quite different from that on his‘Hieronymian translations,
in that it places more emphasis on the creative aspects of Chaucer's translation
methods, by means of which he increased his freedom, creativity, and authority

as translator. As Copeland demonstrates in her discussion of The Legend of

22

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Good Women, the task of Chaucer as translator is to translate the writings of
“olde clerkes” (F. 370, G. 350), but in his attempt to understand intentio auctoris
(“the intention of the author”), "Chaucer invents his own authorship out of the
conventional topoi of Ovidian exegesis" (Rhetoric 195). By using the rhetorical
devices of occupatio27 and abbreviatio (“abbreviation”), Chaucer achieves
rhetorical control over the material in his sources, and his translation
"substitute[s] itself for its source and efface[s] the presence of that source," which
functions precisely like the Ciceronian “model of translation as a form of
displacement” (Rhetoric 202).

Besides Copeland‘s rhetorical understanding of Chaucer's creativity in his
Ciceronian translation, however, there have been different arguments about what
makes Chaucer's Ciceronian translation a creation and displacement of its
sources. Historical differences between the ages of Chaucer's sources and his
translations are the first aspect by which some scholars discuss Chaucer's
originality. In his comparative study of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and its
Italian source, Boccaccio’s ll Filostrato, observing that Boccaccio was already a
Renaissance man, C. S. Lewis argues that Chaucer's original renderings are
basically “first and foremost a process of medievalization” (“II F ilostrato” 37).
Lewis then goes on to argue that Chaucer used the topos of courtly love to
“modify" the Renaissance flavor of Boccaccio's poem back into a medieval one:

It was, then, as a poet of courtly love that Chaucer approached ll

Filostrato. There is no sign as yet that he wished to desert the courtly

 

27 Copeland defines occupatio as “a way of saying something in the very act of promising not to
say it” (Rhetoric 197).

23

 

tradition; on the contrary, there is ample evidence that he still regarded

himself as its exponent....The majority of his modifications are corrections

of errors which Boccaccio had committed against the code of courtly love.

(“II F ilostrato” 38-39)

Drawing Lewis-like attention to the distinctive ages of Boccaccio and
Chaucer, Charles Muscatine also highlights the vast cultural distance between
the ages of the two poets: “the Italian Trecento, with Giotto, Boccaccio, and
Petrarch, was already a “renaissance” century...[while] England was not to have
its own renaissance for another two hundred years” (128-29). Unlike Lewis,
however, Muscatine argues that Chaucer’s realistic and naturalistic description of
fourteenth-century courtly culture in Troilus and Criseyde typifies his originality:

But at the same time he [Lewis] undervalues the medieval realism that

jostles courtly convention all through the period and all through the

Troilus....[whose] courtliness is not that of the twelfth century, merely

raised in technical sophistication; it is a fourteenth-century courtliness,

seen in a context of deepened naturalism. (130-131)

Chaucer’s creativity is not confined to his medievalization of his source and
his realistic description of contemporary courtly culture; it is also prominent in his
unique characterization. Comparing Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale with its source,
Boccaccio‘s ll Teseida, Piero Boitani points out Chaucer’s changes in the
translation: “[the] plot of the Teseida is essentially respected in the Knight’s Tale
but its time-scheme and its dispositio altered at key points" (194). But more

importantly, Boitani continues, by making his characters “dramatic forces rather

24

than human beings,” Chaucer changes “the system and depth of Boccaccio's
characterization”:

Compared to Boccaccio’s, Chaucer’s characters are dramatic forces rather

than human beings. They are lonely figures, whose mentality is dominated

by feudal values rather than courtly manners, and who are for that very

reason much closer to contemporary reality. (195)

Among studies of Chaucer's translations, the originality of the Clerk's Tale .
has been a point of much scholarly contention because of its nature as a double
translation: it is an English translation of Petrarch's Latin version, rendered from
Boccaccio’s Italian version of the Griselde story as the last story in the
Decameron.28 As J. Burke Severs argues, Chaucer’s English version of
Petrarch's Latin includes “important and significant changes in characterization,
in narrative technique, and in the whole tone and spirit” (229), which surely
entitles Chaucer's translation to be labeled an original work.29 However, by
comparing and contrasting the three versions by Boccaccio, Petrarch, and
Chaucer, Muscatine suggests the textual dependence of Chaucer’s translation
on Petrarch’s version, which “overtly Christianizes and moralizes” Boccaccio's
tale (191), as well as a French version:

Chaucer's version is based textually on Petrarch and on the more literal of

the two French translations. Though the tale is placed by the Clerk’s envoy

 

28 For a double translation of the Clerk’s Tale, see most importantly, J. Burke Severs, The Literary
Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerkes Tale (Hamden: Archon Books, 1972).

29 Chaucer’s version is almost entirely new one, that is an original work, since Severs further
argues that Chaucer’s changes in the translation verges on “magical transformation”: “This almost
magical transformation Chaucer achieves through frequent expansion, through occasional
suppression, through appropriate selection when his two sources offer variant readings, and
above all through a general heightening of all effects” (229).

25

in the context of the controversy over marriage that is stirring in the
dramatic frame of the pilgrimage, its inner inspiration, announced by the
Clerk’s Prologue and the concluding moral, is Petrarchan. (192)
Muscatine's study of the Clerk's Tale as translation — emphasizing the
affinity of Chaucer’s version to Petrarch and its subsequent faithful renderings of
Petrarch's Latin version, thus minimizing Chaucer's originality in the Tale —
however, is seriously challenged by a recent study by David Wallace, who in his
extensive study on Chaucerian polity, argues for Chaucer’s greater indebtedness
to Boccaccio’s Griselde story: “I am suggesting, however, that the political
dimensions of Boccaccio’s novella, its embeddedness in contemporary
ideological debate, do have an important bearing on our reading of the Clerk’s
Tale” (282).30 By viewing Chaucer as “a historical reader of Petrarch” and his
Tale as a critique of Petrarch's “timeless exemplum of obedience to God,” or
“dehistoricized spirituality,” Wallace suggests that Chaucer’s originality in the
Tale comes in part from its returning to Boccaccio's Italian version (282).
Wallace’s study of the Clerk’s Tale, however, is important not merely
because it argues for Chaucer’s originality in the translation; more significantly, it
has drawn much scholarly attention to the political implications of Chaucer’s
translation. As Ralph Hanna lll's study of John Trevisa's translation of the
Polychronichon in relation to his patron Lord Berkeley has demonstrated more

convincingly,31 the most recent development in the study of medieval translation

 

3° David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England
and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
3‘ Ralph Hanna Ill, “Sir Thomas Berkeley and His Patronage,” Speculum 64 (1989): 878-916.

26

 

 

 

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is directed to an emphasis on the function of translation, specifically a study of
the political meaning or role of translation. As Wogan-Browne aptly puts it, “less
concerned with translation as a pragmatic or creative practice,” some scholars
working on medieval translation now begin to approach translation as “a site
where. cultural relations of dominance and subservience might’ be played out”
(317). I believe that any discussion of medieval translation should also

address its “strategic function” under its specific “cultural situation,” as can be
inferred from Wogan-Browne’s argument about Middle English discussions of
literature”:

[Middle English] discussions [of literature] are so heavily situated — not

only in the texts in which they occur but also in the social and ideological

issues evoked by those texts and their use of the vernacular - that they
I require to be read in quantity, in careful relation to their cultural situation
and, above all, with a sense of their strategic function, if their theoretical

implications are to be teased out of them. (316)

From this discussion of recent scholarship on later medieval translation,
including Wallace, Hanna, and Wogan-Browne, I suggest that the politics of
medieval translation should be a justifiable alternative to - or a development from
- the previous scholarship, notably by Eckhardt, Machan, and Copeland. By
solely concentrating on the techniques of translation, Eckhardt and Machan tend

to ignore the fact that there usually exist more than one, sometimes radically

 

32 Wogan-Browne’s argument is useful in our understanding of the importance of political function
in medieval translation, especially when we regard “literature” as “secondary translation” following
Copeland’s distinction. .

27

different, manuscripts of a translation and its source, which weakens any attempt
to compare translation with source. Though her scholarly interest goes back to
Rome and extends to other European countries, by discussing medieval
translation in terms of an individual translator's effort, Copeland‘s rhetorical study
of medieval translation does not fully address the translation as (a cultural product

— as the product of the cooperation between a translator and his patron.

4. The Politics of Translation: The Wycliffite Bible and Trevisa’s Translations

Before discussing Chaucer’s politics of translations, we need to turn to
other late medieval translations because political aspects of translation are not
uncommon in Chaucer's time. The Wycliffite Bible translations and John
Trevisa’s translations33 are among those in Chaucer’s time which have prominent
political dimensions and may lead us to a better understanding of the political
roles Chaucer’s translations could have played.

The Wycliffite English Bible,34 translated from the Latin Vulgate and
inspired by John Wyclif, Oxford scholar, theologian, church reformer, and heretic,
is a revolutionary work not only because it is “the first and only complete Bible

made during the Middle Ages” (Fowler, Bible 148) but more importantly, it

 

33 For a detailed discussion of Trevisa’s life and works, see David C. Fowler, The Life and Times
of John Trevisa: The Medieval Scholar (Seattle and London: University of Michigan Press, 1995).
3‘ The Wycliffite Bible has two different versions, the Early Version, dating from the 13703 and
existing in a small number of manuscripts, and the Later Version, done some twenty years later,
of which some 230 manuscripts are extant. What is significant about the two versions as
translation is their different translation style. The Early Version is not only a literal rendering with
glosses but is heavily influenced by the Vulgate in its “vocabulary, syntax, and even to some
extent word order” (Hudson, “Wycliffite Prose" 253), so that it “was virtually unreadable without
the Latin alongside it” (Robertson 218). On the other hand, the Later Version is freer and more
idiomatic and more readable than the Early Version, which must be one of the reasons why it was
more popular than the previous one.

28

demonstrates that the English people had “vernacular literacy - the ability to
write as well as to read” and they were capable of “making script as well as '
deciphering it” (Justice 30-31).

Chapter Fifteen of the Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible in the Later Version,
probably written by John Purvey, a disciple of Wyclif,”5 assures us that the main
purpose of the English Bible translation is the translatio studii, that is, the transfer
of Latin lore into English. First of all, the translator observes that his role is both
that of a compiler working with other colleagues and helpers to gather Latin
scriptures and glosses, and that of a scholar studying those Latin materials and
consulting the writings of various doctors of the Church: N

First bis symple creature hadde myche trauaile wib diuerse felawis and

helperis to gedere manie elde biblis, and obere doctouris and comune

glosis, and to make 00 Latyn bible sumdel trewe; and banne to studie it of
be newe, be text wib be glose, and obere doctouris as he mi3te gete, and
speciali Lire on be elde testament bat helpide ful myche in bis werk.

(Hudson, Selections 67)

In addition, unlike the literal translation of the Early Version, the translator
proposes Hieronymian principle of “not word for word but sense for sense” as a
translation method: "be beste translating is, out of Latyn into English, to translate
aftir be sentence and not oneli aftir be wordis, so bat be sentence be as opin
eiber openere in English as in Latyn" (Hudson, Selections 68).

The political implications of the Bible translation, however, are inherent in

 

35 F. F. Bruce, History of the Bible in English: From the Eariiest Versions (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978), 17.

29

its defense of the vernacular translation, by explaining why there ought to be an
- English translation of the Bible: “For, bou3 couetouse clerkis ben wode bi
symonie, eresie and manie obere synnes, and dispisen and stoppen holi writ as
myche as bei moun, 3it be lewid puple crieb aftir holi writ to kunne it and kepe it
wib greet cost and peril of here lif" (Hudson, Selections 67). What is sharply
contrasted in this statement is the contemporary attempt of the Church,
represented by "couetouse clerkis," to monopolize the Bible and a desire for it
among the common people: the Bible translation becomes a locus of political
rivalry over the Latin lore in the Bible.

As David Norton points out, when there was no vernacular translation of
the Bible, the Church stood between the Bible, the one source of truth, and the
common people, for whom the Bible was too difficult to understand and to whom
it was available only through the interpretation of the Church or the wisdom of
Church clerks:

The Church, directly guided by God, had laboriously developed a

theological tradition based on interpretation of the Bible and the wisdom of

the Fathers and their successors. The Bible alone was not enough - it
was too difficult, too easily misunderstood: the Church, with the Bible and

so much more, was the source of truth. (73)

However, by turning Latin lore into the vernacular and by giving "the people a
basis on which to come at their own sense of the truth" (Norton 73), the Bible
translators challenged the Church‘s authority: for the Church, “translation and

heresy went hand in hand" (Norton 74).

30

Because of its political dimension, the Wycliffite Bible translation was not
merely the translatio studii, turning Latin wisdom in the Bible into the vernacular,
but also the translatio imperii, the transference of power. Responding to a
growing desire of the common people to make the Scripture available to
themselves, it not only weakened the power of the Church over thecommon
people by challenging the Church's attempt to keep a monopoly over the Bible
but also empowered lay people by allowing their access to the Bible without the
intervention of the Church and its authorities.

It is no wonder that the highly political nature of the Wycliffite Bible
translation provoked controversies in favor of or against translation. For example,
at around the turn of the fifteenth century, in a tract organized as a debate
between two doctores with opposing views of translation, Richard Ullerston lays
out thirty arguments against translation and nine propositions in favor of
translation, “with Ullerston’s own, implied, sympathies being with the latter”
(Ghosh 86-87). On the other hand, among Church clerics on whom the impact of
the Wycliffite Bible translations was so immense, it became commonplace to
express “fears about widened access to the Bible, and a resulting loss of
reverence for the sacred text and danger of misreading it if its interpretation were
not officially sanctioned and clerically monitored” (Phillips, “Nation” 58). The
disputes and worries about the validity of the Bible translation instigated by the
Wycliffites ended up with “Archbishop Arundel’s censorship laws - the
Constitutions - drafted in 1407, and promulgated in 1409, [which] categorically

prohibited all disputation on this issue” (Ghosh 86).

31

Besides the Wycliffite Bible, another instance of translation that has
distinctive political implications in the age of Chaucer is John Trevisa‘s translation
of Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, which Trevisa, vicar of Berkeley in Cornwall,
completed in 1387 for his patron, Lord Berkeley. Higden‘s Polychronicon, divided
into the seven ages of the world, reflects the'medieval view of the universal
history as an expression of divine purpose. Trevisa's translation of the
Polychronicon is both commentary and exegesis: he inserted notes as
explanation of, and comments on, his Latin source, defined unusual words and
terms, and provided biblical exegesis (Fowler, John Trevisa 176-78).

The political significance of Trevisa‘s translation is prominent when we
compare it with the Wycliffite Bible translation. While the Bible translation attests
to the confrontation between traditional clerical control of sacred knowledge and
the learned Wycliffites’ attempt to remove that control, what is conflicting in
Trevisa‘s translation is clerical control over secular knowledge in Latin and a
secular lord’s desire to share it with a lay audience as well as for himself. The
clash of two powers over secular knowledge in Latin and its accommodation is
dramatized as a fictional conversation in “The Dialogue Between a Lord and a
Clerk” that Trevisa prefixes to his translation of Higden’s work.

Being confident that only Latin literacy is worthwhile, the Clerk will not
accept the Lord's ideas of the necessity of English translation:

Dominus ...vor 3ef beus cronyks were translated out of Latyn into

Englysch, banne by so meny be mo men scholde understonde ham as

understondeb Englysch and no Latyn.

32

he]
'9

 

 

 

 

725:”

\\\§ :

Re,

Clericus 3e cunneb speke and rede and understonde Latyn. banne hyt
nedeb no3t to have such an Englysch translation. (T revisa 215)

The Clerk’s conventional objections to English translation, however, are
overwhelmed by the Lord’s detailed practical knowledge, who argues that
English translation is necessary eVen for an educated man like himself, who can
“speke and rede and understonde Latyn,” because “ber ys moche Latyn in beus
bokes of cronyks bat y can noBt-understonde, nober bou wiboute studyinge and
avysement and lokyng of ober bokes” (T revisa 215-16). For lewd men, the Lord
continues to argue, the necessity of English translation is much more pressing:
"bou spekst wonderlych, vor be lewed man wot n03t what a scholde axe, and
namelych of lore of dedes bat come nevere in hys muynde, nober wot comynlych
of whom a scholde axe” (Trevisa 216). We cannot tell for sure that the fictional
Lord in the "Dialogue" is Trevisa's patron Lord Berkeley, but it is safe to say that
the Lord speaks for "a broader audience denied textual access by arbitrary
linguistic barriers, in large measure erected and sustained by clerics" with a view
of "overturning a received situation of clerical control" over secular knowledge
(Hanna, “Sir Thomas Berkeley” 895-96).

Trevisa‘s translation of Giles of Rome‘s De Regimine Principum is also
intimately related to political conflict: unlike the Wycliffite Bible translation and
Trevisa's translation of the Polychmnicon, the clash between secular royal power
and secular local lords' power is implied in this translation. By translating De
Regimine Principum, a treatise devoted to the education of Philip lll's son, Philip

the Fair of France, Trevisa carried over to local lords the monopolized lore of

33

kings and princes about the distinction between king and tyrant. What is
significant in the translation is that under the tyrannical rule of Richard II, such
knowledge about a good king and a despot, newly available to lords through
Trevisa's translation, played an important role as “an ideal text from which to
draw arguments against the offending policies of the young king” (Fowler,
Governance x). Moreover, being a book about the qualities of good and bad
kings, Trevisa‘s translation might serve Lord Berkeley as a useful resource when
he worked as a "baronial representative in the processes against Richard,
resulting in the king’s deposition" (Fowler, Governance x).

By discussing the Wycliffite Bible, and Trevisa’s translations of the
Polychronicon and De Regimine Principum, we have seen that the political
function of translation is one of the prominent common features of translation in
Chaucer’s time. To find the political implications of Chaucer’s translations, I
discuss in this dissertation two of his Hieronymian translations - The Romaunt of
the Rose and The Boece — and one of his Ciceronian translations, the Clerk’s
Tale. By discussing the three translations from a political point of view, I hope we
will be able to approach nearer to Chaucer the translator.

My discussion in Chapter Two focuses on Chaucer's translation from Old
French, The Romaunt of the Rose. For a better understanding of Chaucer's
attitude toward French culture, his captivity in war against France in 1359 is
discussed, which opens up the possibility of seeing Chaucer as a poet
challenging the French literary tradition. From this historical point of view,

Chaucer the translator of The Romaunt of the Rose is discussed not as one

34

attempting to imitate French cultural artifact but as one resisting dominant French
literary culture. Another focus of my argument is based on Anglo-Franco relations
during the Hundred Years War, changing from adversarial to more peaceful ones,
which could have changed the role of Chaucer’s translation to that of promoting
peace between the two countries. An extensive examinations of the historical
background of Deschamps's praise of Chaucer as “great translator” shows that
the French-poet's encomium of Chaucer results less from Chaucer's success as
translator than from the necessity for the French court to make peace with the
English court poet. Deschamps's poem serves as a means of building up cultural
connections before the French court's attempt to make political peace with the
English court.

In Chapter Three, I move on to Chaucer's translation from Latin (via
French), The Boece. By examining first the political elements of Boethius’s De
Consolatione Philosophiae, I emphasize that those aspects of Boethius’s work do
not remain as political innuendo but provide Boethius with a “consolation of
power” with which he can overcome his personal anguish. After briefly discussing
King Alfred’s translation of Boethius’s work as suppressing political implications
of Boethius’s work, I suggest that a possible political motive of Chaucer’s Boece
- his concern about Richard’s attempts to strengthen his governing power - can
be drawn from the history of the early 13805. I also suggest that, during the
period from the mid-13805 to 1399, Chaucer’s royalist concerns about a ruler’s
excessive empowerment, expressed by his act of translating The Boece, may

have potential resonance with the concerns of the king’s opponents, his

35

magnates, about the possible misuse of royal power during their antagonistic
rivalry against the king. And then, I discuss the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and
Criseyde, which are among the most prominently Boethian in their subject matter,
to find how skillfully Chaucer counterbalances the implied images of Richard in g
The Boece and the Knight’s Tale, and the degree to which he is or is not
convinced by Boethian clerical knowledge.

What we will see in the discussion of the Clerk’s Tale in Chapter Four is
how a medieval translation can serve power, more specifically the consolidation
of power under particular historical circumstances. The motive and the process of
Walter's creative translation of Griselda are closely examined to show that his
translation, which includes an invention of a new Griselda, is performed as
political propaganda, ultimately aimed at strengthening his governing power over
his land. My discussion of the Clerk’s Tale ends with the comparison of the two
translators, Walter and the Clerk, the latter of whom I will argue is an
unsuccessful translator for his lack of creation in the translation.

In Chapter Five, after reviewing the possible causes for the translations in
Chaucer’s time, I discuss the three characteristics of Chaucer as translator. By
translating, Chaucer could ascertain the reliability of English as a vernacular
medium and his role as translator. However, Chaucer is unusual as a translator
in that his Mo major translations, The Romaunt of the Rose and The Boece, may
have been prompted by political motives and, under changing political situations,
could have had political implications directly opposed to those intended by

Chaucer the translator.

36

CHAPTER TWO

I The Romaunt of the Rose

It may sound ironic to suggest that Chaucer, revered as the “father of
English poetry,” might have begun his early career composing not in English but
in French.36 Chaucer’s biographical facts, however, suggest the reason why he
might have composed in French in his earliest career:

Chaucer was brought up in a court still strongly Norman in its tastes and

ambitions, ruled by a French-speaking king who periodically laid claim to

the French throne. His schooling, we can be sure, was in French and Latin,

not in English... (Muscatine 5)

In addition to possibly writing in French, during his early career as a writer,
Chaucer was deeply immersed in French works. In particular, he was “a devoted
reader” (Borroff 17) of a thirteenth-century French allegorical poem, Le Roman
de la Rose, which resulted in his Middle English translation of the French work
into The Romaunt of the Rose.37

However, the Romaunt signified not just an English rendition of a popular

French work; more importantly, Chaucer’s translation also included in a subtle

way his personal resistance to dominant French culture and, by extension,

 

36 See Wimsatt, Chaucer and the Poems of ‘Ch’ 1-8. James Simpson suggests that Chaucer’s
composition of French poems is suggested by the poet’s reference to “many a song and
leccherous lay” as well as the Edwardian courtly practice:
It may be that Chaucer composed in French in his earliest career. The “many a song and
leccherous lay,” to which Chaucer confesses in the Retractions to the Canterbury Tales
(10.1087), might have been composed in French, as would have been consistent with literary
37 practice in the environment of the court of Edward Ill. (65)
Hereafter Le Roman de la Rose and Chaucer‘s Romaunt of the Rose are abbreviated as the
Roman and the Romaunt respectively.

37

France. What is striking about the Romaunt, however, is its changing fate: during
the peace-seeking period of 1390s, the Romaunt served as a tool to promote
peace between England and France —just the opposite of the role that Chaucer
the translator might have initially intended.

Before we move on to the discussion of the‘ political implications of the
Romaunt, however, it is necessary to examine briefly the controversy over
Chaucer’s authorship of the translation. Chaucer’s authorship of the Romaunt is
clearly suggested in his Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, in which he
makes his most extended reference to the Romaunt. In the Prologue, the God of
Love accuses the dreamer of having translated the Romaunt — and that is heresy
to Love’s religion:

“For thow,” quod he [the God of Love], “art therto nothing able.

Yt is my relyke, digne and delytable,

And thow my foo, and at my folk werreyest,

And of myn olde servauntes thow mysseyest,

And hynderest hem with thy translacioun,

And lettest folk from hire devocioun

To serve me, and holdest it folye

To serve Love. Thou maist yt nat denye;

For in pleyn text, withouten nede of glose,

Thou hast translated the Romaunce of the Rose,

That is an heresye ayeins my lawe,

And makest wise folk fro me withdrawe. (F. 320-31)

38

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In spite of the textual evidence for Chaucer‘s authorship of the Romaunt,
controversy over the authenticity of the three extant fragments of the Romaunt -
Fragment A (lines 1-1705 of the Roman), Fragment B (lines 1706-5810 of the
Roman), and Fragment C (lines 5811-7696 of the Roman) - has never been fully
resolved. Recent editors tend to accept only Fragment A as Chaucer’s, a I
fragment that contains “all of Guillaume de Lorris’s part...the seriously courtly
part” but omits Jean de Meun’s “academic” part (Howard 140).38 Although
Fragment A stops at line 1705, modern scholars argue that Chaucer’s translation
must originally have reached beyond that point, since, as quoted above, the God
of Love accuses the Romaunt of being “an heresye ayeins my lawe/ And makest
wise folk fro me withdrawe” (F. 330-31). However, because the courtly part by

Guillaume is no “heresye” against Love’s law, Chaucer probably translated at

 

3” In his modern English translation of the Roman, The Romance of the Rose, Charles Dahlberg
informs us of the unique authorship of the French work by the two authors at more than a forty-
year interval: ‘

The first 4058 lines are by Guillaume de Lorris, who, according to his name, was born in

Lorris, a village east of Orleans; the longer portion (4059-21780) is by Jean de Meun. In a

long speech (10495-678), Jean has the God of Love tell us that Guillaume began the

Romance but died before he had finished it. Then, more than forty years later, says the

God of Love, Jean Chopinel, born in Meung-sur-Loire (a village southwest of Orleans), will

continue the story. (Guillaume and Jean 1)
Following William Thynne, the editor of the 1532 edition of Chaucer’s works, the three fragments
were believed to be Chaucer’s entirely. However, recent editors accept only Fragment A, based
on a manuscript in the Hunterian collection in Glasgow University, as Chaucer’s on the basis of
the characteristic use of his rhymes. As Xiang Feng argues that Fragment A is a very literal
translation in which “Chaucer may have occasionally breached the rules of his general usage for
original composition for riming purposes” (67), the fragment is very close to Chaucer’s practice,
particularly to his rhymes. On the other hand, Fragment 8 includes un-Chaucerian rhyme and
Fragment C contains a great number of uncharacteristic rhymes, which make most editors of
Chaucer’s works unsure of their authenticity as works of Chaucer. However, about the exclusion
of Fragments B and C on the basis of “the evidence of certain rhymes which are considered to
belong to the Northern dialect,” Simon Horobin argues that “[t]he evidence of Chaucer's use of
third person singular forms of the present tense demonstrate the way in which a typically
‘Northern’ dialect feature was available to a London poet,” and “it is quite possible that he should
draw upon London variants in rhyme which he later rejected as their status changed and his
confidence and skill as a poet grew" (140). For a recent survey of Chaucer’s authorship of the
Romaunt and the three extant manuscripts, see The Romaunt of the Rose, ed. Charles Dahlberg
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1999), 3—24.

39

least some of Jean’s part (Howard 141).

Chaucer’s decision to translate the Roman into English is quite
reasonable, given that the Old French work was “one of the most popular,
influential and durable works of the entire Middle Ages” (Delany 98), one which
“rank[ed] second to none except the Bible and the Consolation of Philosophy’
(Lewis, Allegory of Love 157). However, Chaucer’s choice of the Roman for his
translation seems unlikely to have been prompted by his personal taste alone,
attracted by the reputation and quality of the French work. Instead, I would
suggest that Chaucer’s Romaunt should be understood as being “situated” within
the cultural and political background of the fourteenth-century England. To put it
another way, Chaucer’s translation can be seen as a political response on the
part of a young, emerging poet, not only displaying his aspiration of becoming a
successful poet, but also making a clandestine challenge against dominant
French culture, and by extension, against France. In short, Chaucer the
translator of the Romaunt was at once a faithful student of, and an indignant
resister against, prevailing French culture.

However, besides being a personal means of protesting prevailing French
literary culture, thus ultimately attacking France during the Hundred Years War,
Chaucer’s Romaunt plays a more significant political role during the last decade
of the fourteenth century. With the desire for peace growing both in England and
in France, the existence of Chaucer’s translation of the Romaunt becomes an
emblem of a peaceful relationship between England and France. As we will see

below, the French poet Eustache Deschamps uses the translation as a major

40

ground for his praise of Chaucer as successful cultural go-between and for his
implied commendation of the English culture and court that allow such a
translation to flourish. The Romaunt, which may have originally been intended by
Chaucer as a kind of challenge, albeit an admiring one, to France and its culture,
ironically becomes an instrument of peaceful relations between the English and

the French.

1. The Culture, Language, and Politics of Chaucer’s Romaunt
lf Chaucer undertook his translation of the Romaunt in the late 13603 — as
Derek Pearsall suggests, calling the translation “Chaucer’s first major poetic
enterprise, after some writing of love-songs in French and English” (Life 77)39 —
the translation should be an instance of “the constant interchange and cross
influence...in the late middle ages between England and France” (Wilkins 183).
.Although the Hundred Years War, overarching the whole life span of Chaucer
and beyond, was still under way, England and France shared a common culture
in the late 13603:
The decade after Poitiers, however, does not bespeak much real cultural
difference based upon any sense of ethnic distinctions at the highest levels
of aristocratic society in England. Captors and captives alike conversed in
French, they sang the same French songs...the noblemen and knights

who populate the Chronicles considered themselves members of a

 

39 Chaucer’s Romaunt is assigned to his early poetic career, and is believed to have been written
as a kind of poetic exercise. For example, in his article “Chaucer a3 a European Writer,” James
Simpson argues that “Chaucer made this translation [i.e. the Romaunt] certainly before the mid-

1 3803; it is plausible to imagine him doing it early in his career, as a kind of apprentice work” (65).

