(The New Middle Ages) Elizabeth Allen (Auth.) - False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature-Palgrave Macmillan US (2005)

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FALSE FABLES AND EXEMPLARY
TRUTH IN LATER MIDDLE
ENGLISH LITERATURE
Elizabeth Allen
*
FALSE FABLES AND EXEMPLARY TRUTH
© Elizabeth Allen, 2005.
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments Vll
1. Introduction:Toward a Poetics of Exemplarity 1

2. Anticipating Audience in The Book of
the Knight of the Tower 27
3. The Costs of Exemplary History in the
Confessio A mantis 53
4. Framing Narrative in Chaucer and Lydgate 83
5. The Pardoner in the "dogges boure":
Early Reception of the Canterbury Tales 111
6. Memory and Recognition in
Henryson's Testament of Cresseid 133
Notes 159
Bibliography 203
Index 219
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
M any people have contributed time, energy, and encouragement to this

project. My greatest debt is to Karla Taylor, who oversaw my senior
thesis at Yale University, cultivated my interest in medieval literature, wel-
comed me into the world of scholarship in graduate school, and provided
steady encouragement over the years. The book began as a dissertation at the
University of Michigan, where I had the good fortune to garner aid from
many quarters. I am especially grateful for the generosity of my teachers
Catherine Brown, Michael Schoenfeldt, and Theresa Tinkle. I am also thank-
ful for the intelligence and engagement ofKenneth Hodges, Ondine Le Blanc,
Susan Rosenbaum, Jani Scandura, Will West, and Steven Whitworth.
The support of my colleagues at Allegheny College gave me energy and
confidence at a crucial time, and for that I thank Jim Bulman, Jeffrey Deshell,
Brian Rosenberg, Lisa Sheffield, and especially Laura Quinn, for hours of
intellectual argument and pedagogical advice. My students at Irvine, in parti-
cular Walter Wadiak and Robert McDonie, have challenged me intellectually
as well as helping me finish the bibliography and index.
Many people have read and commented on parts of this project. I am
especially grateful to Richard Kroll and Paul Strohm for reading the entire
manuscript with care and understanding. I am also grateful to Hugh
Roberts for sympathetic reading and advice on most of the chapters. Sarah
Farmer, Susan Rosenbaum, and Victoria Silver helped immeasurably with
chapter 1; Jessica Brantley and Jim Steintrager offered sound advice on
chapter 3; Karla Taylor commented on chapter 4 and on early stages of the
whole project; David Benson helped with chapter 5; Linda Georgianna
commented on chapters 1 and 6; and Alexander Gelley, Steven Mailloux,
and Marshall Brown gave well-timed encouragement and intervention.
Two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press also contributed
extremely useful comments. Extended conversations with colleagues at
Irvine prompted me to rethink continually: for their intelligence, warmth,
enthusiasm, and friendship, I heartily thank Frank Biess, Sarah Farmer, Vivian
Folkenflik, Natalka Freeland, Rachel Gamby, Andrea Henderson, Adriana
Johnson, Victoria Silver, Jim Steintrager, Hugh Roberts, Ulrike Strasser,
V111 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Michael Szalay, Elisa Tamarkin, and Andrew Zissos. I received crucial

inspiration from Seeta Chaganti, Rebecca Krug, Sarah McNamer, Susan
Phillips, Catherine Sanok, and other participants in the New Chaucer Society
seminar on pathos in 2000 and the Medieval Writing Workshops in 2003
and 2004. Many scholars and friends have advised me about intellectual and
academic life more generally. For their kindness, good sense, and in some
cases hospitality, I thank David Benson, Marie Borroff,Jessica Brantley,John
Fyler, John Ganim, Linda Georgianna, Frank Grady, Rebecca Krug, James
Simpson, Paul Strohm, and Stephanie Trigg.
I am grateful to the series editor, Bonnie Wheeler, for her immediate
enthusiasm, and to Farideh Koohi-Kamali at the press. I thank the British
Library, the Bodleian Library, the Balliol College Library, the Huntington
Library, and the staff at Alnwyck Castle for permission and aid in using their
collections, and the University of Michigan and Allegheny College for
travel funds. The book was written with the help of a University of
California President's Fellowship in 2002-03, and completed with an Irvine
Faculty Development Grant in 2004.
Finally, I am profoundly grateful for the humor and insight of my
brother Ralph. I appreciate the boundless curiosity as well as love and sup-
port of my mother, Sara Allen, who contributed to this book in many ways.
My oldest friend, Christopher Calhoun, has been a steady presence through
its many phases. The book had its genesis in argument with my father,
Ralph Allen, and was sustained by ongoing conversation with him about
the nature of moral education. I wish that he were here to read it.
CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION: TOWARD
A POETICS OF EXEMPLARITY
Rychere and Exemplary Narrative

Let me begin with an example. In the section on sacrilege in his early
fourteenth-century penitential manual Handlyng Synne, Robert Mannyng
tells the story of a rich man, aptly named Rychere, who takes sanctuary
from his enemies in an abbey, where he and his family are given quarters.
When he has sex with his wife there, God is unhappy because it is too near
the church. They get stuck together like dogs, and cry out until they are
found, whereupon their situation becomes known and they become
ashamed. The man begs the monks to pray for them, promising generous
gifts in return, and when the monks pray, man and wife are uncoupled.
The monks write the event "yn boke, .. ./ For to shewe hyt euer more, I That
outher myght beware thar-fore" (8969-72). The narrator concludes that
this "chaunce" occurred not for the couple alone, but so that everyone
should be warned away from sex in holy places. 1
The momentum with which this brief exemplum moves from specific
action to general truth characterizes many of the narratives collected in Latin
sermon anthologies of the period and increasingly circulated in vernacular
contexts as well. 2 Man and wife fail to give quarter to the sacred, and get
stuck in their sinfulness; God punishes the couple by making manifest their
animal desire. When Rychere begs the monks to pray, he connects physical
circumstance to moral concept. His plea-"That God almyghty graunte hyt
be so I That oure synne he wyl vndo" (8965-66)-conflates "undoing" the
human physical entanglement with the divine grace that "undoes" sin. God's
grace is available not simply through acknowledgment of the sacred but in
and through the character's recognition of his error. The narrative pivots on
a moment when a concrete error is rendered conceptual, when God's intent
is adequately received. 3 This book is about how and why exemplary texts
2 FALSE FABLES AND EXEMPLARY TRUTH
create such moments-and how, at the same time, their concentrated morals
are belied by the forces of formal contingency, including rhythm and rhyme,
plot, narration, and anticipated audience response.
A concern with the moral benefit of literature pervades the world of
later Middle English writing. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a
proliferation of exemplary compilations, conduct books, and spiritual
manuals; self-consciously higher literature, from Chaucer to Henryson and
beyond, sought to promulgate moral teaching or "sentence." 4 A remarkable
range of Middle English texts frame stories as examples of virtue or vice,
designed to be imitated or avoided. The hope that literature might bring
about change in its readers has a context, of course, much broader than the
strategy of providing examples. Medieval Latin commentaries assume that
literature-specifically, narrative-should have ethical utility, in the sense of
helping to form, or reform, individual understanding. 5 In French and
English vernacular court poetry, literary experience is understood to have
recreational benefits within and beyond the narrow confines of the aristo-
cratic coterie. 6 Later fourteenth-century texts of social complaint and polit-
ical satire-works like Wynnere and Wastour and, most notably, Piers
Plowman-explicitly comment upon an extratextual political world. 7 These
texts share the fundamental claim that the value of literature lies in its
capacity to teach morality. In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English lit-
erature, such texts register the increasing size and diversity of the reading
public, calling special attention to the mode of communication from text to
audience. When texts make exemplary claims, they express an aspiration
toward exact alignment among authorial purpose, narrative form, and audi-
ence response. Indeed, exemplarity is a method of highlighting the terms of
this communication. When texts call upon audiences to imitate action, they
not only provide a primary avenue for literature to apply to the world of
lived experience but also call attention to the parameters of application.
Exemplarity becomes a principal site for sophisticated inquiry into the edu-
cational methods of poetic narrative, highlighting the limits of authorial
control, the importance of narrative as inspiration or seduction, and the
possibilities of imaginative freedom.
I choose to begin with Rychere and not, say, with the next story in the
collection, the much-anthologized "Dancers of Colbek," because R ychere's
tale encapsulates some exemplary aims that are taken as givens in more
highly wrought narrative. In the form of the medieval exemplum, the
didactic impulse appears particularly univocal and explicit. 8 Medieval
exemplary claims are not confined to this form, however; the effort to enact
a general truth in narrative, and the closely related call to readerly imita-
tion, can be found in a range of medieval forms across different genres.
Indeed, any narrative (in any period) can potentially be presented as
INTRODUCTION 3
exemplary-from the epic narrative of Aeneas's pious obligations to

modern-day television shows whose characters are understood as "role
models." 9 Middle English narratives express a pervasive concern with rep-
resenting general morals and urging audiences to "take ensample." Because
this concern is expressed not just in exempla but in romance, hagiography,
political complaint, and other genres, medieval exemplarity is best under-
stood not as form or genre but as mode-an attitude or what Northrop
Frye calls a "temper" or "atmosphere." 10 Exemplarity shapes a general con-
text of expression and address in many genres. 11 The mode is most identifi-
able through explicit admonishment-those imperatives that draw our
attention to the relation among particular story, general truth, and audience
acceptance. In such moments, anxiety about how narrative achieves moral
education emerges with special urgency. But bald injunction is not the only
way to bring narrative and audience into alignment. In the elaborately
staged scenarios of reading contained in the work of writers like Robert
Mannyng, Chaucer, and Gower, moral education is depicted in ways that
call into question the very exemplary claims that constitute the debate in
the first place. These texts experiment with formal tactics for calling
upon the imaginative judgment of readers, privileging mediated forms of
reference rather than the direct communication normally associated with
didactic literature.
I begin with the exemplum form per se as a relatively clear expression of
the contradictory strains of the broader mode-at once universal and par-
ticular, exceptional and typical, transhistorical and circumstantial. When a
text claims exemplary status, it makes a twofold assertion: as a particular
instance, the narrative bears a relation to a concept; and by signaling a
concept, the narrative is "applicable" to other instances, principally the lived
experience of readers. 12 This twofold movement makes the narrative con-
ceptually relevant to readers, who can, in the most explicit formulation,
"take ensample" from it, imitating or avoiding similar experiences. In the
case of R ychere, the narrative stresses the particularity of the sin by making
it manifest in the physical entanglement of the couple, and then immedi-
ately, the strange phenomenon is surrounded by general moral assessments-
the judgment of God that "swyche dede" should not be done so near the
church, the wonder of the spectators that they did such "folye," the
acknowledgment of Rychere that they committed "synne," the monks'
prayer itself. Robert's conclusion urges readers to avoid similar folly. We
shall see that Middle English exemplary narratives often call into question
the very efforts of generalization and application that lie at the heart of their
own didactic aims. But first, it is necessary to take at face value the stated
goal of exemplarity, linking author and audience by joining general and
particular.
Medieval Exemplarity
The combination of general and particular is the defining function of
example, etymologically derived from "eximere;' to cut out; any example
embodies part of a conceptual whole. 13 Considered as a rhetorical device,
an example is usually understood as a specific illustration of a broader prin-
ciple, invoked in order to convince an audience of that principle. 14
Rhetorical efficacy requires the subordination of particular instance to
generalization, so that the example helps explain a principle or render an
argument convincing. 15 In]. D. Lyons's analysis, an example "is a dependent
statement drawing its meaning from the controlling generality" (34). 16 Thus
a narrative is exemplary inasmuch as a general truth gives rise to and shapes
the way in which the particular is used. Medieval exempla in particular,
initially written for a specifically religious rhetorical context, have long
been described as subordinate to doctrinal truthsY Joseph Mosher defines
the exemplum as "a short narrative used to illustrate or confirm a general
statement" (1). The more recent definition of medieval religious exempla
offered by Bremond, Le Goff, and Schmitt is more oriented toward the per-
suasive function of examples, but retains the fundamental notion of subor-
dination to a larger "discourse": an exemplum is "a brief narrative presented
as true and aimed at being inserted into a discourse (in general a sermon)
to convince an audience by a salutary lesson" (37-38). 18 In emphasizing
that such narratives are "presented as true," Bremond and his collaborators
point to the Christian teleology that lies behind religious exempla. Seen in
this light, the Rychere exemplum is a tool for illustrating sacrilege and per-
suading an audience to avoid it, or at least be contrite and seek amelioration
from God. While such an instrumental model of the exemplum certainly
expresses an important aspect of the form, it downplays the particular char-
acter of narratives. Frederic Tubach asserts that, in early Christian exempla,
narrative causation is "above all determined and given direction by a
dynamic force beyond the phenomenological sphere" (412). 19 This makes
explicit what lies behind other critical accounts of the form as well: in the
Rychere story, we might say that the general (and sacral) injunction against
trespassing against the holy determines and gives direction to the narrative's
very structure.
However, it is not a given that the phenomenological elements of
example-as expressed in the narrative details of time, place, point of view-
are categorically subordinate to general moral truth. In the most wide-ranging
recent study of medieval exemplary narrative, Larry Scanlon writes of the
tales used in sermons that "if one attempts to trace [the] apparent translation
of moral to plot, one quickly discovers that the two are inseparable, that the
moral can only be apprehended narratively" (30). The general principle
needs the narrative not simply to make it more convincing but to convey
INTRODUCTION 5
the conceptual point at all. The story's meaning inheres in the moral problem
of sex in this case too near this church; the plot enacts the moral judgment
necessary to understanding how an individual sin is forgiven. The narrative
cannot be described as secondary, ornamental, or even separable from its
general moral purposes. The fact that particular narratives do not simply
support but actively constitute moral generalizations means that the exem-
plum can stand alone. Its status as exemplary does not require explicit artic-
ulation of a "sentence" or injunction. To be sure, such extra-narrative
statements are formally and conceptually important, as we shall see-
especially when they indicate a mismatch between story and moral, or
among various morals. But in this case, even if Robert did not conclude the
Rychere narrative with his explicit indication that the story's purpose is to
warn everyone against misplaced sexual desire, the story would nonetheless
retain its paradigmatic status: Rychere's sin would remain an example of
sacrilege, analogous to the myriad potential sacrileges of its readers, and the
story would remain an example of God's forgiveness, similar to myriad
other acts of divine grace. In Scanlon's terminology, Rychere's story enacts
sacrilege and its "undoing."
To a greater or lesser extent, such narratives shape audience response by
depicting acts of recognition and explanation performed by the characters
themselves. These embedded interpretations curtail variation and imbue a
narrative with a sense of inevitability. In the Rychere narrative, God's assess-
ment of the situation ("God was nat payd, and wyld hyt noght, I So ny the
cherche, swyche dede were wroght" [8949-50]) both motivates the punish-
ment and tells readers how to interpret the couple's act. Then, when
Rychere begs for help, he is "in a sense, the reader of his own story even
while remaining in that story" (Suleiman, 40). Further, his acknowledgment
of error gives rise to a series of other audience responses. "Men" hear the
cry and see the spectacle; the "fame" or knowledge of the event spreads; the
monks pray for the sinners and write the story down; in formalist terms,
the story becomes narration as it is shaped by the contingencies of time and
point of view. 20 The inscribed audience of spectators and monks widens to
anticipate an audience of those who will read the monks' account in their
book. Presumably this readership includes the author Robert, who in turn
tells the story for a still wider audience of"vs euerychone."The monks are
an assenting audience who interpret the sign of sin through their answering
prayer; and then the narrator explicitly calls upon the extra textual audience
to assent, to experience a similar "drede" (8975), the proper response to the
sacred. Suleiman points out that such internal assent, which she calls
"redundancy," diminishes the potential ambiguity of a given narrative and
makes possible a single reading of the text (150). 21 This redundancy can be
an element within otherwise highly ambiguous texts. In the "Dancers of
Colbek," the priest-whose daughter is among the revelers mysteriously

trapped in a yearlong dance in his churchyard-repeatedly assesses and
rearticulates the general sinfulness of their revelry. In Chaucer's Pardoner's
Tale, the Old Man identifies the literal and spiritual death that the rioters are
seeking, and in doing so steers them toward it. Neither of these narratives
finally sets aside all ambiguity, and indeed, the degree to which any exem-
plary narrative asserts a univocal moral perspective can vary a great deal. But
both the "Dancers of Colbek" and the Pardoner's Tale demonstrate the char-
acteristic didactic impulse toward using characters to "shewe" (HS 8956,
8971) audiences how to read. The embedded interpreters read on behalf of
imagined extratextual readers, who are presumably, like the characters, also
engaged in the effort to understand the signs of sin (or of virtue).
Of course, many different sorts of narrative contain metanarrative guidance;
but the exemplum is characterized by an effort toward legislating agree-
ments or alignments among different potential interpreters. In contrast, one
might consider how romance engages in metanarrative commentary about
chivalric values, for instance when, in Chretien de Troyes's Yvain, Laudine
famously talks to herself, weighing the pros and cons of falling in love with
her husband's vanquisher. Here, Laudine's hesitations (and Lunete's dis-
agreements with her) call into question the causes and consequences of her
eventual assent. In the exemplum, on the other hand, interpretative com-
mentary is not ostensibly designed to interrogate the moral values expressed
in narrative development but to confirm a narrative's purposes, curtailing
ambiguity and asserting authority. The disambiguation of" sentence," how-
ever, lends special urgency to acts of interpretation and reception; exem-
plarity places unusual pressure upon both the text's authority and the
audience's assent. Exemplary texts imply that narratives correspond to readers'
lived existence, so that an exemplary moral is reiterated, or reenacted, by live
audiences. 22 Such directly "communicative" aspirations presuppose lan-
guage's direct reference to the phenomenological world, its use of signs to
"point to" things and narratives to "point to" lived events. 23 Clearly, there
are many ways in which language mediates such reference; but to a greater
or lesser degree, the exemplary impulse sustains a fantasy of alignment
among author (or compiler), text, and audience which is essentially a
representational fantasy-a fiction of the direct communication possible
when a well-intentioned author employs a moral narrative to persuade an
attentive reader to virtuous conduct. In its most explicit form, the fantasy of
alignment is expressed as injunction: from this you can see that you must
not have sex too near the church. Such direct communication carries enor-
mous power for the authors of medieval exemplary works. It also raises
difficult questions about the way in which narrative tries to define and
enact moral influence. If texts by their nature cannot guarantee obedience,
INTRODUCTION 7
what sort of influence can they actually exert? To what extent do the
ambiguities of narrative and poetic form contribute to a text's moral influ-
ence? To what extent do narratives qualifY, or interrogate, rather than enact
clear moral principles-as when, for example, we might ask of the R ychere
exemplum how near is too near the church, leading to a proliferation of
further narratives about the relationship between sex and the holy? In other
words, if examples are not simply subordinate to general doctrine, then to
what degree do examples depict general doctrine as finally subject to
particular circumstance?
This question has been answered, in part, by diachronic accounts of the
increasingly troubled relation between general and particular in the exem-
plum itself. Broadly, the history of the medieval exemplum is described as a
development from doctrinally driven religious narratives to more secular
and less determinate types of narrative, and from texts that privilege the gen-
eral to those that emphasize the variability of the particular. In a brief but
important account of this development, Frederic Tubach locates the religious
origins of the form in early Christianity, distinguishing between Roman
examples of" great feats of glory undertaken in the name of Rome" and later
stories that "fulfilled the urgent need of giving immediate relevance to the
Christian faith in simple narrative form" (409). With Crane, Mosher,
Bremond, and others, Tubach points to the profound change in the use of
examples instituted by the Dominican and Franciscan friars in the thirteenth
century, for whom the form becomes less absolutely metaphysical and more
interested in social norms and values (412). 24 Defining early medieval exempla
as static and doctrinal, he points to increasing "fragmentation" (416) and
"impossibility" (414) as the form becomes more secular and fully elaborated.
Tubach associates late medieval exemplarity with what he terms artistic and
literary concerns: "Convinced that truth can be discovered through artistic
form, society produced its own daring synthesis of the world of man and the
world of God ... [T]he exemplum becomes more and more ... a literary
tradition" (412). Karl-Heinz Stierle describes a subsequent development in
Boccaccio's Decameron, which lays bare the contradictions between narrative
and morals (402-407). 25 Stierle makes a distinction between medieval exem-
pla, offered for imitation, and later exempla, which "call... into question the
priority of the generality that gave rise to the exemplum" and hence demand
the discernment or judgment of the reader (404-405). He draws a heavy line
between the direct, didactic mode of communication often associated with
medieval sermon exempla and the constitutive or aesthetic character of
narrative. 26 When exemplary narratives adduce problematic morals, contra-
dict themselves, or simply exceed the parameters of a stated moral, they
impose demands upon their audiences, not simply to imitate or avoid but to
discern a general truth to begin with-to examine principles rather than
reenact given norms. Such calls for judgment reveal that narratives do not
simply correspond to lived realities, but absorb readers in sensory and emo-
tional experiences, raise moral questions, and artificially impose moral order.
Both Stierle and Tubach trace a gradual shift from "closed" or "static"
form to "open" and "dynamic" effects.As Tubach's analysis indicates, exem-
plary texts produce such "literary" effects earlier than Boccaccio; indeed, in
varying degrees, both the aspiration to direct representation and the con-
sciousness of the mediating effects oflanguage are present in any exemplary
context. Even in the earliest Christian narratives, medieval exemplarity
depends upon the difficult task of inspiring audiences through the act of
narration, which is rarely entirely univocal. In the later Middle Ages, texts
exhibit an increasing attention to widening audiences, understood as not only
resistant or dissenting but potentially idiosyncratic and unrepresentable. 27
Where Tubach finds literary complexity, Dyan Elliott finds expressions of
anxiety about interpretation. With the emphasis on the sinner's inner world
typified in Abelard's theological thought and borne out through the prac-
tice of private confession in the later Middle Ages, the individual becomes
the unpredictable locus of moral education. 28 In this context, exemplarity
reveals an increasing consciousness of the ways in which narrative form calls
attention to the local and contingent, even when apparently making the
strongest possible general claims upon readers.
Several full-length studies within the last fifteen years have treated not
just sermon examples but the secular versions of medieval and renaissance
exemplarity, specifically in the tradition of the furstenspiegel or mirror for
princes, and although they tend to confirm the diachronic picture of
Tubach and Stierle, they also complicate it. Scanlon, in an effort to chart the
increasingly intertwined concerns of religious and lay traditions, traces the
history of the furstenspiegel as a formative element in balancing collective lay
authority with late medieval monarchy, arguing that the "public exemplum"
or heroic narrative is an essential tool of lay political authority (81-134).
Simply by expanding the discussion of medieval exempla to include mirrors
for princes, Scanlon finds richer terrain in the twelfth century, where secular
concerns mediated through heroic example already appear. He shows that,
culminating with Boccaccio, reading is politically formative: "[the] lay tra-
dition [of heroic models] enables its audience to become moral simply by
reading, without necessarily requiring heroic action. Secular readership
becomes a self-constituting, self-affirming moral force" (133). Scanlon
explores how secular political exempla lend moral weight to various forms
of political power, which are in his view unstable and always in need of
reaffirmation. Whereas Scanlon is primarily interested in the perpetuation
and appropriation of authority through exemplary texts, Judith Ferster
argues that mirrors for princes also undermine political authority. Ferster's
INTRODUCTION 9
analysis of the genre aims to show how these texts were used "as camouflage
for political commentary," and teases out ways in which advising kings
could open the way to criticism and elaborate the possibilities of political
resistance (4). 29 Ferster's finely reasoned argument suggests the importance
of individual authors' deployment of examples in historically specific ways-
a crucial insight about the circumstantiality of narrative to which medieval
texts continually call attention. As we shall see, exemplarity becomes a
method for anticipating not only political resistance but readerly initiative of
many kinds. What is important in the readings of Scanlon and Ferster is the
fundamentally rhetorical notion that, much as examples may seek a kind of
absolute and continuous political truth, they actually bespeak the need for
ongoing adjustments to the contingencies of political (as well as social and
literary) occasion. These insights also extend to the religious example, which
do not simply illustrate but dynamically assert Christian authority.
Recent studies of Renaissance exemplarity find that humanism puts
new pressure on the exemplary impulse toward univocal moral truth.
According to Timothy Hampton's analysis of texts from Bude to Cervantes,
the political deployment of examples becomes problematic in the
Renaissance, as writers explore the central tension "between an idealistic
faith in the absolute value of models from the past and a gnawing sensitivity
to the contingencies that kept ancient models of excellence rooted in their
own culture" (298). The new sense of distance between past and present
produces skepticism about the capacity of past exemplars to speak to the
present. Although exemplarity is a rhetorical method of placing the self in a
social and political world, for Machiavelli and others, historical models
threaten to lose their exemplary function, becoming too disjoined from the
present to be good models of conduct.]. D. Lyons similarly finds an early
modern "crisis" in the relationship between the individual and the author-
itative sources ofknowledge found in exemplary texts (237). Faced with the
problem of applicability and a sense of the proliferation of examples, writers
of this period increasingly move away from exemplary rhetoric, which
"decline[s] as a source ofknowledge and as a means of persuasion" (238).
Lyons and Hampton extend the path of diachronic change sketched by
Tubach, Stierle, and others-from examples governed by moral continuity
and truth to narratives that increasingly call attention to proliferating and
fragmented ideals. This diachronic account underestimates the power of the
unpredictable in medieval exemplary narratives, even in their simplest and
most concentrated forms; it ignores the awareness of historical contingency
that is always the flip side of the example's authoritative claims. Medieval
exemplarity expresses a thoroughgoing awareness of formal variation and
adjustability of narrative content. Referring to sermons, Jaques de Vitry says
that examples (which he often refers to asfobula or fictions) are for recreation,
not just edification, especially when audiences begin to fall asleep with
fatigue and boredom. 30 With both the recreational and edifying purposes of
exemplarity in mind-both "sentence" and "solas," in Chaucer's Horatian
terms-later Middle English poets subjected didactic aspirations to rigorous
scrutiny even as they made the most ostensibly transparent moral claims. In
this respect even Scanlon's attentive analysis underestimates Middle English
literature's "gnawing sensitivity" to the differences between different ver-
sions of a given story, the inapplicability of stories to lived existence, and the
dangers of audience misinterpretation.
To return for a moment to sermon exempla, then, we might understand
the early modern "crisis" of exemplarity as the flare-up of a chronic condi-
tion, which allows us to see the Rychere story in a somewhat different
light. In Scanlon's view, exemplary discourse appropriates institutional
authority: when an exemplum "recounts ... the enactment of [a] moral"
(33), it expresses cultural power through textual authority. The writer of the
sermon exemplum seeks to establish or confirm the values of the church,
and to exert the power of such values in the community (33-34). Certainly,
Robert's sacrilege exemplum assumes and advocates certain institutional
values. In establishing the sacrilegious character of sex in holy places, he
assumes a distinction between animal and spiritual activity and, further,
suggests that spectators and readers should uphold that distinction, which is
embodied in the monastery's holiness. The exemplum performs the cultural
authority of the religious institution, the monastery, where the monks pro-
vide sanctuary for the man and pray for him. The tale also insists on the
man's obligation to offer a donation in return for the monks' intercession
on his behalf, showing the mutual benefit of institution and lay supporter.
Even more in line with Scanlon's emphasis on institutional affirmation,
Rychere's story embodies the purposes of Robert's manual, which urges
self-examination and contrition in order to affirm the institutional value of
confession. Rychere's tale depicts his need for the penitential method it is
designed to recommend. 31
Scanlon's analysis of how sermon excmpla shore up the institutional
authority of the church (and fiirstenspiegels shore up the increasingly
autonomous authority ofkingship) illuminates the dynamic cultural work
of medieval exemplarity. However, because Scanlon shows how religious
authority appropriates lay discourses-sermons, for instance, incorporate
folk elements like rumors and charms-he is more interested in the exem-
plum as an instrument of power than in its anticipation of variable audi-
ence. Throughout Handlyng Synne, the church's power is everywhere
evident, but disparate moral effects work against it at every turn. 32 In
Rychere's story, the couple's need for sanctuary is prompted by mysterious
enemies, who pursue him "Other for hys gold, or for folys" (8940); in
INTRODUCTION 11
amplifYing his source slightly here, Robert both hints at the man's fault
and fails to specifY it, making the monks complicit in a vague communal
disorderY The presence of these enemies (are they after his riches?) also
emphasizes the material fact of monetary exchange. Riches, in the form of
Rychere's grateful donation to the monastery, ultimately realize his release
from sin. Although getting stuck together during sex is a material sign of
sin, the equally material exchange between the sinner and the monks has
limited, if any, divine or metaphysical implication, and even makes the
monks' provision of sanctuary seem opportunistic. The world of "flesshly
dede" is inconsistently connected to God, an intimation that exceeds the
more explicit purposes of the plot. Scanlon's study implies that it is precisely
the management of such disparity that grants the example its institutional
authority, and certainly for many sermon exempla like the highly compact
stories compiled in the Alphabet ofTales or the Speculum Laicorum, and in
Handlyng Synne as well, this is true. But narratives nevertheless continually
exceed or call into question the univocal doctrine they are designed to
convey. The examples in Handlynf!. Synne frequently call clerical authority
into question, and reaffirm it precariously at best. 34
More to the point, the disparate effects of narrative call attention to the
involvement in sin required by exemplary instantiation. From the begin-
ning of Handlyng Synne, Robert advocates "handling" or getting acquainted
with sin; for him, narratives embrace the material and ordinary world of
human error (what Scanlon refers to as the banal). Such handling occurs
not only in the physical world but also in the mind, through verbal signs;
narrative provides an essential tool for touching often upon sin. More than
an instrument, however, narrative is a way of experiencing sinfulness itself,
and one should read Robert's book not once through but repeatedly:"With
oft redyng, mayst thou lere ... I Handy!, hyt behoueth, oft sythys" (126-29).
The narratives themselves constitute a full-fledged experience, shaping an
audience by absorbing them in a narrative process: audiences to see them-
selves as some of the "handlers" of the Rychere story. The hope that narra-
tives do not just appeal to prurient sexual interest or a taste for violence but,
in fact, might incite desire for moral truth, provides the basis for the use of
exempla in sermons and elsewhere. 35 Chaucer's Pardoner, for example, plays
upon just such a concept of moral desire when, having told his own very
neat exemplum, he makes the Host's involvement-or envelopment, as he
calls it-look like nothing but corruption. As exemplary compilations enter
the realm of the vernacular, the parameters of audience involvement
become particularly charged. Even as medieval exemplary discourse
engages readerly curiosity, it expresses profound suspicion about affective
involvement, simultaneously articulating a merely instrumental notion of
storytelling.
12 FALSE FAilLES AND EXEMPLARY TRUTH
Instrumentality and Phronesis