41

 

class I
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WESIT

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Eng’a
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sick, \
Engla

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chivalric elite which transcended national boundaries. (Bowers, “Retters”

93)

Keeping a common culture through the constant interchange of upper-
class cultural products, led the English and French alike to a prevailing sense
that the'Hundred Years War was a kind of family feud, a conflict between
brothers. The English tended to believe that “[t]he French were still feudal
cousins, bound by ancient family ties to the English, but also engaged in -
alliances and enmities with other relations” (Butterfield 56) while many of the
French leaned towards a belief that since England was “a rival sibling,” the war
was more like “a family conflict”:

[From the French point of view], the Hundred Years War is not so much

about two countries warring over territory but something more like a civil

war between two contrasting models of exercising power. The assertion of
right to the French throne by Edward lll looks less like a modern-style
annexing of a rival state, and more like a family conflict, a means of seizing

back control from a rival sibling. (Butterfield 52)

Similarly, in his letter to king Richard, bemoaning the Great Schism in which
England and France supported different popes, Philippe de Mézieres, a French
politician, “describes the church as a damaged woman...‘[who] lies in her bed,
sick, wounded, in. fragments, divided in two’,” and “imagines the kings [of
England and France] as two warring brothers, and describes them as each
possessing one half of his mother, and abandoning the other half ‘as chiens et as

oysiaux, afin qu’elle soit devouree’ (‘to be devoured by dogs and birds of prey’

42

 

[94, 21])."4° While condemning those who oppose peace, he further specifies the
relationship between the two countries as one of “Christian brothers”:

Let them be crushed and let them flee before the face of God. Let their

backs be bowed down for ever. Lord God, scatter and destroy all those
who seek war against their Christian brothers. Let the criesof the dead
and wounded by [sic] heard in their houses, their wives made widows and
their children orphaned.“1
What kept the common culture between the two countries alive, however,
were the widespread use of Anglo-Norman among the English, England’s
occupation of large territories in France, and Anglo-Franco marriages. First of all,
in the latter half of the fourteenth century, Anglo-Norman still held the position in
London as the dominant language of commerce and government administration,
not to mention the fact that the court and nobility helped to sustain the influx of
French culture to England:
Beyond London there are many indications that the lesser nobility and
gentry were losing Anglo-Norman. . . .But Gower and Chaucer moved in
bilingual London milieux where Anglo-Norman was still the dominant
language of record for guilds, government administration, law and noble
households. (Crane, “Anglo-Norman” 55)
King Richard’s good command of French, his early upbringing in France, and his

two F rench-speaking queens contributed to add French culture to his court:

 

‘° Philippe de Mézieres, Letter to Richard II: A Plea Made in 1395 for Peace Between England
and France, trans. G. W. Coopland (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1975), 21; quoted in
Marion Turner 173. .

‘1 Philippe de Mézieres 124; quoted in Marion Turner 173.

43

 

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“Richard (1377-99) was just as comfortable in French (if not more so) as in
English. Raised by his English mother’s family in Bordeaux, Richard married two
French speaking women, Anne of Bohemia and Isabelle of France” (Williams 19-
20). The familiarity of the aristocracy with Anglo-Norman42 also served to

enhance the influence of French culture as well as the Status of the language in
England: “If not the other tongue of the aristocracy, French was at the very least
a language learned from infancy, and it was associated with the upper echelons
of society” (Williams 20).

Secondly, English possessions of lands in France also allowed continuous
influence of English culture on French soil. The influence of the English H
occupation in France was most prominent in king Edward’s efforts to repopulate
Calais with Englishmen after his conquest of the city in 1347, thus making it
eventually “a stopping place en route to continental Europe or to higher benefices
or political places back home” (Wallace, Premodem 44):

Within days of entering Calais, it seems, Edward had proclamations read

in the north and east of England, promising liberties and commercial

privileges to would-be Calais residents. About 190 such tenures were
registered in the Patent Rolls of 1347, followed by analogous concessions

in the French Rolls. (Wallace, Premodem 39-40)

Thirdly, but no less importantly, marriages between the English and the

French served to maintain a common culture, mostly French culture, between the

 

‘2 It was true that “many nobles could speak no French,” but “many fourteenth-century noblemen
still favoured French, both in their reading and their talk,” including Henry, Duke of Lancaster,
who composed a religious work, Le Livre de Seyntz Medicines, in French (Burrow 20).

44

 

 

of
the

thu-

two peoples. Besides the above-mentioned marriages between Richard II and
two French-speaking women, Henry IV married in 1402 a royal lady from Brittany,
in the north-west of France - Jeanne de Navarre, widow of John IV, duke of
Brittany, and the second daughter of Charles II, king of_ Navarre and Jeanne de
Valois, daughter of John ll, king of France (Jenes Vll. 1-2).

As we have seen, the war between England and France provided the two
countries with favorable conditions for “cultural exchange” as well:

The drawn-out conflict of the Hundred Years War, if anything, reinforced

mutual contacts and influences with the frequent presence of the English in

large numbers south of the Channel, the continual to-and-fro of
ambassadors and proclamations. Certain moments in these campaigns
stand out from the general troubled and complex background as

particularly favorable to cultural exchange. (Wilkins 183)

It is true that for all English people, including Chaucer himself, the war supplied
“a time of curiously intimate as well as adversarial contact with France” (Crane,
“Anglo-Norman” 52).

The cultural exchange between England and France, however, was not
that of equal partners: in the late 13603, the English court and aristocracy were
both heavily influenced by French culture, with England being mainly an importer
of French culture. As John M. Bowers argues, in spite tof their victory at Poitiers,
the English were no match for the French in the field of “cultural competition,”
thus allowing “French cultural dominance” thereafter:

[W]hile the English had been victorious at Poitiers, they suffered a severe

45

disadvantage in the arena of cultural competition. So total was French

cultural dominance, it was a contest in which the English hardly-realized

that they were capable of competing. (“Retters” 92-93)

The subordination of English culture to French culture is attested most
strikingly in the hierarchical relations of Anglo-Norman and English. As Deanne
Williams points out, since Anglo-Norman was the language of the upper class
and the educated few, speaking that language was an indication of the speaker's
higher social class as well as a promise of success in professional fields:

The social stratification between those who spoke French and those who

did not produced the nagging sense that the English language possessed

certain barbarous qualities. The categories of French and English imply not

only linguistic and cultural but also class identities: speaking French serve
to mark not only sophistication, but also class hierarchies, to mystify

relations'of power, and to legitimate mechanisms of social exclusion. (20)

It was, then, especially significant for a poet at the beginning of his career
to learn or absorb advanced literary techniques and themes from French
literature,43 a sort of “literary capital” (Simpson 65) that would later be used for
his literary works:

As an early effort at securing this status [as a court poet], Chaucer’s

translation of the Roman de la Rosa brought into courtly English the full

 

‘3 For discussions of Chaucer’s comprehensive indebtedness to French literary techniques and
themes, see for example, Charles Muscatine, Chaucer and the French Tradition: A Study in Style
and Meaning (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), and James I. Wimsatt, Chaucer
and His French Contemporaries: Natural Music in the Fourteenth Century (Toronto and Buffalo:
University of Toronto Press, 1991 ).

46

 

manr
DEVI
quter
thems
(Pean

Roma
vogue
Chaur
Thel-
hvet
hower
tang

andtr

sensibility of French poetry along with the psychology and value-laden

imagery of aristocratic love. (Bowers, Chaucer 24)

To begin with, in the act of his translating the Roman, Chaucer could find
character types he later used in his most memorable personages. For example,
the Wife of Bath may have been inspired by La Vieille of the Roman, who bears
quite close similarities in that both women are well aware of how to make
themselves attractive to men and emphasize their speaking from experience
(Pearsall, Canterbury Tales 72).

However, one of the most significant influences on Chaucer from the
Roman is the use of the dream vision as a framework which was in “exceptional
vogue in the late medieval period” (Minnis, Shorter Poems 36). As is well-known,
Chaucer’s dream poems - The Book of the Duchess, The Pariiament of FowIs,
The House of Fame, and the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women — take the
love-vision as their form. By redefining the nature of love-vision in his poems,
however, Chaucer responds innovatively to conventional love-vision topoi. To put
it another way, Chaucer extends the subject of the dream poems, the pleasures
and travails of love in the Roman, to serious explorations of such questions as
what value a dream may have or, more specifically, whether a dream is
potentially a vehicle of truth. Yet Chaucer's questioning of the potential
truthfulness of a dream is not limited only to his dream poems; although not as
extensively as in his dream poems, Chaucer indicates his continuing interest in
the same question in his later works, Troilus and Criseyde and the Nun 's Priest's

Tale.

47

 

It is evident that Anglo-Franco cultural relations drew Chaucer into
translating the Roman, one of the most popular French literary works, into
English, thereby learning the literary techniques and conventions of the French
work. However, Chaucer’s choice of the Roman for his translation must also be
one of his responses to the changing status of the two vernaculars of medieval
England, Anglo-Noman and English, early in his poetic career. The latter half of
the 13603 is characterized by the beginning of the reestablishment of English, -
concurrent with the decline of the Anglo-Norman use, which Basil Cottle has
labeled the “Triumph of English”:

The reigns of Edward Ill and Richard II (1327-99) see both a resurgence of

mainland French influence in English literature and the beginning of a

decline in the role of insular French...in this century Anglo-Norman ceases

to be the foremost language for imaginative and personal writing in

England, and surprisingly in the very decades when the influence of

continental court poets...was at its height. Most visible in the careers of

John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer, the turn to writing in English

anticipates a broader shift under the Lancastrians. (Crane, “Anglo-Norman”

52)

Concerning the decline of Anglo-Norman, Susan Crane points out that “the
heightened contact and competition with France of the Hundred Years War”
(“Anglo-Norman” 52) brought home to the English the differences between
Parisian French and Anglo-Norman: “It became evident in England, particularly

as the decades of war led to closer interaction, that Anglo-Norman had become

48

._ '1‘
-l-L _,
. EL. .

not merely the dialect of a particular region but inferior and incorrect” (“Anglo-
Norrnan” 56). Crane continues to argue that the “mobility and expansiveness” of
English gave rise to English as an “alternative” to Anglo-Norman (“Anglo-
Norman” 57),

The drastic change of language use in schools during the 13603 is clearly
indicated in contrasting records of language use in England in Ralph Higden’s
complaint about the general use of Anglo-Norman in the schools in his
Polychronicon (c. 1327) and John Trevisa’s English translation of his Latin work
in 1387. At the end of the first book of the Polychronicon, Higden observes that
English school children were compelled to learn grammar In Anglo-Norman
rather than their mother tongue:

This apayrynge of be burbe tunge is bycause of tweie binges; oon is

for children in scole a3enst be vsage and manere of alle obere nacioun

beeb compelled for to leue hire owne langage, and for to construe hir

lessouns and here bynges in F rensche, and so bey haueb seb be

Normans come first in to Engelond. And also gentil men children beeb

l-tau3t to speke Frensche from be tyme bet bey beeb l-rokked in here

cradel, and kunneb speke and playe wib a childes broche; and
vplondisshe men wil Iikne hym self to gentil men, and fondeb wib greet
besynesse for to speke Frensce, for to be [more] l-tolde of. (Baugh and

Cable 146)

This situation, however, changed after the Plague, as Trevisa observes in his

added passages on the contemporary situation:

49

 

 

bis manere was moche l-vsed to fore be firste moreyn and is sibbe
sumdel l-chaunged; for lohn Comwaile, a maister of grammer,
chaunged be lore in gramer scole and construccioun of Frensche in to
Englische; and Richard Pencriche lemed bat manere techynge of hym
_ and obere men of Pencrich; so bat now, be 3ere of cure Lorde a _
bowsand bre hundred and foure score and fyue, and of be secounde
kyng Richard after be conquest nyne, in alle be gramere scoles of
Engelond, children leueb F rensche and construeb and lerneb an
Englische, and haueb berby auauntage in con side and disauauntage in
anober side. (Baugh and Cable 147)
It is during this general change from Anglo-Norman to English that Chaucer was
working on his Romaunt. Crane suggests that the Romaunt actually helped to
“facilitate" the change in language use: “Thus it seems likely that
Chaucer’s...decision to write in English facilitated, rather than followed on, a shift
in [his] London milieux from Anglo-Norman to English” (“Anglo-Nontran” 58).
However, what should be also taken into consideration in discussing
Chaucer’s translation of the Romaunt is not just that he was a faithful imitator of
French culture and that his translation served to make it easier for English to
substitute for Anglo-Norman. Chaucer’s personal, immediate experiences of
French men and culture through his captivity at the siege of Reims“4 gave him

motive to take on the additional role as an indignant resistant against dominant

 

“ Besides his captivity at a French camp in Reims, Chaucer also had opportunities to experience
French culture during his journeys to France during 1368-70 with John of Gaunt’s expeditionary
force and 1376-79 for international diplomacy (Hanly 155).

50

French culture.

In the so-called Scrope-Grosvenor hearings before the High Court of
Chivalry in 1386, Chaucer’s testimony is recorded, along with his captivity near
Reims”5 during the campaign in France (Pratt 1-2), which was “prompted by the
failure of the French to keep the terms of the treaty” at Poitiers in 1356 (Pearsall,
Life 41). The young Chaucer was captured while he was serving “under Prince
Lionel in the division led by the Black Prince that took this route on the way to
Reims, which was then besieged from early December 1359 until January 1360”
(Bowers, “Retters” 94). After spending several weeks or even months languishing
in French captivity, Chaucer was ransomed for £16 contributed by Edward lll
(Pearsall, Life 40).

Chaucer’s captivity at Reims provided him with both opportunities to
encounter great French poets, or at least some of their poetry, and frustration
from sufferings as prisoner. On the one hand, during his captivity, Chaucer might
have had occasions to meet with Eustache Deschamps - then “Europe’s
foremost poet and composer,” who was in Reims “assisting in the defense of that
city” (Brown 190) — and Guillaume de Machaut, who was “a canon of the
cathedral and endured the siege inside the city walls” (Bowers, Chaucer 50).

Being a captive in a French territory, however, probably did not allow
Chaucer to meet his literary predecessors; for Chaucer, it may even have meant

a terrible, unbearable experience, suffering from appalling foreign weather,

 

‘5 The symbolic importance of the city of Reims as the site where “the kings of France were
traditionally crowned” made it “the major target of the 1359-60 campaign” of Edward III who
intended “to have himself crowned there” (Pearsall, Life 41).

5]

starvation, and threats of violence, as is found in “the documented horrors of
other English captives”:

They suffered the common misery of freezing weather and scarce food.

They were mocked and humiliated by their French captors. And they lived

with the constant threat of chains, long-term imprisonment, and quick,

violent death — or slow, miserable death - far from home and family.

(Bowers, Chaucer 53)

How he might have suffered from psychic trauma of his experience in French
hands is well demonstrated in his “later reluctance to glorify warfare” and his not
giving “military encounters much heroic notice” (Bowers, “Retters” 95). It is highly
probable that “Chaucer’s captivity provided grounds for his career-long antipathy
toward the French and all things French” (Bowers, Chaucer 52).

From the discussion of Chaucer as ardent student of French culture and as
English captive with a deep dislike of the French, it becomes evident that he had
markedly ambivalent attitudes towards French culture, at once a model of his
literary creation and a detestable one. That Chaucer had equivocal attitudes
towards French culture is clearly supported by his treatment of literary
characters46 who “give voice to the prevailing sense of linguistic and cultural

inferiority” (Williams 20) and who reflect pervasive “contempt for the French” in

 

‘6 Among Chaucer’s characters, the Prioress and the Friar are exemplary in representing
Chaucer's ambiguous attitude toward French language and culture. In the General Prologue to
The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer describes that the Prioress spoke the insular Anglo-Norman, not
continental French, thereby exalting Paris and degrading Stratford: “After the scole of Stratford
atte Bowe,/ For Frenssh of Parys was to hire unknowe” (125-26). On the other hand, the Friar’s
use of French in his attempt to deceive the rustic couple in the Summoner’s Tale (“ je vous dy,”
“je vous dy sanz doute”1832, 1838) IS a clear indication that French was seen “as an instrument

of underhandedness” (Hanly 151).

52

“popular and even clerical discourse” (Bowers, “Retters” 93):

On the one hand, some of Chaucer’s English characters manifest a sort of

“inferiority complex” in regard to the language and culture of France; but at

the same time, since the French‘spoken by his characters sometimes

serves ignorant and even debased. purposes, France and its language can
be seen in the text as a medium not of refinement but of vulgarity. (Hanly

150)

Chaucer is not alone, however, in taking an ambiguous stance toward the
opposing culture. On French side, Eustache Deschamps’s attitude toward the
English was equivocal too: C.

At times his poetry manifests rather modem-sounding partisanship for

France and dislike of the English. This dislike was fuelled by events of the

war, especially the burning by the English of his natal home at Vertus in

1380. At the same time, no antipathy is apparent in his personal friendship

with Lewis Clifford or in his admiration for the valour of Guischard d’Angle.

(Wimsatt, French Contemporaries 244)

Although his attitude toward French culture is ambiguous and his case is
not extraordinary, Chaucer’s distinctive uses of a mocking tone toward the
Roman in his translation are remarkable. While he was learning French literary
devices through his translation of the Roman, he was also weakening the
authority of the French work by adding Iooseness, colloquialism, and
enjambment in his English translation, thereby making his translation more like

an English poem.

53

Wrth all its faithfulness to the source, Chaucer’s Romaunt is also distinct
from the Roman for its lobse rendering of the French version in order to form
adequate rhymes in English.47 For example, the following two lines from
Guillaume de Lorris are expanded to four lines in Chaucer’s English translation:

Qu’Amors le' me prie e comande. .

E se nule ne nus demande (Roman 33-34)

For Love it prayeth, and also

Commaundeth me that it be so.

And if there any aske me, '

Whether that it be he or she... (Romaunt 33-36)
The major reason for the expansion in the English translation is to form adequate
rhymes. In lines 33—34 of the Roman, two French verbs are allocated in lines one
.and two of the Romaunt separately, thus allowing the two lines to be rhymed with
“also" and “so.” On the other hand, in the second couplet of the Romaunt, the
second line of the French version is rendered into line three in English translation
but a new line, the fourth line, is added to make the couplet rhyme with “me" and
“she.” The rest of the two lines in French remains unaltered in the translation but
the wording of the translation becomes loose.

Chaucer’s Romaunt is also characterized by its tendency toward

 

‘7 Though she characterizes the Romaunt as a translation with “near minimal change” from the
Roman and with “high degree of fidelity to the source,” Caroline D. Eckhardt also observes that
“the A fragment of the Romaunt is slightly longer than the analogous part of the Roman.
Sutherland’s parallel text shows a gain of fifty lines in the Romaunt, a gain involving several
techniques of expansion” (“Art of Translation” 48, 49, 57).

54

colloquialism, replacing a highly rhetorical expression in the Roman with “an
informal or plain word” (Eckhardt, “Art of Translation” 59). In the very opening
lines, the Romaunt “considerably reduces the density of verbal repetition” of the
Roman such as “songes/ songes songier” and “menconges/ mencongier”
(Eckhardt, “Art of Translation” 60): V

Maintes genz dient que en songes

-N’a se fables non et menconges;

Mes l’en puet tex songes songier

Que ne sont mie mencongier... (Roman 1-4)

Many men sayn that in sweveninges

Ther nys but fables and lesynges;

But men may some swevenes sen

Whiche hardely that false ne ben... (Romaunt1-4).
It is clear that, as Eckhardt points out, Chaucer’s Romaunt achieves “naturalness
and simplicity” at the expense of “rhetorical complexity” in the Roman: “As the
English lines diminish in formal rhetorical complexity, they lose the almost
incantatory reiteration of the word for dreaming, but they increase in naturalness
and simplicity” (“Art of Translation” 60).

Another closely related characteristic of the Romaunt, though not entirely
original with his translation, is that he resorts to enjambment frequently in his
translation. For example, together with line 115 (“Cam doun the strem ful stif and

bold”), lines 116-17 in the Romaunt (“Cleer was the water, and as cold/ As any

55

welle is, soth to seyne”) “not only contribute to the run-on effect, but also
simulates the rippling hurried movement of the stream as it flows down the hill”
(Weiss 176)“:

D’un tetre qui pres d’ilec iere

Desoendoit I’eue fort e roide. A

Clere estoit l’eue e aussi froide

Come puis ou come fontaine (Roman 108-11)

For from an hill that stod ther ner,

Cam doun the strem ful stif and bold.

Cleer was the water, and as cold

As any welle is, soth to seyne (Romaunt 114-17)
The three characteristics of the Romaunt — loose rendering, colloquialism, and
enjambment — are clearly indicative of Chaucer’s sense-for-sense translation
method in his translation enterprise, sometimes even failing to reproduce the
vitality and richness of the Roman. However, what the Romaunt attains instead is
to enrich its Englishness: it reads or sounds like an English poem.49

As Paul Strohm argues, Chaucer’s original audience consisted mainly of

 

‘8 Alexander Weiss notes that enjambment, which is “commonplace throughout the section of the
Roman composed by Guillaume de Lorris,” is “a device. . .that was to remain a characteristic
feature of his [Chaucer’s] later poetry” ( 175).
‘9 Eckhardt finds the excellence of Chaucer's translation in “the right balance between familiarity
and distance” by making his translation at once “no longer alien in English” yet not “thoroughly
English”:
The text is naturalized enough that it is no longer alien in English, but not naturalized to
the extent of becoming thoroughly English, as, presumably, Chaucer could have made it
become. The Roman has thus been transformed into an English near-equivalent that still
carries with it the prestige, sophistication, and courtliness associated with its original, along
with much (if we can hear it) of the actual sound of the original words (“Art of Translation” 50).

56

his “social and literary circle,” that is, “those gentlepersons in service” as well as
“a few London intellectuals” (Social Chaucer 50). However, as is attested in his
frequent references to “yheere” or “herkne,” Chaucer’s literary works were
transmitted largely through public oral recitation, so it was necessary for him “to
f shape his verse so that its rhythms were compatible with the natural accentual
patterns of fourteenth-century English, approximating the rhythms of the native
language as spoken and heard day to day” (Weiss 174). For his intended
audience of the Romaunt, who might have had difficulty in reading French literary
works but would have been ready to listen to his English translation in public, the
Romaunt is rendered into a translation for easy understanding and with natural
colloquialism.5o

However, the Iooseness and colloquialism in the Romaunt, which make the
translation available not only to Chaucer’s social equals but also to the wider
bourgeois audience, undermines the authority of the Roman as a monopoly of
the aristocracy. C. S. Lewis’s observation about Guillaume de Lorris’s

presentation of the opening of the Roman suggests what the intended audience

of the French poem may have been:

 

5° That Chaucer‘s target audience was not the masses but primarily those in the upper class is
well supported by Alison Comish’s observation on vernacular translation from Latin in later Middle
Ages and the Renaissance: .
However, although the authoritative text in late medieval and early modern translation was
indeed moved from the old imperial language (Latin) into common speech, this translation
was done for the sake of those in positions of secular authority. The first wave of
translations into European vernaculars was motivated by the very peculiar situation that
the prestigious and “transcendent” language had become alien or incomprehensible to the
class in power.

The rise of vernacular literature was already an indication that power had become, so
to speak, unlettered. The ocean of translation produced in Italy and France in the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was no democratic initiative to educate the masses;
they were intended, rather, to accommodate a linguistic handicap of the prominent and

well-to—do. (166)

57

Suppose, then, that you are a youth born into higher ranks of a feudal
society. You have just emerged from the restraints of boyhood. Your life '
is in the spring, and all the world is opening to you. As yet no
determinate ambitions have been formed. The life of the court, not yet
envisaged as the basis of advancement, but as mere living, as a self-
sufficient paradise of wit and love and revelry, has drawn to itself all
your desires. (Allegory of Love 125) -
The Roman, created for the aristocracy in a feudal system, is transformed into
the Romaunt, which could be also more widely enjoyed by the bourgeoisie, just
as French romances are transformed on English soil: N
What is most significant in English romances is the nature of the
adaptation of the older French chivalric, aristocratic romances for a
lower social class: although they are derivative, the English romances
are distinct in their strategic borrowing of older material, meant for
another social milieu but modified by the increasing favour in which the

religious piety of the heroes and heroines is viewed. (Coleman 41)

2. “The Quest for Peace, 1389-98"51

For Chaucer, the translation of the Romaunt both opens up a way to learn
French literary conventions, and, more importantly, provides him with a space in
which he can play upon, or even satirize, the Roman. Moreover, like any other

vernacular translation, the Romaunt might serve as a crib for those who are

 

5‘ The section title is borrowed from Nigel Saul, Richard II (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1997), 205.

58

ignorant of French or who wish to gain access to the Roman more easily.

Chaucer’s Romaunt, however, began to play a significant political role as a
medium of peace when the wars between England and F ranoe turned toward
what Hanly has called an “Anglo-French détente” in the 13903 (158). The
Romaunt, originally at least partly a means of satirizing French culture for
Chaucer, turned now into a useful tool contributing to peace between England
and France. A discussion of the development of the Hundred Years War will
show the change of attitudes toward war which securely turned their direction to
peace between England and France from 1389, and will lead us to a better
understanding of the political function of Chaucer’s Romaunt during the quest for
peace between the two countries.

Caused by Edward lll’s ambition for the French throne in 1337,52 the
Hundred Years War lasted until 1453 with alternating wars and truces. Over one
hundred years of wartime can be divided into three distinctive periods: from 1337
to 1369, a period of supremacy of the English over the French in war; from 1369
to 1389, a period of losing wars for the English; and from 1389 and to 1399, a
period of promoting peace between the two countries.

In the early years of the Hundred Years War, the English overwhelmed the
French on the battlefield and could, therefore, expand their governing power over

French territory. With great victories at Crécy (1346) and Poitiers (1356), king

 

52 Although Edward lll claimed the throne of France by hereditary right to perpetuate England’s
rule over Aquitaine, “the large region of south-west France, that came into English royal
possession with the marriage of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the twelfth century”
(Butterfield 52), his claim became “no more than a legal fiction, and in practical terms what had to
be resolved was the limits and status of Aquitaine” for which various plans were presented
(Harriss 419).

59

 

Edward’s “possessions in France were greater than at any time since 1204,” and
the vastness of the regions conceded to Edward Ill made them “difficult to defend
and expensive to occupy” (Rigby 38-39). It should be emphasized, however, the
continuous victories of the English on the continent were made possible by the
cooperation of the king and nobility:

King and nobility were united through the shared purpose - and joint

benefits - which the war brought. To encourage support for the war among

the nobility and gentry, Edward, and his eldest son, Edward, the Black

Prince, consciously promoted the aristocratic code of chivalry. (Rigby 38)

When the war resumed in 1369 after a'decade of peace, however, the
hegemony of the English in war did not sustain itself; the English began to lose
wars against the French. The contrasting political situations in the two countries
contributed to bring victories to France but defeats to England. While the French
were. rehabilitating their regal power and armed forces by reviving the monarchy
under Charles V,53 and by the use of reinforced war strategy by the king and his
able commander, Bertrand du Guesclin (Harriss 411), the English were troubled
by the weakening leadership of the aging Edward III and the invalid Black Prince,
who died in 1376.

Losing the war against the French, however, meant to the English more
than having “no victories to celebrate”; it also compelled them to give up the
lands in the French territory conquered by Edward III, for which they had to suffer

high taxation, including the poll taxes that were among the causes leading to the

 

53 Since king John of France was captured by the English during the war at Poitiers (1356), the
French had to suffer from instability and insecurity until the coronation of Charles V in 1364.

60

Rising of 1381 (Saul, Richard II 206).

Recurrent defeats in the war against the French and consequent losses of
lands in France after 1369 resulted in “a growing disenchantment with the war”
among the English (Saul, Richard II 206), which led to a changed attitude of the
English toward thewar with France. The parliament and the elite began to give
voice to the failure of the court in administering the war and the unjustness of the
war:

One response, strongly articulated in parliament, was to blame the court

for corruption and failure of leadership and to call for reforms which would

lessen the need for taxation. Another, widespread among the educated
and articulate elite, was to question the justness of the war and the

righteousness of those who waged it. (Saul, Richard II 206)

Adding to the general disillusionment with the war in parliament and among the
elite was Richard ll’s own opposition to the war, connected to his domestic
strategy and stemming from his lofty nature:

Almost certainly, he [Richard] saw a settlement with France as a means of

relieving the fiscal burden on his subjects and removing the opportunities

which the crown’s financial weakness offered to its opponents. But
considerations of this kind seem to have weighed with him a good deal
less than those of a loftier nature. The king was moved by a genuine

abhorrence of the shedding of blood between Christians. (Saul, Richard II

207)

Wrth the anti-war sentiment growing in the leading strata of English society,

6]

 

a fear of direct invasion by the French drove the English to move away from
supporting the war with France. Although during the war, the battlefields were
mainly confined to the French territory and south coast of England, the English
suffered from occasional threats of French invasion into London:
On occasion the war came nearer home. It was feared that the French
would seize the opportunity provided by the death of Edward III to attack
not only the south coast but also to sail up the Thames to London....While lP
Richard was away on campaign in Scotland in the summer of 1385, there in
was a further fear of French invasion and men were rushed to the coast.
(Barron 138) .
During the years from 1386 to 1389, Richard’s peace policy with France
developed in close connection with the confrontation between Richard and his
magnates. Whereas the early victories of the war with France depended on the
cooperative relationship between Edward Ill and his magnates, as noted above,
Richard’s peace negotiations with France came more and more into conflict with
the desires and needs of the magnates, who wished not only to continue the war
with France but also to revive the king’s patronage of themselves:
Insofar as Richard turned away for the war, he lessened his dependence
on the feudal aristocracy and frustrated their interests in war-making.
Insofar as he turned to others for the running of the government, the
magnates were less often the recipients of the king’s patronage, just at the
time when they were not reaping the profits of the war. (Ferster, Fictions

79-80)

62

The political conflict between Richard and his nobility emerged
conspicuously in the Wonderful Parliament of 1386, when “the threat of a French
descent on the realm was still real” (Saul, Richard II 157). The first phase of the
parliament of 1386 was the demand by the lords and commons for the removal of
Chancellor de la Pole: “As soon as de la Pole made known his demand for
taxation, the lords and commons together called for his dismissal — adding ...a
veiled reference to impeachment” (Saul, Richard II 157). Moreover, the king
himself was threatened with deposition by his magnates. As Knighton’s Chronicle
informs us, when the king retreated to his palace at Eltham displeased with the
demand for the dismissal of the Chancellor at the assembly, Gloucester and
Arundel, two leading magnates, threatened the king with deposition:

They [Gloucester and Arundel] inform the king of his dereliction of duty, his

responsibility to respond to the needs of the community, his need for better

counsel, and the threat that, if better government were not forthcoming, “it
would be lawful with the common assent and agreement of the people of
the realm (cum communi assensu et consensu populi regnr) to put down
the king from his royal seat, and raise another of the royal lineage in his
place. (Giancarlo165)54

The second phase of the parliament of 1386 was directed to parliamentary
accusations against members of the king’s household. As Member of Parliament

for Kent in 1386, Chaucer may have been particularly concerned by “the

vehemence with which this assembly attacked the king’s household” (Giancarlo

 

5“ The original quotation is from Knighton, Chronicle, 355-61, 361.

63

165).55 The attacks on, and efforts to reform, the royal household were made by
a council, whose primary task was “to implement thefinancial reforms that de la
Pole and his [royal] master had earlier circumvented” (Saul, Richard II 161) and
which eventually succeeded in reforming the king’s household and doing justice
to Richard’s former unworthy'advisers:

They [the councillors] had reduced the backlog of royal debt and had

brought a measure of order to the finances of the household; and they had

gone some way to providing remedies for those to whom justice had

previously been denied. (Saul, Richard II 166)

After the Wonderful Parliament“ of 1386, Richard’s pursuit of peace with the
French was substantially hindered by the parliament’s control of the royal
household and the magnates’ threat to depose the king. However, it was in the
Merciless Parliament of 1388 that Richard’s peace policy was critically damaged
because, in their thirty-nine accusations, Richard’s opponents closely intertwined
the peace-making efforts of the king and his advisors with “treasonous
desires...to surrender lands to France in return for the French king’s help in
murdering the Lords Appellant” (Turner 168):

Also, the aforesaid Alexander etc, and others his fellows, accroaching to

themselves royal power, caused the king to promise to the French king by

the said letters and messages, in order to gain the aid and support of the

said French king and his power for the accomplishing of these high

 

55 About the relevance of the 1386 Parliament to Chaucer's life, Lee Patterson observes that
“Chaucer was also a victim of the 1386 Parliament. He lost his two positions in the Custom, gave
up the rent-free lease on his house over Aldgate, and over the next two years continued to be
harassed by both the aristocratic opposition and financial insecurity” (Chaucer 159).

64

treasons of betrayal and murder, that he would give up and surrender to
the said French king the town and castle of Calais and all his other castles
and fortresses...56
By accusing theking’s advisors of treason and removing them from the court, the
Lords Appellant succeeded in recovering “their customary role as advisors'to the
crown” (Patterson, Chaucer 157):

- When, during the Merciless Parliament of 1388, de Vere was appealed of
treason along with Michael de la Pole, Robert Tresilian, Nicholas Brembre,
and the archbishop of York, the Appellants installed themselves and their
partisans on the council, reasserting what they took to be their rightful
place in the king’s government. (Ferster, Fictions 80)

However, after their ruthless removal of Richard’s favorites, the Lords
Appellant could not keep their governing power continuously. First of all, their
association of peace with treason in the article of appeal was exaggerated, and
failed to gain the general support of the English people, even though “through a
fudged association of giving up French lands — a deeply emotive issue — with a
betrayal of the lords, the article manages loosely to associate peace with treason,
shame, and deceit” (Turner 170). Moreover, a breach in the unity of the
Appellants also weakened their power. While the “personal ambition of
Gloucester nearly destroyed the unity of the Appellants,” the younger Appellants,
Derby and Nottingham, widened the wedge between the elder Appellants and

themselves by failing to realize “the depths of Richard’s powers of dissimulation”

 

5" Westminster Chronicle 263; quoted in Marion Turner’s Chaucerian Conflict,169.

65

(McFadane 34, 36). Most importantly, however, they were wielding the same kind
of power that they criticized the'king for: “As the Merciless Parliament dragged on
over months, it became increasingly clear that the Appellants were themselves
indulging in the kinds of abuses they purported to punish” (Giancarlo 167),
The scanty grounds for the accusation of Richard’s advisdrs as traitors, the
breakdown of the Appellants’ coalition, and their authoritarian exercise of power
brought their fall within a year after the Merciless Parliament and Richard’s
regaining of his regal power. With his recuperated regality, Richard could bring a
his peace policy with France to fruition: the two countries reached a truce June

1369.57

3. Deschamps’s Ballade to Chaucer
While Richard was leading peace negotiations with France in England, it
was Philippe de Mezieres who “was the most outspoken and fervent promoter of
peace between France and England” on the French side:
A French politician, writer, and counsellor who lived from c. 1327 to 1405,
he [Philippe] fervently longed for a united Christendom, for the formation of
his brainchild, the Order of the Passion, and for the destruction of the
infidel. (Turner 171) 5"

Philippe’s “desperate awareness of out-of-control aggression [among Christian

 

57 The initial agreement for a three-year truce was renewed in 1392, and continued to be renewed
thereafter year after year.

5° The Order of the Passion of Jesus Christ, an international crusading order, of which Oton de
Grandson was a leader, “recognized a threat from the east” and “dedicated [itself] to the
restoration of peace in Christendom, ending the schism, and mounting a unified crusade against
the Ottoman Turks” (Brown 192). Moreover, this order “provided the French and English nobility
with both the foundation and the agenda to end The Hundred Years War" (Brown 189).

66

countries], an aggression which he fears will destroy Christendom” led him to
suggest in his letter to Richard II that “Richard should marryCharles Vl’s
daughter. . .to further peace between Charles VI and Richard, and to cement this
peace with a marriage” (Turner 173, 174). It is in this milieu of promoting peace
_ on both sides of England and France that Eustache Deschamps’s. acclamatory
ballade to Chaucer was composed.

Chaucer, in fact, was not the only one to whom Deschamps’s eulogistic
praise was addressed in poems. Deschamps praised his contemporary, the poet
Machaut, calling him “worldly God of harmony” and “the noble rhetorician”
(Wimsatt, French Contemporaries 251). He also wrote an encomiastic ballade to
Christine de Pizan, responding to her laudatory letter. He addressed her as
“eloquent Muse among the nine...Nonpareil...in understanding and learning” and
he beseeched her to allow him “[t]o be among your attendants as your servant so
as to well gain knowledge from studying with you” (lines 1-3, 32-33, in Wimsatt,
French Contemporaries 251-52). In his encomiums of Machaut and Pizan,
Deschamps is remarkable in his “polite flattery and self-abasement” (Wimsatt,
French Contemporaries 252), from which it is clear that his eulogistic ballade to
Chaucer is not unusual as a friendly textual exchange between prominent writers.

What is exceptional about the ballade, however, is that Deschamps’s
great praise of the English court poet seems to be incompatible with his often-
expressed hatred for the English:

In 1383 Deschamps urged [king] Charles to reaffirm his love of arms and

show his enemies no mercy. Indeed, up until 1386 he expresses a

67

vehement hatred for the English....Even five years later (during, or even
after-the period when Lowes dates the “Ballade to Chaucer”), and
apparently still very embittered against the English, Deschamps urges his
countrymen to victory on the eve of the ill-fated. invasion effort of 1386.
(Brown 199)

Deschamps’s intense antipathy against the English is well expressed in his

outrage against “English extension into France,” particularly “the loss of Calais”:
Frenchmen, down to Charles de Gaulle (who married a local girl in the

English-style parish church still standing in Calais) have not been unifome

enchanted by this English extension into France. Eustache Deschamps
certainly felt the loss of Calais with particular sharpness; one of his
pastourelle refrains emphasizes that there can be no peace so long as the
English remain in occupation: ‘Paiz n’arez ja s’ilz ne rendent Calays.’
(Wallace, “Chaucer” 160-61)59
As David Wallace argues, Deschamps’s interest was not “a new French
conquest of England”; he was “simply outraged by the English presence in
France” because of “a sense of nobility that would seek deep roots in the
land” (Wallace, “Chaucer” 187).
Deschamps’s enmity to the English, however, is most prominently revealed
in another of his ballades - composed when he was “dispatched by Charles VI to

inspect French defenses in Picardy” — in which he describes the two English men

 

5° [‘There will not be peace if they do not give up Calais.’] The French text is from Eustache
Deschamps, Oeuvres completes, ed. Auguste Henri Edouard Queux de Saint-Hilaire and Gaston
Raynaud, Societé des Anciens Textes F rancais, 11 vols (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1878-1903), item
344, lines 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 56; cited in Wallace “Chaucer" p. 181, n. 7.

68

whom he met in Calais as tailed creatures:
L’un me dist: ‘dogue,’ l’autre: ‘ride’;
Lors me devint la coulour bleue:
‘Goday,’ fair l’un, l’autre: ‘commidre.’

Lors dis: ‘Oil, je voy vo queue.’

[One said to me ‘dog,’ the other ‘ride’; My coloring then turned blue (pale):

‘Goodday,’ said one, the other: ‘come hither.’ I said to them: ‘Yes, I see

your tails.’]60

Deschamps’s adversarial attitude toward the English, however, was quite
reversed when he began to see the wars between France and England as a
conflict between erring Christian countries:

Thereafter,‘31 Deschamps moves away from the notion that the English are

the sole source of the ongoing conflict and finds the French people

themselves deficient in faith and piety, suggesting that they have ceased to

be a Christian nation. The war is both the consequence and the

punishment of their break with God. (Brown 201)

Deschamps’s ballade to Chaucer, however, goes far beyond a poet’s
personal praise of another poet and a French poet’s overcoming his enmity to the
English based on Christian faith: his career as political figure as well as poet

elucidates a political scheme hidden in his ballade to Chaucer. Deschamps was

 

6° The French text is from Oeuvres VI, 40:1-12; quoted in Brown 200.
6‘ The time after “the breakdown of peace negotiations in 1385 and the failure of the 1386
invasion effort” (Brown 201 ).

69

well-known for his bold criticism of governmental policies and figures, and moved
in circles close to the center of power; he was present during at least one peace
conference (Hanly 156). For a close examination of the ballade, with some
puzzling words and passages,62 from a political point of view, it is provided below
in its entirety:

O Socrates plains de philosophie,

Seneque en meurs, Auglius en pratique,

Ovides grans en ta poéterie,

Briés en parler, saiges en rethorique,

Aigles treshaulz, qui par ta theorique

Enlumines le regne d'Eneas,

L'lsle aux Geans, ceuls de Bruth, et qu’i as

Semé les fleurs et planté le rosier

Aux ignorans de la langue Pandras,

Grant translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier;

Tu es d'Amours mondains Dieux en Albie:
Et de la Rose, en la terre Angelique
Oui, d'Angela saxonne, est puis flourie

Angleterre, d'elle ce nom s'applique

 

62 For example, as James I. Wimsatt points out in Chaucer and His French Contemporaries, the
word “Pandras” in line 9 may be interpreted as either a noun (possibly an allusion to the character
Pandarus in Troilus and Criseyde) or a verb, which is not resolved yet. If “Pandras” is a noun,
“there is no main verb for the first stanza.” On the other hand, if “Pandras” is a verb, the problem
is that “‘pandre’ does not appear elsewhere” (340, n. 32). Wimsatt opts for interpreting the word
as a verb, meaning “you will disseminate, you will illuminate” (251).

70

Le derrenier en l'ethimologique,

En bon angles le Livre translatas;

Et un vergier, ou du plant demandas
De ceuls qui font pour eulx auctorisier,
A ja lbng temps que tu edifias,

Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier.

A toy pour ce de la fontaine Helye
Requier avoir un buvraige autentique,
Dont la doys est du tout en ta baillie,
Pour rafrener d'elle ma soif ethique,
Qui en Gaule seray paralitique
Jusques a ce que tu m'abuveras.
Eustaces sui, qui de mon plant aras:
Mais pran en gré les euvres d'escolier

Que par Clifford de moy avoir pourras,

Grant translateur, noble Gieffroy Chaucier.

L'ENVOY

Poete hault, loenge d’escu‘irie,

En ton jardin ne seroie qu'ortie:
Considere ce que j’ay dit premier -

Ton noble plant, ta douce melodie;

71

3’21

. ‘

 

P"

Mais, pour scavoir, de rescripre te prie,

Grant translateur, noble Geffroy Chaucier.

[O Socrates, full of philosophy, Seneca for morality, for practical life an
Aulus Gellius, a great Ovid in your poetry; brief in speech, wise' in the art
of writing, lofty eagle, who by your science enlighten the kingdom of
Aeneas, the island of Giants, of Brutus, who have sown there the flowers
and planted the rose-tree for those who are ignorant of French; great

translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.

You are the god of earthly love in Albion; in the Angelic land, (which from
the Saxon lady Angela has flowered into Angle-land — from her this name
is now applied as the last in the series of names) you translate the Book of
the Rose; and long since you have set up an orchard, for which you have
asked plants from those who make in order to be authorities; great

translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.

From you therefore, I have sought an authentic drink from the fountain of
Helicon whose stream is entirely under your control, to quench from it my
feverish thirst; I, who will be paralysed in Gaul until you give me drink. I am
Eustace; you shall have some of my plants; accept graciously the
schoolboy works which you will receive from me by Clifford; great

translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.

72

The Envoy
High poet, glory of the esquires, in your garden I should be only a nettle;
bear in mind what I said first of your noble plants, your sweet music; for me
to realise this, I pray you reply; great translator, noble Geoffrey.Chaucer.]63
What is emphasized in the encomiastic ballade to Chaucer is, first, the
English poet’s extraordinary capacity for putting himself in line with the great
classical writers: Chaucer is addressed as “Socrates plains de philosophie,l
Seneque en meurs, Auglius en pratique,/ Ovides grans en ta poeterie” [“Socrates, 1"
full of philosophy, Seneca for morality, for practical life an Aulus Gellius, a great
Ovid in yourpoetry’] (lines 1-3). Since Chaucer is not a philosopher like Socrates
and Seneca, Deschamps’s comparisons of the English poet to classical writers
“seem to form an exercise in hyperbole quite routine for this French poet”
(Bowers, “Retters” 100). However, as Alcuin Blamires argues in discussing the
implication of Deschamps’s association of Chaucer with Seneca, Deschamps’s
comparing Chaucer to Socrates, Seneca, Aulus, and Ovid does not necessarily
mean that the English poet was a philosopher, moralist, practical man, and great
poet but was simply a way of being complimentary:
Whether Chaucer actually read whole ‘works’ of Cicero or Seneca is open
to doubt. Deschamps probably didn’t imply that Chaucer had read Seneca
when he hailed him as a new “Seneca in morals”; it was just a grand

compliment to a morally sophisticated writer (Chaucer, Ethics 9—10).

 

”3 Deschamps’s ballade and its modern translation by Derek Brewer are from Chaucer: The
Critical Heritage. Volume I. 1385-1837, ed. Derek Brewer (London: Routledge 8r. Kegan Paul,
1978), 40-41.

73

In addition to his superb ability, comparable to that of classical writers,
Chaucer’s poetic excellence is also praised in Deschamps’s references to him as
the one “qu’l as/ Semé les fieurs” [“who have sown there the flowers (of poetry)]
(lines 7-8), and the one that controls “la fontaine Helye” [“the fountain of
Helicon”6‘] (line 21). Moreover, Chaucer is designated as “d'Amours mondains
Dieux” [“the god of earthly love in Albion”] (line 11), and as being “Briés en parler,
saiges en rethorique” [“brief in speech, wise in the art of writing”] (line 4).

Deschamps’s high praise of Chaucer for his exceptional ability as writer
and his poetic excellence may suggest his broad familiarity with Chaucer and his
works since there is a possible parallel in the poem: the expression “Aigles
treshaulz” [“Lofty eagle”] in line 5 may demonstrate Deschamps’s awareness of
The Pariiament of Fowls (Brown 195) or The House of Fame (Wimsatt, French
Contemporaries 251). As a contemporary of Chaucer, who shares such
commonalties as “humble ancestry,” attachments to “noble and then royal
households,” “administrative tasks,” participation in “the Hundred Years” War,”
and “self-deprecating humor” among others (Wallace, “Chaucer” 182-83),
Deschamps could have gained access to the English poet and his works, which
allowed him to praise Chaucer.

Deschamps’s ballade to Chaucer, however, is not simply a personal
eulogy to the greatness of an English poet. By glorifying England's most
prominent court poet, it opens a way to applaud English society - and specifically

the English court — that fosters and appreciates his literary works: politics

 

6‘ Helicon is a mountain of the Muses (Brewer, Critical Heritage 42 n. 8).

74

intervenes in the production of a literary text. References to England both in
archaic and contemporary forms such as “L'lsle aux Geans, ceuls de Bruth” [“the
island of Giants, of Brutus"] (line 6), “Albie” [“Albion”] (line 11), and “la terre
Angelique” [“the Angelic land”] (line 12) and the contrasting situation between the
English people’s “supposed base beginnings” and their “current refinement and
achievement” (Brown 197) which Chaucer surely brought to England indicate that
the ballade is designed for praising not only the poet but, just as importantly,
English society. Ultimately, the overall design of Deschamps in the ballade is to
facilitate peace between England and France in a time of pursuing peace in both
countries, rendering his ballade “part of a cultural exchange, an informal dialogue
between the two courts”:
If the date for Deschamps’s “Ballade to Chaucer” is 1391, it was probably
part of a cultural exchange which accompanied, and to some degree
facilitated, both the coming peace negotiations and the royal marriage
[between Richard and Isabel of France]. (Brown 194)65
Deschamps’s design to make his ballade to Chaucer part of a grand
cultural exchange, aimed at expediting peace talks between England and France
is suggested by his stipulation that Sir Lewis Clifford66 could serve as an

intermediary for part of such an exchange: “Mais pran en gré les euvres

d'escolier] Que par Clifford de moy avoir pourras” [“accept graciously the

 

65 Murray L. Brown further argues that “as the conference approached and hopes for peace
became greater, so did the gifts attending them” (194).

66 A distinguished soldier, who “fought in Spain in 1367 and in France in 1373-4...[and] the Breton
expedition of 1378,” Clifford was elected to “the order of the Passion” sometime between 1385
and 1396 (McFarlane 178).

75

schoolboy works! which you will receive from me by Clifford”] (lines 28-29).
Deschamps’s choice of Clifford as messenger of his ballade (and possibly other
works) to Chaucer, however, was not merely based on the soldier's close
connections with Chaucer.67 Since in the early 13906, Clifford was “a trusted .
envoy for the two courts, as 'well as a naturally adept diplomat” working for peace
between the two countries (Brown 194), Deschamps’s delivery of his works to
Chaucer by Clifford’s hand and his wishes to receive Chaucer’s reply‘58 strongly
suggest that he envisioned the poem as part of a large Anglo-Franco cultural
exchange.

Deschamps’s repeated designations of Chaucer as translator also reflect
the French poet’s political scheme. In the ballade, Chaucer is the one who has
“planté le rosier! Aux ignorans de la langue Pandras” [“planted the rose-tree
(possibly an allusion to the Roman) for those who are ignorant of French”] (lines
8-9; on the vexed translation of this line, see footnote 27 above), and more
specifically, translated “la Rose” [a clear allusion to the Roman] (line 12). In
addition, he is called “Grant translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier” [Great
translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer"] (lines 10, 20, 30, 36) in the refrain at the end
of each stanza. As Robert R. Edwards suggests, Deschamps’s references to
Chaucer as translator of the Roman and his metaphoric characterization of that

translation as “insemination” remind us that the English poet was an agent of

 

67 Chaucer’s personal ties with Clifford are evident: Chaucer addressed his poem Truth: Balade
de bon conseyl is addressed to Clifford’s son-in-law Sir Philip de la Vache; and Clifford was
possibly godfather to Chaucers son, Lewis, for whom The Treatise on the Astrolabe was written
McFarlane 182-83).
”de rescripre te prie” [“I pray you reply"] (line 35). However, there is no evidence that Chaucer
ever replied to Deschamps’s request (Wallace, “Chaucer" 186).

76

the translatio studii from France to England:

Deschamps’s praise is not for Chaucer’s fidelity to the original or his

refinements of his own diction and style. Deschamps sees Chaucer as

the figure who has transplanted the Rose to English soil and made it

flourish there. The major metaphor is insemination. (34)

What the ballade aims at by emphasizing Chaucer’s successful transference of a
French literary work to English readership is to arouse the sentiment in the
English court that, in spite of previous long warfare between France and England,
there had been shared taste between the two countries:

[The ballade] intimately addresses and praises a mutual friend while it

delights its larger courtly audience. It praises the court’s good taste and its

acquaintance with the poet. Deschamps lets Chaucer provide the link
between himself, representing French interest, and what is held dear in
both courts. This is surely the language of reconciliation, not. of hauteur.

(Brown 198)

It becomes evident from the discussion of Deschamps’s ballade to
Chaucer that the translation of the Romaunt provided Deschamps with a special
occasion to promote peace between England and France. However, the
emphasis on Chaucer as translator in Deschamps’s ballade indicates also its
diplomatic rhetoric: on the other side of Deschamps’s encomium of Chaucer lies
his “subtle effort at demeaning Chaucer’s enterprise as the mere importation of
the French Rose for an English garden” (Bowers, “Retters” 100). France, which

had influenced England politically and culturally since the Norman Conquest in

77

1066, reveals its intention to continue its cultural domination by forcing England

to remain under what John M. Bowers calls “absentee colonialism”:
Fourteenth-century England represents an early example of absentee
colonialism, when the country is still dependent upon the culture of its
previous rulers long after political independence has been fully realized.

(“Retters” 97)

78

CHAPTER THREE

The Boece, the Knight’s Tale, and Troilus and Criseyde

Considering the popularity of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae69
and its influence70 as one of the "principal classics" for "all educated people of
the Middle Ages" (Gibson 1), Chaucer's interest in Boethius's work and

subsequent translation of The Boece from it is far from exceptional. Like its major

("é-“=1

Latin source, Chaucer's Boece must have been popular and influential in the
fifteenth-century, which is evident from the number of extant manuscripts and the
citations of his name and works in the major works of the same century:
Surprising as it may seem to some, in the fifteenth century The Boece was
one of Chaucer’s most popular compositions. For a start, it survives in ten
manuscripts (some fragmentary) and two early editions, each of which
derives in part from a manuscript no longer extant....Moreover, it is clear
that the work was being read and appreciated. (Minnis and Machan 167)
Scholarly consensus on the provenance of The Boece, however, has been
more'difficult to reach than agreement on its popularity. About what inspired
Chaucer to render an English version of Boethius’s well-known work, scholarly
views vary from his personal need or desire to his historical and political situation.

In his book-length study of Chaucer’s use of language in The Boece, Machan

 

”9 Hereafter Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae is abbreviated as the Consolation.

7° The huge influence of the Consolation on the Western culture is summarized in Edmund
Reiss’s assessment that “the Consolation exerted a greater influence on Western thought and
literature than any other book except the Bible.” He continues to argue that the popularity and
influence of Boethius’s work result from the fact that “[t]he central problems of the Consolation
were those that occupied the attention of philosophers for the next thousand years, and the
answers Boethius gave came to be the answers of the Middle Ages and of Christianity" (144).

79

concludes that the translation was done as “a personal exercise” in language:
The very fact that Chaucer indulges himself so thoroughly in lexical
experimentation may even imply that he never intended Boece for the
general public, that he viewed the translation as, in part, a personal
exercise for increasing the flexibility and expresSion of his own language.
(Techniques 124)71

Similarly, some scholars have suggested that The Boece is the product of

Chaucer’s attempt either “to absorb” or “to master” Boethius’s Latin text. In his

discussion of the translation, Pearsall argues that “Chaucer’s translation of

Boethius is the product of his desire to make the work fully his own, to absorb

it. . .fully into his imaginative experience" (Life 164). Discussing the nature of late

medieval translation, Copeland also asserts that “Boece is arguably a translation

undertaken to master Boethius’s text by studious attention to a difficult

and specialized philosophical vocabulary” (“Vernacular Translation” 57).
Far from viewing The Boece as Chaucer’s individual effort for his own

benefit, however, some scholars of Chaucer have argued that the translation

was possibly aimed at educating princes, thus trying to find its political

implications. Strohm calls our attention to the possible link of the translation to

 

7‘ However, the notion that Chaucer's translation of the Consolation was made as a personal
exercise in language should be taken with some reservations, given the high level of difficulty of
the Latin work. As Henry Chadwick asserts, the Consolation is a product of “a very well-read
mind” using Latin “densely packed with concentrated argument,” which must have been a great
hindrance for a literary person like Chaucer to translate:
This [Boethius] is not a man composing with a library of books open before him, but a very
well-read mind which can recall a phrase from here or from there at will. His Latin is densely
packed with concentrated argument: and the argument is carried on from the prose sections
into the poems which he inserts, he says (iv, 6, 57) with the intention of lightening the reader’s
task with a difficult subject. (223)

80

 

politics when he points out that “[p]erhaps...Boece may be seen as advice to
princes, with a possible (though very uncertain) relation to Chaucer’s
advancement” (“Politics” 108). Donald R; Howard’s speculations suggest an
educational motive for the translation when he conjectures that Chaucer might
have been “asked to prepare it [The Boece] as part of the education of young
king Richard,” since Boethius's work was deemed “essential reading for a
monarch” during Chaucer’s time (379). It is, however, in the work of Minnis and
Machan that we find a more assertive view of the political implications in
Chaucer’s translation, rejecting the idea that it was done “simply for his private
use as a poet” (184). Above all, they suggest, The Boece was rendered for the
edification of princes and was treated as such by later readers:
...another part [of the reason for fifteenth-century interest in the
translation of The Boece] may have been the way the Boece affirmed the
essential moral and ethical sententiae then deemed to be the appropriate
advice for writers to offer princes - it would have sat comfortably beside
books written more formally in the de regimine principum mode. (167-68)
The possibility that The Boece was translated with a view of giving lessons
to princes is strongly supported by the fact that Chaucer’s French source, Jean
de Meun’s Li Livres de Confort de Philosophie, was dedicated to the French king,
Philip IV, who reigned from 1285 to 1314: .
A ta royal majesté, tres noble prince, par la grace de Dieu roy des
Francois, Phelippe le Quart, je Jehan de Meun...envoie ore Boece de

Consolacion que j’ai translaté de Iatin en francois.

8]

[T 0 Your Royal Majesty, most noble prince, by grace of God King of the
French, Philippe IV, I, Jean de Meun...now present Boethius’ Consolation
of Philosophy, which I have translated from Latin into F rench.]72
The political implications of The Boece do not lie in its possible use as a
teaching manual for the prince albne; more importantly, politics is inherent in The
Boece because its Latin source, the Consolation, is an intrinsically political work
as well as a philosophical one“:
The Consolation is thereby also an appeal against the Roman state, or
against the ruler of that state, Theoderic, who is either blinded by or
implicated in the injustices through which Boethius was imprisoned and
would be executed. In the Consolation, Boethius pits the individual against
the state, demonstrating that the man who is truly free need not fear the
false powers of the world. (Staley 44)
Since “the historical examples are interpreted against a philosophical
background” in the Consolation (O’Daly 74) — that is, philosophy serves as a
means of illuminating the circumstance of politics in Boethius’s later life —

Boethius’s work is partly an analysis of his contemporary politics, specifically the

 

72 The quotations are from Copeland, Rhetoric Hermeneutics, and Translation in the Middle Ages:
Academic Translations and Vernacular Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 133.
The French version is from Dedeck-Héry’s (168). The English translation is Copeland’s. For more
discussion of Jean’s translation of Boethius's work, see Glynnis M. Cropp, “Le Livre de Boece de
Consolacion: From Translation to Glossed Text,” in The Medieval Boethius: Studies in the
Vernacular Translations of 'De Consolatione Philosophiae,’ ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D. S.
Brewer, 1987), 63-85.
73 With more direct expressions, Howard also points out that the Consolation is both a
philosophical and a political work:
In hard times the Consolation was a solace, reason enough for Chaucer’s translation, but it is
also a very political work...one of its themes is how a ruler can govern when he cannot control
human nature or events. It is about the order of things, about power, about the place of
randomness in the governance of a society. (379)

82

 

nature of royal power.

It is to such political aspects inherent and illustrated in the Consolation, but
often neglected as nonessential, that we should turn for the discussion of the
political function of Chaucer's Boece during the last two decades of the
fourteenth century. This period is politically remarkable in that it falls during the
time of “the struggle between Richard and the Appellant Lords” (Sanderlin 171)"

and the tyrannical rule of king Richard leading to his deposition in 1399. In this

 

chapter, before discussing Chaucer's translation of Boethius’s work per se, the
political aspects of Boethius’s work will be analyzed, followed by an investigation
of the political implication of king Alfred’s Old English translation of Boethius's
work as an example of translation enhancing political power. Chaucer's Boece
will then be discussed in light of what political implications the translation may
have had, together with the Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, two of the

most highly Boethian among Chaucer's works.

1. Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (ca. A.D. 480-524)75 is known to have

been a transmitter of the “wisdom and graces” of Antiquity to the Middle Ages,

 

7‘ The period spans roughly from around 1385 to 1399. On the other hand, the translation of The
Boece probably falls around the first half of the 13805; the translation was certainly in existence
by 1387, before the execution of Thomas Usk on March 3, 1388, a literary disciple of Chaucer,
who referred to Chaucer’s translation along with Troilus and Criseyde in his Testament of Love.
75 For the general background of Boethius’s life, see John Matthews, "Anicius Manlius Severinus
Boethius," in Boethius: His Life, Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford: Basil
Blackwell, 1981), 15-43, and Gerard O’Daly, The Poetry of Boethius (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1991), 1-8. Many of scholars agree that the three major sources for the life
of Boethius are the Anonymus Valesii by an Italian Chronicler, and History of the Wars, Vol. 1, by
a Byzantine historian, Procopius, and the very words Boethius describes in his Consolation.
(Barrett 58-63)

83

.l_. ‘1

straddling two different worlds, and trying to stop the change “at the point of time
when its [history's] tides began to turn against classical civilization” (Payne 7):
Seen by Gibbon as "the last of the Romans whom Cato and Tully would
have acknowledged as their countryman" and by R. W. Chambers, with
Cassiodorus and St. Benedict, as "one of three founders of the Middle
Ages,” he [Boethius] is eminent among those who served to transmit the
wisdom and graces of the Ancient World "to restore the balance" of the -
New. (Blackwell vii)
It is through his translations and commentaries on the works of other ancient
men, however, that Boethius the transmitter could also be a preserver of the
ancient world.76
When we consider his last work, the Consolation, however, Boethius’s role
is not merely that of a transmitter or preserver but more importantly that of an
eyewitness recorder of his contemporary history and politics.”7 Although
Boethius's work is mainly understood as a philosophical investigation into the
nature of Fortune and Providence, God's Foreknowledge and man’s free will, it is

important to notice that the Latin work also provides us with his autobiographical

 

7° Boethius's translations and commentaries include the Geometry of Euclid, the Musica of
Pythagoras, the Arithmetica of Nichomachus, the Mechanica of Archimedes, the Astronomica of
Ptolemy, the theology of Plato, and the Logic of Aristotle, with the Commentary of Porphyry,
which runs almost all the gamut of human knowledge.

Boethius makes it clear that his purpose of writing the Consolation is to tell his posterity the
truth of his political persecution by recording related events: “Cuius rei seriem atque veritatem, ne
latere posteros queat, stilo etiam memoriaeque mandavi.” [“though so that the true details of this
affair cannot lie concealed from later generations, I have written it down to be remembered.”]
(Book 1, Prose 4, 152-53). All quotations from Boethius are from Boethius: The Theological
Tractates, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. H. F. Stewart, E. K. Rand, and S. J. Tester
(Harvard and London: Harvard University Press, 1973). Subsequent quotations from the
Consolation are followed by book and verse or prose numbers, along with page numbers of Latin
and modern English translation, in the parentheses.

84

 

records of historical incidents, including the gradual rise and sudden fall of his
political career. As Gerard O’Daly argues in his extended study of Boethius’s
poems in his work, political themes are not only crucial but also intertwined with
the structure of the work:
Political themes are important in the Consolation. It is a work written by an _
ex—consul, a man who has held the prestigious and influential post of
Master of the Offices, and worked closely with Theoderic in the
administration of government. . . . In the first four books of the Consolation
political themes are interwoven with the very fabric of the work’s structure,
and linked to its‘overriding themes... (74)
The Consolation is thus in part a chronicle of Boethius’s political ordeal, in which
personal, tragic experience is depicted against the political situation of the State.
In the Consolation, Boethius defends himself by portraying himself as an A
immaculate, faultless philosopher-politician who is being persecuted by the tyrant
king Theoderic. In the first place, through the complaints of Boethius the prisoner,
conversing with Lady Philosophy, who appears to heal his malady of despair,
Boethius recounts his public career from its beginning to his imprisonment.
Boethius reminds her that he first entered into government service because his
previous study of philosophy, especially of Plato's argument about ideal
government ruled by wise men, had convinced him that a wise man like himself-
should serve his State in order to prevent the wicked from ruining the good
people:

Atqui tu hanc sententiam Platonis ore sanxisti: beatas fore res publicas, si

85

eas vel studiosi sapientiae regerent vel earum rectores studere sapientiae
contigisset. Tu eiusdem viri ore hanc sapientibus capessendae rei
publicae necessariam causam esse monuisti, ne improbis flagitiosisque
civibus urbium relicta gubemacula pestem bonis ac pemiciem ferrent.
Hanc igitur auctoritatem secutus quod ate inter secreta otia didiceram

transferre in actum publicae amministrationis optavi.

[It was you who established through the words of Plato the principle that
those states would be happy where philosophers were kings or their
governors were philosophers. You, through that same Plato, told us that ’-
this was why philosophers must involve themselves in political affairs, lest
the rule of nations be left to the base and wicked, bringing ruin and
destruction on the good. It was in accordance with that teaching that I
chose to apply in the practice of public administration what I learned from
you in the seclusion of my private leisure] (Book 1, Prose 4; 146-47)
Boethius goes on to argue that as a magistrate with an independent conscience,
his main objective was to uphold justice in his government, where he could not
but encounter dishonest or powerful men:
Tu mihi et qui te sapientium mentibus inseruit deus conscii nullum me ad
magistratum nisi commune bonomm omnium studium detulisse. lnde cum
inprobis graves inexorabilesque discordiae et quod conscientiae libertas

habet, pro tuendo lure spreta potentiorum semper offensio.

86

[You, and God, who has set you in the minds of philosophers, know me
well, and that I undertook office with no other motives than the common
purposes of all good men. That is why there arose serious and
irreconcilable disagreements with wicked men, and, as a consequence of
keeping my conscience free, I have always maintainedwhat is right and
lawful in spite of the fact that l offended those more powerful than myself]
(Book 1, Prose 4; 146-47)

Moreover, Boethius extends his defense by pointing out that in order to protect

the weak, he opposed the swindling of the poor, private fraud, or oppressive

taxation committed by cruel men in power (Book 1, Prose 4; 148, 149).

More about Boethius’s life that the Consolation cannot offer, historical
investigation has provided, informing us in detail that while he was serving as
upholder of justice and as protector of the weak, his fortune continued to rise: he
himself became Consul in 510, followed by his two sons in 522.78 It was in 523,
however, that by a turn of the Wheel of Fortune, a sudden reversal of Boethius's
fortune threw him down to disgrace, exile, and final execution.

Although his political downfall was personal, it must have been the result of
political as well as religious tension between the Western and Eastern Roman
Empires. After the Ostrogothic king Theoderic invaded Italy in 489, and
consolidated his power as Roman Governor, technically subject to the Emperor

in the East, he could control successfully his new Christian subjects in Italy.

 

7° "He became Consul in 510, when he was about thirty, and thereafter was closely identified with
the interests of the Senate....ln addition to his personal success in the public service, he had
seen his sons follow in his footsteps to become joint Consuls in 522" (Green xii).

87

However, with the accession of Justin l in 518, the new Emperor in the East,
Theoderic’s reign began to falter.79 Since Justin “embarked on a policy of I
strenuous Catholic orthodoxy” resulting in “ecclesiastical alliance between
imperial Constantinople and senatorial Rome”:

Theoderic soon had reason to fear for the well-being of his fellow-

Arians in the east under Justin. At the same time, Justin's religious policies

in the east might prove increasingly enticing to the Catholic Romans of the

old empire, as an alternative to those of Theoderic. (Matthews 34-35)
It was in this intense religious and political situation in which concerns were rising
to unite the west and the east, not only religiously but also politically, that
Boethius was accused of being guilty of treason for supporting his friend Albinus,
and of having made adverse comments in letters to Justin about Theoderic.80

It should be emphasized, however, that the political aspects of Boethius's
Consolation are not. limited to his fluctuating political career; more conspicuously,
they are revealed through Boethius’s exploration of the nature of power,
especially its perversion into tyranny, thus "unmasking" the royal power. By
teaching the transitoriness, susceptibility to tyranny, and fundamental weakness
of royal power, by means of a philosophical investigation into Fortune, God's
Providence, and free will, Boethius’s Consolation attempts to give “consolation of

power,” based not on its powerfulness but on its innate powerlessness to the

 

79 My account of political and religious tension between the Western and Eastern Roman Empires
is largely indebted to John Matthews, "Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius," in Boethius: His Life,
Thought and Influence, ed. Margaret Gibson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), 15—43.

8° The four charges against Boethius can be summarized as follows: Boethius "desired the safety
of the Senate"; he prevented an informer from producing documents damaging to the Senate: he

"hoped for the freedom of Rome"; and he practiced magic and sought the assistance of evil spirits
(Barrett 63).

88

 

innocent.

Drawing from the examples of past tyrannical rulers such as Emperor Nero
and Nicocreon, Boethius’s investigation into the nature of royal power begins with
its evanescence, just like any other gift of Fortune. Lady Philosophy explains that
f royal power, being transitory, is a cause not only of happiness but also of
eventual misery, from which it is obvious that it cannot be a source of true
happiness:

Quod si haec regnorum potestas beatitudinis auctor est, nonne si qua

parte defuerit, felicitatem minuat, miseriam importet? Sed quamvis late
humana tendantur imperia, plures necesse est gentes relinqui quibus
regum quisque non imperet. Qua vero parte beatos faciens desinit
potestas, hac inpotentia subintrat quae miseros facit; hoc igitur modo

maiorem regibus inesse necesse est miseriae portionem.

[If this power over kingdoms does produce happiness, would it not lessen
that happiness and introduce misery if it were lacking in any respect? But
however widely any human empires may extend, there must always be
many nations left which any particular king does not rule. Now wherever
the power that makes kings happy ends, there their lack of power creeps in
and makes them miserable; in this way, then, kings must have a larger
share of misery than happiness] (Book 3, Prose 5; 250-51)

What is striking in Lady Philosophy’s teaching is that during its fleeting regime,

royal power can turn into tyranny if a king is bound only with “sinful lusts” or

89

passion:
nec potestas sui compotem fecerit quem vitiosae libidines insolubilibus

adstrictum retinent catenis

[nor can poWer give a man self-control if he is too firmly in the grip of

sinful lusts] (Book 2, Prose 6; 212-13)

By recounting in detail the tyrannical rule of Emperor Nero, Boethius points out
the inadequacy of royal power governed by vices and mad rage, thus resisting
Theoderic’s tyranny in persecuting the innocent, like Boethius himself:
Novimus quantas dederit ruinas
Urbe flammata patribusque caesis

Fratre qui quondam ferus interempto

Matris effuso maduit cruore

Corpus et visu gelidum pererrans

Ora non tinxit lacrimis, sed esse

Censor exstincti potuit decoris.

Hic tamen sceptro populos regebat

Quos videt condens radios sub undas

Phoebus extremo veniens ab ortu,

Quos premunt septem gelidi triones,

Quos Notus sicco violentus aestu

Torret ardentes recoquens harenas.

Celsa num tandem valuit potestas

90

Vertere pravi rabiem Neronis?
Heu gravem sortem, quotiens iniquus

Additur saevo gladius veneno!

[We know what great destruction that man caused/ The city blazing,
Senators killed,/ His brother murdered, and his savage hand/ Wet with the
blood that from his mother flowed-l He could gaze on her cold corpsel
And not shed tearsl But coolly criticize her beauty dead ./ And yet beneath
his sceptre’s sway he held/ Peoples the sun sees as he sinks in western
waves! After his rising in the farthest east,/ Those beneath the cold stare
of the Bear/ And those burnt by the harsh south wind/ That bakes the hot
dry sands.l Could not such power! Turn this perverted madness? Alas,
how many times! Both knife and poison served the dreadful state of Nerol]
(Book 2, Meter 6, 214-15)
By referring to notorious examples of tyrants in history,‘31 Boethius reveals that
one major design of the Consolation is to exhort those in power to check their
desires and not to be overcome by lust:
Qui se volet esse potentem,
Animos domet ille feroces
Nec victa libidine colla
Foedis submittat habenis.

Etenim licet Indica longe

 

5' Besides Nero, Boethius refers to Nicocreon as another notorious tyrant in Book 2, Prose 6
(210-11). Moreover, Boethius brings up Nero as tyrant again in Book 3, Prose 4 (248-49).

9]

Tellus tua iura tremescat

Et serviat ultima Thyle,
Tamen atras pellere curas
Miserasque fugare querelas

Non posse potentia non est.

[The man who wants to be powerful/ Must tame his high spirits,/ Must not
submit his neck, conquered by lust,/ To its striking halter;/ For indeed
though far-off Indian soil/ Tremble under your sway,l And furthest Thule
serve you,/ Yet not to be able to dispel black carel Or put complaining
misery to flight/ This is no power at all.] (Book 3, Meter 5; 252-53)

The discussion of the nature of royal power which is susceptible to tyranny
culminates in the paradoxical nature of royal power - though seemingly powerful,
it is basicallyweak so that by implication, it cannot subdue an innocent victim like
Boethius himself. By calling into question the power of rulers, and implicitly the
power of Theoderic, by whom he has been condemned to a miserable death,
Boethius provides himself with the consolation that he is a guiltless victim fighting
against a tyrannical ruler. By telling the story of Anaxarchus, whose virtuous
actions triumphed over the tyrant Nicocreon's torrnents, Boethius identifies his
own undaunted and unyielding spirit against Theoderic with Anaxarchus:

Cum Iiberum quendam virum suppliciis se tyrannus adacturum putaret, ut

adversum se factae coniurationis conscios proderet, Iinguam ille momordit

atque abscidit et in as tyranni saevientis abiecit; ita cruciatus, quos

92

 

putabat tyrannus materiam crudelitatis, vir sapiens fecit esse virtutis.

[When a tyrant (Nicocreon) thought he was going to drive a free man

(Anaxarchus) by torture to betray those conspiring against him, the man

bit off his own tongue and spat it in the face of that raging tyrant. So the

very torture which the tyrant thought was the instrument of his cruelty the

philosopher made the instrument of virtue] (Book 2, Prose 6; 210-11)
Earlier, by comparing himself directly with Canius, who defended himself before
the Emperor Caligula against the accusation of having known of a conspiracy
against the Emperor, Boethius “placed himself in an entirely Roman tradition of
opposition to a tyrannical monarch” (Matthews 37): “Respondissem Canii verbo,
qui cum a Gaio Caesars Gennanici filio conscius contra se factae coniurationis
fuisse diceretur: ‘Si ego,’ inquit, ‘scissem, tu nescisses.’” [“Then I should have
replied with the words of Canius: when he was said by Caligula to have been
aware of a conspiracy against his person, he replied: ‘Had I known of it, you
would not’”] (Book 1, Prose 4; 152-53).

By observing the transient nature of royal power, its vulnerability to
tyranny, and its paradoxical lack of power over the innocent, Boethius could have
“console[d] himself by understanding and living the life of authentic freedom, and
by ‘demythologizing' the notionof Theoderic’s power" (O’Daly 75). Through his
investigations into contemporary politics and philosophy, Boethius may not have
succeeded in changing his own earthly fate, but he might have gained inner

control of his own spirit which could have allowed him to meet his death with

93

more serenity.

2. King Alfred's Old English Translation of Boethius’s Consolation

The first complete prose translation of Boethius’s work into English was
rendered as early as the late ninth century, not at the hand of a public officer like
Boethius who sought to defend himself against imperial power by means of his
writing but by a king who would strengthen his governing power. It was king -
Alfred who made his version of Boethius's work in his later years between “the
years 887 and 899” (Payne 3). After completing his prose translation, the king
“went on to versify those portions of the text that were in poetry in the original
Latin, creating OE poems to parallel the Latin Metre” (Griffiths 9).82

Besides being translators, as F. Anne Payne observes, Boethius33 and
Alfred shared much in common, especially in their “unsuccessful” efforts to
preserve a world that they saw as disintegrating:

In the conscious goals that they set for themselves, Boethius and Alfred

were unsuccessful. Rome had already fallen, and no words of Boethius

would bring back that world. In England the general decline in learning and

Anglo-Saxon rule was too great for one man to stop. (10-11)

In spite of many commonalities between Boethius and Alfred, however,

Alfred’s version of Boethius’s Consolation - often called an “adaptation” (Payne

 

82 About these poems, Bill Griffiths further argues that “they were intended to be in place in the
OE prose translation, providing relief to and further illustration of the prose” and “Alfred’s prose
translation did not contain all the Latin Metres of the De Consolatione Philosophiae, and those
that were retained were not all versified” (9-10).

83 As was noted earlier, Boethius was a prolific translator. See Chapter Three, p. 84, especially n.
76.

94

3) or “reworking” (Griffiths 9) - is radically different from its Latin original. One of
the most conspicuous alterations in Alfred's translation is the change of the
names of the two principal characters: the teacher-figure Lady Philosophy and
the prisoner-student Boethius in the Consolation are renamed in Alfred’s version
as Wisdom and Mod (“Mind”) respectively (Payne 4).84
The allegorization of the characters' names in Alfred's translation should
- be understood as part of his broader efforts to christianize Boethius's philosophy
for the people of his kingdom. While in Boethius’s Consolation, “there is an
evidently conscious refusal to say anything distinctively Christian” (Chadwick
224), by referring to God specifically, Alfred makes it clear that his goal in his
translation is to christianize Boethius’s classical work:
Wast bu bat breo ding sindon on bis middangearde? An is hwilendlic,
Oat hate agber ge fruman ge ende;... Oder ding is ece, pet haefo fruman
and hate nenne ende; pat sint englas and monna saula. bridde ding

is ece buton ende and buton anginne; pet is God. (147:26-148z3)

[Do you know that there are three things on this earth? The first lasts for a
time only; it has both beginning and end....The second thing is eternal; it
has beginning and has no end;... such are angels and men’s souls. The

third thing is eternal, without end and without beginning; that is God.]85

 

8‘ Two other changes in Alfred’s version from Boethius's work have been noticed: Alfred
"presents ideas more simply," and he "exploits the lexical resources of the Anglo Saxons' native
vocabulary" (Benison 91-92).

85 The quotations are from F. Anne Payne, King Alfred and Boethius: An Analysis of the Old
English Version of the 'Consolation of Philosophy (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press,
1968), 19. The Old English quotation is taken from W. J. Sedgefield, King Alfred’s Old English
Version of Boethius (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899). The modern translation is Payne’s.

95

Alfred's program to teach English youth by translating Latin books of
philosophy and history, including Boethius’s Consolation as well as biblical
works,86 was a crucial part of his attempts to revive Ieaming in his kingdom.
However, these translations, though made for a seemingly apolitical program of
education in classical and Christian Ieaming,87 served Alfred in his generally
successful responses to the pressing political situation in his time, which was
characterized by the confrontation between Christian England in the south and
non-Christian Vikings in the north.88 By "teaching Christian ideology and
promoting conversion" (Benison 94) through the medium of translation in the
southern part of England, Alfred could not only raise his people's Ieaming to a
higher level, but also help them become Christians, thus consolidating his
sovereignty as supreme Christian leader protecting his people and culture
against the non-Christian Vikings in the north. By writing the Consolation,
Boethius may have been content with expressing his understanding of the nature

of power, but King Alfred actually strengthens his governing power through his

 

“6 For the list of books “Alfred himself probably wrote or translated in close collaboration with his
helpers” and “works translated by other people and assigned, with varying degree of certainty, to
Alfred’s translation programme,” see Robert Stanton, “King Alfred,” in The Oxford History of
Literary Translation in English. Vol. 1: To 1550, ed. Roger Ellis (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008), 118-119.
87 As Robert Stanton asserts in his study on translation in Anglo-Saxon England, “Alfred’s
translations have a clear pedagogical purpose: they will serve as school texts” in order that every
yaouth may learn English (Culture 62). .
Liam Benison summarizes the political situation under King Alfred succinctly:
The social, political and religious context of the translation programme was a period of crisis
and change. The Viking invasions of England, which began with the sack of Lindisfame in 793,
and continued throughout the ninth century, redrew the political, social, religious and linguistic
maps of Britain. Until Alfred won a decisive battle at Edington in 878, the Vikings threatened to
subjugate of the whole of Christian England. The treaty Alfred and the Danes concluded in
878 left Alfred in control of the southern part of England and the Danes ruling the north. The
disruption of religious life in northern England is witnessed by the reduction of parishes and
the movement of bishops’ seats (84).

96

 

translation from Boethius.

3. Chaucer's Boece

Compared with Alfred’s translation of the Consolation, Chaucer’s Boece is
quite different from its Old English counterpart. While Alfred’s version, designed
to instruct his people in the philosophical bases of the Christian faith, suppresses
political elements inherent in its Latin originaI,-thus reducing their importance in
the translation,89 Chaucer’s Boece, a more faithful translation than Alfred’s,90
revives Boethius’s political concerns in the Consolation, thus returning to the
original theme of philosophy serving an improved understanding of politics. By
consulting Jean de Meun’s French version and Nicholas Trevet’s commentary91
alongside Boethius’s Latin original, Chaucer could illuminate Boethius’s difficult
philosophical meaning for a better understanding of politics.

Although Chaucer’s Boece is a faithful reproduction of the Consolation,
Chaucer’s translation differs from its Latin source since Chaucer’s decision to
translate the Latin work may have been conditioned by social and political
circumstances of the first half of 13803. In other words, Chaucer's Boece could
be read as a product of his own response to the tumultuous social upheaval and

its political legacy during that period. A brief discussion of the history of the early

 

89 On the other hand, Robert Stanton argues that Alfred’s translation from Boethius treats worldly
power “more sympathetically than Boethius does,” thus not completely erasing political elements
in the translation (Culture 95).
°°Most of scholars of Chaucer’s translation agree that The Boece IS a faithful, literal translation.

For example, see Jefferson and Machan among others.

9‘ Mark J. Gleason has demonstrated Chaucer’s effective use of Trevet’s commentary for the
illumination of Boethius’ s meaning and for “his versifying of a Trevet gloss ln Troilus and
Criseyde” (104).

97

13803 will lead us to a better understanding of what might have inspired Chaucer
to render his Boece from the Consolation and what The Boece could have meant
for him initially.

If, as Pearsall suggests, the translation of The Boece was launched around
1381, simultaneously with the composition of Troilus and Criseyde, ending up by
1386-87,92 the Great Revolt of 1381 may help us to understand the political
circumstances under which Chaucer translated the Consolation, because the
confrontation between king Richard and the rebels during the revolt and its
aftermath may have been connected to Richard’s later development as a
tyrannical ruler. .

The immediate cause of the uprising of 1381, “the largest and most serious
outbreak of popular unrest in England in the middle ages” (Saul, Richard II 56), is
attributed to the levy of a heavy poll tax in 1380 and consequent ineffective
intervention by the government which further instigated the “eruption of riots”:

Nevertheless, it was the Commons’ grant in December 1380 of a poll tax

three times heavier than that of 1377 that stirred the revolt. Faced with

evidence of widespread evasion, the government dispatched further
commissioners in March to gather the arrears, provoking the eruption of

riots over the whole of East Anglia. (Harriss 447)

Besides the poll tax of 1380, Nigel Saul points but “deep underlying social and

economic causes,” which had been brought into existence by the Black Death of

 

92 Derek Pearsall notes that “[i]t is possible that Chaucer's translation of Boethius went on book
by book with the writing of Troilus. It was finished, as we know from Alceste’s reference as well as
Usk’s use of the work, by 1386-7” (Life 160). The possible beginning year of the translation is
from the “Chronological Table” appended to Pearsall’s same book.

98

1349 (Richard II 59). Saul continues to suggest that the uprising was a result of a
chain reaction of historical incidents: “[a]3 a result of the Black Death and the
visitations that had followed it there had been a massive fall in population...
[w]ages, as a result, had risen sharply”; in response to rising wages, the
government took measures “to peg wages at their pre-Black Death levels” by
“passing first the Ordinance (1349) and then the Statute of Labourers (1351)”;
but “wages had continued to rise” (Richard II 59). However, it was initially
landowners’ efforts to maintain their standing that prompted people93 to riots:

From these cases we can see that lords were using all the powers at their

disposal to strengthen their hold over their tenants. In effect they were

maintaining their living standards at the expense of those beneath them in

the hierarchy. (Richard II 60)

Whether the uprising was brought about by an excessive poll tax or
extreme economic burden of people, it could be both crisis and opportunity for
Richard as king. When the rebels entered London, incinerating “the Savoy
Palace, the symbol of Gaunt’s wealth and arrogance” (Harriss 447), Richard
saved his regality by conceding to their demands:

Richard and his immediate retinue advanced to meet their leader, Wat

Tyler, in the intervening space. Faced with demands for social revolution -

the abolition of serfdom, and an end to lordship, the disendowment of the

 

93 The Great Revolt of 1381 was formerly known as the Peasants’ Revolt, which implied that most
of the participants of the revolt were peasants. However, as David Aers points out, “[tlhe coalition
that made the great revolt of 1381 involved ‘the whole people below the rank of those who
exercised lordship in the countryside and established authority in the towns’, while it was led by
the elites of rural communities in East Anglia and Kent, the village office-holders” (“Vox Populr”
433-34). For the original sources of Aers's remark, see n. 7 on page 434 of his article.

99

Church“ — Richard readily conceded all, saving his regality, and ordered

the rebels to disperse. (Harriss 448)

The revolt, however, was not merely a threat to Richard’s throne; it was also a
chance for Richard - a young king who became fourteen in January 1381,
marking his “passage from ‘pueritia’ to ‘adolescentia’” (Saul, Richard II 108) - to
demonstrate his regal power and authority. Since he himself could stop the
spread of the revolt nationwide by confronting and dispersing the violent,
infuriated rebels successfully, “[wlhether the king’s intervention was rehearsed or
improvised, Richard had displayed courage and assurance” (Harriss 448): it was
his “personal triumph in outfacing therebels” (Bennett 190).

Triumphant as he was in dealing with the rebels, however, Richard began
to feel both “fear and contempt for his lesser subjects” (Harriss 449) because of
the rebels’ atrocities. As Saul points out, after Richard’s encounter with the
insurgents at Mile End, “there were many more who were still roaming the streets
and thirsting for blood” and “the looting and killing continued” by them. Worse still,
their general assault on the aliens resulted in the killings of over 150 foreigners

in London (Saul, Richard II 69).95

 

9‘ The rebels' demands obviously indicate that they were not lower strata but the ambitious
whose advancement in society was blocked by the lords: “Clearly the Revolt of 1381 was not a
movement of the poor and the downtrodden; it was a movement of the more ambitious and
assertive in society. What infuriated these proprietors was the impediments that were being
placed in their way by the lords” (Saul, Richard II 61). On the other hand, Susan Crane argues
that since they belonged to lower strata, the rebels could not represent themselves in writing but
were “reimagined” negatively in various ways by other writers:
Yet the rebels remain outside representation in that they do not represent themselves for the
written record. They are reimagined by those who write. Maintaining a largely oral culture
alongside an increasingly literate higher culture, England’s lower strata appear in written
records as incoherent and irrational creatures or as models of submission and faith, variously
constructed by various writers' own positions and preoccupations. (“Writing Lesson” 201)
95 Steven Justice, however, argues that historical documents on the rising of 1381 recorded
events from chroniclers’ point of views rather than what really happened in the year, thus

100

Another, but no less important, lesson Richard could have drawn from the
revolt was his “belief in the immunity afforded by kingship” (Harriss 449). Since
“[t]hey [the rebels] thought of the monarchy as an institution standing above
individuals and classes, capable of dispensing even-handed justice,”96 they not
only “greeted the king courteously" in their encounter with him at Mile End'(Saul,
Richard II 68) but “professed their loyalty to the king” (Harriss 447). The
insurgents’ unmitigated loyalty to him may have contributed to reawakening his
awareness of kingship and to increasing his firm conviction about the inviolability
of his regality, which are suggested in his attempts to extend “his knowledge of
his realm and his people” by undertaking “extensive tours through the realm”
(Bennett 191).

In a time of socio-political unrest and the ensuing political changes that the
Great Revolt of 1381 brought to England, it was Richard’s efforts to strengthen
his regal power and governance that could have led Chaucer to a renewed
interest in the Consolation, as a work reminding people of the nature of worldly
power and its possible peril of turning into tyranny. Chaucer’s act of translating
the Consolation, then, may have arisen from a desire to share among his circle
his worry about the king’s going too far in empowering himself as supreme ruler
and ultimately becoming a tyrant. That Chaucer may have wanted to express

such desire in his Boece was more pressing around 1384 because by that time,

 

rejecting the idea of the rebels’ violence: “Altogether, the image of indiscriminate, raging violence
in 1381 is more a function of its chroniclers‘ anxieties than of the events themselves” (41 n. 85).
9° Justice 59. The original quotation is from Rodney H. Hilton, Bond Men Made Free: Medieval
Peasant Movements and the English Rising of 1381 (London and New York: Methuen, 1973),
225.

10]

Chaucer “probably realized...that the wind was blowing against the royal
party...[by exercising his] often demonstrated powers of political analysis”
(Strohm, “Politics” 91-92).97
_As a public officer and royalist, however, Chaucer may have found other

aspects of the Consolation as significant as the political ones. As Sheila Delany
asserts in her study of the Physician’s Tale, Chaucer is characteristically “socially
conservative”:

To glorify rebellion - the original aim of the Virginius legend - is utterly

alien to Chaucer’s world-view: our poet is a prosperous, socially

conservative, prudent courtier and civil servant, directly dependent for his

living upon the good will of kings and dukes. (137)
To his conservative mind, the philosophical teaching in the Consolation, which
suggests endurance of evil, was more agreeable than anything else because the
emphasis on endurance in the Consolation does not teach people such a
revolutionary act as deposing a tyrant, but rather a passive forbearance of the
wrongdoings of a tyrannical ruler.