The fantasy of literature's instrumentality answers to a tradition at least as
old as Plato-a tradition of suspicion lodged against the unpredictable,
irrational powers of mimesis. The Republic's argument against the inclusion
of poetry in the ideal city is based, of course, upon a fundamental suspicion
that mimetic experience cannot be trusted, because it engages the mind of
the audience in sensory and emotional experience, leading to a rapturous
engagement, not a rational philosophical analysis. 36 Plato's exclusion of
poetry is predicated upon "a complete gulf between the truth, as under-
stood by reason, and the illusions effected by poetry" (Havelock, 28).
Against this profound suspicion of mimetic illusion and its absorbing, emo-
tional effects, Plato asserts a preference for distanced observation, reason,
and abstract objects of contemplation (Havelock, 234-51). In the Middle
Ages, of course, the object of suspicion was not associated with the oral and
dramatic form that originally defined mimesis, but with the fabulous and
pagan-that is, early Christian thinkers from Augustine onward associated
poetry with pagan texts about the distinctly fictive world of multiplicitous
gods and magical transformations (fabulae). The suspicion of such fictional
representations, which might lead audiences astray, resurfaced in academic
commentary. 37 But an academic cosmological discourse derived from
Plato's Timaeus and other works also gave rise to a defense of poetry, culmi-
nating in twelfth-century poetic allegories. For thinkers like Alain of Lille,
poetic fiction could be validated precisely by its indirection, by its access to
truth through a pleasurable veil or integumentum; the defining characteristics
of poetry, including not only its fictive nature but also its formal, rhetorical
techniques, were defended as fallen language that could lead knowing audi-
ences toward the suprarational contemplation of God. But even as academic
writers sought to defend the value ofJabula by framing, glossing, and writing
elaborate allegorical poems, they also sought to rationalize poetry within
the confines of academic, philosophical discourse. 38
The Middle English debate about the use of examples registered just
such deep suspicions about the value of representation, albeit in a different
literary and social context. From at least the thirteenth century, discourse
about the proper form and use of examples in sermons suggests a con-
sciousness of the dangers of promulgatingfabula among a potentially various
and unpredictable lay audience. With the establishment of the Franciscans,
Dominicans, and other fraternal orders, the exemplum became an increas-
ingly prominent element of sermons, and exemplary stories were compiled
in collections designed to aid preachers. 39 The friars, who traveled and
preached in order to make the institutional church more accessible, translated
exempla to draw in new vernacular audiences, offering them a new "theology
INTRODUCTION 13
of secular life." 40 This new accessibility, and vernacularity in particular,

raised new suspicions about the use of examples for uneducated audiences.
The seductive and corrupting potential of friars (not to mention their
competition with established parish priests) generated a heated antifraternal
discourse. 41 The Council of Salzburg (1386) agreed that "These false
prophets by their sermons full of fables often lead astray the souls of their
hearers." 42 The antifraternal discourse of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen-
turies has a strong flavor of what we now associate with Platonic anti-
rnimeticism.
In England, John Wyclif and his followers voiced the most explicit
objections against false preaching in general, and in particular against sermons
(whether fraternal or not) that employed exempla. For Wyclif, exemplary dis-
course ranges across genres, including "lesyngis of mennys tradicions" (144),
"cronyclis & poisies & newe £Yndynges of hem self, & ... false comenda-
ciones of dede men" (124). 43 Those who tell such stories seek their own
gain in the form of worldly power, including monetary gain. Wyclif closely
associates use of exempla with the practice of begging:
Yif they maken hem besi on the holy day to preche fablis and lesyngis to the
peple and not the gospel, and gon fro place to place and fro man to man to
begge of pore men for here false lesyngis, and !etten [prevent] men fro here
deuocioun; they kepen not we! here holiday. (8)
The preaching of "fablis and lesyngis" is associated here with error or

wandering, both spiritual and physical. False preaching wanders from the
authority of the gospels, and false preachers wander from place to place
soliciting the attention-and the money-of audiences who are easily
seduced away from their proper "deuocioun." Elsewhere, Wyclif accuses
false preachers of catering to their audiences: they "tell en lesynges, fablis, &
cronyclis, ... & dore not telle hem here grete synnes & auoutrie lest thei lesen
wynnynge or frendischipe" (59).Telling stories not only earns winnings, but
establishes friendship with one's auditors, seducing them away from recog-
nition of their own sins. Exempla lead their hearers away from the truth
found in the bible. 44 Even as the Wycliffites translated the bible into
English, they refused extra-biblical "fablis & lesyngis" because of their
implication in a set of worldly desires.
These debates about the use of exemplary narratives in sermons exhibit
a profound anti-representational impulse in Middle English-an impulse
which, ironically, plays itself out in the compilation and use of examples
themselves. In vernacular exemplary literature, moral generalizations make
narratives instrumental precisely in order to justifY writing them. When
audiences are urged to "take ensample," they are encouraged to obey an
apparently abstract moral lesson that is designed to gather any disparate or

unclear narrative effects into a universal, stable, unambiguous truth. The
fiction of correspondence between story and audience glosses over the
mediating effects of narration. At the same time, of course, "taking
ensample" encourages audiences to enter into the particular terms of a
given narrative-the very narrative whose vicissitudes have given rise to the
need for a stabilizing moral.
Indeed, in a study of "taking ensample," it is crucial to recognize the
degree to which exemplary literature is by definition wedded not just to
narrative particularity but to affective response. In practice, exemplary texts
make an array of different kinds of demands upon readers, including
sensory and emotional ones, which are deeply contingent upon individual
circumstance-the very aspects of mimesis that raise suspicions from Plato
onward. The story of Lucrece, for instance, tends to encourage a morally
ambiguous sympathy not just for the wronged woman, but for her rapist,
whose desiring gaze is mimicked by narrative descriptions of her beauty.
Gower's Lycurgus, a king who leaves his subjects in charge of the kingdom
and promises to return, rules successfully because his subjects loyally uphold
his principles in his absence while waiting for his return. The story works
not only by affirming the value ofloyalty but also by encouraging desire for
monarchical stability, entering readers into a state of anticipatory assent that
mirrors that of Lycurgus's subjects. But Gower also emphasizes the state of
deprivation that gives rise to the king's successful rule, evoking a sense of
betrayal that works against the story's apparent political affirmation. In a
range of exemplary contexts, appeals to emotion tend to call attention to
moral questions rather than simply confirming moral statements. By
exploring the ways in which exemplary texts call for affective response,
especially sympathy or "pi tee," this study reveals how exemplary claims, far
from simply perpetuating moral directives, educate through the contingencies
of moral choice.
To be sure, affective response does not inevitably lead to radical moral con-
tingency. Sometimes an audience's emotions can be invoked to mystifY or gloss
over the vicissitudes of moral choice. This is certainly the case in the source for
Chaucer's Clerk 5Tale, which Anne Middleton refers to as "the supreme formal
triumph" of the exemplary narrative in Chaucer (10). 45 As is well known, the
story of patient Griselda, whose husband Walter tests her by taking away her
children and repudiating her, originates with Boccaccio and is translated (from
the vernacular "back" into Latin) by Petrarch. 46 In a letter to Boccaccio
explaining the responses of two readers to his version of the story, Petrarch
prefers the near-devotional sympathy that mystifies Griselda's obedience. His
first reader of the story is about halfWay through when he lets out a sob and
cannot continue; though he tries again, he is eventually so moved that he has
INTRODUCTION 15
to stop reading. Petrarch clearly endorses this reader's response:
I am uncertain how others would interpret this incident, but I interpreted it

in the best light and understood that the man's heart was very sensitive; for,
in truth, there is no more kindly man, at least not that I knowY
In contrast, Petrarch dismisses the skeptical reader who thinks Griselda's

obedience impossible. But the juxtaposition of the two readers encourages
a sense of the miraculous: Griselda is moving because of the impossibility of
her consistent assent. Emotional confirmation of faith, of course, is promi-
nent in religious contexts, where readers are called to sympathize with the
numinous suffering Christ and Mary as exemplars of devotional assent.
Saints' lives, especially, call for wonder and devotion more than analysis and
imitation. When Saint Agnes's hair covers her and saves her from rape, or
when Saint Catherine miraculously converts her prison guards, they illus-
trate human access to the spiritual, just as Griselda's obedience (according
to Petrarch) illustrates wondrous human constancy. Not only in the
Griselda story but also elsewhere, the numinous potential of the exemplary
mode resists analysis, depending instead upon the audience's wonder and
acceptance of the seemingly untrue. 4H While my study does not focus on
devotional texts, we can still see how the devotional dimension of affective
response imbues some of the most "secular" exemplary contexts, from the
Canterbury Tales to Lydgate's Fall of Princes to Henryson's Testament of
Cresseid. In short, the appeal to affective response registers the potential
unpredictability of audiences and can sometimes, by the same token,
mystifY or even avoid it.
Still, the exemplary suspicion of images is severely complicated by the
affective dimension of audience response, and in fact affect becomes the
basis for a principal medieval defense of narrative. The value of exemplarity
lies precisely in the seductive quality of the specific instance rather than its
injunctive authority: in Gregory the Great's oft-quoted formulation, exam-
ples, more than doctrine (verba), inspire the hearts of their hearers to love
of God and their neighbors. 49 Examples do not simply make doctrine
concrete but actually serve more effectively than doctrine to engage an
audience. The notion that examples inspire, arouse, or awaken (excitant)
their hearers to virtue suggests not only that narratives might indirectly
influence audiences more forcefully than moral precepts, but also that they
actually activate the minds of audience members. Examples rely upon an
audience's inner readiness to understand, and the process of understanding
or interpretation implies wakeful, that is, conscious, activity and effort.
This defense of examples on the basis of the activity they encourage in
their audiences places value on affective response and, more generally, on
acts of interpretation over obedience to rules. Instead of promoting the

instrumental value of doctrine designed to bring about moral improve-
ment, Gregory implies that the perception of particular examples contains
moral emotional response-examples awaken love, understood in terms of
the commandments to love God and one's neighbors. In the awakening
or "excitement" of audiences, perception and conduct are virtually
indistinguishable. One is not the instrument of the other. The concrete,
complex narratives that provide the material for exempla are themselves a
site of virtuous judgment. In this sense, an example does not lead to virtu-
ous action; the very experience of exemplary discourse is itself a form of
moral activity. In taking my cue from Gregory's formulation, which pro-
vides a touchstone for the defense of exemplary narratives in the literature
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, I find that the literature every-
where anticipates audience "excitement." For late medieval exemplary
writers, acts of reading are not simply instruments for moral action; rather,
reading constitutes moral activity. Chaucer's Clerk's Tale has an unusually
elaborate framework, including Petrarch's spiritual moralization, an equivo-
cal Envoy, and the Host's relentlessly literal, domestic moral. But the Clerk's
Tale is not alone in framing response as distinct and variable activity rather
than passive acquiescence. In this sense, exemplary literature formulates a
much closer link between moral interpretation and social action than even
its own instrumental claims aspire to. Reading examples is itself social action.
This model of moral action is familiar to modern scholars from the
ethical thought of Aristotle, for whom of course an emphasis on particulars
constitutes part of a deliberate refutation of Platonism. 50 Aristotelian phronesis
or practical wisdom is based upon the good judgment of individuals, which
is produced and refined by successive moral choices, whereby contingent
circumstances produce specific actions. 51 By gaining experience in the
process of moral choice, one practices phronesis, which is understood not as
the completed or fulfilled achievement of virtue but as the application of
goodness in the process of living. Moral choices require local acts of
perception or aisthesis, "a faculty of discrimination that is concerned with
the apprehending of particulars" (Nussbaum, 300). In contrast to Plato's
suspicion of emotion, Aristotle views emotion as an important part of any
person's vocabulary of ethical response to the world; and, because emotions
are not predictable responses to experience, but contingent and changeable
ones, they are not easily subject to moral rules or definitions (Nussbaum, for
example, 3 78-94). While for Plato this unpredictability constitutes a threat
to rational analysis, for Aristotle, ethical action rests in just such concrete,
particular, and various experiences (NE 1103b 30-1104a 2).When Gregory
the Great suggests that exempla are more effective than doctrine in inspiring
audiences, he is pointing to the value of narratives not in promoting rational
INTRODUCTION 17
analysis but in inspiring moral choices. The observation that this locus classi-
cus of medieval exemplary justification so closely resembles Aristotelian
practical wisdom throws open a new window on the possibilities for moral
interpretation. When Gregory advocates examples over doctrine, fore-
grounding the audience's activity, he propels us well beyond the still-common
view of medieval didacticism as a systematic perpetuation of universal
orthodoxies. 52
The ways in which medieval vernacular texts anticipate audience
involvement, then, point well beyond the instrumental, to a process of
internalizing the experience of reading a text-a method expressed in the
pervasive image of eating and rumination (or regurgitation) of books. 53
Mary Carruthers notes that "the medieval understanding of the complete
process of reading does not observe in the same way the distinction we
make between 'what I read in a book' and 'my experience.' ... ' [W]hat I read
in a book' is 'my experience', and I make it by incorporating it (and we
should understand the word 'incorporate' quite literally) in my memory"
(169). 54 Exemplarity requires memorial activity, since a text must be
remembered in order to be imitated or otherwise applied to the ethical
decisions of the present. The Knight ofla Tour Landry hopes that his daugh-
ters will "remembre somme good ensample I or som good lore after that
hit shalle falle I and come to theyr mynde in spekyng vpon this matere"
(13125-27). The act of re-membering can be understood, in Carruthers's
terms, as a re-embodying of a past narrative within the mind, making it
available to future circumstances. Reading, inasmuch as it demands memo-
rizing, is an act of mental arrangement-a judgment-which always entails
internalizing the past and making it one's own (for example, 160-62).
Carruthers's analysis of ancient and medieval scholastic accounts of memory
stresses the phenomenological and emotional aspects of reading; memory
images are "produced in the emotional (sensitive) part of the soul" and are
essentially somatic ways of filing texts in the mind (49-50). In reading a
text, one has a physiological experience of it, which means that, when
applying a past text to present moral decisions, one remembers "what right
action feels like" (169). Readerly involvement does not simply occur at the
moment of reading but in the somatic response that makes the text memo-
rable and usable later-the sensory and emotional response, that is, renders
the text exemplary, or "applicable." If we understand reading in this way,
then Scanlon's notion of the narrative "enactment" of authority can be
understood as an effort to inscribe "what right action feels like"-a feeling
which is the task of involved readers to internalize, in their own way,
and re-member in the necessary moral or ethical circumstances. The
mediation of the reader in this process is a crucial and always, to a degree,
unpredictable activity.
It is not far from this notion of readerly involvement as a process of

making a text one's own to the modern hermeneutical insight that under-
standing a text is always already an act of application to particular historical
circumstances. 55 Gadamer defines interpretation as an act of applying the
past text to oneself, always within a historical situation. In this sense, the
activity of interpretation lies not simply in making the present correspond
to the past, but rather, in readers' active mental appropriations of the past to
a new context. Vernacular writers call upon the hermeneutic structures
defined in scholarly texts in order to shape their readers, even while
acknowledging the deeply contingent ways in which readers, in turn, shape
texts. 56 Rita Copeland has shown that hermeneutic practice in the Middle
Ages-from biblical commentary to vernacular translation-emphasizes
the active and ethical particularity of readers' interpretations. Medieval
hermeneutic practice is not merely mastery of rules, but is related to the
ancient rhetorical notion of fitting language to an occasion (63-64). The
universalizing aspirations of exemplarity are evoked within an intellectual
context that acknowledges the rhetorical importance of specific occasion. If
particular readers appropriate texts to changing situations, then the value of
those texts will depend not only on how well they demonstrate general
truths, but also on how well they make those truths available in sensory and
affective detail. Carruthers insists upon this point in her analysis of medieval
ideas about the mind's process of storing texts, which involves arranging
them for later application (esp. 180-81). Far from functioning as a priori
definitive norms, general moral truths label the contents of the well-
organized mind: they establish categories for convenient retrieval of texts.
The act of applying truths to a new situation does not "normalize an occa-
sion, [but] occasionalizes a norm" (181). 57 An example succeeds when it is
narrated anew, changed to fit a new occasion.
The Clerk's Tale and Readerly Initiative

In fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English literature, the concern with
readerly initiative is highlighted in elaborately framed narratives like dream
visions and dialogues, making available for narration not only the story-
content, but also the framing narration of a given text. 58 In a context of
increasingly varied literate practices, audience initiative is so often encour-
aged, portrayed, and corrected in scenarios of teaching and interpretation that
it becomes a defining feature of the exemplary mode. 59 Embedded readers
stage possible acts of interpretation; they disambiguate the moral message, but
they also provide foils for imagined extratextual audiences, performing obvi-
ously limited acts of reception in order to call attention to the importance of
audiences' contribution to moral meaning. In Gower's Confessio Amantis
INTRODUCTION 19
(chapter 3) the relation between authority and audience is staged through

Genius and Amans, who enact various possibilities for reception and often
signal readers to improve upon their efforts. In Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde
(chapter 6), the empathetic narrator seems so ready to forgive the unfaithful
Crisyede-"I wolde excuse hire yet for routhe" (5.1099)-that the reader is
made suspicious of his own effort to explain her actions.
Chaucer's Host, of course, is the most famous among the many audi-
ences inscribed in Middle English exemplary works, and his activity shows
not only the importance of phronesis in literary judgment but also,
paradoxically, the compelling power of understanding stories simply as
instrumental, as tools of general moral "sentence." Rather than simply
evincing hermeneutic limits, however, the Host identifies norms of exem-
plary interpretation. 60 The Clerk initially moralizes Griselda as a spiritual
example of the constancy everyone should show toward God-a conclusion
translated directly from Petrarch's version of the story:
I decided to retell this story in another language not so much to encourage

the married women of our day to imitate this wife's patience, which seems to
me hardly imitable [vix imitabilis], as to encourage the readers to imitate at
least this woman's constancy, so that what she maintained toward her husband
they may maintain toward our God. 61
This quasi-allegorical reading of the tale's spiritual value makes Griselda's

virtue timeless (not "of our day"), subsuming her specific, wifely suffering
to the larger moral of spiritual obedience. 62 But the Host ignores the spiritual
message entirely in favor of a domestic one, applying Griselda's patience to
his own impatient wife. The Host's response demands a complex act of dis-
cernment on the part of readers, who are called upon not simply to dismiss
the Host's lack of sophistication, or even to choose between two moral
messages, but to examine the reasons for such contrary impulses. 63
If Robert Mannyng's tale of Rychere demonstrates how moral redun-
dancies can disambiguate a story, Chaucer's Clerk's Tale shows how easily an
exemplary frame can undo redundancy, suspending the validity of moral
norms. 64 The Host serves to call into question the mystifYing spiritual moral
of Petrarch. We saw above how Petrarch, in describing the reception of his
own Griselda story, preferred the reader who dissolved into tears and could
not finish reading the text aloud. The second reader Petrarch describes is
unmoved because, far from being hard-hearted, he simply believes that "the
whole thing was made up. For if it were true, what woman anywhere,
whether Roman or of any nation whatever will match this Griselda?"
(Sen. xvii, 4). Griselda's very inimitability makes the narrative unconvincing
and, therefore, unaffecting; the implication is that only if a story really
happened could it be useful. Petrarch's reply universalizes and mystifies the

moral claims of the tale, arguing that there have been many exceptional true
stories of actions "that seem impossible to the multitude." He portrays his
resistant reader as morally limited, since he judges according to his own
moral capacities rather than those of the ideal few, and thereby puts himself
"in first place." Even though Petrarch gives the skeptic a certain authority
by staging his resistance, he condescends to the skeptical response as self-
interested and worldly. In exposing Petrarch's moral elitism, this comment
also reveals an ambivalence about-and ultimately, a distrust of-readerly
authority.
The Host's willful domestic application of the Griselda story shows a
member of the Clerk's audience putting himself in first place. Indeed, the
Host later goes so far as to insist (after criticizing the Monk's monotonous
tragedies) that without audience, stories have no meaning:
"Whereas a man may have noon audience,

Noght helpeth it to tellen his sentence.
"And wel I woot the substance is in me,
If any thyng shal wel reported be." (VII.2801-2804)
These lines do not simply refer to the Host's self-appointed role as judge of
the best tale, but assert the crucial contribution of audience to the
"sentence" of a story. The Host revises Petrarch's depiction of reception by
asserting the value and historical specificity of readers who, refusing to sub-
mit to the author's terms, apply the story to their own circumstances. In
contrast to Petrarch's academic readers, the Host invokes his own marital
experience to make sense of the otherwise impenetrable constancy of
Griselda. The resulting insistence upon the plural nature of audience
response throws Petrarchan authority into relief; the coexistence of the
Petrarchan spiritual moral with the Host's domestic one raises (without, to
my mind, answering) profound questions about the relative power of author
and audience in creating meaning.
Even without the Host's stanza, which appears in only half of the
manuscripts, the Clerk's elaborate concluding framework reminds us that
he puts himself"in first place." After citing the Petrarchan spiritual moral,
the Clerk adds two stanzas-"But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go"
(1163)-in which he claims women today could never measure up to
Griselda, and advises that women should not subject themselves to such
treatment in any case. This highly equivocal conclusion reframes the act of
translation to parody the Wife of Bath; but in gesturing toward women at
all, the Clerk identifies Petrarch's antimarital impulse, pointing out that the
spiritual message represents domestic hierarchy as negligible in the face of
INTRODUCTION 21
higher spiritual ideals. Even within the narrative itself, the Clerk subtly
reinvests the tale with domestic significance. Whereas Petrarch offers up the
spiritual message because domestic obedience like Griselda's is "almost
beyond imitation" (vix imitabilis), the Clerk says, instead, that Griselda's
domestic obedience would be "importable," unbearable. In this small
change, the Clerk responds to Petrarch's denial of Griselda's human suffer-
ing by injecting a hint of that suffering into the text. The change revises
Petrarch's notion of exemplary imitation by shifting the terms from an
impossible moral ideal to an unbearable physical and social experience. This
"predilection for literal modes of meaning" characterizes not only Chaucer
but also other fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English authors. 65 These
writers privilege the literal or concrete (as distinct from the allegorical or
conceptual) aspects of exemplarity.
Further, when Chaucer changes Petrarch he also asserts the historically
contingent character of his translation. Exemplarity is ostensibly dedicated
to the fantasy that, if a story can remain unchanged as it is imported into a
new set of circumstances, then so too can its meaning be fixed, transcending
time and place, and that it can thereby perpetuate clear and immutable
social and moral principles as well. The fantasy of moral imitation is also a
fantasy of translation as unmediated transfer, the creation of an exact corre-
spondence between two versions. The Clerk initially claims his tale is an act
of obedient translation, and translates remarkably closely. 66 Medieval theories
of translation stress the activity of readers in confirming and elucidating past
texts, in a way that imagines those texts as not simply instruments or tools
of education but as a continuously relevant tradition in which modern
readers partake. As Rita Copeland points out, the potential for "displace-
ment" of the source in many medieval acts of translation is easily obscured
by the hermeneutic claims of exegetical explication (222). Although transla-
tion could be understood as a way of"understanding the past in metonymic
terms" (Copeland, 221), vernacular translators use academic discourses in
order to appropriate and, in many cases, eclipse the source text. The
hermeneutic basis of vernacular translation brings to the fore the audience's
role in shaping a text, precisely because of the hermeneutic aspiration to
connection among source text, author, and reader. The Clerk's Tale registers
the power of this communicative continuity for medieval writers-and
readers. But by exceeding Petrarch, the Clerk calls attention to how the
choices of readers become detached from the intentions of authors.
Chaucer and others highlight audience initiative when they curtail,
expand, correct, or outright disagree with their sources. 67 In exemplary
contexts, the act of translation places peculiar pressure upon the putative
integration of source, text, and audience. The Clerk's qualifications of
Petrarch indicate the degree to which his own readers might similarly qualifY
his endorsements-or, as in the case of the Host, choose different principles

of interpretation altogether. In imagining interpretive disjunctions of this
kind, medieval exemplary literature complicates its own strongest instru-
mental claims.When the Clerk's Tale points toward moral principles, it seems
to make the Griselda narrative an instrument of moral education; but when
two competing sets of moral parameters are offered, and presented as
elements of one and the same loyally translated text, the instrumental value
of the story is both emphasized and profoundly undermined.
Literary Form
While framing devices exert particular pressure upon the relationship

between text and audience, the internal workings of the narrative itself are
also crucial to exemplary effects. In reading, moral acts are constituted by
individual interpretive judgments; phronesis is shaped by literary form. If we
take seriously the contingent character of moral choices as presented in
exemplary literature, then a study of this literature must concentrate on the
contingencies of individual texts. We have seen how, even as exemplarity
calls attention to the unpredictability of new audiences, it seeks to bring
about social good through the injunction to "take ensample." At the
same time, though, the literature also seeks to govern reception through
myriad formal intricacies-diction, rhyme, metaphor, allusion, narrative
structure-all of which anticipate and help to shape audience response.
Indeed, these intricacies reveal the difference between moral imperatives
and moral choices-between exemplary authority and readerly agency.
Poems like Gower's Confessio and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales insist on the
peculiar capacity of literature to rnisalign or interrogate clear didactic
messages. 68 Indeed, when exemplary texts combine (ostensibly) universal
moral truths and particular narratives, they imply that formal variety itself
might serve to educate new and various readers. Seen in this light, the
debate about exemplarity can be understood as a debate about the moral
freedom offered by verbal form.
When exemplary texts point to plural possibilities for interpretation,
they call attention to their dependence on aisthesis or perception, the
etymological root of what we now call, under a sometimes rather different
guise, the aesthetic. 69 To assert that late medieval authors make aesthetic
demands upon their readers is not to assert "the elevation or hierarchization
of some representational strategies and regimes at the expense of others"
but to explore the distinctive practical wisdom available in the experience
°
of poetic narrative. 7 For one thing, of course, aesthetic value is a histori-
cally changeable category, less an a priori law than a socially created and
shifting arena of critical response. 71 Moreover, aesthetic processes in the
INTRODUCTION 23
Aristotelian sense occur to some degree separately from the problem of

artistic value or beauty. 72 Literary works can demand judgment based on
aesthetic perception without necessarily engaging ideas of "value." The
notion of aesthetic function developed by Prague School theorist Jan
Mukarovsky suggests that literary forms can be understood as contingent
processes rather than transhistorical, universal values. 73 For Mukarovsky, the
"communicative function" is by definition "extra-aesthetic" (8-9): language
is communicative when its primary goal is to argue, convince, teach, or
otherwise refer to the world of actual experience (9-16). Language that
operates aesthetically, on the other hand, is characterized by a redirection of
reference, so that "the work of art acquires the ability to refer to a reality
which is totally different from the one which it depicts, and to systems of
values other than the one from which is arose and on which it is founded"
(75). The aesthetic is thus defined by indirection, the very misalignment that
seems so easily to call exemplary generalities into question. 74 Further, the
"reality" to which the work of art refers or applies is, in large part, formed by
the norms and experiences of an audience, "squeezed into the ... intellectual,
emotional and free attitude which the [audience] assumes toward reality in
general" (82-83).An audience's contribution, then, is crucial to Mukarovskfs
notion of aesthetic function, which we might understand as the way in which
a work of art is able to refer to particularities outside its own milieu, and thus
constituted in part by the audience's set of circumstances.
Recent scholarly suspicion of formal analysis has been based on a
perception that formalism treats poetry, in particular, in isolation from its
historical surroundings. 75 It has been criticized for complicity in literature's
efforts to unity, resolve, and mystifY political and ideological conflict. 76 But
far from creating aesthetic unity or ideological resolution, Middle English
exemplary texts (despite their own claims) are often disjunctive, interroga-
tive, ambiguous, or indeterminate. 77 In Iser's terms, they invalidate the very
norms they invoke. To be sure, the literature's aspiration to universal truths
must also be considered a vital part of its effects. More to the point, though,
English exemplary texts present themselves as contingent ways of shaping
(and responding to) unpredictable audience response. Through aesthetic
rather than simply directive methods, exemplary literature registers plural
and unpredictable audiences. The literature itself raises the question of how
its own contingent forms might constitute moral education and bring
about social good.
Let me return once more to the Clerk's Tale, which typifies the way in
which exemplary literature examines the distinctive contribution of verbal
artistry to moral reading. This narrative of female constancy would seem an
ideal locus for realizing the exemplary aspiration to timeless virtue.
Certainly the Clerk's Tale depicts a Griselda who conforms her own will so
completely to that of her husband that any reluctance is indetectable; her

willed conformity to Walter's will has made her seem monstrous to some
and numinous to others. But the Clerk's Tale depicts Griselda's absolute
constancy precisely by encouraging attention to formal contingencies. In
part 3 of the tale, when Walter sends his sergeant to take away Griselda's first
child, one unprepossessing rhyming pair-"stille/wille"-is repeated three
times in nine stanzas. One might expect that the rhyme should call atten-
tion to the "stille" or constant "wille" of Griselda, but the rhyming lines
never actually refer to her, as we shall see. Griselda's willed constancy
(her "stille wille") takes shape in the gaps between the rhyme's expected
point of reference and its actual reference. 78 Expectation, of course, depends
upon an audience's initiative, and the rhyme's frequency not only empha-
sizes the thematic importance of a still will but also registers the ways in
which such formal intricacies govern expectations.
In the first instance of the rhyming pair, the sergeant learns Walter's
"wille" and sneaks into Griselda's chamber "ful stille" (IV524-25). Here,
stillness means secrecy, which clouds intentions rather than revealing con-
stancy. The sergeant makes excuses to Griselda as he prepares to take the
child away, explaining that he is constrained by his lord's command, which
he complains about but must obey. The sergeant's model of constrained
obedience provides a foil for Griselda, who never shows similar signs of
coercion. 79 Instead, in the second instance of the key rhyme, she sits "meke
and stille" as the sergeant does "his wille" (538-39). Stillness here indicates
her acquiescence, but again Griselda's own will is missing, and one might be
tempted to regard her as forced into submission. She does nothing to pre-
vent the loss of the child, only begs that its body be protected from wild
animals. In the third instance of the rhyme, Walter experiences a degree of
pity for his wife, but "natheless his purpos heeld he stille, I As lordes doon,
whan they wol han hir wille" (580-81). These lines remind us ofWalter's
duplicity, since he acts violently even though he feels "routhe." The rhyme
again suppresses Griselda's will in favor ofWalter's. In all three uses of the
rhyme, then, Griselda's obedience is clear, but her will is suppressed, raising
the possibility that her constancy arises either from constraint or from
passivity. The repetition of the key rhyme, however, calls attention to what
has been left unstated-Griselda's willed assent to her husband. 80 The
rhyme works by creating a gap in understanding, which can be filled only
in an audience's act of interpretation. Chaucer represents numinous obedi-
ence as analytically demanding: it must be worked for, through the language
of poetic fiction, a language constituted by readers' confrontation of formal
and thematic gaps. Part of the difficulty of the Clerk's Tale lies in its repre-
sentation of the spiritual and the pragmatic as competing but coexisting
frames of reference. 81 The "stille/wille" rhyme provides a formal hinge-a
INTRODUCTION 25
place where the contingencies of fiction open onto the numinous moral
world Petrarch worked so hard to uphold. In this sense, the tale can be
understood as a defense of poetry, not on the basis of its instrumentality, but
on the basis of its capacity to demand effort toward the highest truths.
Toward a Poetics of Exemplarity

Attention to form reveals that aesthetic and didactic concerns are inextricably
linked in later Middle English exemplary texts. 82 Indeed, it is a truism that
didacticism is one of the defining features of medieval literature. Even
scholars within the field have often taken didactic material at face value,
accepting its aspirations to clarity and univocal authority as accomplished
effects. Best known among Chaucer scholars, of course, is D. W Robertson's
conviction that all medieval literature, not just the explicitly didactic, should
be read for its consistent moral and spiritual message of charity, a practice
justified historically by the medieval allegorical method of biblical interpre-
tation known as exegesis. 83 Robertson and other proponents of the exeget-
ical method were criticized for "ruthless totalizing," a criticism that has
largely been accepted in the field. 84 But in the wake of exegetical criticism,
Chaucer scholars have focused more on social and political concerns than
on morality per se, elucidating Chaucer's irony (Donaldson) and reticence
(Pearsall) but not necessarily discovering the full seriousness of his moral
"sentence." 85 Since the work of Paul Strohm on audience, provocative work
on Chaucer's extratextual milieu has permeated the field, but the literature's
most direct statements about its moral aspirations have not come under
much scrutiny. An early and important exception to this general trend is
Alfred David, whose Strumpet Muse examines the fundamental link between
art and morals in the Canterbury Tales. 86 Taking up some of David's con-
cerns, I focus on exemplarity in part to renew attention to the profound
medieval concern with the moral consequences of reading. I accept Anne
Middleton's diagnosis of exemplarity in Chaucer's work as "the gradual
working through of a major problem in poetics" ("Ensamples Mo Than
Ten," 10). Chaucer is one among a range of medieval writers who invoke the
exemplary mode in order to register pressing questions about the activity of
audiences. Especially important among such writers is John Gower, whose
Corifessio Amantis has prompted a steady stream of scholarship concerned
with the relation between "art and morals" over the past twenty years. 87
The study is roughly structured around successive versions of exemplary
narratives-the stories of Perrot Lenard, Virginia, the Pardoner and
Criseyde-whose translations from one context to another register the shift-
ing stakes of exemplary education across a century. My method is deliberately
local, aiming for a kind of critical phronesis; inasmuch as I argue that the
texts anticipate responsiveness to contingent circumstance as a basis for

moral understanding, I try to practice as much as possible a responsiveness
to the shifting moral consequences of poetic form and narrative process.
Each chapter pairs a fourteenth-century text with an earlier source and/ or
a later act of reception, to create a set of miniature and distinct, though
interwoven, literary histories. The study's trajectory is not chronological but
conceptual, moving roughly from the most explicitly injunctive to the least;
it begins with a particularly directive text, The Book of the Knight if the Tower,
because this text reveals the degree to which, in anticipating new audiences,
exemplary writers confronted instabilities that they also coded as new. The
study then explores how more canonical writers complicate such directives,
moving toward a notion of readerly initiative, not just acculturation, as the
basis for reading. With Chaucer and Henryson, the debate explodes into
outright rejection of the exemplary mode (in Chaucer) and outright
defense based on self-consciously aesthetic effects (Henryson). Such local
literary histories reveal exemplary didacticism as a particular and contingent
phenomenon-not simply an act of communication that goes awry, but in
fact a dynamic situation that needs the unpredictability of readers. Medieval
exemplary literature does not simply demand obedience but inquires into
its own social benefit, examines its own poetic indeterminacy, and argues
for its audiences' moral freedom.
CHAPTER2
ANTICIPATING AUDIENCE IN THE BOOK

OF THE KNIGHT OF THE TOWER
T he later Middle Ages saw a proliferation oflay conduct books,including

domestic handbooks for women, written in vernacular French and
English. 1 This occurred amid broader changes in the uses of books and writ-
ing, principally the increase in vernacular writing and the rise of print. While
the Latin advisory text of Cato's Distichs was widely used in the grammar
curriculum, vernacular conduct books circulated in noble households and
became part of the education of both boys and girls. 2 Increasingly, they
circulated among the households of prosperous bourgeois classes. 3 As mer-
chants gained increasing access to wealth and status, conduct books reflected
social aspirations, becoming part of the material trappings of gentility. 4 Such
books, explicitly directed to inexperienced readers, claim to be instruments
of social education. Their social advice-how to create a domestic sanctuary
for one's husband, how to conduct oneself at table-almost inevitably has
moral import. The fourteenth-century Menagier de Paris advises his young
wife about how to rid the house of fleas and flies in order to win her hus-
band's approval and attention, which at first seems a largely pragmatic aim.
But the Menagier then goes on to compare the husband's longing for his
ideal wife to the longing of the penitent for Christ, and the domineering
wife's failure to submit to her husband to the overweening pride of Lucifer
(Section 1, Article 7). To a great extent, such texts "seek to convert the
dynamic and flexible activities of human behavior into more or less system-
atized sets of rules and advice." 5 They subsume specific acts into a larger
moral framework, so that household tasks (or table manners, dress, behavior
in church) are coded as responses to an already-established discourse whose
authority is essentially clerical. In responding to the perceived variety and
inexperience of their audiences, however, conduct books reveal, in varying
degrees, the precariousness of their own discursive authority. 6
Within this context of preoccupation with conduct, the Book of the

Knight of the Tower stands out as a particularly graphic exemplary book. 7
Written in late fourteenth-century France and translated by Caxton a
century later, the book is remarkable not only in the violence of its narra-
tives but also in the striking internal conflict of its framework. The book
evinces a complex awareness of-indeed, anxiety about-its anticipated
audience. The exemplary structure of story plus moral thematizes the
Knight's struggle to accommodate his authority to his audience, not just his
daughters but a more varied body of implied readers. 8 Both exceptional and
typical, the Knight's book illuminates concerns shared by many late medieval
advisory texts. In illustrating precepts with narratives, writers of exemplary
texts put their own responses to unpredictable audiences on display. On the
one hand, they control reading through persuasive tactics that extend far
beyond simple injunction. On the other hand, when they lay bare the
process of applying general precept to individual example, they call attention
to the ways in which readers produce their own pedagogical narratives.
Many, if not most, conduct books for laypeople are catechistic; they do
not use illustrative narratives to inspire or convince their audiences. The
fourteenth-century manual How the Goodwife Taught her Daughter consists of
didactic aphorisms mainly concerning domestic comportment, and The
Babees Book, a fifteenth-century conduct book for boys, consists of a set of
general precepts on manners and social behavior. But widely various books
of precepts from directions on courtly manners (Robert of Blois's thirteenth-
century Chastoiement des dames) to the ins and outs of household service
(John Russell's late fifteenth-century Bake of Nurture) have in common
their inscription of uneducated audiences in need of training. The desire to
appeal to this audience underpins advisory texts, which typically exhibit a
consciousness that books cannot command obedience with the directness
of physical presence. By foregrounding the problem of obedience, these
books imply an audience of struggling educators, as well as willing and
unwilling students. 9
The mediated character of textual education comes to the fore in an
array of efforts to manifest the pedagogical relationship. Conduct books are
by definition educational scenarios, like a merchant teaching his young wife
how to run a household, or a knight teaching his sons; but they often
emphasize such scenarios in tellingly detailed fictions. John Russell's Bake of
Nurture (1452) is framed as a dream vision in which a young man learns his
duties as a butler. Here, the writer announces that he enjoys teaching "them
that nought Can I with-owt gret exsperience" (6). Those inexperienced
young people who do not want to learn, he adds, should be given some toy
instead. In this depiction of an audience who might refuse to learn despite
the pedagogue's pleasure in teaching, the poem's speaker registers a certain
ANTICIPATING AUDIENCE 29
anxiety about the pleasantness of his advice. 111 In response to this anxiety, he
moves to a dream vision in which he is walking in the woods and meets a
young man in need of a master. The young man is attractive, slender, and
frank about his own need; he consents immediately to be taught by the
speaker; and the precepts begin. By framing the educational scenario in this
way, Russell creates a dissonance between two kinds of student-the pliable
young man and those who would rather play with baubles than learn their
occupational duties. The function of the dream vision frame is primarily
corrective, encouraging an inexperienced audience to imitate the young
man's attractive self-awareness, and shifting the pleasure of teaching into a
realm where it can be understood as an act of generosity. The dream vision
does not simply command obedience but tries to involve readers in a
narrative. The text asks teachers and students alike to prefer instruction over
baubles, and asks them to watch themselves doing so. Exemplarity enacts
both an audience's involvement in an educator's terms, and the educator's
effort to meet that audience halfWay. Such scenarios compensate for the
circulation of advice in books, by imagining circumstances in which
transmission would be oral and intimate. Looked at in this way, exemplary
scenarios register an anxiety about the circulation of books among
inexperienced readers.
Concern about pedagogy-the proper role of the authority figure, the
involvement of the learner, and the affective and imitative relation between
them-becomes a subject of active inquiry when the text combines
precepts with exemplary narratives, as in the Book of the Knight of the Tower.
Writers of conduct books deploy illustrative narratives to make norms of
conduct palatable, even inspiring. Narratives can convey the specificity and
drama of virtuous actions. Unfortunately, they can also convey the appeal of
vicious actions, and risk entering readers into the very desires and activities
they are being enjoined to avoid. Therefore exemplary tales are character-
ized by a tendency to pivot on particular signs explicated by characters
(a filthy tablecloth; white clothing; falling down a well). Although many
exempla work by reiterating the meaning of such signs, thus neatly encap-
sulating moral truth, they also express impulses that interrogate the norms
on which they seem to rely. Moreover, especially in tales of the sacred, a
certain estrangement from the ordinary provokes imaginative activity.
Exempla demand a local and unpredictable response to formal cues; as we
saw in chapter 1, they depend upon aisthesis, that faculty of discrimination
so crucial to Aristotelian ethical thought. When a framing authority voices
moral precepts, the effect hovers awkwardly between moral affirmation and
metatextual inquiry.
Exemplarity becomes, for such texts, a method of reflection upon the
process of making pedagogy attractive. Again, embedded narratives undermine
or exceed the precepts that frame them; their separate moral effects cannot
always be absorbed into the pedagogue's explicit purposes. 11 At the same
time, one cannot reduce the complexities of the exemplary mode to a mis-
match between precept and exemplum. 12 The act of exemplification turns
stories toward audiences ("take ensample" or "this is a goode ensample hou
ye ought ..."). Exemplary frameworks can be understood as themselves
rudimentary narratives about the desire for audience receptivity. Moreover,
such extradiegetic frameworks depict their texts as immediately sensitive to
audiences: they respond to anticipated readers by drawing moral conclu-
sions, but they also forestall resistance, encourage obedience, and garner
active assent even as they create barriers against excessive interpretive
liberty. Texts like The Book cif the Knight cif the Tower perform the challenges of
adjusting their didactic goals to the affective, erotic, and aesthetic needs of
their audiences. They express a pervasive cultural anxiety about the dangers
of attracting and engaging readers in the narrative process of moral decision.
Although the Knight's Book and Caxton's translation imply relatively
local audiences-first among the Angevin landed aristocracy of the late
fourteenth century, later in the tumultuous London of Richard III's reign-
these audiences are also depicted, from the beginning, as both intimate and
distant, both controllable and utterly unpredictable. Le Livre du Chevalier de
Ia Tour Landry was written in 13 71-72 by Geoffrey de la Tour Landry for his
two daughters, and Caxton translated and printed it as The Book cif the
Knight cif the Tower in 1484.The text moves among Old and New Testament
narratives, saints' lives, domestic fables, and tales of courtly gaucheries. The
kind of exempla that appear in Jacques de Vitry's sermon collections, and
later in vernacular manuals like Handlyng Synne, also appear here, along with
fable and fabliau, folklore and apparent eyewitness experience. The Knight's
narrative voice shifts between that oflover and that of stern didact, suggest-
ing the difficulty of enjoining virtuous conduct through narratives. His nar-
ration registers a continual awareness that education through stories
demands an interpretative activity whose effects may exceed the moral
parameters he sets forth. In response, he continually sets forth more such
parameters, claiming to articulate clear and univocal moral values, both
within the narratives and in his framing moral discourse. Although the
Knight's Book exposes a conflict inherent to any exemplary text, his narration
evinces a particularly vigorous struggle to reconcile his authority to the needs
of his audience. This audience does not consist of only his literal daughters; his
portrayal of them implies the possibility of other readers as well. 13
When Caxton translates and prints the book a century later, apparently
at Elizabeth Woodville's behest, he projects a different audience: women and
men, nobility and gentry. He emphasizes the book's usefulness as both an
expression of aristocratic morals and a method of self-governance for
"al maner of peple." The present-day patroness conveys the virtues of the
past, which transcend the particularities of time and place just as Caxton's
own printed text aims to transcend social distinctions according to status
and sex. This fiction of unified, timeless moral truth mystifies the Knight's
troubled text. Caxton's edition glosses over the internal divisions in the
Knight's narration, claiming the Book as a tool for the education of disparate
audiences brought under the exemplary wing ofhis royal patroness. At the
same time, however, Caxton does indicate the precarious political situation
of that patroness, in ways that do register, the anxious multiplicity of the
text she commissioned.
The Knight's framework shows how deeply his implied audience threatens
his moral authority. The two daughters for whom he writes are coded as
new, inexperienced readers, and they become figures for new and inexperi-
enced readers in general. In the frame, he seeks to teach his daughters to
avoid the seductive "jangling" of men who would encourage improper
conduct. Like the Goodwife's intimate authority, the Knight's fatherly role
suggests an extended audience of familiar and assenting readers. But at the
same time, he exerts an intrusive authority that his framework continually
seeks to deflect. The distinction between the Knight's clerical text and the
language of courtly seduction breaks down, so that he begins to partake in
the very "jangling" against which he ostensibly armors his daughters. 14
Within the narratives themselves, the Knight's text implicates himself and
his readers in often spectacular vice. The Knight's peculiar combination of
violence and deflection calls attention to the ways in which his audience
might be absorbed in the vices he reveals.As a result, at least some of the time,
he appears to banish his daughters "from the world of the free exchange of
words." 15 But I shall argue that his Book also explores the possibility that pro-
ducing desire and curiosity in his audience will teach them to embrace virtu-
ous conduct. The result is that, while the Knight aspires to a literal and clear
exemplary morality, his text navigates between poles of authority and
leniency, exposing the risks of involving an intimate, "disgarnisshed" set of
readers in the excitements of narrative. Interpretative freedom is alternately
encouraged and discouraged, opened up and curtailed, as the Knight struggles
with the overlap between moral and affective, even erotic, desires.
Imagining Authority
The Knight's Prologue begins with a stock dream-vision scene: the narrator,
in his garden in April, rejoicing in the sound of gay and lusty songbirds,
nostalgically remembers his youth as a servant oflove, and mourns the death
of his wife. 16 He recalls the days when he composed for her "songes I layes.
Roundels balades IVyrelayes I and newe songes" (11119-21). Calling up an
apparently obsolescent world of courtly poetry, he briefly writes in

octosyllabic couplets. 17 Rather than falling into a dream, however, the
Knight catches sight of his approaching daughters, and disavows love-poetry:
I remembryd me of the tyme when I was yong and roode with my felauship
and companyes in poytou ... they...were moche wel bespoken I and had
fayre langage For many tymes they wold haue oueral deduyte I And thus
they doo no thynge but deceyue good ladyes I and damoysellys. and bere
ouerall the tydynges I somme trewe I and somme lesynges ... wherof
I debate me oftyme with them. And saye to them I ye ouer false men I how
may the goddes suffre yow to lyue I that soo oftymes ye periure and forswere
youre self I For ye hold no feythe. (1211-21)
In response to the appearance of his daughters, the Knight shifts his own
position from poet-figure to defender of women against poetry's potential
"lesynges." Though he himself wrote poetry for a beloved in his youth,
"fayre langage" cannot be trusted. Though he claims to have advocated
truth over lies, the debate about love itself obscures the difference between
true and false "tydynges." The world of love is full of those who would
mock behind the backs of women, appearing otherwise to their faces, and
the Knight's effort to exempt himself from such false tidings only implicates
him in a tradition oflove debate that confuses appearances with reality.
This opening reflects the intellectual and social milieu to which the
Knight and his daughters belonged. He moved among the provincial
Angevin aristocracy. 18 He inherited and married into landed wealth, and was
a chevalier banneret (leading companies of at least twenty-five) who fought at
several battles against the English. Two of his three daughters married the
sons of a chamberlain to Charles V 19 The third daughter and one son mar-
ried the children of the Knight's own second wife, consolidating their landed
wealth and status (Boisard, 144). One document (a letter apparently in his
own hand) offers evidence of social aspiration, signed in 1362 with the title
of "baron," a title higher than his actual status (145). Although the Book
evokes a domestic world where local church and town events were known
and discussed, the Knight's own travels in the war and his youth in Poitou
were worth remarking. 20 As we shall see in the stories ofPerrot Lenart and
Pygrere, the consolidation of status in the form of landed wealth appears to
have been of central textual, as well as social, concern to the Knight. His
domestic advice-such as admonishments to dress modestly, avoid ill repute,
and give alms and bread to the church-seems distinctly more aristocratic
than the "bourgeois ethos" expressed in some other conduct books of the
period and, especially, later. 21 Partly because of his ambivalence toward the
courtly, though, the Knight's advice is permeable to the more urban and
mercantile audience for which Caxton translates the book.
Not only in the Prologue but elsewhere, the Knight's world of landed
aristocracy imbues his endeavor with a courtly idealism that both structures
and complicates his exemplary efforts. Boisard remarks that the Knight's
idea of female literacy is inflected by nostalgia for the court minstrels of his
grandmother, Olive de Belleville, whose marriage into the family gave
them apparently greater prestige at the beginning of the fourteenth century
(Boisard, 138). Late in the Book (chapter 136), Olive enacts an ideal of
feminine conduct in a primarily oral and public context. She entertains
minstrels, helps poor gentlewomen by giving them jewels, prays daily with
friars and chaplains, and gives food and nursing to the poor. But in the gar-
den of his Prologue, the Knight seems deliberately to place his Book within
a written context. Indeed, Olive de Belleville does not seem entirely disso-
ciated from the ethos of the "fayre langage" against which the Knight aims
to warn his daughters. Although he portrays her as a pious and charitable
lady, he remarks with particular emphasis upon her virtuous speech. She
blames those who "spake euylle of other folk" (182/28) and herself engages
only in "fayre and proufiYtable talkyng" (18311). Despite his grandmother's
ability to meet the challenges of unreliable speech, it seems to be in part her
milieu from which the Knight protects his inscribed audience, countering
oral lies by turning to writing. Nevertheless the idealization of Olive and,
elsewhere, the Knight's wife, compensate in their turn for the mediated
character of writing, like John Russell's lithe young man, or the worried
mother in the Goodwife.
As the Prologue continues, the Knight goes out of his garden, abandoning
the dream-vision mode, and turns instead to the world of exemplary
didacticism: "I went oute of the gardyn I and fond in my weye two prestes and
two clerkes that I hadde I and tolde to them that I wolde make a book
and an exemplayre" (13/2-4). Even though he himself composed love lyrics
and partook in debates about the truth oflove tidings, the Knight indicates
that his anticipated audience is not equipped to discern the truth beneath
the surface oflove discourse. 22 The suggestion here is that, if women believe
false love talk, they will take literally the lies of seducers who actually want
nothing but their own delight. The inability to see under the surface of
language confines not just the two daughters but women in general, in
effect, to interpretation at the literallevel. 23 Exemplary didacticism would
seem to refer directly to "the world," where truths are obscure enough: "it is
an hard thyng to knowe the world that is now present" (1311).The Knight
expresses the hope that unlike love language, exemplarity will render the
world clear and knowable. By providing a set of already-interpreted stories,
he ostensibly alleviates his daughters of responsibility for interpretation,
depicting them as passive and literal. 24 He gives them an acculturative text,
one that supposedly performs the act of interpretation for them, in order to
curtail their potential for interpretative error. The Prologue's turn to the
exemplary, then, expresses a defining fantasy of the book: that by supplying
moralized stories, the text establishes an alignment among authorial inten-
tions and audience understanding. The Knight's framework promises to
obviate the necessity for interpretations, because the Knight will already
provide them. Literalists are exemplarity's ideal readers in the sense that they
provoke the problem its methods can solve.
This version of exemplarity is authorized by two priests and two clerks
who supply him with sources. The Knight solicits their aid in making "a
book and an examplayre for my daughters to lerne. to rede and vnder-
stonde [roumancier et entendre] I how they ought to gouerne them self"
(1314-6). Here the Knight's mediation is momentarily invisible, as though
clerical wisdom will be embodied in his text, implying that such
transparency will erase his daughters' mediation as well. The two priests and
two clerks translate aloud to him: "I made them to come & rede before me
[traire des livres]" (13/7). 25 His book, then, derives from Latin and is shaped
through an educated collaboration. 26 But despite his efforts to authorize his
compilation by identifYing its sources in clerical books, the Knight
foregrounds his own activity, interrupting this desired transparency. The
narratives he has read to him are "straunge historyes" (1319), rendered
assimilable when the clerks and priests translate them and the Knight puts
them down in the vernacular. 27 He writes for his daughters not in poetry,
but "in prose for tabredge I and also for the better to be vnderstonden"
(13111-12). In foregrounding the process of seeking clerical validation, the
Knight also depicts himself as a mediator, culling examples from disparate
sources to provide not only appropriate material but ways of understanding
that material.
The Knight also reiterates several times that his text will teach his
daughters to read (specifically in the vernacular, in the French version) in
order that they may govern themselves. When he makes the book, he
expects his daughters to learn the methods of self-governance as they
"lerne. to rede." To be sure, the book reiterates the daughters' limitations.
Olive de Belleville in chapter 136, for example, is virtuous inasmuch as her
speech corresponds to truth, refusing duplicitous gossip and mockery. If
literal reading misleads women because they cannot see through courtly
lying, it is nonetheless literal reading that the Knight portrays as appropriate
to them. At the same time, however, the energy with which he limits his
audience indicates what is at stake in their education: teaching them to read
could open to his daughters the possibility of choice, including nonliteral
understanding, both in reading and in other forms of conduct. The sense
that their conduct rests upon their own initiative is registered as a hope that
they will generally "torne to good and to honoure" (13114-15). More
particularly, the Knight imagines examples as a fund of experiences that can

be called upon in later circumstances: "For it may not be but in sometyme
they shal reteyne somme good ensample I or som good lore after that hit
shalle falle I and come to theyr mynde in spekyng vpon this matere"
(13124-27). The Knight imagines how his audience will understand his
text, in the sense of internalizing and reusing it in other circumstances.
Application unfolds locally, and internally; memory happens in his daughters'
minds, informing their "spekyng" and, presumably, their other actions.
Still, even faced with the dangers of interpretative error, the Knight sets
out explicitly to teach his daughters to read:
I haue thought on my wel bylouyd doughters whome I see so lytel to make

them a litil book I for to Ierne to rede [roumancer] I to thende that they maye
Ierne and studye I & vnderstonde the good and euylle that is passyd I for to
kepe them fro hym I whiche is yet to come .... (12135-39)
The Knight is more concerned here with moral education than with literacy
per se. 28 Both Caxton's "reden" and the French roumancer emphasize this
concern; roumancer can refer to both reading and writing, and "reden"
denotes inner consideration and advice-taking as well as comprehending
words (orally or on the page). 29 On one level the fantasy here is that, in
times to come, when his daughters are no longer so little, the book will
serve as an acculturative aid in his absence. His text promises a coherent act
of moral communication that will knit together past and future.
But the easy passage from means to "thende" is interrupted rhetorically
by the activity of the daughters themselves-they have to learn and study,
and in Caxton, understand. The Knight depicts them as "dysgarnysshed of
al wytte & reson" (11129), unequipped with the tools of discernment. His
daughters need "sens," or in Caxton's more specific translation, the "wytte &
reson" to distinguish right from wrong. This discernment, he implies, is a
process of shifting one's understanding according to circumstance. When he
stages his request to his clerks and priests, he makes his own reading process
susceptible to the needs of the moment, calling attention to the process of
selection from old books that will shape his current endeavor. Thus his
Prologue sets out two goals-supplying moral applications for his readers,
and equipping them for their own mental work of application, which their
future lives will demand. These goals are not mutually exclusive, but in the
Knight's book they create a tension between authorial demand and readerly
choice visible in both frame and stories.
In spite of the Knight's disavowal of the courtly world of his youth, the
social world of his stories is permeated with the unpredictable discourse of
love talk. The Knight aims to protect his daughters from those who "after
youre back goo mockyng and lyeng" (12/40): to preserve his daughters'
reputations, to teach them honor, so that they will "haue the loue and the
grace of their neyghbours I and of the world" (13/15-16). He seeks, that is,
to stabilize his daughters' linguistic relation to the immediate community,
and beyond that to the whole changeable world. This concern with repute
is not restricted to courtly discourse, of course, but points toward a broader
consciousness of the ease with which women's "good name and Renomme"
(151/17) can be lost. 30 In several chapters that return explicitly to the
chivalric world of forty years past (chapters 114-117), the Knight praises
that world for honoring good women and excluding bad ones: "And at that
tyme a woman reproued of blame had not be soo hardy to putte her self in
the Rowe or companye of them that were renommed" (152/18-20).These
chapters depict reputation as a transparent social manifestation of individual
virtue or vice. But the Knight everywhere encounters the possibility of a
split between social reputation and inner state, blurring the line between
deserved and undeserved blame. 31 The underlying basis for judgment that
the Knight offers his daughters is his disavowed world of courtly lyric and
seductive speech, of"fayre langage" and "lesynges."The fear of scandal that
haunts his book arises from his own effort to access his daughters' inner
world, which, if exposed, subjects them to public scrutiny and mockery.
At the end of chapter 89, following several tales of educated prophets
and saints, the Knight voices his most explicit-and most explicitly
limited--support for the education of women. Here it is not court dis-
course per se but all "fables and lesynges" that threaten to destabilize proper
"enseygnementes":
And therfor after this ensample it is good to put his children to scale whanne
they be yonge I and make them to Ierne the bookes of sapyence .. ./And not
putte them to Ierne in the bookes of the fallaces and vanytees of the world
Oivres des lecheries at des fables du monde]. For bettre thyng is and more
noble to here speke of the good enseygnementes and techynges that may
proufiYte both to the body and sowle I than rede and study the fables I and
lesynges I wherof no good ne proufiYte may come And by cause somme
folke sayen that they wold not I that theyr wyves ne also theyr doughtters
wyst ony thynge of clergye ne of wrytynge I Therfore I say answerynge
to them I that as for wrytyng it is no force I yf a woman can nought of hit
but as for redynge I saye that good and proufiYtable is to al wymen.
(122110-23) 32
As in his Prologue, the Knight disapproves of fiction-"fables and lesynges"-

and places didactic texts in opposition to such fictions. Reading is clearly a
moral activity, one that provides "prouffYte" and "good" and should therefore
be taught to children. Especially on the heels of saints' lives, advocating
childhood education as an acculturation to virtue hardly places the Knight