The lessons of political conservatism that Chaucer presents appear in the
latter part of the Consolation. In Book 4, Prose 1, Boece the prisoner brings up

the issue of evil in the world by asking a why, in a world where God governs all

 

97 Considering the dates of Chaucer’s translation and of the king’s political reform, we have good
reason to believe that, unlike Pearsall’s suggestion of 1381 as the beginning year of translation
as noted above on p. 98, Chaucer’s translation of the Consolation began probably after 1384,
since Richard’s empowering of himself was not conspicuous until that year:
Up to the end of 1383 there is slight evidence either of Richard’s active involvement in
government or of the influence of a courtier group. The major decisions were still being taken
in great councils and parliaments where the directive force was not the king’s will but that of
- Gaunt and the political community. (Harriss 450-51)

102

things, wicked people torment the innocent, whose virtuous acts are not
rewarded:
But yit to this thing ther is yit another thing ijoyned more to ben wondrid
uppon: for felonye is emperisse, and floureth ful of richesses, and vertu nis
natal oonly wthouten meedes, but it is cast undir and fortroden undyr the
feet of felenous folk, and it abyeth the tormentz in stede of wikkide felouns.
Of alle whiche thinges ther nys no wyght that-may merveillen ynowghe ne
compleyne that swiche thinges ben don in the reigne of God, that alle
thinges woot and alle thinges may and ne wole nat but only gode thinges.
9(24-36) A.
To his question, Lady Philosophy answers as follows:
...I speke, that certes the gode folk ben alwey myghty and shrewes ben
alwey outcast and feble; he the vices ben neveremo withouten peyne, ne
the vertus ne ben nat withouten made; and that blisfulnesses comen alwey
to gode folk, and infortune comith alwey to wykklde folk. (49-56)
In Lady Philosophy’s explanation, what is emphasized is the idea of patientia,

“the quality of the passive endurance of suffering,”98

which is “the point of most of
the Boethian examples of the confrontation of tyrant and philosopher” (Bumley
76). Boethius’s notion of a philosopher, which stresses “passivity and humility

rather than determination and strength” (Bumley 76), becomes more than a

 

9° Similarly, Paul Strohm points out that the Consolation is about “fortitude”:
The intent of Boethius’s work is, of course, to instill fortitude; despite early dissatisfaction with
his fate, he comes to understand that God has ordained all for profit if not delight, and that
even within his constrained circumstances he can exercise his free will by choosing virtue and
eschewing vice. (“Politics’ 101)

103

moral virtue of a philosopher since, as Pearsall points out, it provides people with
a politically conservative norm of behavior:

Philosophy's answer to Boethius’s rather pointed question about the lack

of reward for merit and the evil tyranny and oppression of those in power

(IV, pr. 1) is not that the good should” band together to put the wicked out of

power but that there is no need for action of any sort, since the good

always have true welefulnesse and the wicked do not really enjoy power or

anything else, given that they lack the serenity of virtue. (Life 163)

From discussion of the history of the early 13803 in relation to Chaucer, it
may be inferred that Richard’s efforts to strengthen his power may have inspired
Chaucer’s translation of The Boece, and, if so, one of his major concerns in
translating the work may have been his worry as a royalist that the king would
become a tyrant, a type of kingship that the Consolation opposes as ultimately
impotent. Because of its depiction of bad rulers, however, Chaucer’s Boece may
have had potential resonance with the king’s opponents. As Richard’s emphasis
on his regal power, and consequently his confrontation with his magnates, grew
stronger, The Boece may have begun to reflect the concerns of the magnates
over the possible abuses of royal power. The history from the mid-13803 to 1399
will show what possible political implications Chaucer’s Boece may have had
during that period. -

As Lee Patterson rightly estimates, the Revolt of 1381 brought to England
neither peace nor recovery from the upheaval; instead, England fell into another

long-lasting confrontation between the king and the great magnates which

104

culminated in the king’s deposition in 1399:
The suppression of the Rising of 1381 — an event described by Gower in
terms of the collapse of antique, and especially Trojan, chivalry - was
followed not by a period of national healing but by a bitter and finally
bloody struggle between the king and his nobility. (Chaucer 156-57)
The conflict between Richard and his nobility began in the winter of 1383-84 with
the king’s attempts to restore traditional royal rule, which he planned to develop
in several directions:
He [Richard] had his own priorities: to replace enmity to France with peace
and friendship and, as a corollary, to replace the partnership of Crown and
subjects engendered by war with a renewed emphasis on regality. The
court, not the council or parliament, was to be at the centre of politics, not
only as the arena of royal majesty and the source of patronage, but as the
vehicle‘of the royal will and hence the source of policy. (Harriss 451)
Among these various plans for the restoration of Richard’s kingship, the war with
France was “the primary issue” between the king and his magnates:
Also in dispute between the crown and its nobility - and perhaps the
primary issue between them - was the question of the war. Richard and
his chancellor Michael de la Pole had sought to obtain a more or less
permanent peace with France, a policy that was intensely unpopular with
the nobility. (Patterson, Chaucer 157)
The war with France, however, was not just a matter of losing or gaining a

territory; beneath the issue of war, there were deep-rooted economic concerns

105

on which the magnates could no longer make concessions. In traditional feudal
society, during the war, the king depended on his great lords for their military
support, in return for which they were given monetary benefits in the form of
wages for the soldiers they provided. Richard’s peace policy with France was
particularly detrimental to the nobility’s profits because peace with France meant
their loss both of enormous gains from the war and of the king’s dependence on
them:

The traditional feudal function of the great lords of the land was military.

Insofar as Richard turned away from the war, he lessened his dependence
on the feudal aristocracy and frustrated their interests in war-

making... .They found this erosion of their sources of wealth intolerable.

(Ferster, Fictions 79—80)
Because of these economic reasons, in spite of positive aspects of the Richard’s
diplomatic efforts seeking peace between England and France, the magnates
resisted his peace negotiations with France by “attempt[ing] to reignite the war”
(Harris 420), an attempt that resulted in failure.

Besides Richard’s policy of making peace with France, his reorganization of
the court as the center of regal power made the great lords impatient with the
king’s policy. Instead of turning to the magnates who traditionally gave advice to
the king for the running of the government, Richard was “surrounded by a group
of nobility and knights whom he had chosen and favoured, whose loyalty and
services were both personal and political” and to the nobility’s disappointment,

“they formed an exclusive and manipulative clique” (Harriss 453).

106

However, Richard’s peace policy with France and his court-centered
method of ruling with a view of fortifying his own regal power became difficult to
seek when the threat of French invasion was renewed in 1386, which was a clear
indication that his efforts to promote peace between England and France were
ineffective (Harriss 458). In the Wonderful Parliament later that year, the conflict
between Richard and the magnates was aggravated. Those magnates against
Richard’s policy and impatient with the luxury of his court passed a statute,
clarifying that “the king should be guided by his magnate counsellors, and the
departments of state and household scrutinized to eliminate corruption, waste
and extravagance” (Harriss 460).

In the Merciless Parliament of 1388, the Appellant Lords imposed even
more serious restrictions on the king:

The Merciless Parliament had dealt severe blows to Richard’s kingship.

Although Gloucester and his fellow Appellants abandoned their briefly held

plan to depose Richard (RP, 3:379), and although commons would renew

homage to Richard and his coronation oath to them (West, 294), the
parliament nevertheless ended with severer circumscription of his

prerogative... . (Strohm, Hochon’s Anew 63)

During the period of 1386 and 1388, between the Wonderful Parliament and the
Merciless Parliament, when many of the magnates would believe that Richard
grew closer to a tyrant, Chaucer's Boece could have served for their political
interests. Because of its potential criticism of abuses of royal power, Chaucer’s

translation could have made it easier for the parliament to attempt "to reform the

107

[royal] household and rid the government of excessive royal favoritism and
patronage" (Sanderlin 174).

Chaucer's Boece may also have had another political significance during
the later years of Richard’s rule, especially in his deposition in 1399. The years _
reughly from 1389 to 1399 were those under “Richard’s personal rule”:

Richard waited one more year after the Merciless Parliament to declare

himself monarch and open ten years of personal rule. From being a

bystander of the government, Richard turned into an absolute ruler justified

by the divine sanction of kingship. His revenge upon his uncle Gloucester
was richly deserved,99 though his death was a standing reproach to

Richard, if it was he who instigated it. (Hussey 51-52)

After recovering his power and dismissing the Appellant Lords, Richard
“determined to rebuild and reassert royal authority, so that never again would he
be subjected to such humiliation" (Saul, “Richard II” 862). It is in 1397 that
Richard turned to be more despotic:

In the summer of 1397 Richard ll's kingship suddenly changed its

character. The king’s behavior became more tyrannical. In mid-July the

three senior Appellants were arrested, and two months later they were put
on trial. In the Parliament which met in September the legislation of the

Merciless Parliament of 1388 was reversed. In the final months of the year

new oaths were required of the sheriffs, and oaths were extracted from the

 

99 It was Gloucester who “ordered the death of Burtey who was the king’s tutor” in spite of “the
pleading of Queen Anne” and who “authorize[d] treason trials” in the Merciless Parliament of
1388 (Hussey 50). ,

108

king's subjects to uphold the measures which had been approved in

Parliament. (Saul, “Richard II” 854)

Richard's tyranny in his last three years as king coincided with his effort "to
cultivate a loftier and more exalted image of himself as king" and his "desire to
stress the divine origin of his kingship” (Saul, “Richard II” 854-55). However, his
lawless governing of the kingdom resulted in the eventual termination of his
tyranny by means of deposition. As the 1399 Articles of Deposition suggested,
“the ruler had become a tyrant exercising arbitrary will in the mistaken
assumption that law resided in his own breast” (Aers, Chaucer 34). In this
political situation, though not advocating active resistance to Richard’ 3 tyranny,
the circulation of Chaucer's Boece could have helped enhance the heightened
awareness of misuses of regal power within his courtly and literary circle, thereby
cOntributing to undermining Richard’s governing power.

As a "fencesitter,"1°° however, Chaucer may have mitigated the theme of
the possible danger of the absolute royal power in The Boece by
counterbalancing his description of despotic rulers in the translation with his
portrayal of an ideal ruler in the Knight's Tale. If his Boece could have been read
as a possible reminder of tyranny under Richard’s increasing tyrannical rule, thus
damaging Richard’ 3 prerogative, by associating an ideal ruler in the Knight’s Tale
with Richard, Chaucer could have attempted to astutely secure his political

position in 13803 and 13903.

 

°° Discussing Chaucer’s political position, S. Sanderlin argues that Chaucer was “as canny in
real life as the observations of human emotions and character in his poetry suggest,” thus calling
him a “fencesitter' who could easily jump into either side of a fence (171).

109

4. The Knight's Tale: Theseus as Ideal Ruler

Since he was “wisely and systematically curtailing the extent of his
factional visibility” (Strohm, “Politics” 91), Chaucer usually did not express his
own political intent or opposition openly.101 Chaucer’s “Lak of Stedfastnesse,”
written between 1388 and 1390 — a period “in which Richard lost, and then
regained, his royal prerogative” (Strohm, Hochon’s An'ow 58) — is a rare
exception to his usual reticence about current politics. In the poem’s “Lenvoy to
King Richard,” Chaucer gives direct advice to the royal power:

O prince, desyre to be honourable,

Cherish thy folk and hate extorcioun.

Suffre nothing that may be reprevable

To thyn estat don in thy regioun.

Shew forth thy swerd of castigacioun,

Dred God, do law, lovetrouthe and worthinesse,

And wed thy folk agein to stedfastnesse. (22-28)
What is more remarkable in the poem, however, is Chaucer’s clear division of
current social and political elements into two and his attribution of positive
qualities to the king, while distributing negative ones to his opponents:

He [Chaucer] assembles a body of powerfully suggestive statements

linking steadfastness, sworn relations, reason, virtue, and pity, and the

honorable rule of law, and he opposes to it a nightmare of collusive greed,

 

"’1 As Strohm notes, “mastered by the geographical removal from Westminster to London, by the

continuation of his ‘Lancastrian connections,’ and by his own keen sense of the dangers of
factional activity, Chaucer’s independence was to serve him well in the difficult years" in the latter
half of the 13803 (“Politics' 91).

110

wrong, oppression, fickleness, and extortion, associating the former with
Richard and the latter with his opponents. (Strohm, Hochon’s Anew 72)
The same division of positive and negative qualities, thus glorifying the king as
possessing the former, can be applied to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. As in his “Lak
of Stedfastnesse,” by representing an‘image of an. ideal ruler in the person of
Theseus and associating him with Richard, Chaucer's Knight Tale helps to
promote Richard’s regal power.102 -

A3 Mark Miller points out, the image of Theseus as ideal ruler in the
Knight's Tale is epitomized by his “service of justice and civil order”:
“Theseus...is less a figure of philosophical authority than one of martial virtue,
the courageous and purposeful exercise of military and political power in the
service of justice and civil order” (93). Above all, Theseus’s emphasis on order is
clearly demonstrated in his courteous dealing with the funeral of Arcite. Whereas
Green, the tyrant at Athens, had the corpses of those who attacked Thebes
eaten by the dogs (The Knight’s Tale l. 947) when he forbids the burial of the
dead after the war, Theseus allows a solemn funeral for Arcite after his death in
competition with Palamon for the love of Emelye. That he has Arcite’s funeral
performed flamboyantly and according to custom is a clear indication that
Theseus is an upholder of social order because, as John Gardner suggests,
ceremony is an overt expression of “human order”:

Ceremony is the outward sign, the expression, of human order: it is man's

 

102 However, some of Chaucer scholars do not agree with the idea that Theseus is an ideal ruler.
For various recent critical views of Theseus, see n. 23 and n. 24 in Suzanne C. Hagedom,
Abandoned Women: Rewriting the Classics in Dante, Boccaccio, & Chaucer (Ann Arbor: The
University of Michigan Press, 2004), 91-92.

111

imitation of the order of the universe, or to put it another way man's

demonstration that he submits himself to the larger good 'of which Theseus

speaks at the end of the tale. (242-43)

Moreover, Theseus as keeper of justice in Athens is illustrated in his role
as rule-giver in resolving the love triangle. Competing for Emelye, both Palamon
and Arcite are described as being below human level, first as dogs fighting for a
bone and then wild beasts, implying their lawless pursuit of Emelye:

We stryve as dide the houndes for the boon...

Thou myghtest wene that this Palamon

In his fightyng were a wood leon,

And as a crueel tigre was Arcite;

As wilde bores gonne they to smyte,

That frothen whit as foom for ire wood. . ..

He [Theseus] was war of Arcite and Palamon,

That foughten breme as it were bores two. (I. 1177; 1655-59; 1698-99)
Worse still, their desire for Emelye’s love leads them break their ties of kinship as
well as fellowship (l. 1146-51).

It is Theseus the ideal ruler, however, who introduces “new rules” to their
unruly and brutal chase after Emelye, trying to “make some sense of the lovers’
situation” (Thompson 77): .

That everich of you shal goon where hym Ieste

Frely, withouten raunson or daunger;

And this day fifty wykes, fer ne ner,

112

 

Everich of you shal brynge an hundred knyghtes

Armed for Iystes up at alle rightes, .

AI redy to darreyne hire by bataille....

Thanne shal l yeve Emelya to wyve

To whom that Fortune .yeveth so fair a grace. (I. 1848-53; 1860-61)

Theseus’s qualifications as ideal governor, however, are not limited to his
political capacity to keep order and justice in his territory; he is also endowed with -
such psychological and moral virtues as pity, compassion and reason, all of
which are revealed in his encounter with the young lovers. When he meets with
Palamon and Arcite fighting fiercely for Emelye, Theseus’s initial verdict is the
death sentence for both of them: “It nedeth noght to pyne yow with the corde./ Ye
shal be deed, by myghty Mars the rede!” (I. 174647).103

However, Theseus soon changes his mind at the request of his queen and
. other accompanying women because he has a “gentil herte” and “his herte
hadde compassioun/ Of wommen” (l. 1762, 1770):

Til at the laste aslaked was his mood,

For pitee renneth soone in gentil herte.

And though he first for ire quook and sterte,

He hath considered shortly, in a clause,

The trespas of hem bothe, and eek the cause,

And although that his ire hir gilt accused,

 

1°3 The young knights are subject to death because Arcite was freed from prison under the
condition that he should be killed if he again appear in Athens and Palamon is an ex-prisoner who
ran away from prison.

113

Yet in his resoun he hem bothe excused... (I. 1760-66)
The fact that Theseus is'presented as ruler with the same positive qualities (pity,
reason, and rule of law) which Chaucer attributed to Richard in his poem “Lak of
_ Stedfastnesse” suggests that Chaucer expressed his common attitude towards
the king in both poems. Just as the shorter poem explicitly “flatters and supports
Richard” (Strohm, Hochon’s Anew 72), so too the Knight’s Tale — representing
“Theseus as a symbol of order, a good man who deals- with the disordered odds
and ends of life with dignity and with ceremony, dispensing pardons and justice”

(Hagedom 91) — reflects Chaucer’s support for Richard.“

5. Troilus and Criseyde: The Consolation of Pandarus

From the discussion of the Knight’s Tale, we have seen that the Tale
represents Chaucer’s support of Richard, thereby balancing his empowering of
the king with the possible weakening of regal power that his Boece might have
contributed to popularize for its theme of the abuses of royal power. Troilus and

”5 another highly Boethian poem among Chaucer’s works, may also

Criseyde,
have played a political role in the volatile situations of the 13803 and 13903.
Unlike in the Knight’s Tale, in the Troilus, Chaucer takes sides with the magnates,

who were then opposing the king fiercely, by repudiating Boethian, clerical

 

1“ On the other hand, though she also points out certain politically critical implications of the
Knight’s depiction of Theseus, Esther Casier Quinn concludes that through Theseus, Chaucer
expresses his hope that Richard would be a worthy king:
In my reading of the Knight’s Tale, Theseus is not only the central figure, but serves as a
cover for the poet’s reflections on the political scene. Though at one point or another Chaucer
engages in praise, mock praise, and oblique criticism, by the end of the poem his representing
Theseus as a capable ruler points to his hope that Richard might yet prove to be a worthy
king. (98)
“’5 Hereafter Troilus and Criseyde is abbreviated as the Troilus.

114

knowledge and defending the practicality of the magnates, which was contrasted
sharply with the ceremonious courtly life of the king: in a subtle way, the Troilus '
may have served to weaken Richard’s regal power. In the discussion of the
Troilus that follows, particular attention will be given to how Chaucer understood
Boethian philosophy, which will show that in the Troilus, Chaucer is skeptical
about Boethian philosophical ideas and teachings since they are difficult for
ordinary humans to follow through on completely.

Chaucer’s Troilus is so full of borrowings from Boethius’s Consolation that
it is impossible to deny Chaucer's indebtedness to Boethius's work. This
impression of Chaucer's heavy reliance on the Consolation for his philosophical
ideas have led many Chaucer scholars to take for granted the influence of
Boethian philosophy on Chaucer’s work. For example, Nevill Coghill asserts that
“Troilus is a Boethian book” (51); Derek Pearsall also argues that the Troilus is
“deeply impregnated with Boethian philosophizing about destiny, fortune and free
will” (Life 159).

Some have tried to show the influence of Boethius in Chaucer’s Troilus by
comparing the two works. When he discusses Boethian influences on Chaucer's
Troilus (122-135), Theodore A. Stroud takes the following two sentences from
The Boece and the Troilus as examples of “frequent phrasal echoes” by
Chaucer: the “drery vers of wretchidness weten my face with varray teres” (Book
1, Meter 1) and "This woful vers, that wepen as I write" (I. 7). For Stroud, the
verbal echoes of the Consolation in the Troilus are clear indications that

Chaucer's work is influenced by Boethius. What he fails to notice, however, is the

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possibility that the characters' echoing of Boethian elements in the Troilus can
have implications different from their original contexts. In his example, Stroud
disregards the fact that "This woful vers" from the Troilus means the sorrowful
story of Troilus, who suffers from unrequited love of Criseyde and the later loss of
her love, while "vers of sorvvful matere" from The Boece is about Boethius’s
enlightenment of the nature of man and royal power. Verbal resemblances
between the two works do not necessarily mean the actual influence of the
philosophical ideas of the Consolation on the Tmilus.

The assumption that Chaucer might have become intrigued by Boethius's
work under the influence of academic debates in his time does not necessarily
support the argument for the influence of Boethian philosophy on the Troilus,
either. For Chaucer, Boethius's work is a means to get some ideas about what is
being debated within the walls of the universities. As Chaucer is not a writer who
is eager to participate in the debates or find some answers to the questions in his
works, "[ijn his coolly ironic manner Chaucer turned some of the earnestness of
all these debates into a game" (Hussey 75). The fact that Chaucer composed his
works that includes philosophical materials does not give proof that he is a “the
noble philosophical poete,” as Thomas Usk estimates him (Brewer, Critical
Heritage 43). Moreover, the thematic approach to Troilus — which is basically an
attempt to understand the Troilus by projecting Boethius's perspective in the
Consolation onto Chaucer's work and by finding the similarities between the two
works — has another, more crucial, problem. Under these conditions, Chaucer is

at best a faithful follower of Boethian ideas, not a creative writer. Most importantly,

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scholarly interests in analyzing the influence of Boethian philosophy does not
provide us with an answer to the question of why in the Troilus, Chaucer
incorporates Boethian materials, even when they have little to do with the main
plot.106

To answer the que3tion of why Chaucer incorporates Boethian
philosophical materials into his Troilus, it is necessary to focus on Chaucer’s
departures from the Consolation - however small they may be - by paying close
attention to Chaucer's added remarks when he mentions the Boethian materials.
Though they seem to be casual additions, they are like the glosses in his Boece,
where we hear directly from Chaucer about the specific content he is dealing with.
As A. J. Minnis suggests, “Glossing and comments were commonly held to be a
means of reaching a level of textual understanding which the mere 'letter' did not
reveal,” (“Glosynge” 106) so Chaucer's casual, but actually pre-meditated,
remarks before or after Boethian borrowings can lead us closer to why Chaucer
uses Boethian materials and what significance they may have.

Chaucer's additional observations on Boethian matters indicate, first, that
Boethian ideas were common knowledge among clerks (like Boethius himself
and other learned men) and an educated layman like Chaucer. Just before
Criseyde notes her ideas on human happiness, she says: “‘0 God,’ quod she, ‘so

worldly selynesse/ Which clerkes callen fals felicitee,/ Imedled is with many a

bitternessel’” (Ill. 813-15). It is clear that the Boethian language of “fals felicitee,”

 

1°” In his recent article on Chaucer’s use of Boethian philosophical language, however, William
Watts emphasizes the significant meaning of a small phrase from Boethius such as “verray
felicitee parfit” and argues that “Chaucer’s Boethian appropriations are more dynamic and can
operate in smaller and less dramatic units than has generally been understood” (261).

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a term used by clerks,107

is also understood by Criseyde. Besides Criseyde,
Troilus, Pandarus, and the Narrator display in their daily lives some of their
knowledge of Boethian ideas. In anguish with his unrequited love for Criseyde,
Troilus complains to Pandarus, who is willing to. hear the reason for Troilus's
distress:

For wel fynde I that Fortune is my to;

Ne al the men that riden konne or go

May of hire cruel whiel the harm withsonde;

For as hire list she pleyeth with free and bonde. (1. 837-40)

Troilus begins his lamentation by saying “wel fynde l” in line 837 which shows
that he is well acquainted with the nature of Fortune, a basic element of Boethian
philosophy. In addition, his succinct description of Fortune suggests again that
the nature of Fortune is well-known to everybody.

In spite of the common understanding of Boethian philosophy by clerks
and the characters in the Troilus, however, there are some differences regarding
the level of understanding between them. Chaucer's added comments to the
Boethian worldview show that, unlike the clerks' knowledge of Boethius, the
characters have only partial understanding of Boethian philosophy. For all
Pandarus’s plan to give Troilus and Criseyde a consummation night, when

Criseyde is going to leave Pandarus's house, the Narrator intervenes and

observes Fortune's role in the world: “But 0 Fortune, executrice of wierdes,l

 

W In the Consolation, Lady Philosophy reminds Boethius the prisoner of the fact that what one
may think as the sources of human happiness can give him only “false felicity,” and explains to
him in detail about why riches, honor, and power cannot be the sources of true happiness in Book
3, Prose 3, 4, and 5 respectively.

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O influences of thise hevenes hyell Soth is, that under God ye ben oure hierdes”
(Ill. 617-19). The Narrator accepts Fortune as the minister of the Fates. However, i
the sentence "Though to us bestes ben the causez wrie" (III. 620), added just
after the display of Boethian knowledge, reveals the Narrator’s problem with
Boethian philosophical system: he does not understand the chain of influences
on man, starting from God through the Fates and Fortune. This Narrator is a
representative of a layman since he exemplifies how difficult it is for a layman to
comprehend Lady Philosophy's abstruse teachings in the Consolation. Laymen
not only have partial knowledge of Boethian philosophy, but they also use their
imperfect knowledge of Boethius as a basis for their secular pursuits, because
they are more concerned with the “real,” material world than with the idealistic
and philosophical concepts that Boethian theologians or clerks might provide.

Chaucer's addition of one stanza to the Boethian “Hymn to Love” by
Troilus points to how Troilus’s major concern is directed to the real. Some day
after the consummation night with Criseyde, Troilus sings a hymn to Love (III.
1744-71). Troilus's song is a versification of a part of Book 2, Meter 8 of The
Boece, with some reorganization by Chaucer and rephrasing. The beginning of
the song is taken from the middle of the original poem in The Boece with a slight
change, to emphasize the role of Love in the universe:

al this accordaunce [and] ordenaunce of thyngesis bounde with love that

governeth erthe and see, and hath also comandement to the hevene.

(Book 2, Meter 8)

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Love, that of erthe and 3e hath govemaunce,

Love, that his hestes bath in hevene hye. (Ill. 1744-45)
In the Consolation, Book 2, Meter 8 ends with “[Lady] Philosophy's climactic final
lament” (Windeatt, Troilus 105): “O weleful were mankynde, yif thilke love that
governeth hevene governede yowr 'corages.” Lamenting that the human heart
cannot accept the principle of Love that governs the whole universe, Lady
Philosophy urges Boethius to participate in the cosmic harmony of Love.
However, Chaucer omits this portion in Troilus's Hymn to Love and adds a
completely new stanza with no specific reference in the Consolation:

So wolde God, that auctour is of kynde, I.

That with his bond Love of his vertu liste

To cerclen hertes alle and faste bynde,

That from his bond no wight the wey out wiste;

And hertes colde, hem wolde I that he tvviste

To make hem love, and that hem liste ay rewe

On hertes sore, and kepe hem that ben trewe! (Ill. 1765-71)
In Book 2, Meter 8 of the Consolation, Love is a principle of stability and order
against changing Fortune in the universe and this Love can join people “with an
holy boond.” Chaucer's added remarks, however, go beyond the nature of Love:
human love comes from “God, that auctour is of kynde” (Ill. 1765); no one is free
from the bondage of human love and human love can make people sympathize
with other people. Troilus's song confirms the legitimacy of human love in the

world by relating it to God's Love, not as an earthly felicity. Whereas Boethius's

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poem is a definition of the nature of Love in the universe, Troilus's song is a
confirmation of love's role in human life and justification of human pursuit of it.
The following description of Troilus's changes after he gains Criseyde’s love
shows the effect human love can have on men:

In alle nedes for the townes werre

He was, and ay, the first in arrnes dyght,

And certeynly, but if that bokes erre,

Save Ector most ydred of any wight;

And this encres of hardynesse and myght

Corn hym of love, his ladies thank to wynne,

That altered his spirit so withinne. (Ill. 1772-78)

Though using the Boethian idealistic conception of Love, Troilus ultimately
explores what human love can do in human life on earth.

If Boethian teaching was difficult for laymen to understand and they are
more steeped in practical matters, it would be true that Boethius's philosophical
consolation could not give them any comfort. The additions that Criseyde and
Troilus make in their Boethian references show how ineffective the teachings of
the Consolation seem to them. When Troilus questions her fidelity to him,
Criseyde turns to Boethian philosophy. To lead Boethius the prisoner to true
happiness in God and with God, Lady Philosophy explains that false felicity ends
with death (Book 3, Meter 9). In Criseyde's limited understanding of Boethian
philosophy, Lady Philosophy’s teaching of true happiness finds no room for, and

her final conclusion on “false felicity,” which Chaucer adds at the end of the

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Boethian borrowing, is to deny the existence of true happiness in the world:
“Wherfore l wol diffyne in this matere,l That trewely, for aught I kan espie,l Ther
is no verray weele in this world heere” (III. 834-36). What is obvious here is that,
in a moment of critical importance in her life, Criseyde ponders on Boethian
knowledge but to no avail.

Similarly, In a time of suffering, Troilus also turns to Boethian knowledge
for his future actions but he takes no comfort in his meditation on Boethian
philosophy, either. Hearing the news of Criseyde's prospective exchange with
Antenor, Troilus "was so fallen in despeir that day,l That outrely he shop hym for
to deye" (IV. 954-55). Confronting the moment of choice between his death in a
war and losing Criseyde, Troilus contemplates the scholastic debates about
“divine purveyaunce” (IV. 961) and men’s "fre chois” (IV. 971). However, even
though he faithfully follows Boethian knowledge and tries to answer this question,
his conclusion falls short of Boethian consolation because he admits that things
on earth come by necessity:

Thus in this same wise, out of doutaunce,

I may wel maken, as it semeth me,

My resonyng of Goddes purveyaunce

And of the thynges that to comen be;

By which resoun men may wel yse

That thilke thynges that in erthe falle,

That by necessite they comen alle. (IV. 1044-50)

From the above discussion of his added remarks to Boethian materials in

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the Troilus, we may see a Chaucer who was concerned with the gap between an
“idealistic conception” of the time and the “actual behavior" of people (David140).
The recognition of this gap could have led him to question the possibility of
consolation provided by Boethian knowledge.

Chaucer’s desire to examine the possibility of Boethian consolation in the
Troilus may have resulted in setting up a historical situation analogous to his own
troubled one. The background of the Troilus is Troy, over which hovers an
atmosphere of long warfare with Greece. To this already gloomy situation,
Chaucer adds the moral degradation of Troy. Calkas, who deserts his people and
even his own daughter, is the clear symbol of the disruption .of the relationship
between a lord and a subject in Troy. In addition to this, though they are
generous to Criseyde after her father's desertion to Greek camp, the Trojans are
eager to exchange her for Antenor to reinforce their military leadership: “‘0 kyng
Priam,’ quod they, ‘thus sygge we,/ That al oure vois is to forgon Criseyde.’/ And
to deliveren Antenor they pryede” (IV. 194-96).