in an unusual position. Yet the risks of his audience's active discernment
remain evident: it is better to hear good teaching than to read and study
fables and lies. Further, if literacy engenders knowledge of fiction, then oral
transmission may be a safer and more effective form of didacticism. 33
The discussion of schooling girls is more than a piece of evidence for the
commonly held belief that women should not be taught to write. Writing
serves as a figure for the way pedagogues anticipate the threat posed by
women's independent moral judgment. The Knight's nonchalant assertion
that it doesn't matter if women cannot write imposes a conventional limit
on the uses of literacy. But his own reading led to compilation and moral
teaching-that is, to bookmaking, if not explicitly to the material act of
writing. The casual distinction glosses over ways in which the two processes
(reading and writing) are inextricably linked, and a division between passive
and active moral response is not entirely clear. The Knight insists that
women who read will know more about virtue than those who don't: "For
a woman that can rede may better knowe the peryls of the sowle and her
sauement I than she that can nought of it I for it hath be preued" (1221
24-26). The implication seems to be that, if the material is appropriate
(teachings, not fables), then pedagogues can risk revealing the perils as well as
the salvation of the soul. He glosses over, but implicitly accepts, the necessity
for audience discernment in reading. His final "for it hath be preued" over-
states the case without arguing it-the efficacy of women's education has
not been proven; indeed, it is what will be tested in the pages of his book.
The Knight places limits on the capacity of women precisely in order to
argue for their education and the efficacy ofhis book. Although it is tempt-
ing to find in his discourse only a fundamental antifeminism-one he shares
with many other medieval advisory writers-the specific contours of his
project register an awareness of historical change, and suggest the continual
shifts that take place even within the staunchest forms of social constraint.
Moreover, his assertion of leniency here engages an implied audience of
other aristocratic heads of household, with whom a conversation about
feminine constraint seems to be a precondition of the Knight's account.
Asserting leniency does not simply advocate the education of girls but
places the Knight's Book in a milieu where their education is a matter of
discussion. Le Livre du Chevalier de Ia Tour Landry represents a conflicted
attempt to imagine good behavior at the level of internal orientation, to
educate women based on their capacity for judgment. In establishing an
opposition between exemplarity, narrowly conceived, and poetic lies, the
Knight tries alternately to legislate behavior and to school intentions. But
finally, in order to imagine reaching his readers, the Knight undermines
his own distinction between exemplary truths and lying fictions.
Spectacular Examples
The Knight's narratives themselves register the conflict between calling for
moral restraint and drawing audiences into vivid, not to say lurid, tales.
Roberta Krueger has pointed out that in many of the tales, "the Knight
tries forcibly to reimpose moral order on divergent textual tradition"
("Anxiety of Gender," 68). As her argument implies, the somewhat haphaz-
ard structure of the Book responds to so many different kinds of generic
codes that the effect is defensive, as if the narrator were warding off contin-
ual threats to his authority. 34 Almost half of the book consists of biblical
exempla from the Miroir des bonnesfemmes (chapters 37-110 in Caxton);
toward the end of the book the Knight stages a debate with his wife (chapters
122-33); and he concludes with an account of advice Cato gave to his sons
(chapters 137-44). The structuring devices for the rest of the chapters
appear largely local and associative, so that, for instance, advice about wid-
owhood and remarriage gives rise to advice on guarding one's reputation
(chapters 113-114). In these associative passages, the movement from one
narrative to another often seems to deflect or correct untoward narrative
consequences. This is especially true in the stories that precede the transi-
tion to the Miroir's biblical exempla. The book's opening thirty-six chapters
consist mostly of anecdotes about people whom the Knight depicts as local
or well-known contemporaries, but include saints' lives as well; these initial
stories are predominantly about women who err in matters of religious
observance and daily life. Chapters 35 and 36, however, like the very end of
the Book as a whole, inscribe audiences of men rather than women. These
two particularly spectacular exempla seem designed to avoid the erotic charge
of the sins depicted in the previous chapter (34). As we shall see, a series of
such corrections registers the Knight's awareness of the voyeuristic attractions
of these two tales-and indeed, of exemplary narratives in general.
First, though, it is worth pausing to consider the Knight's typical
exemplary tactics. Like the sermon examples of Handlyng Synne (see intro-
duction), many of the Knight's examples seek to direct his readers' under-
standing of the visible signs of virtue and vice. In one tale, when a woman
refuses to come to dinner, her husband sits her at a filthy table next to his
filthy swineherd; he explains to her, "Lady yf ye ne wylle ete with me I ne
come at my commaundement I ye shalle haue the kepar of my swyne to
hold yow company and good felauship I And this cloute to wype your han-
des withal" (103115). The lady's response is a mixture of shame, wrath, and
self-restraint, for she recognizes her own folly. The filthy cloth and the
swineherd define the lady's refusal as uncourteous, and make her error
distasteful; she is implicitly associated with the hideous swineherd before her
husband makes explicit the plot's meaning. The redundant effect of both
the characters' actions and the moral message calls attention to the story's
interpretative acts. Together, story and moral message present the tale's
meaning as recognizable, even familiar. Repetition serves to align the story,
the moral message, and the audience's understanding. Implicitly, the audi-
ence's understanding should take shape as an act of repetition (or imitation):
in comprehending the necessity of feminine humility, readers reinscribe the
husband's (and the woman's own) act of judgment upon her.
In the Knight's discourse, didactic authority frequently gives way to a
detailed investigation of sin that amounts to voyeurism. His efforts to delin-
eate permissible feminine behaviors tend to lead to more and more richly
detailed stories of spectacular transgression and punishment. A woman who
dresses up on holy days is punished by a hot wind that paralyzes her and
makes her swell (chapter 25); a woman who fasts regularly falls into a well
on the way to meet her lover, but the Virgin saves her by making the water
"hard as a plank" (chapter 8). Many of these stories shift back and forth
between depicting some degree of moral choice and portraying women as
inevitably sinful. Female vulnerability pervades the book. From the biblical
tale ofTamar, raped by her brother Amnon, the Knight draws the moral that
women should not stay alone with anyone, even their own relatives. This
exemplum is followed by the fabliau "The Friar's Pants" (chapters 61 and 62)
in which a wife sleeps with the local prior, tricking her husband repeatedly,
until he finally breaks both their legs; when even that doesn't keep them
apart, the enraged husband runs them both through with a knife-and then
invites the neighbors to come and see what he has done. They all agree that
the husband should be excused for his deed, and then fall to marveling at
how the wife could have loved the prior, "whiche hadde soo grete a bely I
and soo thycke and fatte I soo blacke and so fowle of face and so vncurteys"
(90128-29). In this story, the troubling privacy ofTamar's rape has given
way to a spectacle of sin, leading to a moral consensus. 35 Everyone agrees
the wife deserved to be killed, and the Knight adds that clearly the woman
succumbed to the devil. 36 The story of pleasure generates the Knight's
unequivocal, and violent, moral condemnation.
Throughout the book, sin is often identified through such spectacle,
which depicts a community as having a single understanding that reiterates
the plot's implicit judgment: the woman who falls down the well is found
by townspeople in the morning, and they acknowledge the miraculousness
of her survival; the adultress in the fabliau is similarly subject to the judg-
ment of a gathered crowd. Spectators articulate sanctioned understandings
of otherwise remarkably vivid sins and punishments. When the Knight
depicts a community witnessing sin, he makes the transgression not only
visible but legible, representing the process of understanding a material sign
(the well; the britches; the filthy tablecloth) as an achievement of cultural
agreement about the moral system in which sinner and spectators all live.
The need for these communal acts of understanding, however, suggests a
profound danger of misapprehension, the possibility of misdirected eros.
Even the inscribed spectators in such tales often evince a desire to get close
to the violent or sexual manifestations of sin; the moral meaning can, of
course, seem utterly secondary to curiosity about the details of characters'
sexual or violent desires.
In chapter 35, a sergeant of the church, Perrot Lenart (or Luart), has sex
with a woman on the altar. 37 Like the couple in Robert Mannyng's sacri-
lege exemplum, this couple get stuck together "as a dogge is to a bytche ...
so ioyned and knytted to geder. .. all the hole day" (59/6-8). Whereas the
couple in Robert's analogue are already married, these lovers are not, so
their transgression exceeds the neat redundancy of sacrilege: as in older
versions of the tale, this couple is adulterous. 38 Perrot also fails in his apparent
role as defender of the church. 39 Indeed, in its debased form of joining a
man and woman at the altar, the situation parodies the nuptial mass. The
people from the church and the surrounding countryside have leisure to
gather in a "processioun ... to pray god for them," which has the ritual char-
acter of marriage celebration. 40 Like the monks in Robert's analogue, his
inscribed audience understands the couple's physical circumstance as a sign
or expression of their sin.
The gathered crowd pray for the "empesshed" couple, so by evening
they come apart. While prayer is sufficient in Robert's tale, here the church
must be reconsecrated, and Perrot must be punished. 41 The woman disap-
pears from the story, but Perrot has to appear naked in public (again): "for
his penaunce [he] shold goo al about the Cirche al naked on thre sondayes I
betyng hym self, rehercyng and tellying his defaute and synne" (59/15-17).
Transgression deserves commensurate humiliation; like the sex act, Perrot's
self-flagellation is public and presumably garners the same audience. In
being required to announce his sin, Perrot registers a self-recognition akin
to that of the wife ashamed of the filthy tablecloth, but expressed in less
internal terms. Through several levels of ceremony-the procession, the
reconsecration, and the penance, including public confession-the narrative
repeats the authority of the institutional church. Perrot's sacrilege is not
simply the opposite of the subsequent consecration, but the means by
which the church's sacredness is reaffirmed. Yet the spectacle of such animal
conjointure also suggests that church authority depends upon the public
display of sin, as if the confessional were brought outdoors. In the context
of a conduct book designed to constrain female behavior, the story evinces
a remarkably frank communal involvement in the church warden's corruption.
The way in which the text points toward voyeuristic pleasure is marked by
efforts to redirect the scene's erotic charge.
The next chapter can be seen as the first step in this redirection, although
it also reinscribes the problem. The Knight introduces it as a confirmation
of formal and moral expectations: another tale on "the same matere." In
both, local names suggest the possibility of" actual" witness and confirma-
tion, as if to obviate the moral difficulties of representing such events in
narrative (if the incident really happened, then the narrator is not responsible
for its content). This time the scene is set in an abbey called Chivrefare, in
Pitou, a place sorely damaged by the war. 42 Pygrere, a nephew of the prior,
is a monk in the monastery, and one day after matins he disappears. Finally
he is found in the church, "lyeing vpon a woman in grete dystresse and hard
empesshed ... [A)lle the monkes cam thyder" (59/31-35). Here the monks
are the only witnesses, and they gather but do not pray or process for the
couple. The nephew, rather than beating himself in an imposed public
punishment, feels great shame and sorrow in his heart, and runs away to
another monastery.
The juxtaposition of these two tales creates a marked contrast between
Perrot's spectacular penance and Pygrere's self-recognition. Indeed, the two
fornications occur in two substantially different communities: the text shifts
from manor to monastery, parish to cloister, and the characters shift from
secular servant of the church to monk. These shifts emphasize the change
from Perrot's public, ceremonial penance to Pygrere's experience of shame
and sorrow. The event has become more enclosed, less fully integrated into
the secular community surrounding La Tour Landry itself, and in this way it
seems to render the story less publicly available and more diffuse in its
significance.Yet Elliott finds that the latter "raises the emotional stakes" (8).
Instead of emphasizing the ceremonies of penance and reconsecration, the
monk's story emphasizes the internal act of understanding. The Knight's
discourse also moves from one inscribed audience to another. In the first
story, a wide (and presumably both male and female) audience witnesses the
punishment of a crime in a staged negative exemplum. In the second story,
the inscribed audience is limited to a male and clerical one, and although
the crime is witnessed, the punishment becomes internal. If the Perrot story
implicated its narrator and readers in the audience of voyeuristic witnesses
to both crime and penance, the monk's story makes the inscribed clerical
audience mainly a moralizing force. The monks do not gather and make a
procession, but happen upon the scene, and their presence silently makes
the nephew respond with contrition. These elements downplay the story's
erotic charge, making it a far less ceremonial and audience-driven event.
At the same time, however corrective this second story may seem to be, the
Knight's narration evinces more pity for the monk than for the sergeant,
calling him the "povre moigne" (81). This odd moment of identification
may suggest the degree to which both sexual incidents are represented as
masculine sins. But it also reflects the possibility that affective response might
work against the moralizing thrust of the story. Is the monk a "poor monk"
because his lapse is only one element of the whole monastery's deteriora-
tion? or because his shame is more conducive to identification than Perrot's
drama? or because he appears to be of the Knight's status whereas the
sergeant is not? In this moment the narrator's sympathy shifts the moral
gears and reminds us that both stories are permeable to those acts of local
discernment that render them less morally affirmative than they appear, and
more susceptible to audience perception.
In fact, it is striking that the women go almost unremarked and entirely
unpunished in these two stories (and in their analogues; Elliott, 809). The
Knight's narratives do not usually refrain from detailing the transgressions
and punishments of women. A woman talks back, and her husband breaks
her nose: she should have "holden her stylle and hadde suffred" (35/14-15).
Women with evil husbands should "suffre of her lord and ought to answere
for hym ouer al" (123/27-28).Women eat, dress, desire, and talk excessively;
feed their dogs at meals; dance on tables; keep company with devils. Though
I have suggested that these tales imply an audience that includes educators,
the Knight does usually direct himself in the first instance to women. The
Perrot Lenart story appears to be more directed to people in general,
and Caxton's translation may indicate more than grammatical gender:"And
therfore here is to euery man a good ensample I how that he shold hold
hym [l'en se doit tenir] clenly and honestly in holy chirche" (59/17-19).
The story of Pygrere mentions the woman as an object of desire, not a
sinner herself: the moral of the story is that one should not "loke nor
beholde maide ne woman. but by thought and weye of maryage" (60/7-8).
Certainly this arises partly from the culture's view of men as the active
party in sex (Elliott, 8-9). But the second tale articulates what the first
had left implicit: illicit sex in church is like a photographic negative of mar-
riage blessed by a priest. The penance enacted in both tales avoids men-
tioning the very female audience the Knight has admonished throughout
his book.
At the same time, these chapters reveal other tensions that infuse the
Knight's book. By figuring marriage as fornication on the altar, the Knight
implicitly warns his daughters away from the potential violations of sinful
men and the public scandal that could result. As in the Prologue, the Knight
condemns sinful men and, implicitly, defends women by divorcing them
from a world in which they are under threat (in the Prologue, this is the
courtly world; here, the world of corruptible exchange in marriage). The
story of Perrot Lenart, like drama or festival, stages the participation of its
spectators: it is the scandalized witnesses who humiliate the warden, hence
the audience who give his action and its punishment significance at all. The
story as a whole can be seen as a kind of communal disavowal of sacrilege,
identifying and rooting it out at its most transgressive and punishing it. But
the creation of significance is a community event in which the Knight
himself, by writing the story, participates. 43 It is, further, this community
into which he seeks to acculturate his readers. If he warns them away from
fornication on the altar, he nevertheless gives them witness to the act,
simply by writing it for them. The desires of onlookers seem particularly
charged in visually structured exempla like the tales ofPerrot and Pygrere. 44
Anxiety about masculine sexual initiative surely underlies the tale's effects;
but the Knight here suppresses his daughters as audience because of the
threat of their own initiative as well. In rendering women passive in chapters
35 and 36, the Knight registers the degree to which they are at risk ofbeing
implicated in his frank spectacle, but more threatening still, that the provi-
sion of examples itself will be implicated in the corruptible world from
which he seeks to withhold or restrain them.
The Knight's deflection of his text onto primarily male audiences
suggests that his implied audience is constituted by more than just his
daughters. Consciousness of a male audience appears elsewhere as well: as
we saw, the book begins with his staged advice to "losengiers" to stop
deceiving women, and it ends with advice given by Cato to his sons.
Inscribing male audiences does not make the act of telling lurid tales any
less problematic. The narratives of"marriage" register a degree of anxiety
about dynastic succession for which we saw some evidence in the Knight's
biography, and which resurfaces throughout the book. In fact, the Pygrere
narrative ends with an account of Christ's cleansing of the temple, which
explicitly refers to the corrupt exchange of women. When the Knight
depicts male readers, he anticipates the circulation of the book beyond
the primary audience of daughters and their potential suitors, to any of
those who might look at women-and exchange women-with less than
spiritual motives. This marital concern situates the book in a provincial,
aristocratic milieu wherein masculine deceit and feminine ill repute-the
courtly conventions abandoned by the Knight at the outset-continually
threaten to reemerge, affecting the social standing of his family, as expressed
and perpetuated through his daughters' marriageability. The Knight
concludes this section by calling his exempla "miracles," as if to smooth over
or mystifY the problem of voyeuristic experience they raised. The section
then leads to two chapters of general comment upon the existence of both
good and evil in the world, which serve as an introduction to the examples
of Biblical virtuous and vicious women, taken from the Miroir des bonnes
femmes. In this general advice he returns to his primary audience, his
daughters, emphasizing the function of exemplarity:
My faire daughters he that the best or good seeth I and taketh the bad or
euylle. it is good right that after therof he repente I I say so by cause that we
haue thorough this world many euylle and bad Ensamples . and mo ther be
that rather and soner taken the bad than the best or good. (60121-25)
This moment expresses one form of anxiety in the affirmative discourse of

proverb. But it is a series of bad examples that the Knight has just told, and his
reiteration of the proverb reflects upon the existence of bad examples in the
world as well. Although he generally glosses over what exactly it means to
take an example, he does suggest that to receive examples is not necessarily to
identity correctly how one should conduct oneself; indeed, most people, he
says, rule themselves according to fleshly delight. Such admonishments are
entirely conventional, but they nonetheless reflect the degree to which an
involvement in exemplary stories might have entirely ill consequences.
At this point, the turn to the Miroir (starting with the proverb) seems to
arise from of the local dynamics of this succession of chapters: vivid exempla
of mostly local contemporary life, culminating in the stories of Perrot and
Pygrere, produce the need for a more scripturally authorized, clerical form
of exemplarity. In this sense, the institutional authority of the church seems
to be invoked in the hope of resolving the difficult problem of exemplarity
that the book has raised so far. Throughout the Knight's Book, and indeed in
other collections as well, exemplary stories heavily foreground interpretive
assent (the woman's shame at the filthy cloth; the community's understanding
and prayer for Perrot) but nonetheless contain disparate, unreconciled, and
conflicting impulses. If, as Elliott suggests, public scandal is the result of
"showing [one's] inner vices on the outside" (19) then the narrative of
scandal shows the leakage from spectacle to frame, from fiction to life. This
"contamination" is not so far from the direct alignment of story and effect
that exemplary discourse aspires to. 45 But the breakdown of the line
between narrative and frame implicates audiences in the desires of charac-
ters. Public scandal puts not only the vices of the actors but the judgment
of the spectators on display. The Knight's discourse calls particularly anxious
attention to how the understanding of narratives might be shaped by erotic
and literary pleasure.
The Knight's Wife and the Restrictions of

Feminine Authority
Although the Knight invokes clerks and priests to authorize his didactic
project, the warden and monk who have sex in church call clerical authority
into question. The stories of sacrilege also undermine the legitimacy of the
Knight's framing authority. His concern with female sexuality veers toward
the lurid, so that the relation between story and virtuous imitation becomes
unclear. His concern with sexuality comes close to a discourse of invasive
desire: the Perrot Lenart story is a piece oflocal color narrated by a provin-
cial courtier who initiates his female readers to the titillation of sexual
misconduct. At the same time, he renders women passive and acquiescent,
as if to protect his daughters from implication in narrative activity. The
introduction of a debate with his wife seems designed to offset this internal
conflict, but ultimately reinscribes the problem of audience absorption in,
and responsibility for, narrative.
More clearly than other sections, the dialogue with his wife suggests the
Book's circulation among aristocratic heads of household concerned about
how best to teach conduct. When he begins the dialogue in chapter 122, the
Knight temporarily abandons his role as teacher and plays that of question-
ing pupil instead, invoking the "polite fiction of female sovreignty" gener-
ated by the construct of the cour amoureuse. 46 This "polite fiction" expresses
the indeterminate humor, even mockery, conventional in such courtly acts
of subordination to female authority. He presents his wife as prohibitive
while he argues that his daughters be allowed to take lovers, at least those
who intend to marry them:
... yf so came that somme gentyl knyght I worshipful I myghty I and

puyssaunt ynough after theyre degree had sette his herte on one of them I
and be wyllynge to laue her I and take her to his wyf I why shalle she not
laue hym. (167/28-31)
The wife's response, essentially, is that no woman can trust any man.
Throughout this section, the Knight is apparently no longer expert; he
defers to his wife with questions. He wants to find a way for his daughters
to participate in love, while his wife sets out far stricter limits: "Lady ye be
moche hard & euyll in as moche that ye wyll not suffre that your daughters
be amerouse" (167 /26-27). When he suggests that his daughters might
receive kisses, because kisses don't matter, they blow away in the wind, she
replies that kissing is cousin to the foul deed. The Knight reverts to the ini-
tial persona of his Prologue, writer oflays and a defender of courtly favors.
He accuses the lady of harshness and pleads with her to allow for love, while
she speaks the language of resistance, warding off blame and defamation.
The Knight's ventriloquism allows him a new form of authority: he uses the
ostensible voice of a woman to reinforce his own constraining didacticism.
On one level, the wife's appearance intensifies the book's prohibitions. 47
She insists women should have no "peramours," before or after marriage;
gentlewomen who love anyone but their husbands are worse than harlots,
who love "by the brennynge lecherye of theyr bodyes" (169 132). Whereas
the Knight enjoins against fashionable clothes and makeup (chapters 48-54),
his wife says women should keep themselves "couverte," for many lose the
chance of marriage because of their "amerous loke and fayr semblaunt"
(168122-27). She also returns several times to the corruptibility of the
church. Early on, the Knight emphasized the safety of the church, and the
virtue of proper worship (chapters 1-9). For his wife, the church is ironi-
cally the place of greatest potential sin: a woman in love cannot serve God
because she is distracted from the mass, so that even "as the preest holdeth
the body of oure lord bytwene his handes than cometh most to [her]
mynde euylle and fowle thoughtes" (165111-13). The wife affirms the
clerical and priestly values of the Knight's counsellors. 48
The wife's resistance privileges injunction over narrative, condensing
stories to their bare bones. She gives a condensed version of one of the
Knight's own exempla:
wherupon ye told me ones an ensample whiche I haue not forgeten which

happed to yow of a lady I to whome I gyue no name I the whiche ye wente
ones to see her wyllynge to take her in maryage She that wyst and knewe
well how it was spoken of yow & her for maryage I maade to yow as
grete chere I as she hadde loued and knowen your personne all the dayes of
her lyf... ye demaunded her not I And yf she had hold her self more secrete
and couered I and more simply I ye had take her to your wyf I of whome I
haue syn herd saye I that she hath be blamed I but I wote not for certayne yf
it was so ... (168114-25)
In the Knight's version, the flirtation between himself and the nameless lady
is staged and elaborated; his narrative demonstrates how talkative the lady
was. He gives her a dramatic role and a certain character: "She praid me two
of thre tymes I that I shold not leue I but come see her how someuer it
went ..." (27 133-35). Of course, the Knight narrates the story in more detail
because he is telling it for the first time, whereas the wife is echoing it. But
such detail is characteristic of his methods, and the sparer and more general-
ized version is characteristic of the wife's. The wife refuses the distractions of
specific love talk that complicate his story. While his earlier version advocates
sobriety of speech, hers discourages any female expression whatsoever. Her
interpretation of the story pares it down to a narrative that refuses staging, a
nonspectacle whose moral drive allows for very little misinterpretation and
whose structure therefore perpetuates a more prohibitive authority than the
Knight's. 49 Yet it is worth remembering that the wife echoes several of his
phrases (including the imputation of blame followed by the disavowal of
having spoken ill of the woman); she is clearly interpreting his exemplum.
The Knight employs the debate scenario to relegate the spectacular

dramas of his narratives to subordinate, even instrumental, status, separating
them from the book's general moral purposes and making them more
marginal (and subordinate) than they have elsewhere appeared, like the
grotesques in manuscript marginalia. Marginal grotesques in some books of
hours, which depict dramatic and horrifYing images of sexuality, steer the
attention of audiences toward the pious religious picture at the center of the
page. 50 The Knight's narratives similarly revel in sexual immorality and
invite fascination. When his wife insists that erotic love must be refused
because it distracts from proper liturgical observance, she points out how
close the Knight's narrative grotesques can come to center stage. She sepa-
rates spectacle from morality, confirming the text's primary focus on moral
rectitude.
To a great extent, then, the wife responds to-and wards off-the
inexperience of an audience who might confuse bad examples with moral
truths. Moreover, like the meditation on whether women should be taught
to read, the debate stages a larger conversation in a local community about
how best to convey moral material. This consciousness of"neighbors" per-
meates the book in other ways-indeed, it is neighbors who are responsible
for the looming possibility of ill repute. In implicit response to the culture
ofjudgment they share with others, the wife vouches for the Knight's ped-
agogical method by constraining it. Yet the wife's clerical seriousness is
ironized by its context within an amorous fiction, where the Knight's lover-
persona seeks to overcome feminine resistance. The dialogue between him-
self and his wife serves both to enhance prohibitions and to sustain the
seductiveness oflove-talk. Indeed, the debate can be read as a conversation
between the Knight's lover persona and his didact persona, an attempt to
reconcile the two poles between which he moves throughout the Book. 51
As a permissive father, he can reveal the world for which he seeks to equip
his audience-an aristocratic world of courtly desire where women are vis-
ible, vulnerable, and potentially blameworthy. The constraining mother
allows him to deflect his voyeuristic attendance to (mostly female) sin, and
to disavow the ways in which his text exposes inexperienced daughters to
vices, subtlety, and craft (see nS). He and his wife create a dynamic of debate
that holds both moral severity and leniency in check, thus working against
the potential for excessive suppression on the one hand and excessive
revelation on the other.
The Knight "garners" his daughters with the example of their mother,
whose interpretative standards are based not on discernment between true
and false language, which the Knight raised as such a problem in his
Prologue, but on wholesale rejection of the entire discourse of courtly love
language. For her, Venus is full of art and craft, and love's corrupting
potential is most fully realized in the sanctified arena of the church. Yet at
the same time, the wife's analysis is finally achieved through the love talk that
she so sternly rejects: her argument, after all, takes shape within a love
debate. In spite of repeated disavowals, love language is the very method by
which the Knight seeks to educate his daughters. In writing a text for them,
he enters them into the very cultural milieu that he urges them to reject.
The language of exemplary didacticism is not as divorced from the language
of desire as he would wish. His shifting narrative persona, then, reveals a
fundamental conflict at the heart of his project: his own stories introduce
his daughters to the problem of distinguishing "lesynges" from truth. His
text requires discernment, the very mental activity he claims initially to
obviate by turning from roundels and virelays to examples.
Caxton's Preface: Putting Anxiety to Work

William Caxton's translation of Le Livre du Chevalier de Ia Tour Landry
appears to take the Knight's authority at face value. Caxton's preface,
printed in 1484, reinscribes the Knight's highest aspirations to timeless
exemplary authority, glossing over the most provocative formal elements of
the text he translates. Yet his dedication to a problematic female patroness
also acknowledges the anxiety that imbues the Knight's text. The preface
emphasizes the book's suitability for women, directing it to daughters
generally and to men and women who train daughters. More specifically it
addresses an unnamed "noble lady" in whose service Caxton produces the
book, and for whose daughters' education it is intended. This patroness was
probably Elizabeth Woodville, Queen of Edward IV 52 Although the trans-
lation was finished earlier, its printing seems to have been delayed by
Edward's death, when Elizabeth and her children took sanctuary from
Richard III in Westminster. 53 Caxton implies that the book's rules and
materials for moral governance can validate his patroness's precarious status.
Her patronage gathers diverse audiences and various stories into ideal
lessons in self-regulation. However, for such a heavily charged political
context, the French Knight's conflicted Book seems conspicuously anxious
about the origins of social authority. 54 Caxton labors to assert the fiction
that exemplary texts convey timeless moral value, even as his preface also
registers how the Book itself calls such timelessness into question.
The preface opens by praising the virtuous teachings left behind as
"remembraunce" by those who have died, reinscribing the Knight's nostalgia
for his courtly youth. Caxton locates himself in a present continguous with
the past, suggesting that the truth of the text lives on after the death of its
maker. 55 The "noble lady" who commissioned the book conveys this
eternal past. Her daughters are already well taught, and indeed the lady
herself has always had "very ziele and loue" for their virtue; she wants the
book translated in the hope that "they may alwey perseuere in the same"
(13-15). This continuity between past, present, and future is fundamental
to the text's didactic activity, reflected in the circularity of the opening
sentence:
Aile vertuouse doctryne & techynge had & lerned of suche as haue endeu-
oured them to leue for a remembraunce after theyr dethe to vs I by whiche
we ben enfourmed in science I wysedom and vnderstandyng ofknowleche I
hou we ought to rewle our self in this present lyf haue caused vs to know
many good reules I & vertuouse maners to be gouerned by. (311-6)
In asserting that all virtuous doctrines transmitted by past authors have

caused present readers to know the rules of virtue, Caxton provides a model
of transmission unimpeded by time or change. As the preface continues, he
asserts that the book transmits knowledge from the "noble lady" to "al
maner peple in generally" (23). 56 The patroness disseminates the text to an
audience whose diversity is indicated by specialization according to age,
status, and sex: the book is beneficial "in especial for ladyes & gentilwymen
daughters to lordes & gentilmen" (23-24). 57 Her patronage, then, reveals
the variety of the potential book-buying audience and asserts its broad
appropriateness. 58 In gathering diversity, she makes lordly values applicable
to "gentils."
Elizabeth Woodville chooses an unusual text compared to other
patronesses-neither devotional nor aristocratic. 59 The "noble lady" with
her well-nourished daughters inhabits a realm of gentle domestic virtue,
reformulating aristocratic love debate merely as a source of authorized
domestic material. Elizabeth enables a virtuous circulation of books that
resembles to some extent Margaret Beaufort's more elaborate and committed
form of patronage. 60 She inspires prayers, especially from women, who "arn
bounde to gyue laude praysying & thankynges to the auctor of this book &
also to the lady" (24-25).The Book's focus is not, however, principally pious;
and the preface concerns secular, lay familial education, far from the
Knight's aristocratic milieu. 61 Caxtonjoins the prayers for his patroness, and
stresses that "euery gentilman" can use the book. The redirection of courtly
debate reduces the intimate invasiveness underlying the Knight's narrative
stance, without foregoing the familial context he established. Like the
domestic scenario in How the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter, the Priface's
scene of familial education privileges the public importance of private
comportment and offsets the risks ofbreaches in courtesy.
In a number of other ways, Caxton carries out the least intimate of the
Knight's moral intentions. He describes the book's content as primarily
preceptual-"many good rewles," not primarily a book of narratives. Still,

the book's effects are to "enfourm" its readers "in science I wysedom and
vnderstandyng of knowleche" (3-4), which emphasizes discernment.
"Informing" implies a dynamic process, and "scyence" suggests not simply
academic discipline but judgment (MED, s.v. "science," 1b). 62 Similarly, the
notion of an "understanding of knowledge" indicates a self-consciousness
that permeates exemplary texts. More than a set of rules and regulations,
then, the book offers an understanding of self-rule, lessons in the formation
ofjudgment. Exempla are the vehicle for generalizations that will be "more
playnly said" in the book itself (10). This plainness points to the daughters'
literal reading method, without acknowledging the courtly impulses that
trouble the Knight's narration. Further, Caxton prefers histories and author-
itative examples to fables or tales (21-23), and urges audiences to "worship
and good renornmee" (36), buzzwords from the Knight's text. 63 In providing
such an innocent interpretive frame, he makes himself, in a sense, the
Knight's ideal reader.
Yet Caxton's representation of a rational, distant, and diverse audience
works against an incipient social instability. His notion that reading provides
public unification offsets a more particular anxiety: that children might not
persevere in virtue after the parent is gone. From the beginning, the author
of the book is dead. The book's active progenitor is instead the patroness,
whose zeal and goodwill toward her children are invoked less as a measure
of her affection than as a call to continued virtue in her name. Caxton
repeatedly calls for prayers for "her long lyf & welfare I & when god wil
calle her fro this transitory lyf that she may regne in heuen sempiternally
where as is loye & blysse wihtout ende" (28-30). 64 Setting this pious
perspective against the world of"this present lyf," Caxton implies that the
noble lady is doing what the Knight did: trying to prepare a remembrance
after her death. 65 Like the Knight's book, the lady's commission is designed
to circulate beyond her temporal purview and help keep her already-
virtuous children under the sway of self-governance even after she is gone.
In announcing his translation of past "remembraunce," then, Caxton picks
up and intensifies the Knight's dynastic anxiety: he portrays the encroaching
possibility of the noble lady's death. 66
The noble lady does more than authorize or sell copies of the book. Her
presence provides an imagined link between the Knight's internal, narrative
conflict and the political turmoil that might invade Elizabeth's sanctuary,
and that threatens to invade Caxton's literary market as well. Patronage is a
fiction of applicability. The domestic values of an aristocratic knight can be
conveyed, through the patron (and her printer), to a new, more publicly
apprehensible, domestic field. More to the point, the narratives contained in
the Knight's Book, through the noble lady, enter into the present tumultuous
and transitory life. An exemplary book is the perfect stage for such application
because, along with providing rules and regulations, examples offer diverse
informing circumstances, available for contingencies. Exemplary texts
aspire toward the eternal truths Caxton associates them with, while, at the
same time, providing tools for living in the here and now. At first glance The
Book if the Knight of the Tower would seem an odd choice for publication
when Elizabeth's fortunes were so precarious. But the book capitalizes on
the tension between eternal truth and changing experience that character-
izes exemplarity. The preface uses an account of pedagogy to mystify the
circumstances (and even the name) of his patroness, creating an image of
eternal truth perpetuated through books, while locating the book's applic-
ability in the households of current gentility. This image helps unify varied
audiences and reduce historical contingency, but doesn't completely do the
trick: the "noble lady" still registers the instability of both the now-dead
past and the politically unstable present.
In this sense, then, Caxton's very effort to gather and unite both
"techyngs" and audiences, together with his repeated insistence upon the
good examples of the text, respond to the Knight's own internal conflicts.
His preface responds to a particularly conflicted brand of exemplarity,
which he uses as a selling point. We saw how the Knight's timeless moral
truths are complicated both by courtly lying and by narrative appeals to
intimate, sometimes voyeuristic, desires. He anticipated audience responses
that were variable, unpredictable, and dependent upon acts of memory and
judgment. Inasmuch as Caxton seeks to recommend the book to a later
and still more varied audience, he calls upon his patroness both to express
and to gloss over the book's conflicted workings.
An act of reception as compressed as Caxton's preface, and as detachable
from the narrative complexities of the Knight's text itself, inevitably simplifies
the text it introduces. In this case, it also makes especially clear an intense
desire for moral certainty, which the book both expresses and anticipates in
its readers. In Caxton's printing, the Book's fantasy of stable moral truth
achieves authority precisely because of the historically and socially tumul-
tuous English milieu in which it circulated. The anxious perpetuation of
dynastic privilege becomes ideal material for the socially aspirant, "gentle"
English audience. The preface registers the unpredictability of audience
response, but subsumes it into the product itself; the printing of the book-
the sheer material value of the object itself, connected to the value of social
virtue-helps resolve the Knight's moral contradictions. For Caxton, audi-
ences are inevitably various, unpredictable, and politically volatile, and that
is why books should be reproduced and circulated. In answer to the
Knight's qualms about reception, Caxton embraces the activity of books
themselves in the public sphere, suggesting the degree to which a conflicted
desire for "som moral thyng" (Canterbury Tales, VI.325) had become not
only a motivating force for the material reproduction of books but also
a source of social, political, and literary authority. As we shall see, this
achievement of authority through the staging of conflicted moral desire
defines the canonical English literary works of Chaucer and Gower as
well-authors for whom a primary obligation of poetry was not simply the
achievement of authority but the thoroughgoing exploration of the moral
consequences of an audience's interpretative freedom.
CHAPTER3
THE COSTS OF EXEMPLARY HISTORY

IN THE CONFESSIO AMANTIS
I n the story of the Roman maiden Virginia, first told by Livy and later
taken up by Jean de Meun, Gower, Chaucer, and many others, the
heroine's exemplary virtue is perhaps the one facet of the tale upon which
all authors agree. Unlike its sister case, the rape of Lucretia, Virginia's story
does not generate doubt about its heroine's virtue, though the tale raises
many other moral questions. 1 Virginia is the daughter of Roman soldier
Virginius; when the decemvir Appius Claudius takes a liking to her, he rigs
the Roman court to take possession of her. Rather than see his daughter
defiled, Virginius takes her aside and stabs her. Like the suicide of Lucretia
with which it is often paired, her death prompts political revolt. But in her
difference from Lucretia-Virginia is not a suicide-lies a crucial problem:
when does endorsement of an exemplary figure amount to an act of
violence? The many medieval retellings of the story reveal profound invest-
ment in this question, which places severe pressure on any ideal of timeless
and univocal exemplary authority and, hence, on the possibilities for using
examples to teach virtue.
Livy tells the story of Virginia in his history of Rome, Ab urbe condita,
where it appears as a public event with direct significance in the Roman
political world: the death of the young virgin brings about revolt against the
tyrannical decemvirate. Because Virginia's death generates republican
reform, Livy's account goes to some lengths to endorse the events of the
story. Medieval authors dramatically reframe the tale: John Gower places it
near the conclusion of Book 7 of the Confessio Amantis, where Genius
makes it an account of domestic tyranny (7.5131-306); Geoffrey Chaucer's
Physician tells it within the microcosm of the Canterbury pilgrimage,
where it sets the stage for the disruptive Pardoner's Tale (VI.1-328); and John
Lydgate frames it with an elaborate bow to Chaucer, then curtails the story
so drastically that Virginia herself virtually disappears (Fall of Princes,

II.1345-407). 2 Livy's endorsement is called into question by Gower and
Chaucer, who reframe the story to reveal vast literary and political differences
from the Augustan historian; Lydgate's corrective effort, in turn, seeks to
reestablish timeless exemplary virtue. In the present chapter, I argue that
Gower treats Livy as a representative of Roman public virtue and then
challenges the basis of that virtue, arguing for an imaginative use of exam-
ple instead ofLivy's historical facticity. In the following chapter, I argue that
Chaucer uses the narrative to call into question the very nature of the exem-
plary impulse; and that Lydgate's Fall of Princes indicates how intolerable
Chaucer's later readers found his interrogations.
We have seen that the exemplary mode relies on a fiction of alignment
among author, text, and readers. Exemplary morals offer either praise or
blame, endorsement or condemnation: writers tell stories of virtuous
actions in order to endorse them, and of vicious actions in order to con-
demn them. Although writers of exempla rarely, if ever, achieve such perfect
alignment, the fantasy of doing so is a crucial ideal for both Roman histo-
riographer and medieval vernacular poets. Livy's story of Virginia appar-
ently goes far toward stabilizing meaning by making extraordinarily tight
alignments between the historian and the engine of the plot-not between
Livy and Virginia herself, but between the author and the father (and
secondarily, Virginia's betrothed, Icilius). Livy signals his endorsement by
recording virtuous and vicious characters differently. When the virtuous
characters speak, Livy quotes them directly; when the vicious Appius
speaks, Livy uses indirect discourse. This strategy is based on an assumption
that direct quotation grants moral authority to a character, while indirect
discourse calls attention to the narrator's intervention, as he issues a warn-
ing or attaches blame to the character in the process of paraphrasing his
speech. In the fourteenth-century versions of the story, on the other hand,
quotation does not directly serve moral judgment; both Gower and
Chaucer use unreliable narrators and complex framing devices to reveal the
violence inherent in Virginius's ideal fatherhood. In particular, as we shall
see, Gower's account limits direct discourse to one outburst by the raging
Virginius-an outburst that undermines, rather than reinforcing,Virginius's
moral virtue. Direct discourse, in both fourteenth-century texts, serves to
stage moral questions rather than shore up moral authority. Finally, Lydgate
avoids direct discourse altogether in order to retrieve a relatively stable form
of political morality in his severely curtailed version of the story.
By associating forms of discourse with moral status, Livy not only
endorses the virtue of the Roman revolt but secures a coherent historical
teleology. The events of the Virginia tale validate the resulting revolution,
which reestablishes tribunal government in Rome. In the larger story of
EXEMPLARY HISTORY 55
Rome from its foundations, the plebian Virginius represents a step on the
path toward the pax romana. For Livy, history is a series of events in which
repetition creates pattern: repeated popular and patrician revolts mark stages
of development toward the ideal Roman state. In such a context, imitation
of exemplary conduct creates a basis for meaningful history. Virginia not
only symbolizes a victimized Roman populus; she also helps generate the
historical emergence of a truth that is at once politically ideal and authentic,
a true commitment to republican government that contemporary Rome
must imitate. In aligning his narration with the rhetoric ofVirginius, Livy
associates his historical text with this coherent narrative teleology, depicting
himself as advocate of a republicanism and, implicitly, encouraging his audi-
ence to perpetuate it. To be sure, Livy does not always succeed in wedding
his historical text to political ideals, and indeed, he frequently interrogates
the very continuity from past to present that he apparently seeks. But his
account ofVirginia enacts a fantasy of alignment to an unusual degree,
hence serving as a useful foil for medieval explorations of exemplarity.
For, according to medieval authors, Livy represents an ideal of historical
truth. His association with history locates his account in a public realm with
coherent political principles; to take up an account from Livy presupposes
that this public realm is constituted through Roman rhetoric derived from
Roman legal justice. For Gower and Chaucer, however, Livy's realization of
political principles in the Virginia account embraces a rigid civic utility that
obscures the contingent relationship between public good and familial
bonds. A central medieval analogy between kings and fathers comes to the
fore (Appius is a king in the medieval versions) when both Gower and
Chaucer unfold the domestic brutality ofVirginius's actions. Gower depicts
Virginius as a raging and "wilde" father, making the Roman republican
revolt look almost tyrannical. Chaucer dramatizes the intimacy between
father and daughter, making the revolt appear secondary and inadequate.
These changes call into question the ideal republicanism that generates
Livy's apparently absolute connection between historical facticity and
rhetorical truth. Instead of making transparent truth claims, Gower and
Chaucer associate Virginia's death with the fictional modes of fable, marvel,
and transformation. In calling attention to the way fictional techniques
mediate and distort facts, the medieval authors refuse to confirm the
simple direction of Livy's historical teleology, in order to test the function
of exemplarity itself. 3
The fourteenth-century versions thus complicate any attempt to view
the maiden Virginia as center of a historically true, publicly beneficial
pattern of events that continues across time. J. D. Lyons asserts that all
"example depends on repetition" (26); the exemplary mode seeks to sustain
meaning across different historical circumstances. Lyons's formulation
suggests the stubborn timelessness of exemplary stories whose messages can

be imported from Livy to the Middle Ages, but does not account for the
possibility that repetitions across time will not "match up." In response to
Livy's embrace of republican revolt, Gower and Chaucer refuse endorse-
ment not only at the level of narration, but also at the level of intertextual
imitation: they estrange their accounts from Livy. 4 Though both authors
cite Livy dutifully, they do so to point out that meaning can change across
time, from one era to another, indicating the shift from Roman forum to
medieval household. Certainly not all imitation makes a primary claim to
difference, disjunction, and hence variability of interpretation over time; some
medieval mythography, for example, makes serious claims to reconciling and
universalizing Christian teleology. And Lydgate aims to quell variety rather
than embrace it. But as we shall see, Gower and Chaucer call attention to
the drastic changes they make to their source, asserting that different
contexts produce new political effects, and hence insisting that exemplary
meaning is contingent upon literary and historical context.
Such self-consciousness about authorial imitation has consequences for
how medieval authors attempt to shape reader response. Exemplary dis-
course makes the strongest possible claim for literature's agency in people's
lived lives: examples are by definition designed to be imitated. One might
go so far as to suggest that such calls for imitation are designed to control
readers, and certainly we have seen such efforts of control (with differing
degrees of success) in Handlyng Synne and The Book of the Knight cif the Tower.
But Gower and Chaucer use the example ofVirginia to focus attention on
the principles ofjudgment at work when interpretation is not a simple mat-
ter of endorsing, and consequently imitating, a virtuous exemplum. When
they call into question the value of the Roman revolt that arises from
Virginia's death, the medieval poets call into question the implication that
readers should embrace, and indeed imitate, zealous republican reform. In
the process, Gower and Chaucer constitute themselves as readers who resist
not just Livy's particular program but the very principle of alignment on
which his account is apparently based. Their departures from Livy imply
that their own future readers might subsequently disagree with them.
Indeed, in their versions of the Virginia story, Gower and Chaucer empha-
size the near-impossibility of any simple readerly acceptance, much less
imitation, of the virgin heroine or her revolutionary father.
But the failure of alignment between story and readers does not simply
constitute a failure of moral effect: on the contrary, in the context of these
medieval disagreements with Livy, argumentative reading becomes admissi-
ble, and misalignment among characters, narrators, and readers takes on a
potentially productive aesthetic function. In the fourteenth-century recep-
tion of Livy, then, the story becomes less a call to endorsement than an
assertion of readers' imaginative activity and consequent freedom to call

textual and political lessons into question. Gower's Confessio, a compilation
of frankly exemplary tales, increasingly calls for reading methods that
extend well beyond acceptance of authorial directives-instead demanding
readerly initiative and imagination.
Absolute Endorsement: Livy's Virginia

For Livy,Virginia's death confirms a fundamental causal alignment between
rhetoric and political action. 5 Within the account, the girl's exemplary
status arises from and produces rhetorical truth: the virtuous Virginia
generates a rhetoric of just revolt against tyranny, which brings about sys-
tematic political change. Livy's account assumes that her family's language is
effective because it is true, and that its truth makes it comprehensible to the
Roman people. Implicitly working against the age-old danger that false
rhetoric can be convincing, he links rhetoric, in the sense of persuasive legal
argument, with historical causality: language leads directly from virtuous
intention to the political action that realizes Roman republican ideals, a
historical instantiation that can and should be repeated across time.
Although the pity of Roman matrons and the false language of Appius
threaten this clear alignment between rhetoric and political revolt, Livy's
account seeks to contain such threats as much as possible, linking his text to
the true rhetoric ofVirginius and Icilius instead. This effort to endorse
the virtuous characters serves to confirm Livy's rhetorical truth-both his
facticity and his political virtue. Indeed, his insistence on the fiction of
alignment among rhetorical, political, and historical truths ultimately
becomes the basis on which Gower and Chaucer challenge him.
Livy's strategy of aligning his narration with the oratory of his characters
constitutes an effort to link his own history with persuasive rhetoric,
establishing his role as an active participant in a coherent Roman political
teleology. Though this is not the place for an analysis of Livy's political
situation, I would suggest that the shaky status of Roman republicanism in
the Augustan era gives Livy's alignment with the republican revolt an ironic
edge that was perhaps not accessible to Chaucer or Gower. Indeed, Livy's
rigid endorsement of the revolt in the story ofVirginia differs from his
emphasis upon the brutal costs of Roman foundations in much of the rest
of Ab urbe condita. 6 Nevertheless, the account stages an effort to identifY
exemplary figures directly with the events they generate and their social and
political consequences.
Virginia's virtue is important in his account because her emblematic
status works; that is, she successfully stands for the honor of her father and
her city, and that representation functions to motivate the body politic to
revolt. Whether she is slave to Appius's client or daughter of her father, she
remains a possession of the men around her; her status as possession of one
or the other man provides Appius with the means for rigging the courtJ
Her ultimate public function relies on her passive silence in the face of
Appius's apparently complete power: Anne Middleton goes so far as to call
her a "nonperson." As an extension of her father's and her city's subjection
to injustice, she is victimized by the decemvir's tyranny, as helpless, imbecilla,
as the women who grieve over her death. 8
Virginia's simultaneous silence and communicative power operate
within a context of rhetorical efficacy; indeed, much of the plot is driven by
oratory. When the tyrannical Appius claims her, Icilius launches a long
public protest; when her father is summoned from battle, he too attempts to
protest in court. In the first of the two court scenes, Appius's decision,
rendered in indirect discourse, almost succeeds in enacting his desire: he
awards custody of Virginia to his own cliens, and no one dares to object
(recusare, 45.4, to make a rebuttal). The threat here is that the power of his
word will be direct and absolute, like that of a monarch. 9 Just in time, Icilius
arrives to deliver a speech that reveals the falsehood of Appius's judgment,
presenting it as an act of concealment (taciturn, celari, 45.6) and tyranny, and
threatening to invoke the aid of the army on Virginius's behalf. 10 This
speech causes the ever-malleable Roman mob to become restless enough to
make Appius give in for the moment, leaving the final decision until the
next day. The two men have embarked upon a rhetorical competition, each
trying to enact his word.Appius's tyranny is figured as an abuse on the level
of language, an attempt to make his word seem to carry out publicly
sanctioned law, when actually his command fulfills private desire.
That is,Appius's tyranny produces fiction instead of rhetorical truth-an
opposition Livy works to maintain throughout the account. He renders the
speech of Icilius and Virginius consistently in direct discourse, while he
represents Appius's language directly only once, just after his judicial deci-
sion, when he issues a desperate command to control the Roman mob. This
alignment-between rhetoric as staged within the tale and Livy's narrative
allegiances-shores up the author's exemplary purposes. Within the
account, Appius does not have access to rhetoric in the sense of publicly
effective words. Even when he attempts to make his words deeds, he fails
because the significance of the words is hidden, celarus, false. That which is
concealed is potentially incoherent, or meaningful only locally, in terms of
personal desire. Livy explicitly represents Appius's effort to win Virginia as a
kind of fiction-making: "The plaintiff carried out a fiction known to the
judge, since he himself was author of its plot" (No tam iudici fabulam petitor,
quippe apud ipsum auctorem argumenti, peragit, my trans. [44.9]). Appius's
tyranny is figured as a fundamental misuse of language. The plaintiff enacts
the command of the judge, making his word deed, but that command itself
is a Jabula, a fictional tale. 11
The association of tyranny with fiction sets off both the political truth of
Icilius's and Virginius's rhetoric and the factual truth of Livy's historical
project. In contrast to Appius's Jabula and argumentum, the rhetoric of Icilius
and Virginius is not only an instrument of political effect but also, to begin
with, a true (verifiable, authentic) use of language. They reveal truth and
expose Appius's fiction as a lie. Appius's plotting also allows Livy to disclaim
storytelling himself history has an access to truth that fabula and argumentum
clearly do not achieve. For Livy, history is the proper venue of rhetorical skill,
and rhetoric that refers to fact is the proper instrument of historical action. By
privileging historical facticity throughout the account, Livy associates his
own text with a use oflanguage defined as inherently true and effective.
When Virginius returns from the army camp, he makes a spectacle of his
daughter, leading her through the city pleading for support from the
people. In spite of the dramatic nature of this act, it is represented as rhetor-
ical, not fabulous. In court,Virginius has been rendered inactive, allowed no
opportunity to speak as Appius hands down his false judgment awarding
custody to the plaintiff. In a moment of meta textual comment, Livy denies
Appius's language even documentary truth:
The discourse with which he led up to his decree may perhaps be truthfully
represented in one of the old accounts, but since I can nowhere discover one
that is plausible, in view of the enormity of the decision, it seems my duty to
set forth the naked fact, upon which all agree, that he adjudged Virginia to
him who had claimed her as his slave.
Quem decreta sermonem praetenderit, forsan aliquem verum auctores
antiqui tradiderint: quia nusquam ullum in tanta foeditate decreti veri similem
invenio, id quod constat nudum videtur proponendum, decresse vindicias
secundum servitutem. (47.5-6)
In admitting that he has discovered no veri similem, nothing like the truth,
Livy claims access to nudum, naked fact, unmediated "true" historical event.
He expressly disclaims anything but the most direct linguistic reference .The
standards against which he defines the naked fact, however, seem to be a
combination of plausibility and general agreement among historians; both
of these categories suggest mediation. Livy comes close to representing
historical narrative as the discovery of similitudes, the creation of coherent
explanations of contingent nudum. History in this sense can apparently look
so much like fiction that the divorce between the historian and any acts of
fiction-making must be emphatic. What underlies this passage is not as
much a problem of sources as a problem of ethics: Livy's reluctance to
record Appius's discourse, not only here but throughout the tale, suggests
that lies cannot be repeated even as part of historical record; that to write
lies is to endorse them. Livy records only the rhetoric of those who are
morally good, lcilius and Virginius. Even recording the argumentum of a
tyrant might taint the truth of the record, rendering it rhetorically invalid,
and-worse-misleading readers.
Livy's resistance to tyrannical discourse constitutes an attempt to control
his audience. The risk of recording Appius's decree is that, like the Roman
mob, his readers may be tricked into believing it. Livy's coherent train of
events-the development of Roman republican government ab. . .condita,
from its foundations-might be derailed by a fabulous nonrepublican argu-
ment. Or, perhaps more threatening still, this interruption in the pattern of
verifiable facticity might undermine the very notion that there is a single
historical direction. When Livy can offer no discourse leading up to
Appius's decree, he can offer no chain of causation that would make histor-
ical nudum cohere. And as he stages the Roman mob's response, we see the
extent to which historical coherence depends on coherence between
author and audience as well. The problem with Appius's decree is precisely
its aesthetic function-its appeal, independent of its referential truth-
which threatens Livy's effort to communicate a clear, unitary political truth
to an assenting audience. Appius's fabula interrupts the relation between
language and its referents, opening a world in which readers' interpretative
activities have increased freedom. Livy's distrust of his sources betrays the
degree to which his account slips toward the contingent and unpredictable
"realities known to the [reader]" 12-a reader who then calls upon his own
preconceptions to "clothe" Livy's naked information.
At first, it seems that Livy's embedded audience-the chorus-like
Roman mob-accepts the informative authority of Virginius and Icilius
over the fabula of Appius. After Appius's decree has been issued, Virginius
threatens to rouse "those who have arms," whereupon the crowds push the
plaintiff away from Virginia and the judge accuses both Virginius and Icilius
of sedition. As before, the direct discourse ofVirginius's speech allows Livy's
readers to be as moved as the Roman crowd. But such alignment of politi-
cal event, historical record, and audience response gives way almost imme-
diately. Suddenly we are granted access to Appius's language, which has
deteriorated into bald command: "Remove the mob and open a way for the
master to seize his slave!" he cries. The moment distances Livy's readers,
who cannot possibly carry out such a command. But Appius's word almost
becomes deed. The crowd parts, leaving the girl "prey to villainy" (praeda
iniuriae). The fabric of the entire account is now at risk: the crowds respond
as directly to tyrannical command as to moving and truthful oratory.
Virginius's reaction here turns on a trick, a lie, a fiction, a false apology
that allows him a chance to "talk" with his daughter: "Suffer me to question
the nurse here, in the maiden's presence, ... that ifl have been falsely called
a father, I may go away with a less troubled spirit" (deinde sinas hie coram vir-
gine mutricem percontari quid hoc rei sit, ut si ]also pater dictus sum aequiore hinc
animo discedam, 48.4).Appius's tyrannical falsehood has displaced Virginius's
rhetorical control, leaving him powerless in the public realm, and under-
mining the very truth and efficacy of his language.Virginius entertains the
notion that his rhetoric could be based on Jabula, falsehood; that his private
and public role might be based on a false word, pater. But then, at the point
where the link between rhetorical truth and political effect threatens to
break down, Virginia becomes the means of return to rhetorical efficacy.
Virginius grabs a knife from a butcher's stall and stabs her. Even as he does
so, he speaks his own action:"Thus, my daughter, in the only way I can, do I
assert your freedom" (Hoc te uno quo possum . . .modo,Jilia, in libertatem vindico,
48.5). Virginius renders his own paternity a representation of popular
authority, and his daughter a representation of Roman purity; his assertion
of her libertas enables the people to fight for their own libertas (49.1).
Holding up the knife, he devotes himself to the destruction of Appius with
the blood of his daughter. His language gains him the protection of the
Roman crowd, and eventually the story of Appius's abuse of power, which
Virginius retells to his men (49.4ff), produces a full-fledged Roman revolt.
In an apparently perfect chain of alignments, confirming the girl's exem-
plary status and the value of her sacrifice, Virginia's blood becomes the
instrument of Appius's destruction and popular revolt.
Virginius's brutal stabbing of his daughter explodes the account into the
realm of figurative relations, and although Livy tightly reins in the figurative
implications of the act, the language of this climax suggests a number of
difficulties in his construction of the account. In partaking of Appius's fab-
ulous methods, Virginius reveals the degree to which his own act is based
upon local, almost happenstance manipulations of both actors and audience
in the creation of Virginia's spectacular death scene. Her status as spectacle-
like that of Perrot Lenard and many other exemplary figures-emphasizes
the idiosyncrasy of this historical event, which appears as much inexplicable
nudum as Appius's decree. Although Virginia becomes an effective example
whose death has general public consequences,Virginius's lie reveals that her
iconic value is a fabrication. By extension, this artificiality extends to Livy,
suggesting the idealizing selectivity involved in constructing a coherent
Roman republican history.
As we shall see, Gower emphasizes the selectivity of exemplary discourse
by highlighting the violent particularity of this father's sacrifice of his
daughter. For the most striking difficulty in Livy's construction ofVirginia
is the brutality with which she is sacrificed for the sake of political revolt.
Rome's matrons give way to grief at the death of the girl, while the men
speak only of their nation's wrongs. Livy clearly aligns himself with the
public moral concerns of the men: the women's anguish is pathetic (maestior
imbecillo animo, eo miseribilia magis querentibus subjicit, 48.8), and useless in the
context of the multitude's impulse to freedom. Yet the mourning women
emphasize the price ofVirginius's claim to libertas, and Livy's pointed effort
to thrust them aside emphasizes the price of rhetorical efficacy. Virginius,
bent on his public goal, seems to think that his daughter's death really is,
literally, her own libertas and the libertas of Rome. When he stabs her (trans-
figit), he seems to try to fix her, relegate her to the realm of rhetorical truth,
as though she were a mere word, her death a vehicle of public inspiration,
her identity a pattern of virtue. Although his move into the fictive realm
ultimately enables a return to truthful rhetoric, consisting mostly of several
chapters of political wrangling over the formation of a new tribunal
government, Virginius's act-and Livy's history-exact a heavy price for
exemplary efficacy.
Gower's Critique: Virginia as Political Metaphor

Gower's Tale of Virginia, the second to last tale in Book 7 of the Confessio,
transfers Livy's account of Roman revolution into the realm of fiction, further
destabilizing Livy's already precarious endorsement. In Gower's version,
Virginia's silence enters the foreground; the revolution itself fades into the
background; and Virginius, Livy's grimly heroic centurion, becomes a tyrant.
Unlike early Roman government, of course, which (in theory) imposed
institutional limitations on rulers' power, medieval English government was
monarchical. Throughout Book 7 of the Conjessio, a mirror for princes
framed as Genius's account of Aristotle's teachings to Alexander the Great,
Gower stresses the individual virtue of the king as the locus of political
authority. When Gower takes up classical political events, he lodges criticism
not against structural governmental problems, but against individuals
(frequently labeled "kings" whether they were monarchs or not) who do not
virtuously fulfill their roles. 13 The king's success depends on his own voluntas,
with which the wills of subjects exist in rather precarious analogy. At the
same time, the king is sanctioned by absolute and God-granted authority:
in Ulpian's much-quoted formulation, the king's will (or, dangerously, his
pleasure) is law. 14 In Book 7, the proximity between the governed royal will
and the individual, ungoverned desire of the king poses a constant threat to
the success of monarchy. Book 7, then, stages an exploration of useful
fictions for perpetuating a workable analogy between individual and public
forms of desire. The resulting variety of political strategies suggests that
Gower views governance as founded on human mutability, even as mutable
human will is also the locus of tyrannical misdirections of desire.
The second half of Book 7 is organized into five points of policy according
to which rulers should govern their realms: Truth, Largesse, Justice, Mercy
("Pite"), and Chastity. The last of these virtues brings to a head the analogy
between the king's personal desire and public will: sexual desire, figured as
idiosyncratic and multiplicitous (inspired by "a route of faire wommen;'
4414), is the downfall of Sardanapalus, Cyrus, Amalech, Solomon, and
Antonius. Following these narratives of sexual corruption, the Roman sto-
ries of Lucrece and Virginia apparently suggest the possibility of achieving
political reform through women's deaths. Since sexual desire has wreaked
havoc in the previous stories, one might be tempted to read here the logical
extension of an antifeminist convention: public life is inevitably corrupted
by the personal, hidden desires associated with women, and the public arena
is purified by their sacrifices. 15 But although Gower here encourages an
association between women and personal, idiosyncratic, even unpredictable
desire, the structure of the Chastity section finally refuses to embrace
antifeminism, instead focusing attention on how the achievement of public
good violates Lucrece and Virginia. In the case ofVirginia, highlighting vio-
lation does leave some small room for an autonomous female will, but more
important, challenges Livy's privileging of the public good. For Gower,
Livy's account embodies the triumph of public benefit over personal
domestic ties, which constitutes a failure to value not just female will but,
more generally, the human will as agent of virtue. 16 For Gower, that is,
Livy's historical narrative in praise of Roman republicanism privileges
public institutions at the price of individual life.
Book 7 of the Confessio defines the human will as (at least in part) an
imaginative faculty: good governance relies upon the virtuous use and inter-
pretation of metaphor. 17 We have seen how, in Livy, Appius's tyranny is based
on fobula, which allows him to misrepresent not only his own desire but also
the civic good: reform depends upon restoring truthful rhetoric. Gower does
not accept Livy's opposition between rhetorical truth and fabula. Instead, he
makes the Virginia story explicitly fictional, inviting the argument Livy tried
to suppress: that fictions convey moral effects, and indeed that moral virtue
is shaped by the contingencies oflanguage. Thus he uses Livy as a foil for his
own fundamentally rhetorical understanding of public virtue-a rhetorical
understanding based on both "plain" (in a sense associated with Rome) and
figurative uses of language. Although Gower's reputation as a moralist has
historically tended imply that poetic concerns take a back seat to didacticism
in his work, recent scholars have seen links between the moral and poetic
impulses, especially when morality has political consequences. 18 In what
follows, I explore the tale of Virginia as an instance of increasing
attention to the combination of fabula and didacticism in the end of the
Confessio.Althoughfabula remains potentially false and even harmful, Gower
nevertheless embraces it here. Indeed, I suggest that Gower's tale of Virginia

helps constitute an argument for the political necessity of imaginative
fiction.
The tale ofVirginia (together with the Lucrece story) represents Gower's
sole use of the Roman historian. Though cited frequently in the Middle
Ages, Livy's Ab urbe condita was not part of the liberal arts education, nor was
it circulated prolifically outside the intellectual centers of Italy and
Avignon. 19 The first known commentary on it was not written until the
thirteenth century, by Nicholas Trevet, an English friar living in Bologna,
and the general availability of both text and commentary seems to have
been limited. 20 Gower's access to Livy may well have been in a compilation,
or possibly through Bersuire's French translation. 21 He would also have
encountered a version of the Virginia story itself in Jean de Meun's
completion of the Roman de la rose, but chose not to echo it; Jean is more
important for Chaucer's version of the tale than for Gower's. Gower does
take various other Roman stories from an array of histories like the Gesta
Romanorum, Godfrey ofViterbo's Pantheon, and Latini's Tresor. It seems likely
that Gower had access not to the full text of Ab urbe condita but to an inde-
pendent version of one or two translated excerpts. Because his plot details
and thematic concerns-including the crucial death scene-resemble Livy
more than Jean de Meun, I think it likely that he read some such indepen-
dent version.
Having idealized Roman truth and justice throughout much ofBook 7,
Gower presents his retelling of the Virginia story as a revision of Roman
political virtue in general. Thus, however indirect a source Livy may have
been, Gower attacks the Romans for the problem posed by Livy's text: the
apparent endorsement of an act of political violence. Livy's account, with its
associated truth claims, neatly encapsulates Gower's reconstruction of the
Roman relation between rhetoric and political virtue. 22 Because the sub-
stance of Gower's disagreement with his source text has to do with the
political instrumentality of exemplary writing, the tale enables Gower to
revise his hitherto idealized construction of Rome, and consequently to
revise the political claims of his poetic project as a whole. In the tale of
Virginia, Gower reveals the fictive nature of Roman "plein trouthe." In
doing so, he translates Livy's exemplary efficacy into an argument for the
political importance of metaphor.
"Pleine Trouthe" and Copious Example in Book 7

"Moral Gower" achieves aesthetic indirection not by a process of opposition
to or contradiction of communicative claims but by a slow accretion of
examples that set up norms and then increasingly complicate them. One
such norm is the plastic term-and late fourteenth-century buzzword-

" common profit." Common profit is a communal political fiction which, in
Walter Ullmann's analysis, arises out of the theocratic notion that the king
acts for the utilitas publica. 23 The notion of public utility is one of the ways
in which kingship, ideally at least, is rendered amenable to the community's
needs. 24 Common profit implies an alignment between king and people
whereby his will both gathers and conforms to the will of his subjects:
"the state ensures a social order which will allow citizens of all kinds ... to
pursue their own callings .... There is an overall unity coexisting with the
diversity of subjects and members" (Black, 24). The ephemeral nature of
such reciprocity haunts the whole of Book 7-and indeed the whole of the
Confessio. 25
"Common profit" can be applied to the world beyond the king, of
course; as Anne Middleton has shown, both public service and public
poetry like the Confessio can work for the common good, the mutual benefit
of a populace or community. 26 As the word "common" suggests even in
Modern English, the term gathers multiplicity: common good could refer
either to a collection of individual goods or to actions of general benefit
such as defense of the realm (Black, 26). Middleton associates the poetic
common voice with plain style and mediation between extremes; she also
points out that the commons can refer to the increasingly varied "third
estate," people neither noble nor clerical (100)-those whose horizontal
ties arose among the rapidly changing hierarchies of the later fourteenth
century. 27 The common profit is closely tied to a fiction of an audience that
shares concerns, but that is made up of various interests:" [Ricardian public
poetry] envisions a society composed of members whose differing stations,
functions, and ways of life yield different perspectives on the common
world, which it is the aim of the speaker to respect, to bring to mutual
awareness, and to resolve into common understanding" (98). Common
profit, then, is by definition copious: it is a rhetorical fiction about the gath-
ering of various audiences, and the shaping of various truths that find
expression in mutual benefit.
For Gower, the monarch gathers and shapes common profit. As Jeanne
Quillet points out, community is "not necessarily a unity" (528); common
profit as a single or unified benefit depends on the binding power of the law
carried out by the king. 28 In the context of advice to princes like the
Confessio's Book 7, common profit describes the king's public effect; the
problem is that common profit, like any corporate fiction, cannot necessarily
account for the king's intentions, his individual will, in spite of the fact that
his will determines the way law will be carried out. 29 The king who follows
his idiosyncratic desires as if they were those of the people is a tyrant. 30
Instead, his will should be informed, counseled, and shaped by those around
him, so that he provides a willed unity that supercedes his own desires.
Although common profit may signal an ideal alignment of the king's intent
with that of the people, the king's will remains fundamentally opaque and
private, and hence fundamentally mutable. Furthermore, as the fiction of
commonality also suggests, the idiosyncratic wills of the people may be
mutable as well? 1 In Gower, the difficulty of matching the king's will to
that of the people gives rise to a fantasy of communicative plainness enacted
through conventional exemplary alignments. Indeed, plainness-the
adequate relation between intention and effect, between king's will and
general benefit-lies at the core of Gower's ideal of common profit. But as
we shall see, "plainness" in this sense will, in turn, demand continual effort
and revision.
Exemplary discourse would seem to offer the surest mode for binding
the multiplicities of a divided kingdom because examples bind moral
generalization and particular instances. Exemplary discourse makes the
singular common. The political value of such conceptual binding is implicit
from the very beginning of the Confessio, where Gower announces that in
the present "diversed" or changing time he will turn to texts of the past for
guidance:
[F]or to magnifie
The worthi princes that tho were,
The bokes schewen hiere and there,
Whereof the world ensampled is;
And tho that dede thanne amis
Thurgh tirannie and crualte,
Right as thei stoden in degre,
So was the wrytinge of her werk. (Pro.44-51) 32
Worthy princes offer examples to the world, as shown or revealed in books.