In addition to open betrayals by its citizens, Troy (with the exception of the
noble Hector) also accepts ravishing without condemnation. Pandarus advises
“Go ravysshe hire!” (IV. 530) to Troilus, who is lamenting at the news of
Criseyde's exchange. Moreover, the Trojans accept Paris, who deserts his lover
Oenone and ravishes Helen, which leads to the eruption of the war between
Greece and Troy.

By establishing a pagan setting similar in some ways to his own Christian

world in the Troilus, Chaucer casts doubts on Boethianism, thereby suggesting

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that for a human being to live by it is actually quite difficult. As an alternative to
Boethian consolation, however, Chaucer casts Pandarus as the-comforter of
Troilus by adding some comments to Boethian materials in Pandarus’s words. If
we look closely at what he gives Troilus as consolation, then we will see what
Chaucer has in mind as a pctential, though not necessarily admirable, substitute
for Boethian wisdom.

Pandarus's argument, which is added after Troilus’s meditation on
predestination, rescues Troilus from despondence to the hope of preserving his
and Criseyde’s relationship. When Pandarus finds Troilus is pondering, he asks:
“Whi, Troilus, what thinkestow to doone?/ Hastow swich lust to ben thyn owen
fo?” (IV. 1088-89). Pandarus is against Troilus's thinking because he is sure that
his practical mind will eventually lead Troilus out of his helplessness: “What,
parde, yet is net Criseyde agol/ Whi list the so thiself fordoon for dredel That in
thyn hed thyne eyen semen dede?” (IV. 1090-92). By reminding Troilus of the
fact that Criseyde is still with them, Pandarus changes Troilus's perspective from
d.1oa

the ideal, conceptual world of Boethian philosophy to the real worl

From this discussion of the Troilus, we may find a hint of why Chaucer

 

1°° However, it should be noted that Pandarus's consolation is not without its limitations. Criseyde
is in fact still going to leave, and in fact does eventually betray Troilus. Moreover, Troilus is able
to truly escape his sorrow only when he dies and sees the folly of setting his heart on an earthly
love with Criseyde: ,

And down from thennes faste he gan avyse

This Iitel spot of erthe that with the se

Embraced is, and fully gan despise

This wrecched world, and held al vanite

To re3pect of the pleyn felicite

That is in hevene above. . ..

And dampned al our werk that foloweth so

The blynde lust, the which that may not laste,

And sholden al oure herte on hevene caste; (V. 1814-19, 23-25)

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uses Boethian materials in it: in a fictional world of pagans, he may have wanted
to examine freely the possibility of Boethian consolation perhaps because of his
pressing need for hope to live on in social and political upheaval of his time.
However, if we consider the fact that Chaucer presents Pandarus as an
alternative comforter, who is optimistic and has a practical perspective,
Chaucer's use of Boethian materials is not his main concern but a means to
achieve the consolation of Pandarus. This interpretation of the Troilus, putting an
emphasis on Pandarus as a provider of consolation, seems to be problematic; it
does not appear to conform to the traditional understanding of the ending of the
Troilus, which is called "the head of the whole body of the poem" and is regarded
as a reward for Troilus's "trouthe” to Criseyde on earth (Donaldson 122, 126).
However, if we consider that the idea of Contemptus Mundi, as is
suggested by the lines "And in hym self he [Troilus] lough right at the wo/ Of hem
. that wepten for his deth so faste" (V. 1821-22), is achieved only after Troilus's
death, then the ending of the Troilus can be read as an ironical one. Rather than
a story of "the saving of Troilus" (Nolan 244) through his joyful apotheosis, the
ending of the Troilus suggests that Boethian knowledge has only limited
usefulness to the agony and worldly pain of a man: Chaucer is ultimately
showing us that even if Boethian understanding might be desirable, it is very
difficult to achieve it in this life. As John Leyerle points out, "in heaven, Troilus
gets what he freely chose, enduring and stable love, but not where he looked for
it with Criseyde" (Barney 200). Chaucer's main purpose in creating a pagan world

in the Troilus is "not to reprocess it [pagan antiquity] as material for Christian

125

teaching" (Spearing 43), but to question the Boethian idealistic ideas, whether it
is philosophical or theological, and discover its alternative.

As we have seen, by questioning the validity of Boethian teachings in his
time, Chaucer undermines the authority of Boethian philosophy as provider of
consolation to those under distress. By calling into question thepractical
application of Boethian clerical knowledge, Chaucer indicates his sympathy with
those who choose a more pragmatic, less absolute path than the clerks, through
which he is coming one step nearer to the magnates, characterized by their
concerns with the real and contrasted with idealism of the clerks and theoretical

attitudes.

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CHAPTER FOUR

The Politics of Translation in the Clerk’s Tale

In discussing the Romaunt and The Boece, we have seen how Chaucer’s
two translations might have played different political roles under specific historical
surroundings. Whereas the Romaunt could have contributed to promote peaceful
relations between England and France in the 13903, The Boece might have
supported the criticism of Richard by the magnates who were opposing the king.
However, unlike the Romaunt and The Boece — in which the fact that a medieval
translation could have a political significance can only be assumed by historical
conjectures — the politics of translation is most prominently shown in the Clerk's
Tale. An example of Ciceronian translation, the Tale not only invites us to a
better understanding of the creative nature of a medieval translation,109 but more
importantly, it provides us with a chance to recognize the political function of late
medieval translation as a creative act more thoroughly than any other work by
Chaucer.

Much recent scholarly interest in the Tale has been focused on either the
Christian allegorical reading or feminist analyses of gender relations in the Tale,

neither of which have substantially explored the Tale’s characteristics as

 

1°” The theory of translation endorsing the creative nature of translation, however, is not limited
only to medieval translation as is discussed in Chapter 1. The concept of translation as creation is
recently much supported by modern translation theorists. See for example, Andre Lefevere,
Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London and New York: Routledge,
1992), where he argues for translation as rewriting which allows a translator to have freedom to
change the originals to conform to the literary and cultural conventions of his time: “Translation is
the most recognizable type of rewriting, and... it is potentially the most influential because it is
able to project the image of an author and/or those works beyond the boundaries of their culture
of origin” (9).

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translation.11o

Pointing out that the Tale draws a picture of an exemplary human being
through the image of the extraordinary patience of Griselda, Derek Pearsall goes
on to develop the argument that the Tale enforces man’s proper attitude towards
God: I

The story is rather an example of the patience that all men should display

in adversity, and the example is the more forceful in that our obedience is

due to God, where Griselda’s was due only to a man. We have the greater

reason as well as the greater obligation to be obedient. (Canterbury Tales

265) '-
Similarly, Samantha J. Rayner contends that Griselda is “a symbol of how all
Christians must behave under God’s design” (134), adding that the rulers in the
Tale are all “exemplars of how God’s actions can often seem arbitrary and unfair”
(135). The focus of the Tale, however, she concludes, is “on how his [Walter’s]
subjects react to his decisions” and ultimately “how the consequences of
Griselda’s patience resulted in a world of joy for all” (135).

On the other hand, Elaine Tuttle Hansen, who is particularly concerned
with women and power, suggests that Griselda’s “utter submissiveness and

essential silence" (189) provide a good basis for a paradoxical argument that

 

11° For traditional Christian allegorical readings of the Tale, see Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury
Tales (London: Unwin, 1985), 265-77; Charlotte C. Morse, “The Exemplary Griselda,” Studies in
the Age of Chaucer 7 (1985): 51-86; and more recently, Samantha J. Rayner, Images of
Kingship in Chaucer and His Ricardian Contemporaries (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2008), 134-
36. On the other hand, for newer feminist approaches to the Tale, see for example, Carolyn
Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 132-55; Jill
Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer(New York and London: Harvester, 1991), 146-64; and Elaine Tuttle
Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1992), 188-207.

128

 

Griselda “attains certain kinds of power by embracing powerlessness” and “she is
strong... because she is so perfectly weak” (190). As a'feminist critic, Hansen
presumes that Griselda’s empowerment in the Tale can be possible through “her
suffering and submission” which are “fundamentally insubordinate and deeply
threatening to men and to the concepts of power and gender identity upon which
patriarchal culture is premised” (190).

Peggy Knapp directs our attention to specific historical, political situation in
the Tale. Unlike Pearsall and Rayner, or Hansen, who attempt to analyze the
Tale from the perspective of the relationship between man and God, or man and
wife, Peggy Knapp argues that, through patient Griselda, what the Tale ultimately
offers is "an idealization of the feudal social order," based on “old-style
authoritarian relations between ruler and subjects tempered by mutual respect
and consideration” (136):111

The political aspect of the story [the Clerk’s Tale] thus reveals the same

split in genre that the marriage trial does. As exemplary tale, controlled

inside by a noble Markys and outside by an authoritarian scholar, it
preaches the obedience of the peasantry and the eventual inclusion of one

of them in the company of aristocratic privilege. (137)

In her argument on the political elements in the Tale, Peggy Knapp rightly points

 

1" A political dimension of the Griselda story, whose popularity was sustained throughout the
Middle Ages, has recently been a point of attention. For example, discussing French versions of
the Griselda story, Carolyn P. Collette points out that politics are always interwoven with marriage
in the story:
The Griselda story is never simply a story about husbands and wives in marriage, although...it
was widely disseminated as an exemplum of ideal wifely behaviour in late Fourteenth-century
French culture. From its earliest popularity it also contained a political dimension closely
entwined with the marriage plot. (60)

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out the significance of the obedience both of Griselda and the people. However,
the feudal world, which is based on the rulers absolute power and the subjects’
unquestioning obedience, is what the Marquis and the Clerk suppose to be an
ideal one, but the same is not true of Chaucer the writer of The Canterbury Tales.
As we will see next, Chaucer’s major concern in the Tale is less about the
obedience the people and Griselda show to Walter, than about how Walter the
Marquis draws out the willing submission of his subjects.

Spurred by recent interest in political elements in the Tale, by discussing
the political features of the Tale including power relations among Walter, Griselda,
and other people and the question of the legitimate succession of the lordship, I
argue in this chapter that, by viewing translation as creative process, the Tale
leads us to better understand how a medieval translation can serve power, more
specifically the consolidation of power under a particular historical, political
situation. On the basis of the analogical relation between Walter and Griselda,
and the translator and his translation, I examine closely the motive and the
process of Walter's “translation” of Griselda, thus attempting to show that his
translation is rendered in an effort to proliferate a sort of political propaganda,
ultimately aimed at strengthening his governing power over his people and

land.112

 

"2 An incessant effort for image-making among monarchs and rulers is not unusual in the later
Middle Ages. Richard II, under whose rule Chaucer spent most of his writing career, is well-
known for his obsession with his own image-making, which became a clear target of hostile
comments in the chronicles. It is often noted that he “invested heavily in a rich variety of symbolic
practices to project a carefully fashioned image of sacral kingship” (Barr 80). For more discussion
of Richard ll’s preoccupation with his own image-making, see Helen Barr, Socioliterary Practice in
Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), especially 63-79, and Richard II:
The Art of Kingship, ed. Anthony Goodman and James L. Gillespie (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1999), especially 15-35. For a more recent discussion of Richard ll’s attempt to perform on the

130

1. Walter as Translator in the Clerk's Tale

A It is almost impossible to deny the prominence of translation in the Clerk's
Tale since it begins and ends with the clear indications of its Latin source. When
the Narrator specifies the source of his story at the beginning of the Tale - “Iwol
' yow telle a tale which that ll Lemed at Padowe of a worthy clerk...Fraunceys
Petrak, the lauriat poete” (26-27, 31),113 — what the “learned” Clerk brings to the
mind of his reader] audience is that his tale is an English translation of Petrarch's
Latin, rendered for his “lewed” companions among the Canterbury Pilgrims.114
Moreover, the nature of his story as translation is re-emphasized at the end of his
tale when he mentions the presence of Petrarch as a source writer: “And
herkneth what this auctour seith therfoore” (1141) and “therfore Petrak writeth/

This storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth” (1147-48). It is no wonder,

 

stage of diplomacy, see Lee Patterson, “The Necessity of History: The Example of Chaucer’s
“Clerk’s Tale,” in Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk,
ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 187-210. Describing in detail the
elaborate diplomatic meeting at Ardres in northern France from October 26 to October 30, 1396,
between Charles VI of France and Richard II for the issue of Richard’s marriage to Charles's
eight-year-old daughter, Isabelle, Patterson defines the meeting at Ardres as “another way for
Richard to affirm a value that had always been important to him but that by the 13903 had
become almost an obsession: the sacral nature of his kingship” (192).

"3 Though the Clerk mentions explicitly only Petrarch’s name as the source of his story, it is
generally accepted that the Tale is based on an anonymous French version of the Griselda story
as well as Petrarch’s. For a more detailed discussion of the Tale and its sources, see pp. 23-24 in
this dissertation. What is also noticeable in the Clerk’s naming of Petrach as his source is that his
Griselda story is not transmitted through the textual translation of Petrach’s Latin text, but by
means of an oral version made from his personal contact with the Italian poet. Given that
Petrarch’s Latin (“learned”) version is based on Boccaccio’s vernacular Italian version, Larry
Scanlon correctly interprets the Clerk's description of “the transmission of Petrarch’s Latin
narrative as an oral, rather than literate, process” (230) as showing “the interdependence
between the oral and the literate and the vernacular and the learned” (231) in the later Middle

A es.

1' Chaucer’s works, most of which are translations from Latin, French, or Italian, could be useful
not only for people whose literacy was limited only to English, but also for the court audience who
had good command of foreign languages as supplements to the originals. For a discussion of
Chaucer's audience, see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge and London: Harvard
University Press, 1989), especially 47-83, in which he assumes that Chaucer’s intended audience
could be “a circle of [his] social equals and near equals,” and The Book of the Duchess in
particular was “a poem addressed to a social superior” (50, 51).

131

therefore, that major modern scholarship on the Clerk's Tale has shown much
interest in detailed comparisons of Chaucer’s translation with its sources.115

Despite the plethora of studies of the Tale on the subject of translation,
however, only a few studies have approached the Tale in the direction that it
provides a glimpse of a medieval translator at work.116 In much the same way
that a translator reads and interprets a source text carefully, planning to translate
it in the future, Walter gazes at Griselda, finds excellent virtue in her, and decides
to marry her some day, should he marry, thus “translating” her from a peasant
girl into a Marquise:117

upon Grisilde, this povre creature,

Ful ofte sithe this markys sette his ye....

Commendynge in his herte hir wommanhede,

And eek hir vertu, passynge any wight

 

"5 For brief, recent overviews of twentieth-century criticism of the Tale, see Charlotte C. Morse,
"Critical Approaches to the Clerk's Tale," in Chaucer’s Religious Tales, ed. C. David Benson and
Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1990), and Judith Bronfrnan, Chaucer’s Clerk’s
Tale: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated (New York: Garland, 1994). Many of the
works on the issue of translation in the Tale are heavily indebted to J. Burke Severs's extensive
work on the Tale, The Literary Relationships of Chaucer’s Clerk's Tale, and a more recent work,
Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales: Vol. 1, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel
(Cambridge: D S. Brewer, 2002). As is found in the discussion of Kirkpatrick (231) and Wallace
(Chaucerian Polity 282), one remarkable direction of recent scholarship on the Tale is to question
the validity of Chaucer's outright mentioning of his source, thus challenging the idea that Petrarch
is the only direct source of the Tale. With all its achievements, however, the method of comparing
the Tale with its plausible, but basically speculative, sources can never be free .from a problem
inherent in the method of comparison. A3 Machan suggests in his discussion of the Boece that "if
we do not know the exact Latin and French manuscripts which Chaucer used, then there must be
a degree of doubt about the source of every individual reading in the Boece," any study of the
Tale by comparing it with its sources is open to questions of whether Chaucer might have used
those same manuscripts that modern scholars are using for their comparison (“Editorial Method”
190)

"6 For the discussion of scholars who have examined the Tale using the metaphor of translation,
see Dinshaw, Ferster, Wallace (Chaucerian Polity), and Staley (Languages), among others.

"7 For the view of woman as a text, see Dinshaw's discussion of the Tale in her Chaucer's
Sexual Poetics, in which she argues that from the history of the Griselda story, it is clear that
"woman is associated with a text to be read and interpreted by men" (133).

132

Of so yong age, as wel in chiere as dede.
For thogh the peple have no greet insight
In vertu, he considered ful right
Hir bountee, and disposed that he wolde
Wedde hire oonly, if evere he wedde shblde. (232-33, 239-45)118
Moreover, just as a translator changes the language in his source into another
with a view of making his source available to readers who have not read - or
cannot read — it, on his wedding day, Walter has Griselda stripped of her shabby
clothes and adorned with a new garment and ornaments:
And for that no thyng of hir olde geere
She sholde brynge into his hous, he bad
That wommen sholde dispoillen hire right theere;....
Hir heris han they kembd, that lay untressed
Ful rudely, and with hir fyngres smale
A corone on hire heed they han ydressed,
And sette hire ful of nowches grete and smale. (372-74, 379-82)
From the role Walter plays in the Tale, it is obvious that the Tale illuminates the
process of translation - how a medieval translator works on his source text and
strives to ensure a new life for his translation.

The metaphor of Walter and Griselda as translator and translation,

 

"8 Mark Miller interprets Walter’s decision to marry Griselda if he should marry a woman
presupposes the impossibility of the incident in his mind: “he [Walter] can do so [decide to many
Griselda] partly because he ‘knows’ in principle that he will never make this thought a reality”
(228). However, as the discussion on the process of Griselda's translation in this chapter will
demonstrate, Walter’s decision to marry her is more like part of his grand project of her translation
than a mere fantasy. ~

133

however, leads us to an enigmatic question about the Tale: how can we
understand Walter’s inhuman tests - or “persecution” as some would say - of
Griselda and her corresponding superhuman patience, which comprise about

two-thirds of the Tale, in terms of the process, of translation?119

This question,
whichasks about the intrinsic relatibn between Griselda’s translation and ‘
Walter’s tests of her, however, has not entirely escaped scholarly attention,
especially among feminist scholars.

In her compelling study of Chaucer’s works, Carolyn Dinshaw attempts to
answer the puzzling question by distinguishing two kinds of translation in the
Tale: positive and negative translation. The influential feminist scholar looks upon
Walter's making a peasant girl into a Marquise as “realizing the positive
hermeneutic potential of translation,” while relegating Walter’s cruel testing of her
into an example of translation which goes wrong and verges on destroying the
text:

Walter, the translator, is the one who with “insight! In vertu” (242-43) has

discerned and revealed, made public and useful, the text’s wisdom and

truth. But this good translatio goes bad: Walter dissembles, saying one
thing but meaning another; he moves about, separates people from one
another, substitutes one woman for another. And he runs the risk of

forever losing or damaging his wife, who...would seem to promise the

possibility of full disclosure of meaning, of truth. (143)

 

"9 Both Walter's “inhuman” tests and Griselda’s “superhuman” patience have led some of the
critics to find “monstrosity” in both of them. See for example, J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and
Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004), pp. 116-40.

134

Though she aptly distinguishes the differences between two sorts of translation
the Tale presents, another question naturally springs up unanswered in her
argument: why must the Tale show two kinds of contrasting translation? In other
words, is there any possibility of some connection between the two kinds of
translation?

In contrast, when Judith Ferster, focusing on interpretation and politics,
argues that Walter's tests of Griselda are motivated by his curiosity about
“whether Griselda can remain true to him and to her promises” on their wedding
day (Chaucer 95) and by his fear that “she will lose her previous identity”
(Chaucer 96), her argument addresses an arguably human aspect of Walter’s
inhuman tests. Ferster's contention, however, does not fully illuminate the issue
of translation and translator in the Tale, either. As we will see in this chapter, late
medieval translators enjoyed the status of a creative writer because of their
inventions of a new story through their own interpretation of the already existing
text. What they sought in their translation was not just the identification of a
translation with a source text as Ferster contends, but the creation of a new
identity in his translation.

Since the concept of a translator as creator or inventor was dominant in
the later Middle Ages, Walter’s testing of Griselda can be interpreted from a new
perspective, as a creative act. As an essential part of his project to complete his
translation of Griselda, that is, the invention of the public image of “Patient
Griselda,” Walter tests her successively over a long period of time. In other words,

his tests of Griselda are his attempt to project a new kind of virtue onto her, thus

135

distinguishing her from any other woman in Saluzzo and making his own Iow-
born wife reborn as a qualified spouse for him as Marquis. More significantly,
however, in the whole process of translating Griselda, what Walter ultimately
aims at is inventing his own image as capable ruler, an image indispensable to a
young Marquis who has no immediate family near him.‘2° It is clear, then, the
whole process of Walter’s translation of Griselda must be one of his ways of
securing political control over his land and people through the creation of the

image of “Patient Griselda.“1

2. “This flour of wyfly pacience”: Inventing “Patient Griselda”

If we hold a conventional idea of translation that the best translation must
not only keep its source’s worth and ideas, but also look like another source text
without a slightest tinge of translation, then Walter’s creation of a Marquise out of
a poor peasant girl — the first act of translation as we might call it - seems to be
complete and successful. As Marquise, Griselda not only keeps her maiden
virtues (925-31), which grow in good qualities (407-409), but more importantly
she looks like a Marquise who was born high and brought up as such:

That it ne semed nat by liklynesse

 

12° As Andrew Sprung points .out, Walter is "a young orphan ruler...[whose] only visible relatives

are a distant sister and brother-in-Iaw” (348). That Walter has no family member at hand to help
and advise him presses him with the urgent need to prove himself as a capable ruler.

‘21 Feminist interpretations, however, stress that it is not Walter but Griselda herself who is
empowered in the Tale. For example, commenting on the significance of the Tale’s ending, Mann
argues that “For it is not Griselda who gives way under the pressures of his trial, but Walter. As in
the Franklin ’3 Tale, the story does not simply illustrate the virtue of patience; it shows that
patience conquers” (152-53). Likewise, Tara Williams also argues that “As the suffering heroine,
Griselda could be cast as exercising a female form of power or enduring in the face of capricious
male authority” (105). For Mann and Williams, Griselda's life exemplifies that a woman can gain
power through her submission as a wife and subject to Walter, the Marquis.

136

That she was born and fed in rudenesse,

As in a cote or in an oxe-stalle,

But norissed in an emperoures halle. (396-99)
Moreover, Griselda’s fulfilment of her role as the spouse of a Marquis far
exceeds what isexpected of an ordinary Marquise. With her virtue and Wisdom,
she acts as a peacemaker who brings “reste and ese” to the people in dispute as
well as a wife of the lord:

Nat oonly this Grisildis thrugh hir wit

Koude al the feet of wyfly hoomlinesse,

But eek, whan that-the cas required it,

The commune profit koude she redresse.

Ther nas discord, rancour, ne hevynesse

In al that land that she ne koude apese,

And wisely brynge hem alle in reste and ese. (428-34)
When her husband is away, she even successfully reconciles enmities among
the people, and for her wisdom, judgment, and thoughtful words, she is revered
as a heavenly creaturem:

Though that hire housbonde absent were anon,

If gentil men or othere of hire contree

Were wrothe, she wolde bryngen hem aton;

 

‘22 Some feminist critics have claimed that Griselda’s exceptional role as “a saintly ruler” brings
Walter's tests of her. For example, Hansen argues that “Walter’s decision to torture and humiliate
her as a wife and mother comes, according to the narrative, after she has been acclaimed as a
saintly ruler, and so the narrative sequence implies on the contrary that such virtue in a woman
only provokes male aggression” (191 ).

137

So wise and rype wordes hadde she,

And juggementz of so greet equitee,

That she from hevene sent was, as men wende,

Peple to save and every wrong t'amende. (435-41)

Thus, as Marquise, Griselda must be a translation equivalent to, and even‘far
surpassing, the qualities of its source.

Walter’s performance as translator — his first step of translation - turns out,
however, to be neither complete nor successful. To begin with, his translation of
a peasant girl into a Marquise is made without due consideration of the role of its
reader, a role,which it might be said, his people play. The audiences of medieval
translations could enjoy moral virtue from the reading of completed translations;
arguably, the translator's imaginary projection into the minds of his audience
even allows them to participate in the making of new versions of a text. As the
“translator” of Griselda, Walter should thustake into account the opinions of his
“readers” about making a peasant girl his spouse. By selecting a poor virtuous
woman as his wife, he may be successful in satisfying his people's moralistic
expectation that he take a wife,123 but Walter does not take into full consideration
what their reaction will be to the transgression he makes in his marriage to a low-
born girl. In his response to his people's request to marry, by marrying a peasant
girl, Walter puts the social hierarchy at stake. Walter's marriage to Griselda,

performed initially for the stability of society, turns out to be a potential threat to

 

‘23 So virtuous is Griselda that she is loved by all the pe0ple in Saluzzo, independent of sex or
age: "That ech hire lovede that looked on hir face" (413) and "So spradde of hire heighte bountee
the fame/ That men and wommen, as wel yonge as olde,/ Goon to Saluce upon hire to biholde”
(418-20).

138

society because of his transgression of social decorum. By not addressing his
“readers’” (that is, his subjects’) concerns about his translation, Walter’s first act
of translation remains incomplete.

A deeper discussion of the idea of medieval translationand translator,
however, will lead us to a better understanding of why Walter's translation is only
halfway to completion. To deepen our understanding of the medieval translator, I
again turn to Eustache Deschamps's encomium of Chaucer as a "grant
translateur” in his ballade to Chaucer?”

By using the metaphor of insemination, the French poet praises Chaucer
as asuccessful transplanter of Le Roman de la Rose to English soil, thus making
it flourish there:

...qui par ta theorique

Enlumines le regne d’Eneas,

L’lsle aux Geans, ceuls de Bruth, et qu'i as

Semé les fleurs et planté Ie rosier

Aux ignorans de la langue Pandras
Grant translateur, noble Geoffrey Chaucier (5-10).125

What is striking in Deschamps's praise of Chaucer, however, is that in the

succeeding stanzas, "Deschamps expands the metaphor [of insemination] so

 

‘2‘ Eustache Deschamps, “Autre Balade,” in Chaucer: The Critical Heritage. Volume I 1385-1837,
ed. Derek Brewer (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 40-41. For a fuller discussion of
the poem, especially in relation to the One Hundred Years’ War, see Chapter Two of this
dissertation.

‘25 “who by your science enlighten the kingdom of Aeneas, the island of Giants, of Brutus, who
have sown there the flowers and planted the rose-tree for those who are ignorant of French; great
translator, noble Geoffrey Chaucer.” The modern English translation is Brewer’s. For further
comment on the translation of “Pandras,” see Chapter Two, p. 70, n. 62.

139

that Chaucer's translation becomes itself another version of the garden and then
an authentic source to other writers" (R. R. Edwards, Dream 34).

How, then, can a translation have literary authority such as a source text

may have? To answer this question, we should return to the issue of the

differences between translation and source. As we have already seen in Chapter
One,126 recent scholars of medieval translation regard “differences” between
translation and source not as “incorrectness” but as having the more positive
meaning of “departures” or even “discontinuities.” Moreover, since "the changing
or shifting of a single adverb or pronoun [in a translation] can be of enormous,
Iong-terrn consequence" (Wallace, “Troilus” 257), even the slightest differences
and changes that a translator makes in a translation have often become the point
of scholarly attention.

It is through those intentional changes and consequent differences
between a source text and its translation, "a missaying" to use R. A. Shoaf‘s
succinct expression, that a translator projects "new meaning" into his translation
("Notes" 58, 66). Since a translation has “a creative, revelatory, interpretive
potential,” it has “the capacity to make the reader (or hearer) see something in a
new way" (Dinshaw 139). From this freshness and inventiveness, a later
medieval translation can acquire authority by displacing the original:

On the other hand, the vernacular versions also demonstrate a tendency to

displace the original: particular vernacular versions achieve considerable

authority or popularity and become in fact primary references and sources

 

‘26 See Chapter One, pp. 17-21.

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for later versions, thus acquiring a kind of vernacular canonical status of

their own. (Copeland, “Vernacular Translation” 56)

Likewise, as a later medieval translator is more than a transmitter or a rehearser
of a pre-existing text, the line drawn between a translator and an original writer
begins to fall down.127 As Copeland asserts in her discussion of the G—Prologue
to The Legend of Good Women, the medieval translator may well be called an
"auctor” (“author"):128

In mastering that academic discourse the vernacular translator has

become the subject of that discourse: no longer just an exegete, a

transmitter or “rehearser” of lore about the auctores, he is himself an

auctor. (Rhetoric 197)

Given that a translator is a creator as well as a transferor, and a translation
should be a creative art, Walter's appropriation of Griselda into his household is a
translation which is only half done because, in his first act of translation, he does
not create a new image of her to secure her authority as rightful Marquise. Since
she is a poor peasant girl by birth, her popularity among the people and her
excellent role as Marquise during the absence of her husband cannot guarantee
her a perpetual, secure life as the spouse of the most powerful man in the region.

Seen from this perspective, then, Walter's tests of Griselda, though

unquestionably inhuman, are his long-lasting efforts to make her an indisputable

 

127 See Chapter One, pp. 13-15.

12° Although it is clear that Chaucer aspires to a status of an "auctor" when he hopes his work to
"kis the steppes where as thow [his work] seest pace/ Virgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace"
(Troilus and Criseyde 1791-92), he typically assumes the role of a compiler or a rehearser. For a
detailed discussion of Chaucer's assuming the role of "rehearsing” reporter as well as the
differences between a rehearser and translator, see A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory 190-210.

141

Marquise, whose qualifications for the position of lord’s wife can never be
questioned. By making obedience - the quality she possesses before her
marriage - her outstanding virtue, Walter invests her with the image of “Patient
Griselda,” the symbol of utmost wifely virtue in his time, thus reincamating
Griselda - who may not have been regarded as Walter’s rightful spouse for her
low birth — as qualified spouse to him.