Not only do princes imbue written examples with their authority; but the
written record of their deeds ("her werk") in turn confirms their status,
how they "stoden in degre." The variety of princely conduct is evident even
here: books show the multiple and various deeds of kingship, good and bad,
"hiere and there," and offer tools for discernment, the magnification of
worth and the condemnation of tyranny and cruelty. But Gower's turn to
old books implies that the past was more unified and hence more legible than
the present. Writing accomplished a form of common profit through social
affirmation. Implicitly, Gower's "book of princes" too will recall, for the sake
of a divided present, the beneficial principles of a morally clearer past.
The very structure of the Confessio, however, complicates Gower's initial
effort to use examples of the worthy princes of the past to ameliorate
present political division. Framed by the discussion of love between Amans
and Genius, Venus's priest, the Confessio's examples are embedded in a

courtly context that mediates their exemplary application to the public
world invoked in the book's Prologue? 3 Although Book 7 is introduced as
an explicit mirror for princes-its "matiere" derives from Aristotle's education
of Alexander-it is also introduced at the end of Book 6 when Amans asks
for distraction from his obsession with his resistant lady: "For.. .ifl herde of
thinges strange, I Yit for a time it scholde change I Mi peine, and lisse me
somdiel" (6.2417-419). Amans essentially suggests here that politics will
mitigate his self-regard, taking his mind off his own suffering by offering
something "strange" or different to consider-a kind of recreational poli-
tics, as it were? 4 At the same time, of course, the structure implies a crucial
analogy between Amans, primary recipient of Genius's teaching, and the
prince Alexander, recipient of Aristotle's teaching. The king becomes an
exemplary self, a way of imagining governance that could apply to Amans,
the yearnful lover, offering the unstable lover stable moral principles. In
advocating good kingship Genius focuses exemplary authorityin the figure
of the king, who binds the multiplicities of a divided kingdom and offers an
ostensibly unified philosophical discourse on the nature of governance.
But in practice, Book 7 multiplies examples of worthy and tyrannical
kings, suggesting a fundamental precondition of the mirror for princes
genre: the practical governance of the realm depends upon contingent deci-
sions. That these decisions are mediated through books is crucial both to
Gower's project and to the political community he seeks to reach. For
Gower, the privacy and mutability of the human will-whether royal or
not-create the necessity for multiple and copious exemplary fictions, pre-
cisely because unitary generalizations so easily fail to adjust to individual
circumstance. The examples reveal the multiplicity of common profit, plac-
ing severe pressure on unified moral truth-and on the unity supposedly
offered by "worthy princes" as well. The contingencies of various, and
changing, political circumstances call into question the clarity of exemplary
alignments among author, tale, and moral; kingship as constructed through
exemplary discourse emerges as a continual, effortful process of imagining
general unity. If examples make the singular common, they also indicate the
degree to which, for Gower as for his classical predecessors, political virtue
must be constantly reformulated rhetorically, in the re-presentation and
reinterpretation of new exemplary instances.
Nevertheless, the poem does more than gesture toward ideals of stable,
unified moral truths. For much of Book 7, Genius idealizes Rome as a
model of legal justice and integrity carried out through rhetorical "pleine
trouthe." "Trouthe," of course, is not simply facticity but truth to one's
word; in a political context, the word has strong associations with feudal
contract, at once a hierarchical and a voluntary bond made by oath between
lord and vassalY The word "plein(e)" in Middle English derives from two
different words, one from the Latin plenus, full, and the other from the Latin
planus, flat. 36 When Gower's Genius associates Rome with "pleine trouthe,"
he draws primarily on the latter meaning, praising Rome's unembellished
rhetoric and its adherence to law, and endowing Roman political leaders
with a stable sincerity and insight that function to resolve problems of
trickery and injustice through the frank recognition of authentic circum-
stances. When subjects speak the truth, Roman leaders hear, repeat, and
match that truth with appropriate deeds. Roman leaders tolerate "wordes
pleine and bare" (2350) from their advisors and promulgate plain truth
themselves. "Pleinness" in this sense implies mutual alignment between
king and people, uninterrupted by figurative uses of language. When a
soldier claims unjust treatment, for example, Caesar eventually recognizes
his complaint ("This Julius knew wel ynou I That al was soth which he him
tolde" [2000-2001 ]), and awards him recompense accordingly. When another
man attempts to flatter Caesar, the emperor answers with such wisdom that
his subjects thereafter "broghten nothing to his Ere, I Bot if it trouthe and
reson were" (2485-86). In these moments of incisive reading, the ideal
"king" and his subjects trim away excess, justly matching each other's
"trouthe and reson." When a monarch can read his subjects, especially his
counselors, and when likewise they can read him, then their wills are
aligned in an ideal monarchical unityY Reference is direct and clear.
Plainness is at once an ideal of rhetorical expression in which intention
matches effect, "withoute frounce [wrinkle]" (7.1594), and a form of
redundancy or accord on which political communication depends. 38
Yet plainness is not Gower's final "answer" to political problems. The
compiled tales of the Confessio, interpreted as they are by Genius and
Amans, regularly adduce general truths, which provoke further tales that
undercut, disavow, and revise them. Indeed, the careful reconciliations
between moral and story that we have seen in some compilations of exam-
ples (chapter 2) can in Gower result in variation and uneasy juxtaposition,
wherein the judgments of different characters or of narrator and characters
are not easily reconciled. Latin headverses and English narratives do not
match, Genius's morals do not encapsulate his stories, Amans's responses
reject Genius's offered generalizations. Gower highlights ways in which
exemplary discourse tends to produce two or more coincident but different
truths. This doubleness, however, is a source of exemplary plenitude. When
Gower advocates "pleine trouthe," a problem central to the exemplary
mode comes into relief inasmuch as examples aim to achieve a plain or
integrated truth, they demand a constant process of reconciling general
truth with specific instances. Example is inevitably "excessive" in this sense
because any instance linked to a general truth will have "characteristics that
exceed what can be covered by the generalization" (Lyons, 34). Further, when
the expression of truths is multiple-as when two characters express disparate
truths, or contradictory examples accumulate in succession-further changes
of emphasis become possible, both rhetorically and politically. Rather than
concentrate on one general truth, examples multiply particulars; especially
in a compilation like Gower's, the resulting "plenitude" or fullness exceeds
the ideal integration that Gower's plainness proposes. But plenitude, or
what Carruthers calls "copiousness," also allows for readerly discernment
among fully known, if disparate, possibilities: knowing the "pleine trouthe"
in this sense-the full truth, all the information-enables proper arrange-
ment or ordering of multiplicity, so as to give specific resonances to a
general truth. 39
Rhetorical plenitude and its attendant dangers of duplicity and excess
easily contaminate the notion of"pleine trouthe," allowing Gower to revise
the ideal of instrumental rhetoric he initially associates with Rome. In his
brief disquisition on rhetoric, Genius highlights exactly what Livy sought
to suppress in his version ofVirginia-rhetoric is, by definition, a potential
trick. He warns against the misuse of eloquence: "For whan the word to the
conceipte I Descordeth in so double a wise, I Such Rhetorique is to
despise I In every place, and forto drede" (1554-57). Even if plainness quells
trickery by mediating between word and concept, then the "double... wise"
that constitutes rhetorical discord remains a constant threat. 40 Yet the
"goode" that words can do also tends to arise from the copious way words
do not simply refer to but generate more words and even constitute new
realities. After issuing the conventional medieval condemnation of Ulysses
for rhetorical trickery, associating him with sorcery and magic, Genius
quickly acknowledges that words can also be used for good; and there
follows a list ofboth social and cosmic functions words can fulfill:
The word under the coupe ofhevene

Set every thing or odde or evene;
With word the hihe god is plesed,
With word the wordes ben appesed,
The softe word the loude stilleth;
Wher lacketh good, the word fulfilleth,
To make amendes for the wrong;
Whan wordes medlen with the song,
It doth plesance wei the more. (1579-87)
The ideal of rhetorical plainness has quickly given way to a formulation in

which words have value in themselves rather than solely as instruments for
matching up appearances with truth. Words "set" things, or to use another
of Genius's favorite terms, they "enfourme" or give form to things 41 ;
but words also respond to other words, as when "the softe word the loude
stilleth." Words fill in gaps "where lacketh good," suggesting the very
plenitude that plainness might seem to rule out. Words, with overtones of
responsivity to God's own Word, please God and make amends. Perhaps
most tellingly, words conceived as plenteous have an aesthetic component:
they contribute to the pleasure of song. Although "plein trouthe" is the
proper use of words to mediate between "hertes thoght" and appearances, it
may be difficult to achieve such integrity. Further, in some circumstances
the full import of language lies in its persuasive capacity: language creates
significance beyond strict rhetorical integrity. Genius's presentation of the
power of words in this celebratory list emphasizes both the plenitude and,
finally, the circumstantiality of rhetorical virtue-words have many disparate
effects "under the coupe of hevene."
Roman plainness, then, as represented in Livy, is not the full truth.
Gower's notion of rhetorical virtue, in fact, emerges in his exemplary prac-
tice as fundamentally dialectical. Ostensibly in order to exemplify the ideal
of words that tell a "tale plein withoute frounce;' Genius tells the story of
Caesar and the accomplices of Cataline. The Roman consuls want to put
the accomplices to death: they "spieken plein after the law" (1623). Caesar,
on the other hand, argues for "pite" or mercy. He tells a different "tale"
(1616) wherein he "the wordes of his sawe I Coloreth in an other weie"
(1624-25). 42 Through studying such arguments, Genius concludes, men can
learn the science of rhetoric. Initially, this exemplum defines truth as the
faithful enactment of the law, essentially the act of applying an established
text. Reading and applying a written statute, and especially arguing a case,
constitute the origins of rhetoric as a discipline; they also constitute the
basis ofRoman civic virtue. 43 But Gower uses the account of the argument
about the accomplices of Cataline to show that public rhetoric requires
more than faithfulness to a past legal text.
For, although the truthful application oflaw is essential to good govern-
ment, the gap between law and concrete action produces a need for Caesar-
like mercy as well-a need, that is, for the equity that qualifies justice, filling
in under circumstances "where lacketh goode." Several times in the course
of Book 7, Genius rhymes the Christian concept of "pite" with the classi-
cal notion of"equite," where equitable pity emerges as a balance between
harshness and excessive compassion (see 3919-20, 4171-72). 44 As we shall
see, mercy or Middle English "pite" is largely an imaginative endeavor: it is
not codified as justice is codified into law, and it arises out of a willed recog-
nition of the needs of those outside the self. 45 Its very contingency makes
"pite" essentially dependent upon individual will, even in its most public
applications. Later in Book 7 "pite" emerges as one of five points of public
policy, where Genius explains that it has its origin in the great act of mercy
"Thurgh which the hihe mageste [God] I Was stered" (7.3108-109)-

God's expression of love in the incarnation of Christ. Human "pite" indi-
cates the governance or proper "steering" of human majesty as well: it
makes hierarchy adequate to the task of creating order and, in turn, affirms
the monarch's authority, "For Pite makth a king curteis I Bothe in his word
and in his dede" (3120-21). When Caesar argues for "pite" for the accom-
plices of Cataline, he engages in an imaginative endeavor of a sort that, as
we shall see,Virginius fails to invoke with regard to his daughter: Caesar tells
a "tale," gives a "sawe," colors his speech. The difference between the sena-
tors' legal plainness and Caesar's rhetorical colors is the difference between
the application of law and the fabrication of an imaginative alternative,
between adherence to justice and the capacity for mercy, and, broadly
speaking, between senatorial government and monarchy.
Plainness is not only incomplete but potentially dangerous. Genius's
Roman examples-the bulk of which appear under the first point of policy,
Truth, or the third, Justice-repeatedly expose the high costs of rigid
rhetorical instrumentality. Plainness can violently excise "pite" from the
scene. In an example of justice that anticipates the brutality of the Lucrece
and Virginia stories (without the sexual exploitation that brings those
accounts into the domestic arena), the account of the consul Carmidotirus
suggests the limits of plain adherence to law. Having banned weapons in the
Senate on pain of death, Carmidotirus mistakenly wears his own weapon to
his seat. The senators refuse to kill him, so he kills himself. As in the Virginia
story, as we shall see, the sword aligns actor, circumstances, and reception,
becoming the instrument of both the legal statute and its application: "with
the same sword he bar I The statut of his lawe he kepte, I So that al Rome
his deth bewepte" (2886-88). There is no raging Virginius here: in a
moment of exemplary causal alignment, Carmidotirus's death exhibits the
absolute integrity that makes him worth grieving for in the first place.Yet,
since Genius supplies no framing moral message, the senators' balking and
the subsequent popular grief indicate an excess, and suggest the futile
overkill of legal justice in the consul's death.
Gower's insistence on the copiousness and contingency-that is, the
fundamentally rhetorical character-of his exemplary project makes spe-
cific demands upon readers. The story of Caesar and the accomplices of
Cataline has a secondary status in Genius's narrative: it is introduced as a
reference to Brunetto Latini (who, in turn, follows Sallust) and as such is left
incomplete, as though Gower assumes the outcome-the pardon of the
accomplices-is well known or easily accessible. This incompletion simul-
taneously establishes and invalidates the norm ofRoman adherence to legal
precedent by centering on the disagreement, not the resolution, between
the consuls and Caesar. The dialectical nature of rhetoric demands readers'
discernment: leaving the argument unresolved encourages readers to

resolve it themselves, accept its irresolution, or produce some other kind of
coherence. 46 Further, the call to readers to make sense of the story by read-
ing another book (as in Chaucer's account of Dido in the House of Fame and
some of the Le:.;ends if Good Women, for example) suggests the degree to
which judgments inhere, not in the text itself, but in readerly activity.
Specifically, the oscillation between plainness and plenitude as ideals of
rhetorical action suggests that neither one can be jettisoned. It may be
tempting to argue that, when Gower interrupts the clear communicative
function of exemplary discourse, he rejects rhetorical instrumentality alto-
gether, in favor of rhetorical plenitude-a preference for Caesar's eloquence
over that of the consuls, which is indeed what the end of the plot as it
appears elsewhere might imply. But paradoxically, Genius's refusal to tell the
end of the plot heightens the degree to which, in spite of Gower's privileg-
ing of copious and indirect forms of persuasion, consular integrity-
plainness-remains a crucial ideal throughout Book 7, and indeed
throughout the Confessio.
Gower's Virginia
Gower insists that kingship depends upon internal governance; he formulates
kingship as an act of imaginative will. As a result, the whole of Book 7's
political philosophy revolves around efforts to inform, or reform, monar-
chical self-governance. Chastity, the final of Gower's five points of policy,
epitomizes this effort to bring public conduct home.
The tale of Virginia is set up by Lucrece, a figure of plain truth. The
precedent here is Livy, who introduces the account of Virginia as having
originated with lust, "no less shocking in its consequences than that which
had led, through the rape and the death of Lucretia, to the expulsion of the
Tarquinii from the city" (3.44). Virginia mirrors Lucrece in her subjection
to lust associated with aristocratic tyranny; she differs from her predecessor
in that her death prevents rather than punishing the rape itself, and in that
her father (not she) commits a peculiar form of intimate violence. Even in
Livy, Virginius does not lack emotion. In inciting revolt among the soldiers
afterward, he begs them to pity him, albeit in the indirect discourse earlier
associated with Appius: "he besought them not to ... repudiate him as one
who had murdered his child ... [H] e had been impelled by pity [misericordia]
to an act of seeming cruelty.... As Virginius spoke these words in a loud
voice, the multitude signified with responsive shouts that they would not
forget his sufferings" (3.50.5-1 0). 47 Virginius's mingling of murder and pity
troubles most medieval authors of the tale. In juxtaposing Lucrece with
Virginia, Gower uses the "other" Roman rape as a lens through which to
see the costs of Lucrece's ideal Roman integrity. In the process, Gower
puts additional pressure on the relation between affective response and
violence-between inner state and public action-makingVirginius's loving
brutality look very close to Appius's tyranny.
On its own, the tale ofLucrece has a long and well-documented afterlife,
not only among Italian humanists but also in the English tradition, includ-
ing most famously Shakespeare. Augustine is the first to call Lucrece's virtue
into question, and thereafter the effects of bodily corruption upon her inner
state receive much exploration-how can she be pure and defiled at the
same time, how can suicide indicate her inner state, and to what extent can
her spirit remain integrated, or pure? Virginia's story on its own has a more
obscure and, in many ways, less consistent history. The drastic differences
among versions have less to do with her inner state, however, and more to
do with crucial dramatic and rhetorical facts: the love and hate of her father,
the degree to which she speaks or acts at all before she dies, the method of
her death (stabbing in Livian versions versus beheading from the Roman de
larose), the degree of pity shown to Appius and his companions, the impor-
tance of the Roman revolt. Such variation implies a degree of discomfort
and unfamiliarity-even alterity-that is built into the tale from the begin-
ning, and indeed such alterity begins with Livy himself. In Livy's effortful
portrayal of the castigating Virginius who nevertheless becomes a figure
demanding pity, and even more, in the marvelous or wondrous sacrifice of
his daughter, the story contains an impulse toward the luridly sacred that
Lucrece's suicide does not convey. Timothy Hampton remarks that in
exemplary discourse," [e]ffective application of past to present is contingent
upon a dialectic between the alterity of the past and the needs of the
community" (Writing From History, 18). In Gower and, especially, Chaucer,
as we shall see in chapter 5, the synthesis of this dialectic is severely inter-
rupted by the exposure of what is irreducible or inapplicable in the Virginia
story. History itself, in these medieval versions, thereby becomes a set of
contingent alterities rather than a patterned teleology-a set of stories with
inadequate moral messages, inapplicable communicative teachings, and
distinctly aesthetic forms of reference.
In his account of the tyranny of Tarquin and his son Aruns (who in this
version commits the rape), Gower allows his readers intimacy with both
Aruns and Lucrece, creating an uneasy set of alignments. When her own
husband brings Aruns to spy on her, Lucrece complains of how she longs
for Collatine, giving the reader (and, simultaneously, the two men) an
illusion of intimate access. This seems to offer unmediated truth, "The
menynge of hire trewe herte" (483 7). After having seen and fallen in love
with her,Aruns goes over her image in his mind, thinking of her facial fea-
tures, her yellow hair, her clothes. Desire pushes him into the figurative
realm, where he sees not her "trewe herte" but her "ymage." At one level,
this is a quintessential exemplary move: the rendering of character as image,
in the sense of a feature extracted from historical context. 48 But Aruns
recognizes beauty at the cost of seeing the full story of Lucrece's virtue,
suggesting that aesthetic pleasure runs the risk of blinding audiences to the
communicative function of an image or a story. Gower's Aruns, labeled
tyrant and animal, is not much interested in Lucrece's virtue. 49 While the
aftereffect of intimacy from her initial speech still lingers, the threat of his
sword renders her speechless, completely passive, "lich a Lomb whanne it is
sesed I In wolves mouth" (4982-83).When he finally carries out the rape,
the illusion of intimacy with Lucrece appears violent: reading is exposed as
a precondition for rape. When she tries to tell her husband and father what
has happened, she is almost inarticulate, showing the consequences of a
violated exemplary system in which her virtue-and hence her didactic
moral function-has broken down. Lucrece chooses to reestablish commu-
nicative function at the expense of her own life, making herself an example
and catalyst of revolution. The story turns, then, on the apparent affirmation
of exemplary significance at the expense of both the aesthetic pleasure of
Lucrece's beauty and, of course, her life.
Gower's Lucrece makes any interpretation based on images look like a
potential failure of integrity. 5° Following Lucrece 's story, the decapitation of
the silent Virginia takes place with a plainness and formality that seem to
quell the threat of aestheticizing intimacy. Yet Virginia's death brings home
the problem with Roman plainness raised in her predecessor. Indeed,
"Lucrece" is an experiment in plainness that prompts a deeply skeptical
version of the Virginia story, in which Virginius's Roman integrity looks as
absolutist as the ideals of Carmidotirus and Lucrece. Yet it would be an
exaggeration to say that the Virginia story explicitly advocates plenitude and
moral flexibility. On the contrary: the story is almost "withouten frounce"
in the rhetorical sense; it is a tale about what happens when integrity is
taken as fixity. Further, even as both these tales of tyrannical desire expose
the costs of suppressing the will, they also evince a profound doubt about
the individual will as a locus of value-it is singular tyrannical desire, after
all, that suppresses the singular will of the tyrant's sexualized subjects.
Whereas Gower's Lucrece eventually expresses herself through suicide,
his Virginia is unreachable, silent, effaced. She neither speaks nor acts;
Appius falls in love with her based on her "fame," what others say about her,
not even on the Ovidian particulars of her facial features or her yellow hair.
Whereas Gower labels the story of Lucrece as among the "olde gestes" of
Rome (4593), he calls Virginia's tale "a wonder thing" (5134), removing it
from the context of historical, political fact into a fictive and vaguely hagio-
graphical arena. Gower also removes many of the repetitive assertions built
into Livy's account, most notably the speeches of Icilius and Virginius in
defense ofVirginius's paternity. Finally, he takes the heroine out of the
public realm, by downplaying the dynamic response of the mob, the grief of
the matrons, and the righteous anger of the revolt.
Gower's most striking critique of Livy resides in his account of the murder
scene itself. When Appius manipulates the court to gain possession of the
maiden, his lechery is so overpowering that he acts "half in wrath the" (5221).
Virginius's response to the outrageous verdict matches the tyrant's fury:
Riht as a Leon in his rage,

Which of no drede set acompte
And not what pite scholde amounte,
A naked swerd he pulleth oute,
The which amonges al the route
He threste thrugh his dowhter side,
And al alowd this word he cride:
"Lo, take hire ther, thou wrongful! king,
For me is levere upon this thing
To be the fader of a Maide,
Thogh sche be ded, than if men saide
That in hir lif sche were schamed
And I therofwere evele named." (7.5240-52)
In answer to Livy's account ofVirginia's death, Gower points out not only
the physical violence her father performs but also his ethical brutality. His
is the only oration Gower retains in direct quotation, and as such it argues
that rhetorical oratory, far from an automatic truth claim, can be an act of
wrath. The father's animal rage recalls a similar image in the previous
story-Aruns waiting through Lucrece's supper "as the Tigre his time
awaiteth I In hope forto cacche his preie" (4945), and later seizing her like
a wolf. Andrew Feldherr points out that, in Livy's account, the moment of
Virginia's death marks a point where "the distinction between man and
beast breaks down" (210) as she becomes "prey" (praeda) to her father's
knife, snatched from the butcher's stall. Gower makes Virginius's animal rage
into metaphor instead of metonymy. When the animal quality becomes
explicitly figurative, the effect is that of indirect discourse: the simile "Riht
as a leon in his rage" is a kind of extranarrative commentary, a near-cliched
comparison chosen by Genius to call attention both to Virginius's moral
state and to the deliberate, even artificial, nature of the meaning he attributes
to that state.
The disjunction between father and daughter, then, creates a misalign-
ment between Virginius and his narrator, who does not endorse his act.
Livy's endorsement emerged most directly when he cited the "naked fact"
(nudum) of Appius's abuse of power, as if the very nakedness of the account

would guarantee its historical authenticity and coherence. The "naked
swerd" with which Gower's Virginius kills his daughter in effect transposes
Livy's nudum from Appius to Virginius, but doesn't work as a guarantee of
coherence. Instead, the naked sword suggests a vaguely incestuous violence
that comes to the fore more strongly still in Jean de Meun and Chaucer.
The language of accounting throughout the death scene further emphasizes the
excessiveness ofVirginius's action, for he fails to set value upon what "drede"
or "pite" ought to amount to-his accounts, that is, do not balance properly.
Such failures of integrity make Virginia's communicative function seem to
arise out of fundamental rifts, not the alignments Livy's account worked so
hard to assert. This is not to say that Gower's Virginia fails to be exemplary at
all, but rather that her exemplary effect depends less upon Livian alignment
among author, character, and historical fact than on violent imaginative leaps
associated with metaphor. If exemplarity relies on such imaginative leaps,
then the historical teleology Livy celebrates looks artificial, and the effect of
examples in the public realm seems instead dependent upon the individual
judgments of characters, narrators, and audiences.
In Livy, Appius's abuse of power resides in his "illegitimate use of the
forms of public authority for the pursuit of private ends" (Feldherr, 204)
and the consequent deformation of familial bonds. For Gower, the com-
monplace analogy between public and domestic leaders focuses attention
on the individual wills of both fathers and kings. Appius's clearly tyrannical
lechery is less problematic in this regard than Virginius's violence. The father
sets no value on fear and pity, which might have kept his sword sheathed.
"Drede," the proper attitude of the subject toward her king, suggests less
about Virginia's state of mind, perhaps, than about the hierarchy that her
father abuses when he uses his superior status to kill her. Whereas Livy's
Virginius upholds Roman public honor in insisting his daughter is not a
slave, Gower's Virginius, in his extreme rage and self-absorption, forgets
both the private and the public necessity of "pite"-that turn of mind that
resists the codifications of justice and therefore depends upon a willed
recognition of the needs of those outside the self. Mter killing his daughter,
he flees through the streets, "Lich to the chaced wylde bor" (5255).
Virginius takes action for the sake of his own honor and "name" at his
daughter's expense: his identity as "fader of a Maide" cancels out her life. Livy
has Virginius reestablish the truth of his paternity by killing his daughter, but
Gower changes Virginius 's concept of paternity itself from outward status to
inner state, from proper public role to possessive and ungoverned desire.
Livy's Virginia is a "nonperson" (Middleton) because of Appius's tyranny,
and his Virginius is constructed as victim and savior of Rome; although he
finds it necessary to defend himself against the charge that he murdered his
child (III.l.6), nevertheless he claims to have acted out of something close

to pity (misericordia). Where Livy emphasizes the opposition between
Virginius and Appius, Gower emphasizes their similarity. But this case of
resemblance or moral alignment, rather than clarifYing the exemplary force
of the characters, serves to expose the alienation of both Appius and
Virginius from their principal subject. Gower's Virginius, like Appius, acts
according to an ungoverned will that overcomes his imaginative capacity
for mercy toward his daughter.
Indeed, like Livy's Appius, Gower's Virginius becomes author of a fic-
tion, albeit a fiction of a rather different character:
And with his swerd droppende ofblod,

The which withinne his douhter stod,
He cam ther as the pouer was
Of Rome, and tolde hem a! the cas, ...
Of this merveile which thei sihe
So apparant tofore here yhe,
Of that the king him hath misbore,
Here othes thei have aile swore
That their wol stonde be the riht. (5265-81)
Appearing before his knights with his bloody sword,Virginius presents his
"cas" to them, but it is the picture of him holding the sword aloft, a mirac-
ulous, iconic figure, that moves the Roman army to see clearly Appius's
tyranny. Virginia's blood is at the center of the translation from particular
live virgin to emblem of general oppression that enables the translation from
injustice to revolt. The syntactic ambiguity of lines 5265-56 ("withinne"
could govern either "blod" or "his dohter") emphasizes the origin of that
blood "withinne" Virginia's violated body, but also hints at a gruesome
metamorphosis that is close to eucharistic: the sword drips with blood that
seems almost to be the substance of a transformed Virginia. "Stod" recalls
the stasis of Livy's "transfigit" and highlights the disjunction between
dripping blood and transfixed girl. 51 The animal metaphors of Virginius's
rage, however cliched, similarly hint at the metamorphic, surrounding the
scene with unrealized transformative possibility that reveals the stubborn
humanity of both father and daughter. Where Livy's Virginius seemed to
believe that he had actually transfigured his daughter, Gower evokes the
brutality of the abortive attempt to do so. In effect, he insists on the pres-
ence of metaphor. Virginia's blood does not literally contain her; but it does
"stand for" her, and the "merveil" is that, dead, she stands for the general
public victimization, a "standing for" that enables revenge. The moment when
Virginius addresses his men, which Livy depicted as authentic rhetorical
action, Gower depicts as a marvel-a moment that suggests a miraculous,
not literal connection between Virginia and revolt-and a moment that

characterizes "merveil" as predicated on violence and disjunction.
The "merveil" ofVirginius's dripping sword requires interpretation. It is
a seductive fiction, a way of inspiring his men to revolt. But it is a far cry
from miracle, not least because of Virginius's questionable virtue. Livy, in
the process of endorsing the historical truth he tells, goes to great lengths to
unifY his story's message. As a result, he conflates the virtue of his characters
with his own authority when he refuses to recount the rhetoric of Appius's
decree. Gower's revision ofVirginius criticizes Livy's effort to purifY his
own and his hero's rhetoric. Although Gower elsewhere advocates the
imitation of Roman virtue associated with "plein trouthe," here he portrays
the Roman revolt as brutal and its public concerns as violent. He insists
that there is a gap between Virginia herself and her blood on the sword,
between the marvel of her death and the resulting revolt. When he implies
that Virginius's "merveil" is instead a metaphor, he exposes Virginius-and
Livy as well-as violently literal. When he portrays Livy's Rome as attached
to factual truth and rhetorical plainness, he portrays his source as failing to
produce adequate political fiction.
In the scene of Virginius rallying his troops, Gower's revision of Livian
narrative strategy comes to political fruition. We have seen how Livy's hero
reaches the mob through direct discourse, responding to Appius's abuse of
the court essentially by taking the court outside and producing his own
rhetorical argument based on the facts of the case instead ofJabula. And we
have seen that Gower eliminates all oratory (or describes it in indirect
quotation) except for Virginius's speech when he kills his daughter. Then,
when Virginius appears before his army, it is not his oratory but the sight of
him, and his corresponding power as witness to tyranny, that inspires the
allegiance of his men; their oaths are part of an imaginative and even picto-
rial effort. By rendering oratory in indirect quotation, and by framing
Virginius as an icon, or more accurately a moving picture, Gower empha-
sizes the contingency of public response to Virginia's death. Further, as the
story reaches its conclusion, the gap between Virginius's act and the revolt is
filled by rumor. Gower's hero produces a picture of the consequences of
tyranny, an image that is translated into a story by an organic process in
which "every man seith what he couthe" (5286) until the narrative of
tyranny reaches the "comun feere" (5290). The public expansion of the
picture into story does not occur as a direct result ofVirginius's oration, but
as a gradual process initiated by his knights' reading of his "merveil" and
developed through the repetitions implied in rumor. Rumor, as the tradi-
tion from Ovid to the House cif Fame attests, is notoriously unreliable
because each time a story is repeated it may be expanded, abbreviated or
otherwise changed. The punishment and replacement ofAppius does finally
take place by "comun conseil of hem alle" (5294), implying that a single
effect arose from political plurality, the essence of common profit. But
rumor, what "men seyn" about Virginia's beauty, also gave rise to Appius's
initial lust. For Gower, the making of exemplary meaning is a mediated and
compromised process, dependent on the imaginative will of a potentially
brutal-or potentially helpless-audience.
In reducing the narrative strategies that help Livy endorse the instru-
mental character ofVirginia's death, Gower calls into question her exem-
plary effect and increases the aesthetic claims of the tale. This does not mean
that Gower jettisons exemplary discourse altogether, but rather, he makes
examples depend for their effect upon readers' reception of misalignments
and metaphors rather than didactic reiterations. In the context of Book 7,
Gower's departures from both his historical source and the Livian norms of
exemplary discourse suggest a degree of skepticism about the capacity of
poetic narrative to be politically instrumental. Indeed, it is tempting to con-
clude that Gower depoliticizes the Virginia exemplum in typically late-
medieval fashion, emphasizing private suffering over common profit, and
thus fragmenting the political reference of the account. In the context of
Book 7, however, poetic narrative emerges as a crucial element of policy.
The problem is that policy then becomes quite mutable, and subject only to
the most indirect forms of political advice-not because the king might
punish insubordinate advisors, but because imaginative activity itself is
politically useful.
The Virginia story shows what happens when policy emerges only out
of private will: the set of analogies between private and public virtue, over-
simplified and misread, serve private will at the expense of common profit.
As the notion of common good itself implies, the line between kingship
and tyranny blurs. Medieval political theorists distinguish tyrants on the
grounds of the mistaken or corrupt idea that the will of the ruled is exactly
aligned with that of the ruler. For Thomas Aquinas, a tyrant is "only one
person who seeks his own advantage from his rule"; he "transforms the
common good of the multitude into his own personal advantage." Brunetto
Latini, a primary source for Book 7, differentiates tyranny from kingship by
means of a rhetorical question, highlighting the troubling nature of the
issue: "What is the difference between a king and a tyrant? They are the
same in fortune and in power but the tyrant commits acts of cruelty by
desire, while a king does not do them without necessity." 52 Tyranny, here,
looks disturbingly close to the necessary application of the king's will. In
Book 7, tyranny also looks very close to the justice that meets out appro-
priate punishment. Appius's abuse of power consists in his excessive and
whimsical enactment of "justice." The tyranny ofVirginius consists in a
similarly excessive justice, one that lacks the imaginative effort of "pite."
Violent misgovernance, then, emerges as a failure of imagination, an attach-

ment to physical expressions of power, and a literalizing interpretation of
political fictions. When Appius brings his personal desire into the public
realm, he tries to close the gap between himself and his subject; he takes lit-
erally the analogy between ruler and ruled, and exploits the fiction that
royal will, by definition, enacts the public or common profit.
Virginius's response to Appius furthers this interpretative error by
misreading a closely related political fiction, the analogy between his king and
himself. As Thomas Aquinas explains, "he who rules a home is called head of
household, not king. Nevertheless, he has a certain resemblance to a king, on
account of which kings are sometimes called the fathers of the people" (102).
The reciprocity of Aquinas's image highlights its metaphorical character:
kings, of course, are not literal fathers of their people. Indeed, the distinction
between king and father is crucial to the tale of Virginia. But when Appius
insists that his own desire encompasses his subjects, Virginius makes the
answering claim that he, too, can encompass his "subject;' Virginia. If Appius
ignores the distinction between his personal advantage and the will of his sub-
jects,Virginius in turn ignores the distinction between his own outrage and
the will of his daughter. Virginius fails to recognize the degree to which his
own action reflects a version of the pitiless destruction ofVirginia thatAppius
himself had threatened. Rather than making a stirring, if brutal, sacrifice to
the public good, Gower's Virginius essentially brings political trouble home.
By shifting the tale away from the public realm in the direction of the
familial, then, Gower calls attention to the unsteadiness of the relations
between public and domestic tyrannies, and between public benefit and
private desire. These relations emerge as necessarily metaphorical: it is the
failure of both Appius and Virginius to recognize the metaphorical status of
political fictions that generates their respective acts of cruelty. For Gower,
the gap between individual desire and public policy must be mediated by
the tools of fiction. Kingship, then, emerges as a process of reading political
fictions, not only the theoretical fictions of the body politic and the com-
mon profit, but also the narrative fictions of his own mirror for princes.
Kingship requires reading of the sort that counselors and poets can provide.
But Genius's concluding moral heavily complicates any clear affirmation of
counsel, much less dialogue, in political affairs. He reinscribes the king's will
as the locus of moral agency, ignoring all the actors except the king himself:
in order to avoid "chastisement," rulers should "eschuie I The lust of vice
and vertue suie" (5305-5306). This moral renders the ruled community
dependent on the very individual virtue that turned so easily into tyranny
within the tale. Common good is dissociated from the relative virtue or vice
of the king, who is here constructed as an isolated individual at risk of a
vague, abstract idea of punishment.
Genius's narratorial function emerges fully here, more explicitly than

during the moments of metaphorical judgment upon Virginius's rage.
Rather than integrate Virginius's actions with the redemptive power of
Roman liberty, Genius appends a thoroughly conventional, aphoristic
moral about monarchical virtue-one that anticipates the starting point of
Lydgate's later, and much curtailed, version of the same story. The resulting
disjunction between story and moral (a frequent effect in the Confessio)
interrupts the story's exemplary efficacy, and further, highlights the diffi-
culty of resolving Hampton's "dialectic between the alterity of the past and
the needs of the community": Genius fails to reconcile the violence of a
past domestic tyrant with the present need for good counsel for kings. As
we shall see, Chaucer's Physician 5 Tale calls far more attention to the story's
narrator, precisely in order to highlight that "alterity" between historical
narrative and the imaginative effort of applying the story to lived life. Both
versions deracinate the story; they detach it from its historically coherent
Livian narrative and make it "applicable" to the present without, however,
providing adequate connective tissue by which the example could attach
itself securely to present-day conduct, either of virgins, fathers, or for that
matter kings.
The last tale in Book 7 has nothing to do with kings at all, but rather
exemplifies chastity in an explicitly miraculous setting: the deaths of seven of
Sarah's husbands whose intentions were not chaste, and finally the survival of
the eighth, Tobias, whom the angel Raphael has taught "hou to ben honeste"
(5359). Tobias, it is worth noting, does not suppress his desire but rather
learns to govern it; in the end he "his wille hadde; I For he his lust so goodly
ladde" (5361-62). The end of Book 7 not only makes entirely private
Gower's construction of chastity, but also therefore throws the notion of
monarchy itself into a rather troubling light. The section on chastity opened
with an emphatic warning to princes not to fall into "riote" with women,
at the risk of their own manhood: here Gower constructed women as dis-
tracting, "misleding" men from affairs of state. The last three exempla of
Book 7 (Lucrece, Virginia, and Sarah) suggest chastity has less to do with
women's status outside the public realm than with the crucial importance
of women-and the domestic in general-as part of the common profit.
But as this qualification emerges, the "comun feere" itself tends to recede
from view.
Gower uses Livy to highlight the price of an exemplary Roman plain-
ness that cannot retain the status of a political or poetic ideal: a plainness
that reduces a set of dynamic human relations to a rhetorical alignment,
diminishes a woman to a static emblem, and limits the notion of truth to an
insistently factual history. Clearly, Roman plain truth is insufficient to
political efficacy. Yet Livy's very presence in turn calls into question the
monarchical fictions Gower's stories seem designed to embrace. Even

though Gower's Virginia story constitutes an argument for and enactment of
imaginative activity in the political realm, both tale and framework simulta-
neously exhibit profound skepticism about the effects of such imaginative
endeavor. Although much of Book 7 suggests that imaginative activity and
political flexibility are defining forces of successful monarchy, and that copi-
ous truths should balance plain truth in the work of governance, the section
on chastity severely undermines this political theory. The Confessio needs
the romance of Book 8 to reestablish the possibility of political virtue aris-
ing out of individual, ethical development. I would suggest that Book 8's
"Apollonius ofTyre," the antique novel about a king who never goes home,
responds explicitly to Book 7's doubts about the consequences of bringing
politics home. Romance is a genre that Frye has argued is a paradigm of fic-
tion itself. 53 The romance of Apollonius subjects the political tensions of
Book 7 to the generative plenitude of imaginative fiction, and in that sense
brings to fruition Gower's defense of poetry.
In the political environment of Gower's writing, the will of the king had
become a particular object of scrutiny as Richard II's arbitrary will was
criticized and actively reformed in 1387-88 and ultimately overpowered in
1399. Generally, Gower has been seen as Ricardian, then Lancastrian, as he
changed the dedication of the Confessio from Richard to Henry in 1393.
Book 7's skepticism about the imaginative work required for exemplary
efficacy suggests a somewhat more equivocal politics. 54 The Confessio's
compiled stories represent kingship as a mutable role; such a vision might
afford a defensive monarch a certain amount of leeway in his personal
development and a certain opportunity for political maturation. It might
also encourage patience and tolerance on the part of a periodically impa-
tient aristocracy. 55 But Gower's political poem also severely tests the king's
capacity to allow, and to effect, his own political transformation.
CHAPTER4
FRAMING NARRATIVE IN
CHAUCERAND LYDGATE
I n returning to Virginia, the present chapter treats her as a touchstone for

understanding the problems of exemplary narration in late medieval English
literature. Exemplary gestures call attention to how narratives can be relevant
to their readers' lived existence. We have seen that far from simply command-
ing obedience, exemplary texts pose the problem of fiction's moral benefits,
and involve readers in the active exploration of moral questions through
particular narratives. The near-stasis of the story ofVirginia would seem to
generate a clear, discrete nugget of truth transferable to readers. As we have
seen in Livy, however, direct discourse blurs the boundary between narrative
and frame; the words of the evil Appius reach beyond his own story, across
Livy's mediating narration, and leak into the perceptions of readers, who might
be seduced by his language. In Gower,Virginius's direct discourse undermines
his moral virtue and the clarity of the story as a whole. In showing how read-
ers generate meaning, Gower, like Livy, blurs the boundary between his own
mediating narration and the story proper. In both situations, direct discourse
calls attention to the contributions of audience to the story's meaning.
For Geoffrey Chaucer, the crossing of such narrative boundaries occurs
throughout the Canterbury Tales, most obviously in the role of Geoffrey him-
self, who is at once observer, interpreter, and participant in the Canterbury
game. Each pilgrim, too, raises an array of questions about the investment of
narrators in the content of their stories; in particular, the narrators of the
Canterbury Tales pose a basic challenge to the supposition that narratives find
their relevance in exemplary application. The mediation of narrators inter-
rupts direct communication, turning over to readers the burden of the story's
moral conclusion or"sentence." Far from asserting any easy analogy between
ideal character and imitative reader, Chaucer's tales tend to focus attention
on what constitutes readerly activity in the first place: "The 'sentence' is in
the action of the reader, not the protagonist, and in reading the Canterbury
Tales we are, like the pilgrims, always in motion" (Middleton, 31). 1 The
process of reading-the interpretive process of being "always in motion"-
constitutes the moral effect of narrative, and the mental activity of the reader
constitutes action in the world. 2 As we shall see, however, this process is cur-
tailed and discouraged by the peculiarly intrusive and unreliable figure of
the physician, who tells the story of Virginia. The Physicians Tale shares
with Gower's Confessio both a consciousness of the high costs of Virginia's
exemplarity-in order to be exemplary she has to die--and a concern with
the contrast between fiction and political history expressed in her story. But
the narrative curtailments of the Physicians Tale differ markedly from Gower's
seamless version. The Physician-narrator adjusts Virginia's meaning to a series
of different, even incoherent, discourses while asserting historical truth as a
guarantee of her consistent and unchanging value. Although the story's effi-
cacy is quickly recuperated by an emotionally inspired Host, the Physician's
narrow moral "sentence" produces serious doubt about how authors might
use narratives to shape readers' judgments.
Whereas Chaucer uses the unreliable narrator to call moral certainties
into question, John Lydgate reasserts their legitimacy. Lydgate has often
been understood as a poor imitator of Chaucer who did not understand his
predecessor. 3 When he responds to the Physicians Tale, however, I argue that
he understands all too well the narrator's struggle to disavow complicity in
the corruption of Appius and the murder of Virginia. Lydgate responds to
Chaucer by embracing Virginius instead of his daughter, aligning himself
with a figure of virtuous discernment and advocating just such discernment
on the part ofhis readers. He lays bare the Chaucerian reticence that under-
girds the Physician's performance, calling to account the Canterbury Tales'
dependence upon unreliable narration by portraying it as an avoidance of
moral commitment. In the process, as we shall see, he also undermines
Gower's gesture toward the precarious but necessary exercise of pity. Ironically,
the result ofLydgate's effort to align himself with the righteous Virginius is
that Virginia, the crux of the story's exemplary value, becomes all the more
irrelevant. Her suffering, enhanced in Gower and Chaucer, is almost com-
pletely erased in Lydgate. This excision curtails the possibilities for audience
response, emphasizing instead the writer's authoritative moral insight. In the
face of his predecessors' treatment of the uncertain efficacy of exemplary
truths, Lydgate reasserts narrative clarity. In the process, he argues that
poetry's obligation is not to raise questions but to sustain moral order.
Chaucer's Physician and the Poetics of Complicity

Chaucer's Physician tells the story of Virginia in Fragment VI of the
Canterbury Tales, preceding the Pardoners Tale. His performance consists of a
FRAMING NARRATIVE 85
disjointed series of summarized discourses, parenthetical interruptions,

fleeting drama, and moments of stern moralism abstracted from the narra-
tive itself. In a preamble that repeatedly asserts Virginia's virtue, the
Physician shifts from one discourse to another, leaving readers to fill in
striking logical gaps. The plot does not get under way until over 100 lines
into a tale that is less than 300 lines long. These irregularities call more
attention to the act of narration than does the more consistent narration of
Gower's Genius. Specifically, the Physician laboriously endorses his own
tale, rendering it exemplary in the most restricted sense. In making the
Physician's moral endorsements so pronounced, Chaucer not only makes
exemplarity appear ineffective but also stages the compensations that
audiences make for such ineffectiveness. A thousand people respond by
thrusting into the courtroom to save Virginius after he has killed his daughter;
the Host responds by calling for an outpouring of pity for Virginia. Both
acts of reception, as we shall see, suggest a very different sort of pity from
the kind that Gower advocated in Book 7 of the Confessio.
The difficulties of fitting teller to tale are the focus of a significant
amount of Chaucer scholarship, of course. 4 The Physician has presented a
particularly hard case for critical efforts to discover relations between a
pilgrim's General Prologue portrait and his Tale, precisely because, although
his narration is intrusive and suggests a "personality," he is not fully realized
as a character with motivations other than those suggested by his narrative
actions (in contrast to, say, the Wife of Bath). His inquiry into authorial
endorsement does not express much about his social status, profession,
or psychology. 5 Instead, the Physician's Tale engages in overt acts of moral
definition--stated endorsements, historical truth-claims, and direct discourse--
that stage an effort to stabilize historical, moral, and political truth. For this
reason, the Physician's narration disavows the very transformations inherent
to plot. 6 But his combination of endorsement and disavowal does not finally
affirm his authority; instead, it creates a rift between his apparent intentions
and the actual demands his tale makes upon audiences. 7 The Tale is a study in
misalignment between narrative strategies and moral framework.
In the first few lines, the Physician cites Livy: "Ther was, as telleth Titus
Livius, I A knyght that called was Virginius" (Vl.1-2). 8 This opening would
seem to identifY the narrative as historical and establish the exemplary status
ofVirginius, who is honorable, worthy, wealthy, and "strong offreendes" (4).
But as soon as Virginia herself is introduced, the narration veers into cos-
mological discourse. The narrator describes Virginia, metaphorically, as an
expression of Nature's pride in her own handiwork: he says Nature has
formed the girl "As though she wolde seyn, 'Lo! I, Nature, I Thus kan I forme
and peynte a creature, I Whan that me list; who kan me countrefete?' "
(11-13). He has Nature claim that Virginia's perfection cannot be copied,
R6 FALSE FABLES AND EXEMPLARY TRUTH
that she reflects an essential natural perfection in the phenomenal world,

and that, since Nature is God's "vicaire general" (20), her ideality also
expresses God's will. The Physician authorizes his narration by associating
his exemplary character with Nature and God.
Yet the Physician's Nature figure is also carefully framed as a figment of
his own narratorial imagination; he concludes her speech by remarking,
"Thus semeth me that Nature wolde seye" (29). This odd disavowal points
toward the narrator's mediating role and suggests that maintaining Virginia's
perfection requires his conceptual effort. Nature's discourse suggests worldly
mutability even as she boasts of her timeless powers, claiming that every-
thing lies in her care "Under the moone, that may wane and waxe" (23).
Following Nature's speech, the Physician continues describing Virginia's
ideal beauty and virtue, but gradually his language veers toward vice.
Though Virginia speaks in no "countrefeted termes," she has often "feyned"
illness in order to avoid the folly of others (51, 62). Indeed, the Physician
says, feasts and revels are perilous, for they make children ripen too early,
and all too soon Virginia will "lerne loore I Ofbooldnesse, whan she woxen
is a wyf" (70-71). This echo of the waxing associated with natural mutability
suggests that, like other natural changes, sexual maturity occurs inevitably
and will eventually compromise Virginia's perfection.Y
It is not only sexual mutability that the Physician's story anticipates but
intertextual transformation. When the Physician stages Nature's boast, he
echoes Nature's confession in Jean de Meun's Roman de laRose, wherein the
things formed and painted by Nature bear a complex relation to human
sexuality. 10 In the allegorical tradition of the Roman, Nature is associated
with procreative sexuality more than virginity. Philosophical allegory,
which the Physician represents as an authoritative source of Virginia's
unchanging exemplary virtue, turns out to point toward the potential
mutability of her virtue. Further, as Wetherbee has shown, this tradition
increasingly places a high value upon the phenomenological world, in turn
elevating human art, specifically poetry, as a source of concrete knowledge
about man and God. The figure of Nature, then, associates the Physician's
exemplary effort with imaginative poetry more than history. As soon as the
Physician's narration raises the possibility that his tale could be framed as
poetic fiction, though, he disavows it by changing tack. Indeed, he does not
even mention Jean de Meun, relying instead upon the transparency of that
initial citation of Livy, the historian "che non erra." 11 The Tale's plot does
not come directly from Livy but is heavily mediated; it owes its structure
and many narrative details to Reason's account of Virginia in the Roman,
which similarly opens by quoting Livy. 12 The Physician's opening, then,
interposes fiction between history and his own tale, and another vernacular
between Latin and English. Jean's vernacular verse allegory has an even
more troubling relation to moral truth than does Livy's Latin prose.
Claiming historical facticity becomes part of the Physician's effort to
endorse stable moral virtue, but his tale is structured by a pattern of evoking,
but disavowing, the fictive cosmology of the Roman de la Rose.
As soon as the narrator has hypothesized Virginia's imminent growth into
wifehood, his preamble changes course dramatically. He shifts to conduct-
book moralism, enjoining parents and governesses to look after their wards:
And ye maistresses, in youre olde lyf,

That lordes doghtres han in governaunce,
Ne taketh of my wordes no displesaunce .
. . . .Looke wei that ye unto no vice assente,
Lest ye be dampned for youre wikke entente;
For whoso doth, a traitor is, certeyn. (72-89)
The risk of vice gives rise to strict regulation of children by authority

figures. The logic of this injunction reestablishes the exemplary authority of
both the Physician and his imagined audience of "maistresses," by reframing
the narrative in new moral terms. The narrator calls attention to this
framing activity when he urges his audience not to take offense at his
admonishment. Those who have lords' daughters under their care should
themselves admit no vice; the implication here is that, if daughters were to
behave wickedly, then the "wikke entente" of their guardians would be the
cause. 13 Blaming governesses retains an image of the daughters themselves
as innocent, even as their innocence is continually under threat. And advo-
cating sternness surely suggests a vantage point from which to endorse,
later,Virginius's radical refusal to "assent" to vice. But the Physician's partic-
ular focus upon authoritative assent to vice places further pressure upon his
own exemplary intentions. For, if authority figures are to blame for the mis-
conduct of their wards, then authors may be to blame for the development
of their characters, the progress of their plots, and the responses of their
readers, as well.
On the heels of the natural "loore ofboldnesse," the Physician's conduct-
book morality seems to propose a stable moral system upheld by governesses.
But that moral system, like the previous cosmological system, rapidly
reaches the brink of collapse. The narrator addresses the governesses as good
teachers either because they have led chaste lives or because they "knowen
wei ynough the olde daunce" (80); he even goes so far as to imagine that
they might resemble poachers, who know how to "kepe a forest" better
than anyone because of their experience mis-keeping it. But this gesture
toward the educational value of vice complicates the endorsement of virgin
innocence that is the ostensible goal of the passage. Sin is "olde crafte" (83);
sexual experience is the "olde daunce" (79). The antiquity of such learning
implies its familiarity and its inevitable repetition. Indeed, the Physician's
repeated warnings against providing bad examples and neglecting proper
punishment register the degree to which his conduct-book discourse
represents innocence as continually under threat. Like the Knight of La
Tour Landry, whose struggle with authority we explored in chapter 2, the
Physician confronts the ways in which the presence of "disgarnysshed"
readers makes authority figures into agents of corruption.
The radical shifts in the first hundred lines of the Physician 5 Tale reveal
how the narrator repeatedly confronts the limits of endorsement. In the act
of moving to each new discourse, the narrator reasserts Virginia's stable
beauty and virtue, only to have her become compromised in the very
process of being praised. His deflective shift away from cosmology, toward
conduct literature, suggests that natural waxing should have no place in his
moral system; but sexual maturity and the old dance encroach upon her. 14
The Physician's introductory narration lays bare the effort required to
maintain Virginia's unchanging ideality, behind which lies the premise that
exemplary truth is based on the character's stability. By the time the narra-
tive proper begins, then, the narrator's attempts to endorse his character's
stable virtue have taken center stage. To a degree, plot itself (the transforma-
tion of character in time) counteracts this effort. But the Physician's central
mediating activity also destabilizes the exemplary moralism of the narrative,
not only in overt truth-claims embedded in the story, but also in the use of
direct and indirect discourse in the death scene and after it.
Before the climax of the story, the narrator's mediation is perhaps most
obvious in his frank effort to associate the narrative with historical truth and
to disavow fiction. In Livy's version, we saw how the narrator undermined
the truth of Appius's rhetorical claim by rendering the decemvir's speech
consistently in indirect discourse and identifYing his direct speech as fabula.
In the Physician 5 Tale, although Virginius is named in the Tale's opening
lines, Appius is called only "justice" and" govern our" for the first half of the
story. The narrator distances himself from Appius by simply refusing to
name him until he engineers the plot with his hireling:
Whan shapen was a! hire conspiracie

Fro point to point, how that his lecherie
Parfourned sholde been ful subtilly, ....
This false juge, that highte Apius,
(So was his name, for this is no fable
But knowen for historial thyng notable;
The sentence of it sooth is, out of doute),
This false juge gooth now faste aboute
To hasten his delit a! that he may. (149-59)
FRAMING NARRATIVE R9
This passage at first assumes Appius's name is an instrument of vice, but then
the Physician's aside carefully separates Appius's deeds from the "sentence"
of the story. The use of"fable" echoes Livy's use ofjabula (xliv.9) to refer
to the conspiracy. In both texts, the word separates the truthful narrator
from the false character by associating the narrator with historical fact and
the character with fiction. 15 The Physician's Appius (like Livy's Appius)
becomes a fiction-maker. His love for Virginia is a "tale" (142) he tells his
churl; the rigging of the court requires plotting, which is figured as shaping
(149) and performance (151). These artifices are engines of change; they
bring about unpredictable and indeed illegal actions that compromise the
steady virtue ofVirginia. Disavowing artifice, the aside claims history and
disavows fiction,just as the opening lines of the Tale claim Livy and suppress
the fictive Roman de Ia Rose.
The narrator's assertion of the facticity of the case assumes that known
historical facts should be cited in the service of moral meaning, and indeed,
that true "sentence" and true facts are more stable than fabulous plotting.
Historical things are already established, "knowen," unchanging and
unchangeable; they are not of the narrator's making. The story's meaning will
emerge, it seems, despite the passing inclusion of vicious characters, whose
hasty actions are implicitly subordinate to the true and stable "sentence."The
Physician's parenthesis disavows any agency in creating "sentence," in order
to endorse instead Virginia's exemplary honor and her father's method of
upholding it. Historical facticity apparently helps guarantee the coherent
moral logic of the story's events and implies not only Virginia's unchanging
virtue but the transhistorical value of that virtue. 16
But the Physician's aside, of course, calls attention to his rhetorical inter-
vention. Moreover, his appeal to "historial thyng notable," precisely because
it imitates Livy, points to an essential difference between the Roman historian
and the medieval storyteller. For Livy, historical narrative helped establish the
development of a coherent political system from Rome's foundations to the
pax Romana. The Physician's historical truth claim, on the other hand, is
unconnected to a foundational narrative. He makes history itself look like a
collection of decontextualized famous or "notable" things rather than a
Livian account of historical causation. In disclaiming any connection to
fabula, or even to the shaping of an ordered narrative, the Physician creates
a narrative no-man's-land (neither fabulous nor historically coherent in
Livy's sense) where the contingencies of time and point of view are supposedly
irrelevant to "historial thyng notable." In actuality, the very defensiveness of
the aside serves to point out the presence of both time and point of view,
calling attention once again to the Physician's mediating presence. In citing
the Roman historian initially, and in echoing him here, the Physician's very
effort to link Livy and his own tale points to the alterity of the case. As we
shall see, his narrative ends up suggesting that perhaps changes over time-
and, indeed, changeable fabula itself-have, in fact, modified the "sentence"
of the tale.
As the story continues, however, the Physician's effort to control narra-
tive transformation comes to resemble the possessive control of Appius. The
word "sentence" appears throughout the court scene, in the mouths of
Appius and his churl. The churl's false claim to Virginia is introduced and
concluded as "the sentence of his bille" (177, 190) and the judgment of
Appius is called his "sentence" (204). In these instances, of course, the
word's semantic range shifts, from indicating the res or underlying meaning
of the story as a whole, to identifYing the gist of the churl's plea, to denoting
Appius's corrupt judicial decisionY In such close proximity, the repetition
of the word clouds the Physician's moral intentions; if Appius's sentence is a
false judgment, then retrospectively, the truthful "sentence" of the narrator's
"historial thyng" also comes under question. Rather than a timeless exem-
plary moral, the Physician's "sentence" begins to look like a judgment-not
only a potentially untrue judgment but, more important, a self-interested
one. Again, the Physician's interests are not, to my mind, explicable according
to his professional or characterological investments. Indeed, his interests are
abstract and narratological; his narration seeks to display the moral virtue of
his storytelling.
However categorically he denounces Appius, then, the Physician also
evokes an analogy between his own role and that of the false judge. Both are
readers ofVirginia's perfection; both recognize her moral integrity; both
want to appropriate her, one sexually and one narratologically.As in Gower,
here too Appius's desire is essentially portrayed as tyrannical. His secrecy
suggests that he privileges his own private and isolated will over the com-
mon good. But unlike Gower, Chaucer is staging an act of narration that
implicates his narrator in acts of control that resemble Appius's coercion. As
this controlling effort unfolds, the choices for audience response begin to
diminish; the successive disavowals of each interpretive framework take
away conceptual frameworks for understanding. Moreover, the Physician's
display of moral desire suggests that the desire for exemplary meaning itself
has unsavory consequences. His succession of endorsements and disavowals-
of Nature, of conduct-book morality, of the shaping or ordering of
history-make any effort to promulgate morals via stories look uncomfort-
ably like tyranny. Well before the climax of the story, readers are put in the
awkward position of calling into question the nature of moral investment in
narrative. In creating a narrator whose endorsements are so rigid that even
he does not sustain them, Chaucer seems to prevent readers from either
endorsing or condemning the story's events with any clarity, but does not
offer an alternative method of interpretation. 18 This puts the problem more

strongly than Middleton, who finally embraces the way in which the
Physician 5 Tale turns over responsibility to the reader ("Love's Martyrs," 31).
In another context, Elizabeth Salter argues that Chaucer abandons his read-
ers to their own moral devices; this "feeling of 'abandonment' " can have
morally productive consequences, but here, the consistent negation of
moral effort implies an authorial absence that leaves audiences with inade-
quate interpretive methods. 19 The absence of a governing poetic ethos has
important consequences, as we shall see, not just for the meaning of the
exemplum but also for the viability of exemplary storytelling and, indeed,
for the possibility of moral response.
In the climax of the story, rendered as dialogue between Virginius and his
daughter, the father is tormented by grief and the daughter undergoes a
process of acceptance. Unqualified by narratorial disavowal, the direct
discourse here seems at first to justifY the plot, in particular the anguished
actions of the virtuous characters.As in Livy, the implicit fantasy here is that
direct discourse is the clearest, least mediated instrument of moral truth.
We might expect that having Virginius explain his tormented state of mind
would mitigate any blame for his violence, and even aggrandize his act.
Though his decision to kill his daughter has already been made even before
the scene is enacted (Middleton, "Love's Martyrs," 21),Virginius's suffering
seems designed, at least to an extent, to offset or deflect the force with
which he imposes this decision upon her. But actually, as in Gower,
Virginius too looks remarkably similar to Appius. After Appius pronounces
judgment,Virginius goes home from the courtroom and sets himself in his
hall, summoning his daughter just as Appius summoned him. In naming her
for the first time as he addresses her ("Doghter, ... Virginia, by thy name,"
[213]), he renders her an instrument of his own social self-assertion and
affective torment. Of course, even as he controls her by naming her, he
makes us aware that his name derives from hers. Indeed, Virginia is the
source of her father's joy and sorrow, "my last wo, I And in my lyf my
laste joye also" (221-22). Finally, like Appius, Virginius too pronounces
judgment: "0 gemme of chastitee, in pacience I Take thou thy deeth, for
this is my sentence" (223-24).
The Physician's Virginius carries out "at hom" what is, in Livy and
Gower, the account's most public moment. The peculiar intimacy of the
father-daughter scene calls attention to the father's exercise of control. His
grief both anticipates and obviates his daughter's: "And with a face deed as
asshen colde I Upon hir humble face he gan biholde" (209-10). This
mirroring moment implies that her face will take on the deathly look of
his, almost as though his physiognomy had the power of command, even
though she is the one who will actually die. The scene as a whole suggests
some of the ingredients of incest: the isolation of the daughter at home, the
absence of the mother (mentioned in line 5 and never referred to again),
and the embattled, isolated suffering of the father. Though both father and
daughter are "strong of freendes" (4, 135), the climactic scene presupposes
the absence of any further social recourse. Because of this suggestion of
incestuous isolation, the scene's appeal to emotion does not simply justifY
Virginius's action. The Physician's affective drama, like his Roman-derived
cosmological imagining and his conduct-book didacticism, veers away
from simple endorsement ofVirginia's death. Instead, the scene destabilizes
further the already troubled relation between the story's "sentence" and the
moral virtue that the Physician works so hard to convey.
The hint of incest here is actually an extension of the Roman de la Rose,
where Virginius kills his daughter "through love and without any hatred"
("par amour sans haine," Lecoy 5605; Dahlberg 114). 20 The Physician's
Virginius picks up this line and extends it:
"Take thou thy deeth, for this is my sentence:

For love and nat for hate, thou most be deed;
My pitous hand moot smyten of thyn heed." (223-25)
The quotation of Jean de Meun accomplishes several effects. By avoiding

agency in "for love and nat for hate," Virginius raises the question of
whether it is Appius's love or Virginius's love that necessitates the girl's
death. By projecting the violence onto "My pitous hand," he suggests,
rather than a simple reluctance to kill his own daughter, a reluctance to
admit that he will bear the responsibility for her death. By juxtaposing pity
and smiting, the passage emphasizes even more than Gower the radical
dissonance between the father's expressions oflove and his act of violence.
The father's torment at the prospect of having to kill his daughter represents
a denial of the very authoritarian agency that he will assert.
This emergence of the suppressed Roman also brings to light a crucial
juxtaposition of historical and fabulous sources. In the Roman, the moment
when Virginius kills his daughter "through love and without any hatred" is
prefaced by a truth-claim: ''ifTitus Livius doesn't lie ..." (Dahlberg, 114).
The truth-claim actually marks the beheading ofVirginia, which is the
Roman's principal deviation from Livy. The conditional assertion that Livy
might be lying calls attention to the fictive status of the Roman's version.
When the Physician's Virginius quotes this moment, he points toward the
fact that his own version relies upon fabula instead of the Livian "historial
thyng." We are reminded that, in the Physicians Tale, "historial thyng" is
mediated not only by the Physician's earnest narration but also by Jean de
Meun's fiction, and by Jean's fictionalizing citations ofLivy. Historical fact,
which the Physician suggested ought to guarantee moral truth, here

becomes fiction in the very moment of greatest moral challenge, the killing
ofVirginia. In particular, Virginius's paternal pity-killing his daughter for
love and not for hate-comes to seem a fabrication invoked in order to
preserve familial and political hierarchy. IfVirginius's pity is part of Jean's
(or Livy's) lie, then the Physician's narration of the death scene, ostensibly
designed to evoke sympathy for the conflicted hero and heroine, instead
looks like an emotional artifice designed to mystifY Virginius 's violence.
The Physician's use of direct discourse, then, does not affirm the moral
virtue ofVirginius's "pitous" sternness in preserving his daughter's virginity.
Instead, Virginius 's protestations oflove reveal his authoritarian violence. At
the same time, more than any other version, the Physician 5 Tale suggests a
modicum of resistance on the daughter's part. The Physician 5 Tale is the only
version in which Virginia speaks at all. Although Virginia ultimately acqui-
esces to her fate, she begs for time to complain like Jephthah's daughter,
who similarly died sinless. 21 To be sure, she awakes from a very brief swoon
with gratitude that she will die a maid, and begs her father, "Dooth with
youre child youre wyl, a Goddes name!" (250). This emphasis upon the
father's will continues in the narration, as he kills her "with ful sorweful
herte and wil" (254). The process by which the daughter acquiesces high-
lights the limited responses available to her: her swooning "complaint"
emphasizes the finality of her father's already-pronounced "sentence" and
the ultimate governance of his parental will.
Nevertheless,Virginia's direct speech has made her acquiescence appear
less inevitable than her utter silence in other versions; her swoon, and even
the odd rapidity with which she conforms to her father's judgment, render
her obedience artificial rather than inevitable. The pause between his com-
mand and her acquiescence, that is, gestures toward the possibility that her
conduct exceeds the exemplary ideal. Her protest-"Is ther no grace? Is
ther no remedye?" (236)-enhances her victimization and the scene's
appeal to pity. Still, the scene does not linger on her suffering martyrdom;
the call to pity is brief, her death is quick, and her father immediately takes
up her head by the hair, moving the action rapidly away from Virginia's
suffering and the suggestion of sacrifice that hovers behind her death:
Hir fader, with ful sorweful herte and wil,

Hir heed of smoot, and by the top it hente,
And to the juge he gan it to presente. (254-56)
Within a sentence, Virginia is killed and her head presented in court. The
brevity of the beheading renders her complaint a gesture rather than a
sustained act of suffering. Because the tale's climactic scene evokes but cuts
short the possibility of affective response, it calls attention to the ways in

which pity mystifies and seems to excuse violence. Pity, that is, emerges as
yet another inadequate moral framework for interpreting the event.
Nevertheless, the remainder of the Physician's Tale relies upon a succes-
sion of appeals to pity. After killing her, Virginius presents his daughter's
head to Appius in court, a gruesome mockery of the judge's "sentence."The
judge thereupon bids that Virginius be hanged,
But right anon a thousand peple in thraste,