What Walter does as a translator who recreates a source text is, by
interpreting it in his own way, to find a "seed" which he will make full-blown in a
translation, and then he confirms the validity of his own interpretation of it before
he presents it to the reader.129 Because of the translator's double burden of
interpreting the text first and then of relating his interpretation to his reader,
Walter wants to reassure himself of Griselda’s virtue of obedience before he
presents her as a archetype of patience to his people.

Walter the translator makes certain of the propriety of his own .
interpretation of Griselda's virtue by allowing his reader, that is his people, to
participate in his recreation of the text by giving them voices in his fictionalized,
but fairly plausible, pretexts for his cruel tests of Griselda. He commands first that
she be stripped of her daughter, on the ground of the nobility's complaint about
their having to serve a lowborn peasant girl as Marquise:

And though to me that ye be lief and deere,

Unto my gentils ye be no thyng so.

 

‘29 Derek Brewer emphasizes the freedom of a medieval writer, which enables him to interpret as
he pleases: "Medieval writers did not consciously alter the main outline of the plot; on the other
hand, they considered themselves perfectly free to alter its significance, to interpret it, in any way
they desired" (Tradition 24).

142

They seyn, to hem it is greet shame and wo

For to be subgets and been in sewage-

To thee, that born art of a smal village. (480-83)
And then, before he has her robbed of her two-year old son, he produces his
people's grievance about their destiny to serve an offspring of a poor peasant cf
Janicula as their lord:

My peple sikly berth oure mariage;....

“Now sey they thus: ‘Whan Walter is agon,

Thanne shal the blood of Janicle succede

And been oure lord, for loother have we noon.’ (625, 631-33)
In reflecting vox populi (“the voice of people”) in his translation, Walter pretends
his people are participating in his invention of "Patient Griselda" as if they were
"coauthors" of his translation.130

As Walter implies by the secrecy of his cruel acts ("Ther is no wight that
hereth it but we [Walter and Griselda] tweye" 476), Walter‘s first two tests — the

131 — which are comparable to

stripping of their daughter and son from Griselda
the act of reaffinning his own interpretation of the text as translator, are privately

and surreptitiously performed between them, with the involvement of only one

 

13° As Shoaf suggests, Chaucer’s use of the reader as his “coauthor' in his rendering of a story is
one of his strategies of writing: "Hence the strategy, here in the Troy/us and supremely in The
Canterbury Tales of provoking the reader, of drawing him into the text and making him part of
it...thus problematizing his response and forcing him, in effect, to become coauthor of the text"
Dante 131 ).
13‘ For modern readers, Griselda’s acquiescence in giving up her children may well provoke
outrage but Gillian Rudd explains a unique situation of a married woman and her children in
Chaucer’s time which may make Griselda's responses to Walter’s cruel demands probable: “in
the fourteenth century children were more explicitly attached to the father, and a woman's duty as
wife came before those as mother” (127).

143

other person in Saluzzo, the Sergeant. Just as a translator looks carefully over
his translation to ascertain whether his own interpretation is correct, after
depriving her of the two children, Walter desires to check: "if by his wyves cheere
he myghte se,l Or by hire word aperceyve, that she/ Were chaunged" (599-601),
‘ and "[h]e waiteth if by word or contenance/ That she to hym was changed of
corage" (708-709).

What is noticeable in Walter's first two tests is that, when he suggests to
Griselda that she "Shewe now youre pacience in youre werkyng" (495), he is
more concerned with her patience than her steadfastness, and it is her patience
that makes him marvel at her: "This markys wondred, evere longer the moore,/
Upon hir pacience" (687-88). While he is ostensibly testing her wifely "feith
and...benyngnytee" (1053), what Walter actually tries to do is to set up an
occasion to make her outstanding patience visible to, and ultimately
acknowledged by, his people.

Being assured of, and content with, Griselda's patience as her
distinguishing virtue, Walter launches upon her public image-making through a
sham marriage. After he has the Pope's bull forged, allowing his divorce with
Griselda and new marriage, and has a letter sent to Count Panago, his brother-
in-Iaw, asking him to bring Walter’s own son (now seven years old), and his

daughter (now twelve years old) as his new bride,132 he publicly relegates

 

'32 As Thomas A. Van suggests, “that Walter's pretended bride is his own daughter at least
grazes the taboo against incest between parent and offspring” (220). Were it completed, Walter’s
project of a fake marriage with his own daughter could be another instance of his transgressive
acts because such marriage is an act of “incest,” which Christopher Baswell defines as “perhaps
the deepest threat to social identities formed through patrilineage and the orderly transmission of
dominion” (“England’s Antiquities” 243).

144

Griselda to her father's house with her dowry:

And trewely thus muche l wol yow seye,

My newe wyf is comynge by the weye.

Be strong of herte, and voyde anon hir place,

And thilke dowere that ye broghten me,

Taak it agayn; l graunte it of my grace.

Retoumeth to youre fadres hous, quod he; (804-9)
By sending Griselda back to her native home, Walter allows his people to
recognize the patience with which she endures “The strook of Fortune or of
aventure” (812): in the Clerk’s terms, she now becomes “flour of wyfly patience”
among the people:

Thus with hire fader for a certeyn space

Dwelleth this flour of wyfly pacience,

That neither by hire wordes ne hire face,

Bifom the folk, ne eek in hire absence,

Ne shewed she that hire was doon offence;

Ne of hire heighe estaat no remembrauce

Ne hadde she, as by hire contenaunce. (919-24)

Walter, “The Markys, which that shoop and knew all" (946) about his translation

- of Griselda, stages a fake wedding ceremony as an occasion to announce the
birth of a new Griselda, the emblem of Patience. After providing Griselda another
chance to demonstrate her wifely patience at his court by forcing her to do menial

work as a maid, in the presence of the people from Panago as well as his own

145

people, he asks her, "How liketh thee my [new] wyf and hire beautee?” (1031).
She answers this question, which may be deeply tormenting to her, with her
usual faithful obedience but not without the hint of criticism, by advising Walter
that he “ne prikke with no tonnentyngel This tendre mayden” (1038-39). Being
convinced that her outstanding patience is disclosed enough to the people,
Walter announces his tests of her are finally over and unveils his motives for
testing her:

“This is ynogh, Grisilde myn,” quod he;

“Be now namoore agast ne yvele apayed.

I have thy feith and thy benyngnytee,

As wel as evere womman was, assayed,

In greet estaat and povreliche arrayed.

Now knows I, dere wyf, thy stedfastnesse” —

And hire in arrnes took and gan hire kesse. (1051-1056)
In this scene at the pinnacle of the public image-making of Griselda, it is
remarkable that the revelation of the truth of his tests of her is intended not only
for Griselda but also for the people who are encouraged to recognize Griselda’s
unprecedented superb wifely virtue of patience:

“And folk that ootherweys han seyd of me,

I warne hem wel that l have doon this deede

For no malice, ne for no crueltee,

But for t'assaye in thee thy wommanheede,

And nat to sleen my children - God forbeede! -

146

But for to kepe hem pryvely and stille,

Til l thy purpos knewe and al thy wille.” (1072-78)
It goes without saying that the people marvel at her astonishing patience, which
is beyond imitation by other girls, or even by anyone, and they come to realize
that, for all her low blood, she is the highest person in regard to her virtue of
patience in Saluzzo.133

Griselda’s remarkable patience and uncomplaining obedience to the
Marquis, however, is sharply contrasted with the fickleness of the people who
turn their interests from Walter’s cruel treatments of Griselda to the immediate
approval of his new marriage (“Walter was no fool, thogh. that hym leste/ To
chunge his wyf, for it was for the beste” 986-87), which brings in the Clerk’s
severe denunciation of their inconstancy and lack of fidelity:

“O stormy peple! Unsad and evere untrewel

Ay undiscreet and chaungynge as a fane!

Delitynge evere in rumbul that is newe,

For ka the moone ay wexe ye and wane!

Ay ful of clappyng, deere ynogh a janel

Youre doom is fals, youre constance yvele preeveth;

A ful greet fool is he that on yow leeveth.” (995-1001)

Now that she is a qualified spouse to Walter, the marriage between Walter, the

 

‘33 It has been observed that Griselda’s patience signifies more than endurance. For example,
discussing the ethical system of the Middle Ages, Alcuin Blamires suggests that “patience and
perseverance were sub-categories of fortitude” (173) and points out that Griselda’s “unshakable
cheerful forbearance” (172) displays, not just “patience” which means the “voluntary endurance of
hardships for the sake of honor,” but an “amalgam of [three] virtues” (174).

147

highest person by blood, and Griselda, the person with the highest virtue of
Patience, leaves nothing to be desired, which is celebrated more splendidly by
those people at the court than their marriage:

Thus hath this pitous day a blisful ende,

For every man and womman dooth his myght

This day in murthe and revel to dispende

Til on the welkne-shoon the sterres Iyght,

For moore solempne in every mannes syght

This feste was, and gretter of costage,

Than was the revel of hire mariage. (1121-27)

The imagery of rebirth in the revelatory scene shows obviously that
Walter's tests of Griselda culminate in the invention of the image of a wife of
exceptional quality. When Walter announces that he has intentionally tested her,
Griselda "herde nat what thyng he to hire seyde" (1059). Upon hearing that her
son and daughter have been kept safely, she falls into a swoon, which is an
experience of a kind of psychological death. When she returns to consciousness,
however, she is revived as a qualified Marquise and treated as such by the
people:

Thise ladyes, whan that they hir tyme say,

Han taken hire and into Chambre gon,

And strepen hire out of hire rude array,

And in a clooth of gold that brighte shoon,

With a coroune of many a riche stoon

148

Upon hire heed, they into halle hire broghte,

And ther she was honured as hire oghte. (1114-20)

Griselda, however, is not the only one who experiences “rebirth” in the final
scene. Now that their mother is a qualified Marquise, her daughter and son (who
is later called “my heir” by Walter) are reborn as qualified noble offspring, as is
suggested in the scene reminiscent of the “childbirth”:

And in-hire swough so sadly holdeth she

Hire children two, whan she gan hem t'embrace,

That with greet sleighte and greet difficultee

The children from hire arm they gonne arace. (1100-1103)134
It should be emphasized, however, that Walter's inventions of his wife and their
children as qualified spouse and legitimate offspring of a Marquis are ultimately
performed for his own political image-making as competent ruler, through which

his future as ruler of Saluzzo can be stabilized.

3. Inventing Walter as Capable Ruler
Due to his cruelty to Griselda, Walter deserves to be called “a lawful ruler
consumed by an insatiable lust for absolute dominion” (Aers, Chaucer 32) and “a

sadistic tyrant worst of all men and cruelest of husbands” (Hansen 190).135

 

‘3‘ In his discussion of the scene, Wallace also notes that "The...narrative moment, in which
Griselda's children are drawn from her body with great care and difficulty (1102-3), has all the
physical intensity of childbirth" (Chaucerian Polity 292).

35 However, it is true that Walter is not entirely “an autocratic ruler" because “he listens to his
people and even acts on their desires” (Ferster, Chaucer 110). Moreover, it is also true that
Walter’s sympathy toward Griselda, though rare, discloses his humane aspect. For example, in
her plea to keep her smock on not to expose her womb when she is ordered to leave the palace,
Walter allows her to do so and “wente his wey, for routhe and for pitee” (893).

149

 

Walter’s image as a tyrannical ruler, however, is already forcefully implied in the
opening stanzas of the Tale. First of all, since he is mentioned as being “ybom of
Lumbardye” (72), he is naturally linked to the region in Italy which Chaucer
elsewhere describes as the site of tyranny: “This shulde a ryghtwys lord han in
his thought,/ And not ben lyk tyraunts of Lumbardye,/ That usen wilfulhed and
tyrannye” (Legend of Good Women Prol. G 353-55). Moreover, the Clerk also
describes Walter as living a life of “delit” (68), connecting him again to-a recent
tyrant of Lombardy, Bemabo Visconti: “Off Melan grete Bamabo Viscounte,/ God
of delit and scourge of Lumbardye” (The Monk’s Tale B2 3589-90).

In addition to the specific references linking him to tyranny in the first few
stanzas of the Tale, Walter’s tyranny becomes more conspicuous when we
remember the fact that his behavior as ruler is reminiscent of Richard II, who was
being accused of tyranny, especially in his later years after the death of his
Queen, Anne of Bohemia, in 1394.136 The first thing that connects Walter to a

despotic Richard is the pressing need of a legitimate heir, which troubled both of

 

‘36 Much critical attention has been placed on Walter’s tyranny in light of Richard ll’s despotism.
See for example, Wallace (Chaucerian Polity), Aers and Staley (The Powers of the Holy), and
more recently Patterson (“Necessity of History”). Some scholars have pointed out the particular
interrelation between the onset of Richard's tyranny and the death of Anne of Bohemia in 1394,
emphasizing the role of the Queen - which was no longer available to Richard - as “eloquent
wife wishing to dissuade an irate and powerful spouse”:
When Anne of Bohemia died in 1394, much of the immediate historical relevance of
Chaucer’s writing - particularly his devotion to female eloquence — died with her. Richard
without Anne has customarily been characterized as a tyrant; the Lombard scenario - the
nightmare of Fragment IV - loomed more threateningly than ever during Chaucer’s final
years. (Wallace, “Italy” 220)
Although Walter reflects Richard’s despotism generally, however, some have argued that his
feigned attempts to divorce Griselda in order to many a noble woman is drawn from not from
Richard but from Richard’s friend, Robert de Vere, well-known for his “ill-treatment of his wife”:
Though it is not always clear when Chaucer may have been thinking of one or another of
these lords, it is clear that he was concerned both with Richard’s mismanagement of his
realm and with Robert de Vere’s ill treatment of his wife (Quinn 119).

150

them. As rulers of Saluzzo in Italy and England respectively, both Walter and
Richard have “childlessness” L that is, the concern for succession - as a central
issue at hand, and more significantly, contrary to their subjects’ worries,137 both
are seemingly unconcerned with it. Unmindful of the importance of succession,
Walter would not marry under any circumstances: “And eek he [Walter] nolde —
and that was worst of alle -/ Wedde no wyf, for noght that may bifaIIe” (83-84),
though he decides to marry Griselda if he should marry. On the other hand, after
the heirless demise of his much beloved spouse Anne, Richard definitely did not
seem to want to resolve the problem of “the hollowness of his Crown,” because
his remarriage arrangement was made to Isabella, the six-year-old daughter of
Charles VI of France, to the amazement of Richard’s contemporaries (Harriss
477).138

Besides his apparent unconcern over the issue of succession, Walter is
also like the tyrannical Richard in that both men exact unquestioning obedience
from their subjects. As we have seen above, Walter forces Griselda, both his wife

and Marquise, into doing whatever he wishes. To his ostensibly arbitrary exercise

 

‘37 The fearful worries of Walter's subjects regarding the dire consequence his negligence of

marriage would bring are fully expressed in their plea for his hasty marriage:

“Delivere us out of al this bisy drede,

And taak a wyf, for hye Goddes sake!

For if it so bifelle, as God forbede,

That thurgh youre deeth youre Iyne sholde slake,

And that a straunge successour sholde take

Youre heritage, O wo were us alyvel (134-39)
‘33 On the age of Isabella (or Isabelle) at the time of Richard's remarriage negotiations, scholars’
speculations do not exactly accord. For example, Patterson mentions Isabelle as the “eight-year-
old daughter” of Charles VI (“Necessity of History” 187). However, what is important in Richard’s
remarriage is the fact that his new spouse is far under 10, which makes the expectation of near-
future offspring between the new couple virtually impossible. For contemporary skeptical views of

Richard's second marriage, see Harriss p. 477 n. 116.

151

of will, Griselda submits, and by doing so, she “define[s] obedience as a unity of
will so complete as to include, both in word and in thought, the willingness to die,
‘though me [she] were looth to deye’ (364)” (Grudin 84). However, as Heffeman
observes, the ruler’s “arbitrary will” compelling subjects” submission to it is what
constitutes the heart of Richard’s tyrannical rule, which eventually brought about
his deposition: “[tjo be sure, Richard Il’s unwillingness to subordinate his own
arbitrary will to the laws is a theme sounded often enough in Parliament’s articles
of deposition in 1399” (334).

One striking difference between their demands for the absolute obedience
of their subjects is that while Walter's demands of obedience are mainly ”due to
his own perverse will, Richard ll’s tyrannical enforcement of his subjects’ loyalty
has not only historical but also theoretical backgrounds. In the description of
Walter’s second test of Griselda, in which he deprives her of her son to prove her
absolute obedience to his command, the Clerk attributes Walter’s problem to his
imprisoned will, for which he cannot stop his testing of her:

But ther been folk of swich condicion

That whan they have a certein purpos take,

They kan nat stynte of hire entencion,

But, right as they were bounden to a stake,

They wol nat of that firste purpos slake. (701-05)

On the other hand, unlike Walter, whose pathological personality requires all
subjects to be obedient, Richard II had good reasons to rule tyrannically. As

Nigel Saul argues, the powerful kingship that Richard tried to achieve in the

152

13903 was the result of his effort to strengthen both his kingship and his subjects’
obedience:
The vigorous new kingship that Richard styled in the 13903 obviously
originated as a response to the setbacks and humiliations of the 13803.
Richard’s general aim was to enhance the prestige and authority of his
office — to raise himself above, and to distance himself from, his
subjects. In that way, he believed, he could strengthen his claims to his
subjects’ obedience. (“Kingship” 49)
Beyond his “desire to avenge his humiliation of the previous decade,” Richard
went further in the summer of 1397 to arrest his three principal noble enemies,
Gloucester, Arundel, and Warwick, which was definitely an act of “an assertion of
[his] sovereignty” (Dunn 53-54). Along with the suppression of his major
opponents among the nobility, Richard took exceptional measures for local
stability by enforcing the loyalty of his subjects:
The sheriffs appointed in November 1397 numbered many who were
royal retainers and were continued in office the following year; all were
put under fresh oaths to arrest those speaking ill of the king. Oaths to
uphold the acts of the Westminster and Shrewsbury parliaments and
the later banishments were administered to ecclesiastics and officers of
the major cities. . .. (Harriss 484) .
However, Richard’s drastic measures to establish firmly his kingship and his
subjects’ obedience were also the natural result of his absolutist vision of regality,

or his theory of kingship, reflecting “his own exploration of its historical and

153

religious roots” and culminating in his “conviction of the inviolability of his

' kingship” (Harriss 476). To enhance the royal power, Richard visited the deposed

Edward ll’s shrine and made efforts for the canonization of the unfortunate king.

In the Liber Regius, compiled in 1390-91, Richard’s genealogy is listed back to

Brutus. Moreover, in the rebuilt Westminster Hall stood thirteen statues of kings

from Edward the Confessor to Richard II, with two larger statues of Richard and

the Confessor surrnounting the entrance doorway. With these historical

affirmations of regality, Richard was convinced of “the protection [of his kingship] ..
accorded by God and the saints, particularly those of the Anglo-Saxon royal

house” (Harriss 476).139 I,

Richard’s theory of kingship, however, did not rest solely on “his own
exploration of its historical and religious roots.” It was also highly influenced by
Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, a treatise on kingship composed about
1280 for Philip the Fair of F rance,”o the main argument of which is clearly stated
in Giles’s own words as follows:

...or that there be read at the table [of kings and princes] the book on

the rule of princes, both so that princes themselves might be instructed

in how they should rule, and that others might be taught how to be

obedient to princes.141

Since “knowledge among the laity of De regimine [passed] beyond the

 

‘39 The discussion of Richard’s theory of kingship in this paragraph is much indebted to Harriss’s
excellent study of the subject.

“° I do not suggest that Giles’s Latin work is the only source of Richard’s absolutist tendencies. It
is fair to admit that Richard’s theory of kingship “found justification in a broad array of sources,
including the writings of several scholastics, certain principles of Roman law, and the opinions of
English jurists that find expression in Glanville and Bracton” (Briggs 62).

1" De Regimine Principum 2. 3. 20. Quoted in translation in Briggs p.1.

154

confines of the royal court to several members of the upper nobility” by the time
of Richard II, Giles’s Latin work provided his political opponents with a powerful
tool to attack on the king. For example, based on the knowledge of Giles’s work,
Thomas Woodstock, duke of Gloucester, “chastised Richard in October of 1386
for adhering to unwi3e counsel rather than the advice of his magnates” (Briggs
60-61). But the influence of Giles’s ideas on Richard’s theory of kingship is much
more forceful than his opponents’ use of Giles’s ideas, especially as they relate
to subjects' obligation of obedience:

Giles said that strict obedience to the sovereign’s will was the source

from which all the values of the commonwealth were derived; Richard

and his ministers both stressed the subject’s duty of obedience in

letters or speeches in 13903. (Goodman and Gillespie 44)

Richard’s view of kingship as mandating subjects’ obedience is further informed
by “the Augustinian view of a world ordered and set at peace by obedience to
God the Father”; and in this world, “[s]ubjects were bound by obedience to him
as God’s surrogate, and on that obedience depended their individual and
common good” (Harriss 489).

From the discussion of Richard’s theory of kingship, it can be inferred that
just like Richard, who governed his country on the principle that “the essence of
good government [lies] in the king’s will and subjects’ obedience to it” (Harriss
460), Walter the Marquis rules Saluzzo with the same absolutist idea of tyranny.
The image of Walter as tyrannical ruler is further supported by the Tale,

especially in Griselda’s view of him not as husband but as lord with absolute

155

power over her life. As Peggy Knapp correctly suggests, “Griselda is not just a
wife subject to her husband, but a woman of peasant origins subject to her feudal
lord” (136); careful examination of the relationship between Walter and Griselda
in the Tale shows that she regards him as not so much her husband as the
Marquis of Saluzzo. In his prenuptial demand, Walter asks of Griselda an
absolute obedience like that required of a subject toward a feudal lord:

“I seye this: be ye redy with good herte

To al my lust, and that l frely may,

As me best thynketh, do yow laughe or smerte,

And nevere ye to grucche, nyght ne day?

And eek whan I sey ‘ye,’ ne sey nat ‘nay,’

Neither by word ne frownyng contenance?
Swere this, and heere I swere oure alliance.” (351-57)”2
To his demand, Griselda not only unconditionally assents but vows to go even
further than what is asked of her: “And heere I swere that nevere willyngly,l In
werk ne thoght, I nyl yow disobeye” (362-63). Moreover, in response to Walter’s
abrupt command to return to her village home, she acknowledges that "I nevere
heeld me lady ne mistresse,/ But humble servant to youre worthynesse,/ And

evere shal, whil that my lyf may dure" (823-25), thus giving proof that she

considers him not so much as her husband but as her feudal lord.

 

“2 The linking of marriage with the social relationship in feudal society is also proposed by
Walter’s description of the marriage condition as a hindrance to liberal life he enjoys before his
marriage: "I me rejoysed of my liberte,/ That seelde tyme is founde in mariage; Ther I was free, I
moot been in sewage” (145-47). For a brief discussion of the social and political implication of the
word “servage,” especially after the Rising of 1381, see Staley p. 70.

156

Walter's role as the political ruler, however, is steadily obscured by the
Clerk, who being sympathetic to Griselda's plights, interprets Walter's story in
affective terms, thus failing to extract political elements from the story.“3
Ironically, it is through his contrasting description of Walter as ruler that we come
to understand Walter’s ability as capable Marquis.

After relating the Marquis's good lineage and his excellent quality as a man,
the Clerk adds that Walter is "Discreet ynogh his contree for to gye" (75).
Interestingly enough, however, immediately after this praise, he speaks of
Walter's outright disqualification as governor of Saluzzo:

I blame hym thus: that he considered noght '

In tyme comynge what myghte hym bityde,

But on his lust present was al his thoght,

As for to hauke and hunte on every syde. (78-81)
One word associated with Walter is “lust,” with the connotation “self-indulgent
pleasure,” and the Clerk also calls him “yvele” (460), “crueel” (740), and “wikke”
(785), thus exposing the Marquis’s immorality.

The Clerk's conflicting assessments of Walter as ruler lead us to another
puzzling question in the Tale: if Walter is unqualified for governing his subjects
due to his indulgence in present pleasure and his carelessness about the future

of the land, then how can he be called a “discreet” (that is, “prudent” or “wise”)

 

“3 Although the Clerk is following Petrarch's additions in his Latin version - an explicitly feudal
background and a good political reason for marriage, the security of succession - the Clerk loses
sight of the significance of politics in Saluzzo: since "he is so remote from the latter [the real
world]," he does not understand how the political world works (Pearsall, Canterbury Tales 275).
For the Clerk, “the basic conflict” at the beginning of the Tale between “Walter's aristocratic desire
for pleasure and his reluctance to marry” and “his subjects’ wish for an heir" remains just an
ethical conflict, not a political one (Johnston 154).

157

 

ruler, under whose rule people are seemingly enjoying a utopian life at least
initially?” What the Clerk misses in his partial understanding of politics in
Saluzzo is that, in spite of the Marquis's youthful and seemingly irresponsible
love of freedom, he is actually an effective ruler who can manipulate his subjects
by making them regard him with “appropriate ambivalence - amor et timor” (“love
and fear”) (Burlin 142-43): Walter successfully invents his own image as a
competent Marquis by- letting himself be both “biloved and drad” (69) by his
people.

By wielding his power to take the lives of his people, the Marquis uses his
subjects' "timor" as a powerful tool to govern them. Walter warns the Sergeant,
who takes Griselda's daughter from her, that "upon peyne his heed of for to
swappe" (586), he should not reveal the secret about the baby; and peOple in
Saluzzo are easily duped into believing that Walter has slain his own daughter
and son on account of their mother's low birth. Moreover, because of Walter’s
power to deprive his subjects of their lives, "obeisant, ay redy to his hond,/ Were
alle his liges, bothe lasse and moore" (66-67).

Both Janicula, Griselda’s father, and Griselda are no exceptions to the
fearful experience in the presence of Walter. In his first exchange of words with
the Marquis, Janicula shudders with fear, as he conforms his will to the

Marquis’s:

 

‘“ The beginning of the Clerk's Tale introduces the utopian setting of the Tale - a world of
“economic and social well-being” with “established, hereditary rulership” and people's “obedience,
diligence, and reverence” for their superiors: Saluzzo represents an “ideally ordered state”
(Grudin 64). Grudin's idealistic assessment is perhaps cast into doubt by the people’s fear of
Walter.

158

This sodeyn cas this man astonyed so

That reed he wax; abayst and al quakynge'

He stood; unnethes seyde he wordes mo,

But oonly thus: “Lord,” quod he, “my willynge

Is as ye wole, ne ayeynes youre Iikynge

l wol no thyng, ye be my lord so deere;

Right- as yow lust, governeth this mateere.” (316-18).

So does Griselda: “quakynge for drede” (358), she gives unconditional assent to
Walter’s marriage agreement by promising “as ye wole youreself, right so wol I”
(361). '-

However, though powerful, provoking "timor" in his people’s minds alone is
neither sufficient nor effective for Walter to be successful in governing his
subjects. More importantly, as the Parson advises lords (“werke in swich wise
with thy cherles that they rather love thee than drede” [The Parson’s Tale 763]),
what Walter needs is willing submission from his subjects, which is attainable
only when they respect him with voluntary "amor." In welcoming a peasant girl as
his wife, Walter demonstrates his exceptional ability for soliciting his subjects’
“amor” through positive image-making of himself as ruler.“5 When he discovers

her virtues and rewards those qualities by marrying her, his people look upon him

 

“5 To take “image-building measures” with a view of making a ruler more powerful is also typical
of Richard Il’s kingship. For fashioning a powerful new image of the king, in his Coronation
portrait, Richard is described as being “crowned and with the orb and scepter, the symbols of
sovereignty, staring out frontally like an iconic closeup of the face of the Christ.” And in the Wilton
Diptych, he is shown “in the company of saintly sponsors and receiving a banner from the Virgin
Mary and Child.” However, for Richard, these image building methods are not adequate “by
themselves” so that he should complement them with “more concrete measures to strengthen
and broaden the royal power-base” (Goodman and Gillespie 49—50).

159

 

as a “prudent man” for his selection of her as his wife:

Thus Walter lowly—nay, but roially—

Wedded with fortunat honestetee,

In Goddes pees lyveth ful esily

At boom, and outward grace ynoghhad he;

And for he saugh that under low degree

Was 0er vertu hid, the peple hym heelde

A prudent man, and that is seyn ful seelde. (421-27)
The first stage of Griselda's translation is, then, what Sophia Menache calls a
way of “political communication” (6) deliberately performed to attain the
“favorable public opinion” (3)146 that Walter, who looks like a wanton young man
in his subjects’ eyes, is a responsible and able ruler who plans carefully about
both his own and his people's future and is consequently, superior to his people
in light of morality, not to mention political power. If we agree that Walter is a
capable ruler and his transformation of Griselda into Marquise serves as one of
his methods to get his subjects’ favorable opinion of him, then his tests of her are
understood as one of his efforts to secure his political control over his subjects
through the invention of “Patient Griselda.”

Although his appropriation of Griselda into Marquise obtains the people's

adoration, however, we should also be reminded of the fact that Walter's

 

“6 In her study of communication in the Middle Ages, Menache defines “political communication“
as “the deliberate passing of a political message by a sender to a receiver, with the intention of
making the receiver behave in a way that otherwise he might not do. By its very nature, political
communication systematically aims to reach large audiences and to influence them through
controlled information sent out over a long period” (6). She also argues that “The pursuit of
favorable public opinion...became an essential feature in the process of state-building from the
eleventh century onward” (3).

160

 

marriage to Griselda, Walter’s first act of translation of her, is potentially more
menacing than beneficial to him. Walter’s marriage to a peasant girl and his
allowing her to substitute for him in his role as Marquis in his absence are

threatening to his power as leader of society.147

Walter’s marriage, “the union of
the extremes in the society” (Martin 141), is disruptive in a hierarchical society
where “l [Walter as Marquis] may not doon as every plowman may” (799). By
marrying a woman of humble origin, Walter intentionally transgresses the
hierarchical order of the society, an order on which not only his society but also
his own lordship is based. Moreover, by allowing his newly wedded wife to
replace him in his role as leader of his land in his absence, Walter breaks a
political norm. Through his acts of transgression, which disturb established
hierarchical social and political order, Walter potentially threatens the stability of
his society, although he frees his people from any anxiety concerning the
succession of the lordship for the time being.

In his second stage of translation, however, which is meant to bestow on
him the image of a powerful ruler, it becomes obvious that the overthrow of the
social order unavoidably inherent in the first act of translation is part of his grand
scheme for his image-making. Instead of leaving the destruction of social order
as a threat to his society, Walter turns it into a means to strengthen his own

power. While he invents "Patient Griselda," Walter also creates an image of

himself as an authoritative ruler. To his people, Walter may appear as a cruel

 

“7 Hansen, however, argues that since Griselda has been acclaimed as a saintly ruler, Walter

decides to test her". “But Walter’s decision to torture and humiliate her as a wife and mother
, comes...after she has been acclaimed as a saintly ruler, and so the narrative sequence implies
on the contrary that such virtue in a women only provokes male aggression” (191).

161

husband persecuting his wife without a cause, or as a ruthless father killing his
children because of their mother's meanness of birth. However, as he reveals in
the final scene, he has made his tests of Griselda with a clear plan148 that will be
eventually rewarding to all of his people, not to mention Griselda, himself, and
their daughter and son. In his long-term tests of Griselda, Walter invents his
image as a dependable ruler with foresight, at the expense of the image of a
merciless husband and father.

Walter invents his image of a ruler with power and authority when he
solves the problems of succession and of the transgression he commits in his
marriage to a peasant girl, thus bringing peace and security to Saluzzo. In his
invention of "Patient Griselda," a qualified Marquise, Walter invents his own
image as a powerful ruler who is the only person in Saluzzo that can contain the
transgression of social hierarchy that his first act of translation of Griselda has
brought about. For Walter, the whole project of translating Griselda, done in two
stages, is his means of demonstrating his power to destroy social order and to
contain the consequent social threat, thus proving that he is the only powerful

and dependable ruler in his land.

4. The Clerk as Futile Translator

By discussing the Clerk's Tale from the perspective of a translator's

 

“8 That Walter’s project of translation, especially his testing of Griselda, has been done with his
definite plan is evident from the fact that his three tests are performed “with ritual formalitjr': “The
testing, like all other activity in the story, proceeds with ritual formality. Each test begins with a
solemn announcement by Walter and a clear acquiescence from Griselda, and is followed by his
close inspection of the effect it has on her” (Van 217).

162

process of translation, I have attempted to demonstrate the significance of
Walter’s tests of Griselda and the reasons for these tests. What I have stressed
is Walter's invention of the images of himself as well as of Griselda. Just as a
translator creates a new image and meaning in his translation, thus building up
his own image as an authoritative figure, Walter invents a new image of Griselda,
thus inventing himself as capable and authoritative ruler.

Walter's second act of translation, creating new images for both Griselda
and himself, is not only contrasted with his first translation of Griselda but, more
importantly, is sharply opposed to the Clerk's efforts to make a faithful
reproduction of his Latin version: whereas Walter's second translation leads to
success, the Clerk's rehearsing ends up with failure. The Tale the Clerk tells is
not without any attempt to invent a new story out of the Petrarchan version of the
story of Walter and Griselda. By complaining against Walter, the Clerk tries to
weave into the Petrarchan moral story his own voice of pathos towards innocent
Griselda:

But now of wommen wolde l axen fayn

If thise assayes myghte nat suffise?

What koude a sturdy housbonde moore devyse

To preeve hir wyfhod and hir stedefastnesse,

And he continuynge evere in sturdinesse? (696-700)

The Clerk presses our sympathetic engagement with Griselda’s suffering more
directly in his comment on the scene of her swooning and reunion with her

children: “O which a pitous thyng it was to se/ Hir swownyng, and hire humble

163

voys to heere!” (1086-87).

However, the Clerk’s efforts to add his own emotional voice in his story
falls short of creating a new story, thereby making his translation far from
successful. His unsuccessful translation results from his attempt only to make a
faithful reproduction of the Latin version. In the concluding statement of his story,
the Clerk suggests that his goal remains to present Petrarchan moral — that his
tale be interpreted in the same way as Petrarch's Latin version:

This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde

Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee,

For it were inportable, though they wolde,

But for that every wight, in his degree,

Sholde be constant in adversitee

As was Grisilde; therfore Petrak writeth

This storie, which with heigh stile he enditeth. (1142-48)

Since it is not a new creation, the Clerk's translation is not welcomed when
it is offered to the other Pilgrims, who are different from the audiences of
Petrarch’s version. From two responses by the Host and the Merchant, whose
tale follows the Clerk’s Tale, it is Clear that the Clerk’s story is not persuasive to
its audiences, who are mostly concerned with the actual fact that their wives are
quite different from Griselda. The Host says:

Oure Hooste seyde, and swoor, “By Goddes bones,

Me were Ievere than a barel ale

My wyf at hoom had herd this legende ones!

I64

This is a gentil tale for the nones,

As to my purpos, wiste ye my wille;

But thyng that wol nat be, lat it be stille.” (The Clerk’s Tale 1212b-12129)
Similarly, the Merchant also observes that “Ther is a long and large difference/
Bitwix Grisildis grete pacience/ And of my wyf the passyng crueltee” (The
Merchant’s Prologue 1223-25). Not fully aware of the fact that, to make a
successful translation, he should not just transfer Latin knowledge into English
but invent a new story for his vernacular audiences, the Clerk cannot be a
successful translator.

On the other hand, upon finishing his second act of creative translation in
which he plays the role of a creator, Walter brings every problem to an end. By
marrying Griselda, Walter takes care of the issue of succession, the pressing
problem in Saluzzo. Being aWare of the radical nature of his marriage to Griselda
and the possible disturbances it may bring to Saluzzo, by refashioning his low-
born wife as qualified Marquise, he resolves permanently the issue of
succession. Only peace and happiness are left in Saluzzo:

F U! many a yeer in heigh properitee

Lyven thise two in concord and in reste,

And richely his doghter maryed he

Unto a lord, oon of the. worthieste

Of al Ytaille; and thanne in pees and reste

His wyves fader in his court he kepeth,

Til that the soule out of his body crepeth.

165

His sone succedeth in his heritage
In reste and pees, after his fader day, '
And fortunat was eek in mariage,

Al putte he nat his wyf in greet assay. (1128-38)

166

h-

CHAPTER FIVE

Conclusion: Chauceras Political and Radical Translator

1. What Brought an Age of Translation to England
As was already noted in Chapter One, the age of Chaucer Was also the .
“Age of Translation.” One thing remarkable about the period is that the sudden
emergence of a vast number of translations in various fields was. not a i-
phenomenon peculiar only to England, but was part of a greater tide of L.
translation in Europe. For example, before the “Age of Translation” in England,
early fourteenth-century France witnessed the production of a great number of
translations. Working under commissions from Charles V, professional
translators rendered a “great series of translations” including “the French
versions of Aristotle’s Ethics, Politics, and Economics; Augustine’s City of God;
John of Salisbury‘s Policraticus” (Salter 239) and Louis d’Orleans’ Bible
translation, produced with the help of eight other men over twelve years (Green
150)
What, then, brought a kind of “translation rush” in Europe in the fourteenth
century? The answer lies in new interests in the value of the vernacular among
literary figures like Dante Alighieri, with an advent of a fresh literary culture
acknowledging the advantages of the vernacular over Latin’s role as a universal
European language. In his famous apology for the vernacular in De Vulgari
Eloquentia, written in the first decade of the fourteenth century, Dante not only

defended the vernacular but more importantly, stressed its supremacy over Latin:

167

Of these two kinds of language [that is, the vernacular and Latin] the more

noble is the vernacular: first, because it was the language originally

used by the human race; second, because the whole world employs it,

though with different pronunciations and using different words; and

third, because it is natural to us, while the other is', in contrast, artificial.

(Botterill 3)
The same awakening of the capacity of, and increasing pride in, the mother
tongue that Dante realized of Italian provided many translators with occasions to
turn Greek and Latin works into their own languages, thus proving the potential of
their languages to serve as the language of serious literature and other works.149

No less important than the immense European wave of translations —
definitely spurred by the new realization of the value of the vernacular - were the
changing fortunes of the three languages - Latin, Anglo-Norman, and English —
in England, changes that helped nurture the expansion of translation in
Chaucer’s lifetime. After the Norman Conquest, in the trilingual setting of
medieval England, the uses of the three languages were distributed, though not
uniformly, in different registers and media. Latin was used “for written purposes,
but it was not normally used as a spoken language”; Anglo-Norman was also
used “in a normal register for written purposes, but unlike Latin, French was a

spoken language as well. It coexisted, together with Latin, as a language of

record, the language of the court, of the institutions ruled by the Normans”; and

 

“9 For example, the translations of classical works and the Bible into French by the translators of
Charles V attempted to demonstrate that “the French language was adequate to encounter the
difficult content and the 'merveilleus stille’ of Latin originals” (Salter 239). «

168

 

English, the language of “the lower ranks of society” spoken by the vast majority
of population, was “reduced to a conversational, everyday language that was
transmitted orally” (Crespo 24). As John Burrow observes fourteenth-century
England saw the changes in the status of the three languages, resulting in the
rise of English, concurrent with the rapid decline of Anglo-Norman and with Latin
keeping its authority:

By the end of the following century [that is, the fourteenth century]

England had largely supplanted French [that is, Anglo-Norman] as the

written vernacular of England, but Latin maintained its status throughout

the fourteenth century and beyond as the prestige language par

excellence. (1 9)
French, first introduced to the British Isles as the language of the conquerors
after the Norman Conquest, developed into Anglo-French in England, and
enjoyed status as a European language of culture in the thirteenth century. In the
fourteenth century, however, although still favored by noblemen “both in their
reading and their talk,” Anglo-French increasingly became a language many
nobles could not speak at all: “French [that is, Anglo-French] was no longer a
true vernacular, but rather a second, artificial, language, maintained by the efforts
of teachers — like Latin, but with less prestige” (Burrow 20).

Just as Anglo-Norman was increasingly losing its status as an oral and
written language among the English, so was Latin, though much more slowly. As
Alastair Minnis aptly puts it, as an international language, Latin had more power

than the vernaculars, especially in spreading the ideas of dissent:

169

 

Latin offered more possibilities for the powerful expression of radical
thought, since dangerous doctrines expressed therein knew no European
frontiers, and the tales of heresy could thus be scattered more easily
and take root the more readily in foreign fields. (“Making Bodies” 11)

The problem with Latin was that it Could not produce new vocabulary to be used
in a changing new society, or at least not without borrowing from the vernacular:
No longer an evolving vernacular, Latin...could not develop its own
genuine new terminology to reflect the changing societies in which it

continued to be used for official purposes, and vernacular terms had to

be introduced to fill the gaps. (Rothwell 51) A
To meet “the Iexicological demands of a changing society” macaronic Latin — a
mix of Latin and the vernacular - was used “for trade and business in general,”
“to make the gist of the records comprehensible to many who would not normally
be considered Latinists, thus opening up the possibility of a wider readership”

(Rothwell 51-53).‘5°

2. The Characteristics of Chaucer as Translator
It was against these international and domestic backgrounds of European
translation surges and the rise of English that Chaucer worked on his translations

of the Romaunt, The Boece, and the Clerk’s Tale. The uniqueness of Chaucer as

 

15° In her examination of some of the texts in business world in late Medieval England, Laura
Wright also argues that by using “the medieval abbreviation and suspension system,” “a mixing of
two or more languages is the norm” in “the text type of accounts and inventories.” Against some
arguments condemning this kind of account-keeping Latin as “degenerate," she argues that “it
was a functional register, with its own intemally-consistent grammar” (149-51 ).

170

 

translator, however, is distinctive in his attempt to establish firmly his authority as
translator as well as English asa vernacular medium, his attention to politics in
his translations, and his skillful maneuvering of the balance of content in his
primary (more literal) and secondary (more “creative”) translations.

First of all, Chaucer as translator surpasses any other English translator in
his efforts to establish the prestige of English and his own authority as writer. As
Pearsall points out, Chaucer’s decision to write in English was a conscious
choice151 to enhance the status of English as a vernacular among European
languages:

When Chaucer came to make his decision to write in English, it was not

because he wanted to assert an independent national identity but because

he wanted to enable England to take its place among those more
advanced nations of Europe - France and Italy — that already had an
illustrious vernacular. English is part of Chaucer's European project.

(“Before-Chaucer Evidences” 29)

While his translations, both primary (such as the Romaunt and The Boece) and
secondary (such as the Clerk’s Tale), helped consolidate the position of English
as “an illustrious vernacular,” his authority as an independent writer was also
confirmed in his peculiar response to the topoi of the translatio studii et imperii in
his translation. As Ernst Robert Curtius observes in discussing the “renewal of

the Empires by Charlemagne,” a formula of the translatio imperii, which means “a

 

'51 In the fourteenth century, “writing in English was not an inevitable choice” because “[t]he
languages of cultural prestige were Latin, and for much of the later Middle Ages, French, and the
role of the English writer had to be justified and defined” (Wogan-Browne 3).

171

transferal of the Roman imperium to another place” was coordinated with another
formula of the translatio studii, which means “transferal of Ieaming from Athens
or Rome to Paris” (29). The use of the topoi of the translatio studii et imperii,
however, is not limited to the transfer of learning and power from the ancient
world to the eighth-century France; the topoi are commonly employed to explain
the arrival of vernacular literature in the later Middle Ages. Nicholas Watson, for

example, expands the application of translatio studii to the coming of vernacular -

literature in the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century:

Copeland’s interest in the changing shape of the institutional structures in

which rhetoric and hermeneutics were conceptualized marries with her

concern with the intellectual logic of translatio studii, the translation of

Ieaming, as a shaping force in the rise both of Latin literature, in the first

century BCE, and of vernacular literature, more than a millennium later.

(74-75)

The idea that a translation may transfer not only learning but also power to
another culture, however, has been the focal point of recent postcolonial
discussions of translation, stressing power relations between the colonizer and
the colonized. In her study of colonial translation in eighteenth-century India,
Tejaswini Niranjana focuses on translation and unequal power relations:
“[t]ranslation as a practiCe shapes, and takes shape within, the asymmetrical
relations of power that operate under colonialism” (2). For Niranjana, translation
as a kind of colonial discourse, which means “the body of knowledge, modes of

representation, strategies of power, law, discipline. . .that are employed in the

172

construction and domination of ‘colonial subjects’” (7), produces “strategies of
containment” of a colonized subject:

By employing certain modes of representing the other...translation

reinforces hegemonic versions of colonized, helping them acquire the

status of what Edward Said calls representation, or objects withoUt
history....ln creating coherent and transparent texts and subjects,
translation participates — across a range of discourse — in the fixing of
colonized cultures, making them seem static and unchanging rather than

historically constructed. (3)

Since, unlike eighteenth-century India, fourteenth-century England was far
from being under the direct military dominion of France or Rome, it may not be
possible to apply postcolonial theories of translation to Chaucer’s work as a
translator. However, it is true that Chaucer’s England was heavily influenced by
French literary techniques and conventions and Roman philosophy, through
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman and Boethius’s Consolation:
England in the later fourteenth century was under the cultural domination of
France and Rome, though not a military or political one.

Living in an age of cultural colonization by France and Rome (in the form
of Latin culture), however, Chaucer did not attempt to construct culturally
colonized subjects in his two translations of the Romaunt and The Boece.
Instead, Chaucer can be characterized as a translator who not only was a faithful
reproducer but also, more importantly, resisted French and Latin cultural

dominion. To put it another way, Chaucer as translator of the Romaunt and The

173

 

Boece was “a decolonizer of Anglo-Norman culture” (Bowers, “Smithfield” 55) as
well as Latin culture, who defied “the construction and domination of “colonial
subjects’” and “the fixing of colonized cultures” with which Niranjana has defined
postcolonial translation.

[As has been discussed in Chapter Three, Chaucer’s departures from his
Latin sources in The Boece and his critical evaluation of the philosophical ideas
of the Italian original of Troilus and Criseyde bear witness to his resistance to
dominant Latin culture. However, Chaucer’s decolonizing project against
dominant French culture, as we have seen in Chapter Two, is no less
prominently shown in his secondary translations in The Legend of Good Women I.
and The Canterbury Tales:

After Chaucer’s “Italian period” of the 13803, the poet was again induced to

engage directly with this hegemonic French tradition. In addition to his

burlesque of the courtly love vision in The Legend of Good Women, the

Canterbury Tales represented his literary response as a postcolonial writer

to these cultural challenges and, moreover, provided the materials of a

nationalist English tradition ready-made for appropriation by a subsequent

imperialist movement. (Bowers, “Smithfield” 53-54)

Chaucer’s independence as a translator, resisting Latin and French culture,
is most significantly revealed in the fact that his translation is an invention,
displacing the original and claiming its own authority. As lvana Djordjevic
suggests, viewing Chaucer as a translator might have been “literary-historical

parricide” of the “father of English poetry” when the belief that translation is

174

 

unoriginal prevailed, because the concept of Chaucer as a translator could ruin
his literary authority as a creative writer:

In the centuries after his death, Chaucer gradually came to be revered as

the father of English literature, and during the same period, as originality

acquired greater and greater prestige in the aesthetic marketplace,
translation was increasingly looked down upon as a literary activity. By the
time the study of English literature emerged as an academic discipline,
translation’s stock was so low that to extol Chaucer as a translator would

have been tantamount to literary-historical parricide. (255-56)

However, “through the lens of the medieval understanding of translation-as
literary invention, as a fluid reconstruction of a source text” (McWebb 242),152 we
can now see all of Chaucer’s primary and secondary translations as original
works: “as Chaucer knew, no matter how close, a translation Will always be
original” (Djordjevié 269).

If one prominent trait of Chaucer as a translator is his attempt to establish
firmly both English as a vernacular and himself as translator, another noteworthy
characteristic should be the political motive of his translations and their
consequent political functions, whether expected or unexpected. Unlike other

d,153

translations by the colonize which aim at the effacement of the specific

historical situation, as we can see from the discussion in Chapters Two and

 

‘52 That Chaucer the translator is an inventor with authority is supported by recent views of
“translation as rewriting,” which look at “the process of translation as cultural rewriting, as an
expressive tool which is often laden with political, ideological, and! or religious underpinnings”
(McWebb 241 ).

53 See the argument of Niranjana on postcolonial translation above.

175

Three, Chaucer’s translations of the Romaunt and The Boece are the results of
his responses to specific social and political conditions of his time.

Chaucer’s Romaunt, composed early in his writing career — probably in the
late 13603 - initially reveals both his aspirations as writer influenced by an
advanced French literary culture and his'expression of an anti-French ethos; later
it was used as a tool for enhancing peaceful Anglo-French relations in 13903,
thereby possibly playing the political function of strengthening Richard’s regal
power as he was promoting peace between England and France. On the other
hand, Chaucer’s Boece could have been intended as a warning to the young king
Richard with the purpose of preventing him from becoming atyrant in the early
13803, but by reawakening interest in what constitutes a tyrant, it could serve as
an effective weapon attacking Richard’s tyranny after 1386, and especially during
his last years from 1396 to 1399, thus weakening the king’s governing power. In
short, the later fortunes of Chaucer's Romaunt and The Boece both show
political implications and applications of works that he had originally intended in
quite opposite directions.

Another, but no less important, distinctive aspect of Chaucer as a
translator is closely connected to the political motives and functions of his
translations. As is clearly shown in combined discussion of The Boece and the
Knight’s Tale, when it comes to politics, Chaucer typically tries to balance his
political stance, paying close attention not to give an impression that he is
leaning toward a certain political camp. When his translation The Boece might

serve as a useful tool against Richard as the king became more and more

176

 

tyrannical, Chaucer counterbalanced the descriptions of a tyrant in The Boece by
producing an image of an ideal ruler in the person of Theseus in the Knight’s
Tale, suggesting the close connections between the‘exemplary Theban duke and
Richard. In the political turmoil of the 13803 and 13903, by being ambiguous
about his political position, and by attempting to achieve balance in expressing
political ideas, Chaucer could conceal his own political inclinations so that he
may well be called “the master of indirection”:
[W]riting while in the service of different members of the royal family
through the reigns of three different monarchs, he [Chaucer] was in an
excellent position to comment on the political and social events of his
time....Yet...he rarely comments on those kings whose lives he had the
opportunity to observe from close quarters, or engages directly with the
ideas of kingship. Indeed, to ‘turn to Chaucer and ask that he sum up a
conversation about the definition of regal authority is to ask the master of
indirection for an answer he can only give obliquely.’ (Rayner 83)154
It is no wonder, then, that attacks on Richard’s tyranny are characteristically
absent in Chaucer’s writings, for which he is open to criticism:
There are no equivalents in Chaucer’s poetry of Gower’s outspoken
attacks on the tyranny of the deposed Richard II, and...Chaucer’s
perceived failure to rail against the sufferings and tyrannies of late

fourteenth-century England has been condemned. (Meecham—Jones 152)

 

15‘ The quotation about “the master of indirection” is from Lynn Staley, “Translating
‘Communitas’,’ in Imagining a Medieval Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), 292. ,

177

Chaucer’s evasiveness in expressing his political stance candidly results
partly from his “ambiguous” social status and partly from his acute insight into the
current political situation. As Marie Borroff points out, by dint of his “ambiguous
though comparatively high social status,” Chaucer was “a member of the ‘gentil’
class, but one who belonged to the lower rather than the upper level of that large
and miscellaneous body, lacking the secure aristocratic status confirmed by the
possession of hereditary lands and income” (68). However, Chaucer’s
unwillingness to clarify his political stance — or his “cautious self-protectiveness”
as Borroff calls it (4) - comes more from his shrewd perception of contemporary
politics, fatal to those who were on the losers’ side:

[Hjis “evasiveness” owed less to his sense of being on the margins of

aristocratic society than to his recognition of the potentially deadly

consequences of being too closely identified with the losing side in any

conflict. Before him, as a reminder was the tragic career of Thomas Usk, a

self-styled poetic follower of Chaucer, whose political involvement led to

his imprisonment, and execution in 1388. (Meecham-Jones 153)

3. Chaucer, Politics, and Radical Translation

The three characteristics of Chaucer as primary translator of the
Romaunt and The Boece we'have discussed above, especially the political
aspects of his translation that lead us to call into question the validity of the
conventional understanding of Chaucer as the “father of English poetry” and a

politically and/or socially conservative man. First, as many scholars of Chaucer

178

 

have noted, the literary fame of Chaucer as the “father of English poetry” is a
direct consequence of Lancastrian “construction” of him as a national literary
figure after his death in 1400:

Chaucer — as author, as “laureate,” and as “father” of English poetry — is a

construction of his later fifteenth-century scribes, readers, and poetic

 

imitators. . . [and] it is central to the fifteenth-century literary system to
imagine Chaucer as a public, and publicly patronized poet. (Lerer 3, -

17.18)155

 

The establishment of Chaucer as the “father" of English poetry in the fifteenth
century, however, didn’t originate from the support of men in the literary field
alone. More importantly, from a political point of view, it was also a result of

conscious efforts of the Lancastrian new regime, which aimed at distinguishing

 

itself from “the francophile Ricardian court”'56:
Within the context of Lancastrian sponsorship of the English vernacular, it
is also possible to suggest a conscious political strategy behind this
interest in translation...the Lancastrian kings presented themselves as the

patrons of an English national culture (in implicit contrast to the francophile

 

'55 Though arguing that Chaucer as “the father of English poetry” was constructed for his service
for “dominant social interest,” David R. Carlson differs from Lerer since Carlson suggests that
Chaucer was already made a national poet in his time, not in the fifteenth-century as Lerer
suggests:
Chaucer was made “the father of English poetry” not because he was a good poet, though he
was. There were other good poets. Chaucer was made the father of English poetry because
he was servile, doing useful work serving dominant social interests, materially and
ideologically, in both his poetic and other employments. (1)
‘56 The geographical center of Lancastrian sponsorship of the creation of Chaucer as a national
poet was his last known residence between Westminster Palace and Westminster Abbey, “where
the poet’s literary remains were preserved, fair copies and foul papers were sorted out, and
exemplars were prepared for professional c0pying” (Bowers, Chaucer 33). And it was Thomas
Chaucer, Chaucer's son and only heir, who had “opportunity to oversee the copying of his father’s
works” (Bowers, Chaucer 33).

179

Ricardian court) as part of a strategy for consolidating their reign. (E.

Knapp 51)

It was Chaucer as a secondary translator of The Canterbury Tales who
was established as a highly revered literary figure, through a Lancastrian political
' strategy of degrading the old dynasty while glorifying the new one.'This point is
well demonstrated by the fact that, because of their satirical attitudes toward the
court culture around Richard, The Canterbury Tales were circulated by
supporters of the new Lancastrian regime as part of their “energetic production of
the Lancastrian texts”:

Always adroit at safeguarding his life and livelihood, Chaucer ensured a

degree of artistic immunity by composing the Canterbury Tales as a closet

work meant for posthumous publication. This wide-ranging anthology with
its raucous frame-narrative had no association with the Ricardian court and
actually contained elements distinctly anticourtly and explicitly satirical of

Ricardian excesses. (Bowers, Chaucer 33).

As Bowers further points out, “Chaucer’s works and his reputation underwent a
form of rehabilitation in order to serve more loyally the orthodoxies of the new
regime” (Chaucer 125).

If we can fully realize how much Chaucer’s literary fame depends on
Lancastrian political schemes, then we may also be able to see how the
traditional view arises, connecting him naturally with conservatism based on his
career as a public service man. It is undeniable that as a government official

serving the king as well as the court, Chaucer might have worked as a repressor

180

of the people, especially in the period of the king’s tyrannical governance:
“Chaucer was the police, not in an attenuated or metaphoric sense: in the better
part of his mature employments. he was an official of the repressive apparatus of
, state” (Carlson 1). Concluding that conservatism was Chaucer’s fundamental
political stance, based on his public career and a (presumed) consequent royalist
propensity, however, does not suffice. As we have already discussed in this
chapter, Chaucer typically does not disclose his political inclination openly in his
works, and once his political stance is exposed, then he attempts to provide the
opposite one, thus adroitly concealing his political preference.

Besides his usual ambiguous attitudes toward politics in his writings, which
leave us unsure of his conservatism, Chaucer’s close affinities with the
Wycliffites preclude us from reading Chaucer as a conservative royalist. As
Strohm points out, Chaucer seemed to associate with the “Lollard Knights,”
though he appears to have had less contact with them during the political turmoil
of the 13803 and 13903:

Chaucer seems to have made the acquaintance of several of the Lollard

Knights - Clifford, Vache, Stury, Clanvowe, Nevill — in the 13703 and early

13803; although his conduct in the trying period 1386-1389 reflects the

same discretion as theirs, he seems not to have seen much of them during

his time in Kent. (Social Chaucer 45) .

Although we may believe that Chaucer’s friendship with the “Lollard Knights” may
indicate his concerns with radical social issues, he seems not to have been

affected by radical Wycliffism; his Lollard Knight friends were “early Lollards,”

181

 

whose main interests were not attacking the Church and controversial religious
issues, as Borroff observes of Clanvowe:
Clanvowe is the author of two extant literary works. The Boke of Cupide, a
love-vision...[and] The Two Ways, a religious treatise in prose....[which
includes] a lengthy exhortation to the individual Christian to renounce all
that wordily men most value, including bodily lusts, riches, and fame.
These ideas are certainly in accord with the views of Wyclif, but Clanvowe
does not carry them further; he shows no interest in attacking
ecclesiastical corruption or engaging in doctrinal controversy. (30)
Chaucer’s radicalism, much more prominent than his acquaintance with
some of the “Lollard Knights,” is clearly expressed in his Prologue to A Treatise
on the Astrolabe, which uncovers “Chaucer’s interests in Wycliffism, his proximity
to Wycliffite ideas” (Cole 79). As Andrew Cole asserts, it is quite plausible that
Chaucer gained access toWycliffite Bible translations, considering the close
relationship between Chaucer and Clanvowe and the possession of Wycliffite
writings by Clanvowe’s son:
Sir John Clanvowe demonstrated a literary relation to Chaucer when he
wrote his Boke of Cupide in imitation of the poet’s own verse....
Clanvowe’s heir, Thomas Clanvowe, owned Wycliffite catechetical
and scriptural material...[and] probably inherited these from John....[S]uch
Wycliffite scriptural translations were never far out of reach for Chaucer.
(79-80)

Chaucer’s awareness of Wycliffite Bible translations is evident from his

182

“use of a cluster of ideas and phrases that can be found only in one Chaucerian
text - the Prologue to the Treatise on the Astrolabe — and only in one Wycliffite
text, the General Prologue to the Wycliffite Bible” (Cole 81). Chaucer’s
incorporations of the Wycliffite theory of translation in his Treatise on the
Astrolabe are shown prominently in' two aspects. To begin with, Chaucer and the
Wycliffite writer make similar use of the translatio studii topos. Just as the
Wycliffite translator “tak[es] up the translatio studii conventions of authorial praise
and of the transmission of learning, and reconfigurles] them into a polemic that
rationalizes a translation that is thought...to have no precedent at all,” so
“Chaucer...reconfigures the conventions of translatio studii in ways parallel to the
Wycliffite translator’s” (Cole 88). Moreover, Chaucer and the Wycliffites share
ideas about a “superfiuite of wordes” which may spring from the translators lack
of discretion:
Chaucer’s depiction of his own limitations as a translator whose
indiscretion renders a “superfluite of wordes” resonates meaningfully within
the specific contexts of vernacular hermeneutics that the Wycliffites were
shaping... (Cole 89)
By presenting his theory of translation in the Prologue to the Treatise on the
Astrolabe, Chaucer reveals that although he may be viewed as conservative in
his politics, in his ideas of translation, he takes a radical position that resonates

with Wycliffite thought.

183

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