To save the knyght, for routhe and for pi tee,
For knowen was the false iniquitee.
The peple anon had suspect in this thyng,
By manere of the cherles chalangyng,
That it was by the assent of Apius;
They wisten wei that he was lecherus. (260-66)
The "thousand peple" thrust into the courtroom in an act of"routhe" that
implies endorsement: seeing the churl's corruption and Appius's lechery,
they support Virginius's action. They identifY the judge as a conspirator,
aided not only by the churl but also by a vaguely governmental body, "[t]he
remenant" who "were consentant of this cursednesse" (275-76). They
reestablish justice, casting Appius into prison and condemning the churl to
hang. The thousand people apparently reestablish the tale's exemplary focus
by clarifYing the evil of Appius and the pitiable circumstances ofVirginius.
But the emphasis upon the thousand people's knowledge-the judge's
"fals iniquitee;' apparently, is well "knowen"-calls attention to their
absence earlier in the tale. If the thousand people knew that Appius was
lecherous but allowed Virginia to be killed, then there is a fine line between
reformers and those "consentant of this cursedness." The reformers seem to
have been complicit with Appius's deception earlier in the tale. Indeed, the
thousand people thrusting into the courtroom are as vaguely characterized
as the conspiring "remenant" who consented to Appius's actions; neither
group displays determinate authority. Even when the thousand people
finally thrust in, they constitute no defined governmental or civic body;
they do not even spread vague rumors among the "comoun feere" as in
Gower; their pity and ruth are not a matter of policy. In Livy, Virginia's
death led to public revolt and reestablishment of tribunal government; she
was an example of Roman suffering under tyranny and hence prompted a
revolt against it. In the Physician's Tale, there is no public revolt, only the
hanging of the tyrant's supporters. Even this punishment does not suggest
"common profit" but rather has the contingent character of private
vengeance. Like the rumor-mongering in Gower, the courtroom revolt
does not bring to fruition the general efficacy ofVirginia's death, but calls
into question her usefulness as example of Rome's suffering and as catalyst

for political transformation.
Chaucer differs from Gower in that the delay of the thousand people sug-
gests not simply political hesitation, but the profound failure to locate and
accept agency that permeates the logic of the tale as a whole. Paradoxically,
the Physician's effortful and even coercive narration, designed to display
clear and stable moral virtue, produces instead a series of moral dead-ends
that make the narrative a political dead-end as well. In this sense the
Physician's performance discourages exemplary "sentence" altogether. In
another textual situation, such a limited act of narration might call for the
exercise of judgment with which, as we saw in Gower, audiences are often
called upon to respond to exemplary claims. But the Physicians Tale stages an
experiment in what happens when the imaginative activity of Gower's
version-and even the imaginative activity that could be encouraged by the
cosmological source of the tale itself-is curtailed. In other words, the
much-remarked failure of the Physicians Tale is the consequence of how
exemplary moralization restricts moral and hence imaginative judgment.
Disjunctive narration need not necessarily create such an impasse. The
Physicians Tale shares with the Clerks Tale an essential skepticism about the
extent to which endorsing virtue provides an adequate model for interpre-
tation. But the Physician's performance presents a thematically and func-
tionally impoverished narrative, in which any assignment of meaning looks
excessive. 22 The difference lies partly in the brevity of the account. But it
also lies in the peculiarly defensive mode of narration, which intrudes so
heavily that it interrupts the tie between author and audience. The audi-
ence, I have suggested, if encouraged to be Middleton's active reader, is
finally left without adequate tools for interpretation. The author-that
ever-inaccessible shaping intention with which so many readers of Chaucer
create a genial community-has receded almost completely. Through the
consistent breakdown of the Physician's moral claims, the tale stages an
exploration of moral and political reticence.
Chaucer's reticence in a slightly different sense has often been noted: his
poetry contains remarkably little in the way of political reference or com-
ment. Pearsall remarks that Chaucer "exhibits scarcely a sign of any direct
response to the political and social movements of his day" and refers to the
"deflective and evasive strategies" of his work. 23 In contrast to Gower,
Chaucer does not offer advice to princes, much less a jeremiad against the
Rising of 1381 or other political problems. This does not mean Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales exhibits no interest in social or political conflict. On the
contrary, Strohm argues persuasively that, although the Canterbury Tales may
not refer directly to the political realities of Chaucer's world, the poem
contains an alternative realm wherein conflict is expressed; he regards this
alternative world as providing the possibility for "socially constructive

resolution" (Social Chaucer, 172). 24 This is an essentially optimistic analysis of
the Canterbury Tales and indeed of the possibility for fictional universes to
provide a relatively safe arena in which to explore the challenges of social
and political change. In this reading, the stylistic variety of the Canterbury
Tales provides a figure for social variety and can stage conflict and resolution
among various social groups. The Physician's Tale, however, seems designed
to explore the costs of this modus operandi. Certainly, the Physician's series of
direct endorsements do not resolve the social problems raised within the
tale. Instead, stylistic variety-the succession of different discourses that
frame the narrative-undermines the creation of significance. The
Physician's narration both fragments the community depicted within the
tale, and undermines the function of the tale within the Canterbury com-
munity. The only alternative provided are the pity and ruth of the thousand
people and the Host, which are characterized as local, arbitrary, and even (in
Virginius's case) potentially brutal. The Physician's Tale produces the acute
sense that a governing poetic ethos is absent. The risk of that absence lies in
a deeper authorial disavowal of responsibility, even obligation, to make and
stand by a statement.
It is in this absence of agency that Chaucer differs most from Gower. Just
as there is no sure way to know whether Chaucer read Livy, there is also no
way to know whether he read Gower's version of this tale before writing his
own; that is, there is no way to tell whose version came first. 25 Nevertheless,
it is nearly impossible not to read the two fourteenth-century texts in
dialogue with one another. When Chaucer calls into question the story's
accomplishment of public reform, his version of the story resembles Gower's,
wherein the problem with the political system is characterized as one of
personal judgment, individual "sentence" as it were. But Chaucer's tale lacks
the context of political theory that encourages readers of Gower to regard
individual will as a coherent and educable locus of political morality. Instead,
Chaucer provides a context defined by the fits and starts of the Physician's
overbearing narration, wherein no one moral claim seems tenable; each moral
framework is disavowed as it becomes linked to either sexual corruption,
narrative literalism, or political coercion. As we have seen, Gower's narrative
ultimately suggests the importance of poetic fictions in creating moral mean-
ing. But Chaucer's Physician's Tale suggests only the inefficacy of its narrator's
exemplary aspirations, which are defined by a refusal offabula and a disavowal
of his own principal source. The Physician's disavowal of fiction cancels
exactly that realm of readerly initiative that Gower explored in the Confessio.
The irony of the tale is that, even though the Physician prevents the readerly
initiative that Gower associated with aesthetic perception, the tale does not
produce moral clarity either. Instead, it reveals a vacuum that underlies
Chaucer's tolerance of political and social variety throughout the Tales. In the
General Prologue, of course, the narrator claims to be offering us mere
reportage: "Whoso shal telle a tale after a man, I He moot reherce as ny as
evere he kan I Everich a word .. ./ Or ellis he moot telle his tale untrewe, I
Or feyne thyng, or fYnde wordes newe" (1.731-36). While embracing the
social variety of his pilgrims, this disclaimer also pretends that feigning and
invention (the finding of new words) do not mediate the representation of
social variety. Of course, the very act of disclaiming calls attention to
Chaucer's mediating effects; more to the point here, though, the act also dis-
locates Chaucer's agency in representing the pilgrims-not only their differ-
ing social states, but their various moral states as well. The problem oflocating
stable grounds for judgment of character remains one of the central problems
in the Canterbury Tales. In the Physician's Tale, when the concluding action
opens out into the quasi-public realm, the dislocation of moral rectitude
becomes particularly problematic. If the possibility for any identifiable moral
response seems attenuated, then the possibility for political benefit or
"common profit" seems even more distant. Indeed, the Physician's Tale
ultimately gives rise to the most radical communal break in the Canterbury
Tales, the argument between the Pardoner and the Host.
At the conclusion of the tale, the narrator's moral claims grow increas-
ingly attenuated, while affect comes increasingly to the fore as an interpre-
tive tool and cause for action. After Virginius shows pity in killing his
daughter, the thousand people show pity for Virginius and rescue him; in
turn, Virginius shows pity and urges the community to spare the judge's
churl from hanging. Pity is even more crucial to the tale's concluding
framework. The Physician's moral message suggests the degree to which
determinate conclusions have been undermined: essentially, he admonishes
his audience to beware the punishments of God even against the most
"pryvee" sin (281) and to "Forsaketh synne, er synne yow forsake" (286).
This message could hardly be more general; its chiastic structure suggests an
enclosed, inapplicable threat that offers little in the way of amelioration. 26
In spite of this ending, or perhaps because of it, the Host responds with
overwhelming pity:
"Algate this sely mayde is slayn, alias!

Allas, to deere boughte she beautee!. ..
Allas, so pitously as she was slayn!
... But trewely, myn owene maister deere,
This is a pitous tale for to heere.
I pray to God so save thy gentil cors ...." (292-304)
This reaction describes the tale as an affective success, not an exemplary

failure. The Host's emotive reception seems to fill in what is missing in the
Physician's framework. Indeed, his effort to thrust in and claim sympathy

seems, in the context of the Physician's rigid moralizing, misplaced and
even potentially ridiculous. 27
This display of affect is, I believe, a crux of ethical argument between
Chaucer and Gower. I have elsewhere argued that Chaucer called Gower to
account for his stylistic seamlessness, which makes sense too readily of
narrative and moral problems. 28 Here I believe the argument between them
is more particularly political. In their versions of the Virginia story, the two
authors enact an argument about the capacity of pity to provide political
coherence and shape good government. In Gower's version,Virginius's stab-
bing of his daughter takes place in rage and lacks the imaginative range of
pity-a crucial element of virtuous political conduct-but the tale is
designed to call for the very pity that Virginius lacks. In Chaucer's version,
Virginius is full of pity; his compassion mystifies the assertion of paternal
authority at the heart of his violence. By the end of the Physician's perfor-
mance, pity has come to seem like a convenient fiction rather than a worthy
political principle. Chaucer would seem to be far less sanguine than his
contemporary about the political ramifications of"pitee and ... routhe."
Yet the Host's response is, in another way, exactly what the Physician 5 Tale
calls for. The alternative offered by the tale's embedded narrator-moral
endorsement and disavowal-does not offer stable meaning; the alternative
suggested by its implied author-reticence linked to complicity-fails even
more markedly to make Virginia's death significant. The Physician's many
deflections have left logical and moral gaps into which the Host pours
feeling, offering an illusion of meaning where the text has given only
incomplete modes of interpretation. His florid response construes pity itself
as an emotion of emptiness, a gap-filler, a substitutive, vicarious response.
This differs from Theseus's "pi tee renneth soone in gentil herte" (1.17 61),
where pity as a point of policy enables human community. But the Host's
pity can be seen as an imaginative attempt to preserve human community
in the face of a profoundly uncommunicative tale-a tale whose frag-
mented and conflicting discourse points to a lack of shared values not only
within the narrative but also in the world of the Canterbury community. In
this sense, Chaucer seems to agree with Gower about the crucial role of
compassion in affirming social attachments, even if, in this instance, they
come to seem radically contingent. To locate such pity in the audience-an
audience imagined not as a prince but as a tavern-keeper-renders social
attachments not only more artificial but more happenstance than Gower's
more highly structured Conjessio generally does. The Physician's Tale is fol-
lowed by the aggressively anti communal Pardoners Tale. Fragment VI as a
whole seems designed to lay bare the deeply contingent character of human
attachments, and of the shared moral suppositions that ostensibly uphold
them. The Host's apparently exaggerated pity offers at least a socially cohesive
method of interpretation. He claims to understand Virginia's death, if not as
a rational exemplum then as an affective experience-however ill-matched
his affect may appear to be to the end of the Physician 5 Tale.
The Host's outpouring of pity, then, provides social glue by making the
failed exemplum into a kind ofRoman saint's life. As he moves on to intro-
duce the Pardoners Tale, the Host seems to assume that his display has
accomplished its goal, and that the community is now prepared to hear
entertainment from the next pilgrim. The pilgrims overrule him, however.
Indeed, arguably, the end of the Physician 5 Tale makes the pilgrims all the
more insistent upon hearing "som moral thyng" from the Pardoner. When
the pilgrims lodge this request, they register just how much the Physician
has unraveled his own "moral thyng."The Host's pity appears inadequate to
fill the Physician's moral gaps. Later, at the conclusion of the Fragment-
and perhaps because of his focus on emotions that gloss over moral prob-
lems in order to rescue communal goodwill-the Host becomes the special
recipient of the Pardoner's malice. In spite of Harry Bailly's affective efforts
and the pilgrims' desire for "som moral thyng," the unsettling absence of
human community in the Physician 5 Tale as a whole sets the stage for the
Pardoner's performance. There, as we shall see in chapter 5, the breakdown
in communication is predicated, ironically, on an exemplum replete with
significance and applicability.
Lydgate's Appius and the Poetics of Slander

For John Lydgate, the unsettling gaps uncovered by the Physician's narra-
tion must be closed. Lydgate tells the story of Virginia twice in the Fall of
Princes (II.1345-1407 and III.3011-3115). In contrast to his English prede-
cessors, Lydgate avoids almost entirely the father's troubling combination of
love and violence, curtailing the story so drastically that Virginia herself
virtually disappears. He frames his first account with an elaborate bow to
Chaucer and echoes several Chaucerian lines; he frames the second account
as a reiteration and submission to his source, Boccaccio, but echoes con-
cerns from Gower. In both, Lydgate stresses the falsehood of Appius and the
virtue ofVirginius, in order to bolster his authorial good intentions and also,
more important, to advocate narrative transparency-an unmediated, reliable
narrative endorsement that stabilizes the desperate oscillations of Chaucer's
Physician and the unpredictable political fiction-making of Gower.
More than any other author we have explored, Lydgate carries out the
essential fantasy of exemplarity, the correspondence between authorial
intention and audience reception. His Fall of Princes is a 36,000-line com-
pendium of stories, biblical and classical, in a loosely structured mirror for
princes derived ultimately from Boccaccio's De casibus illustrium virorum.

Commissioned by Duke Humphrey in the 1430s, the work bows to the will
of Lydgate's patron, as well as to the authority of"Bochas." 29 The vocabu-
lary of submission suggests a series of carefully maintained alignments-
among Duke Humphrey's intentions, Boccaccio's text, and Lydgate's
translation-brought about by loyalty and obedience that extend, implicitly,
to readers. In the course of the Fall of Princes, these alignments can become
upset, as in the Prologue to Book 3 when Humphrey clearly has not paid
Lydgate what he needs (Hammond, "Poet and Patron," 122-23), or at the
end of Book I when Lydgate criticizes Boccaccio's antifeminism
(1.6644-6706). Occasionally intertextual gestures open gaps between
Lydgate and his sources; Lydgate's Boccaccio comes through Laurent de
Premierfait's French translation, Des cas des nobles hommes et femmes, which
usually disappears but can interrupt the fantasy of direct transmission?0
Lydgate's primary innovation is in three- or four-stanza "Envoys" requested
by Duke Humphrey, each of which draws a single moral from several
narratives arranged in chapter-groups. But unlike the Latin headnotes in the
Confessio Amantis, which stress disagreement between moral and tale,
Lydgate's Envoys subsume the specific to the general, decrying deceit or
insisting upon the justice of the inevitable downfalls of great men. His
additions unity author, source, and audience: various characters and histo-
ries are all attributed to the good intentions shared between sources and the
present authorY
Lydgate emphasizes the responsibility of authority to reconcile tensions
and clarity moral intentions in poetic form. 32 In his world, political history
is a "contingent and entropic force," where individual cases demonstrate the
variety of downfalls available to men, without a sense of political progress
over time. 33 This iterativity serves at once to admit diversity and to gather
individual stories, however loosely. Examples, for Lydgate, are designed
"to shewe Fortunys variaunce, I That othre myhte as in a merour see I In
worldly worshepe may be no surete" (1.54-56). The tension between
specific instance and general truth that is a hallmark of the exemplary mode
is hereby both resolved and explained: what authors show through the
exemplary mirror is the historically reiterated pattern of uncertainty that
defines worldly experience. As a result, the poem downplays the dynamic
tension between authority and unpredictable audience which characterizes
late medieval exemplarity. Thus in his accounts ofVirginia, it might seem
that Lydgate merely simplifies his predecessors by glossing over their ques-
tions about the violence of exemplarity. Yet his imposition of moral order
constitutes an astute reading ofboth Chaucer and Gower. He rejects what
he codes as hidden, or false, in Gower's and especially Chaucer's methods of
narration. With many recent scholars, I differ with the assessment that
"Lydgate's Chaucer is not our Chaucer" (Pearsall,John Lydgate, 64). Like

"us" modern critics, Lydgate depicts Chaucer's narrative structure as
disjunctive and his narrator as unreliable; he registers the questions raised in
Chaucer's Physician 5 Tale and in Gower's Confessio about the violence of
exemplarity. 34 But the consciousness of political change expressed through-
out his work is marked by an impulse to institute poetic order. 35 Lydgate
does want his poetry to answer or quell his predecessors' questions, and in
this respect, he seeks a distinctly anti-Chaucerian set of correspon-
dences among his source texts, his authorial role, and the meaning of his
narratives.
The first ofLydgate's two accounts ofVirginia directly refutes Chaucer,
and the second one (less directly) answers Gower. Three moments in the
first account echo Chaucer: the opening citation, "As is remembred in Titus
Lyvyus" (2.1346); the praise ofVirginius as a "worthy knyht" (1356); and
the assertion that the virgin daughter gets her name from her father
(1359-62), none of which appear in Premierfait.The account-barely more
than a summary-begins by insisting upon the falsehood of Appius, "a iuge
ontrewe, proud and luxurious" (2.1349). As we have seen, Appius's false-
hood is a crux of the narrative even in Livy:The decemvir cooks up a secret
plot, but the Roman historian essentially refuses to quote him in direct
discourse, as if to ward off even the possibility that a reader could find his
plot convincing. In Chaucer, the Physician avoids naming the judge until he
has dramatized his falsehood, as if naming him might endanger the
Physician's moral authority. If the purpose of relating a story is to endorse
virtue, then both Livy and the Physician call upon formal means for dis-
avowing involvement in reported falsehood. Lydgate points out, however,
that disavowal itself easily becomes a form of falsehood; it creates a gap or
misalignment between narrator and story.
Lydgate endorses Virginius, the father, instead. After the initial condem-
nation ofAppius comes the praise oNirginius as a "worthy knyht" (1356). 36
In the Physician 5 Tale, Virginius has not only the virtues associated with
knighthood but wealth and friends; he is part of the community:
Ther was, as telleth Titus Livius,

A knyght that called was Virginius,
Fulfild of honour and of worthynesse,
And strong offreendes, and of greet richesse. (CT,VI.l-4)
These characteristics are less the attributes of a soldier than those of an

upstanding member of a peaceful community, albeit one that reemerges
later in another light-the "thousand peple" who rescue Virginius in his
embattled helplessness. Lydgate's initial amplification ofVirginius's worth
echoes the Physician's Tale:
And she was douhter to a worthy knyht,

Ful manli founde in his deedis alle,
And Virginius the Romeyns ded him call e. (Fall, 2.1356-58)
Lydgate's worthy Virginius accomplishes the manly deeds of a knight or

soldier. Yet, his public social ties, and any questions they might raise, evapo-
rate from this account along with honor, wealth, and friends. The rhyme
(alle/calle) gives society essentially a naming function, bolsteringVirginius's
paternity. Lydgate's focus remains on Virginius as the account continues. He
makes no effort to align himself with the wronged virgin, and in this, he
estranges himself from the Physician's Tale entirely: exemplary endorsement,
for him, is not an effort to hold onto the perfection of the virgin heroine
but an affirmation of paternal governance.
Indeed, Lydgate insists upon the authority ofVirginius's fatherhood.
Livy, Gower and Chaucer, in their different ways, emphasize the way in
which the violent imposition of the name of the father constitutes the
daughter's exemplary status. Lydgate suppresses the violent consequences of
paternity by reclaiming it as virtuous authority. 37 In contrast to the
Physician, he names all three characters in the opening three stanzas. Then,
in a whole stanza spent on Virginius's paternity (in an account of just over
fifty lines), he replies to the problems raised by both Gower and Chaucer:
Whos goodli douhter, the story doth us Jere,

Was afftir hym for his noble fame
Virginia callid, most goodli & enteere;
And for this cause she bar the same name.
But Appius ful gretli was to blame,
Which hath conspired thoruh his gret falsnesse,
Yiff that he myhte hir beute to oppresse. (1359-65)
The insistence upon the genealogy here replies to the Physician but takes
him one step further. Surely, narratologically, the father Virginius is named
for the daughter's virginity. But Lydgate insists she is named for him, because
she perpetuates his "noble fame." It is as if he seeks to ward off any ques-
tions about whetherVirginius can be called her father, so that his killing her
will look less an assertion of his paternity-less like a declaration of embat-
tled helplessness-and more like a defense of Roman liberty. When the fifth
line of the stanza turns abruptly to Appius, the function of Lydgate's
genealogical insistence is exposed: the reminder that "Appius ful gretli was
to blame" is predicated on the tacit suggestion that actually, Virginius may
be to blame as well. Lydgate counters that all blame must be placed on the
tyrannical decemvir for his falsehood. In contrast to Chaucer, Lydgate has

created a clear, preexisting link between names and deeds, in which
Virginius passes along his virtue without imposing anything but "goodli"
qualities upon his daughter, who is victimized by Appius's deception.
Endorsing Virginius, though, requires some odd rhetorical moves. The
moment ofVirginia's death especially reveals Lydgate's narrative commit-
ments, and the crux of his argument with Chaucer. Whereas the Physician~'
Tale makes Virginius at once a piteous father and a domestic tyrant, Lydgate
makes Virginius reasonable and deliberate:
And be this mene, in his fals delite,

[Appius] Thouhte he myhte hir beute best disuse,
So for taccomplisshe his flesshli appetit,
She beying feeble thaccioun to refuse.
Whereupon hir fader gan to muse,
Fulli conceyued off Appius the maner,
In hir diffence wrouhte as ye shal heer. (2.1373-79)
This stanza turns on the contrast between the two men's modes of com-
prehension, one lecherous and the other contemplative. In the pivot line of
the stanza, Virginia is the subject of a verb for the only time in the whole
account, one of Lydgate's omnipresent participles plus the weak negative
infinitive "to refuse." In contrast, her father muses, conceives, and fashions
his own response. With that tag "as ye shal heer," the stanza brings concept
("conceyuing"), action, and audience response into alignment. The next
stanza clinches this correspondence by emphasizing Virginius's virtuous
judgment, narrating his action, and then returning to intention in the last
couplet, where Virginius is said to deem it better to kill her than have her
beauty oppressed by a tyrant. Lydgate depicts Virginius's action itself with as
little violence as possible: "Hir manli fadir, most knyhtli off entent, I Took
his appart, as he thouhte it good, I And with a knyff shadde hir herte blood"
(1382-84). The stanza is virtually all intention, deeming, and thought, so
that the knife becomes a mere vehicle of considered moral judgment.
Though Lydgate explicates Virginius's act yet again in the following stanza,
he still downplays the physical violence involved, insisting that "Virginius to
keepe hir honeste I Spared no thyng to make hir sides bleede" (1389-90). 3H
In omitting Virginius's intimate violence, he implies that his authorial
responsibility is to protect the integrity of his hero. He quells the pathos of
the father-daughter scene, suppressing any suggestion ofVirginius's tyranny;
he omits the combination of love and hate in Chaucer; he removes the
scene from any domestic context, and instead bases Virginius's action
upon deliberation and good intentions, deeming and sparing-the stuff of
reasonable inner advisement. Lydgate's flattening ofVirginius implies that,
for him, the disjunctions of the Physician's narrative served to hide the
author's best intentions. So he endorses his virtuous character by stressing
good intentions and evading the problem of how those intentions produced
violence.
Despite their convoluted verbal constructions, these moments pay a
graphic attention to blood that might normally produce pathos, as when, in
a moment Lydgate raids from Gower, Canacee's baby rolls in its mother's
blood. But Lydgate immediately moves away from the qrama of the scene
and once again reminds us who is to blame: "But Appius for this horible
deede, I And decemvir, thoruh this onhappi chaunce, I Hadde in that
cite neuer afftir gouernaunce" (1391-93). Appius is intimately connected
to the horrible deed, which in turn has the automatic political effect of
overthrowing him. At the same time that fault is clarified, the bizarre notion
that the whole event is "onhappi chaunce" seems to distance the question
of blame, discouraging examination ofVirginius 's role, and warding off the
retrospective political question raised in Chaucer (where were the "thousand
peple" when Virginia was killed?). Narrative produces political good with a
facility that suggests that unhappy chance expresses an inherent, cosmic
moral rectitude-or, to put it in the more political terms that permeate the
Fall of Princes, that Fortune's depredations are, finally, the just deserts of
proud and oppressive men. This sense of cosmic justice further distances the
reasonable Virginius from the graphic violence of the account.
A summary stanza finally makes a call to exemplary reading that clinches
Appius's fault. Once again Lydgate ignores the problems of paternal violence,
in favor of a dislocated moral about the downtrodden of the realm, taken
from Premierfait, who says that earthly princes should not underestimate or
"mesprisier" the power of"aulcun singulier hom[m]e" (fol. 46r.1). Lydgate
omits the notion of misprision. He adds instead a "merour deer" with no
apparent potential for distortion:
Men may heer seen as in a merour deer,

Estatis chaungid for ther gret offencis;
And be sum poore persone synguleer
Pryncis put doun from ther magnyficencis .... (1401-1404)
The lesson concerns the just consequences ofAppian crime, not the violent
death of Virginia. Lydgate elides the difference between Virginius and
Virginia, since presumably either could be the "poore persone synguleer"
who causes the downfall of princes. The sudden emergence of the "poraile"
against the magnificent conflates characters and subsumes historical rebel-
lion into divine justice. 39 It also renders narration the transparent instru-
ment of inevitable cosmic forces, a far cry from the moral reticence of
Chaucerian embedded narration.
In his second rendition of the Virginia story, Lydgate increasingly contrasts

his transparent truth with Appius's falsehood. 40 Even in the first account,
the decemvir is "Behatid ... for his gret falsnesse" (2.1351). Later, Appius
deserves repeated bad press, at the hands of all authors. Lydgate frames the
story as an obedient transmission ofBoccaccio:
Natwithstandyng Bochas aforn hath told

Off Appius that falsnesse importable,
And his outrages & surfetis manyfold,
To be remembred hatful and repreuable,
Yit as hym thouhte, it was heer couenable,
To mor rebuk and spottyng off his name,
Newe to reherse his sclaundre & his diffame. (3.3012-3017)
Lydgate makes certain his readers are aware that the repetition of the story
is deliberate, and arises from truth to his source-perhaps in spite of its
inconvenient content. The crescendo from remembering to reproving,
rebuking and spotting of his name reaches a climax in the slander and
infamy of the last line: Appius's name has already accrued every possible
affirmation of unbearable falsehood, which nevertheless will be rehearsed
anew. This vehemence drives home the efforts ofhis predecessors to achieve
moral and political transparency. Lydgate bolsters his moral authority and
makes narration itself a bulwark against hiddenness or deceit, the Appian
crime. In Premierfait, Appius hides under his robes to avoid the author's
gaze; Lydgate omits this clash of narrative with frame. 41 Instead, his repeated
condemnation of Appius associates criminal desires with lying and deceit,
and his own authorship with Boccaccio's truth. 42
Although Lydgate's intentional slander here certainly arises in part from
his French source, it also rings a variation upon the political hearsay that was
so important to Gower's version of the story. In the conclusion of the
Confessio's Virginia episode, as we saw in chapter 3, rumor becomes the
engine of political understanding. Having seen the "merveile" ofVirginius's
dripping sword, the Roman soldiers spread the word ofAppius's tyranny, so
that his private treachery comes openly to men's ears. Lydgate's slander sim-
ilarly seems designed to offset the hiddenness of Appius's crime. But in
Gower, the circulation of knowledge creates a political fiction that is tenu-
ous but nonetheless viable. Lydgate instead tells a story wherein the fictions
ofAppius are overthrown in favor of dear-sighted "comoun profit" (3087).
Lydgate's response to Gower depends less upon exact and recognizable
verbal echo than upon a network of associations among lying, blindness,
rumor, and common profit. The response to Gower is subterranean in part
because ofLydgate 's governing fiction of transparent translation. Reminders
of Boccaccio's authority are repeated (3060, 3081), eliding Premierfait's
intervening amplifications, as though the story transfers unchanged across

time and circumstance. Boccaccio's intentions are carried out loyally by his
English translator, who dutifully repeats what's been said already: a good
reader, then, is a repeater. The value of such redundancy seems to lie less in
the exact moral about Appius's corruption than in the notion of readerly
obedience, which depends upon the good intentions of those in authority.
In repeatedly slandering Appius, Lydgate shows himself to be reading
"loially"-truthfully, obediently, according to the details of Boccaccian
circumstances as well as the general moral truth. Lydgate admits Gowerian
rumor only to distinguish it from his own deliberate slander.
The second summary of the Virginia story, however, reworks Gower
even as it curtails BoccaccioiPremierfait considerably. 43 Lydgate's sources
take from Livy the description of Appius's rise to power, especially empha-
sizing his abuse of the symbols of office. Even before the near-rape of
Virginia, Lydgate recounts, the decemvir instituted new ceremonial proces-
sions in a display of authority threatening to the people and costly to the
city: "To seen the sergantis walke in plate & maile, I Thei thouhte it was a
merueilous werkyng" (3046-47). This pageant is designed to menace the
people; the 120 armed men express Appius's apparent military might.
Lydgate calls the display a "merueilous werkyng," suggesting the making of
a monarchical fiction, wherein the decemvirs behave "as ech had been a
kyng" (3049). The pageant is a lie that transposes backward in the plot the
lies of Appius that drive the Virginia narrative elsewhere. We saw in chapter 3
how Gower transposedAppius's fiction-making to the "merveil"ofVirginius's
dripping sword, implying that Virginius took on some of Appius's deceitful
violence when he killed his daughter. Here, Lydgate does the opposite of
Gower in associating marvel with Appius alone, and the "true" or "loial"
with Virginius and his followers. 44 His distinction registers the degree to
which Gower's version, like Chaucer's, challenged the exemplary alignment
between authorial intention and narrative effects. Lydgate's response is to
reassert Appius's early powermongering-his ill intent-while curtailing
the full historical narrative given by BoccaccioiPremierfait so as to keep
marvel away from his reasonable hero,Virginius.
The insistence on Virginius's transparent virtue is part of Lydgate's
argument against Gower. In the one stanza about the Virginia plot proper,
Virginius appears only as instrument ofhis daughter's death:"hir fader in that
striff I With a sharp suerd made hir lose hir !iff" (3063-64). Once again, the
indirection of the syntax makes Virginius's violence all but disappear, but the
use of the word "sword"-it is the Livian "knife" earlier, and "coutel" in
Premierfait-provides at least a suggestion that Gower underlies Lydgate's
effortful narration. In Gower, the sword dripping with Virginia's blood sig-
naled the father's violent political fiction-making, but here all "hasti violence"
is attributed to Appius. The political maneuverings elided in Middle English

versions (though recounted in Premierfait) are once again elided here.
Lydgate quickly concludes that Appius's demise is for "the comoun profit" of
the city-another buzzword which, though widespread, nevertheless also
tightens the link to Gower, where the circulation of Appius's crime in the
"comun feere" and "comun conseil" are what serve to overthrow the
decemvir. If the agency of this common will seems attenuated in Gower and
Chaucer, in Lydgate it is even more so: finally the blindness of great men like
Appius, more than the just action of their people, leads to their falls. I would
hesitate to reduce the Fall of Princes to this political principle; certainly, as
Simpson and others have shown, the political principles here and in the Troy
Book are more complex than an exploration of one abbreviated narrative can
reveal. But the inevitability of Appius's demise emphasizes the iterativity of
great men's falls. Chaucer's Knight and Host call the Monk's similar reitera-
tions of the falls of men depressing and dull; but Lydgate's notion of poetic
order relies upon just such repeatability.
We saw that when Gower calls attention to the political necessity of
imaginative fictions, especially those which would enable the pity disabled
by Virginius's paternal rage, he makes an argument for the value of story-
telling with which Lydgate differs on principle. Lydgate prefers a poetics of
slander, the villain's immediately perceptible "eternal shame" (3078). The
Envoy to this second account of the story meditates upon injustice as a
problem of discernment: judges practice evil when favor blinds them and
they accept bribes. The notion that justice depends upon clear insight and
discernment is not surprising, but like the moral about the "poraile" in
Book 2, the injunction against bribery seems deflective, since Appius is
never bribed. In earlier versions, of course, Appius does cast his dishonest
gaze upon Virginia: in Premierfait he gecta ses desloiaux yeulx sur une belle
pucelle (E 94v, col. 2), and in Chaucer the image is one of courtly attraction.
Both desloiaux yeux (untrue or unfaithful eyes) and courtly love suggest the
lability of Appius's desire, its tendency to exceed any sense of truth to legal
principles. Lydgate omits this deceptive sexual gaze, focusing on pecuniary
desire instead, just as in Book 2 he ascribed the depredations of Appius to
the general oppression of the "poraile." This desexualizing of the Virginia
story indicates the degree to which its sexual politics confuse any ideal clear
case. Bribery-the trade of favors for money, a duplicity that interrupts the
alignment between payment and purchase-provides a model of corre-
spondence that fixes Appius's crime and considers it paid for.
Lydgate's apparently transparent reception of his Boccaccian source,
repetition of the criminal's "eternal shame," and suppression of any ambigu-
ity about the hero's virtue leave very little room for readerly initiative. His
awkward exemplary messages instead insist upon authorial visibility.
Implicitly, Lydgate anticipates readers who need extremely explicit authorial

direction and who, without his explicit link between hiddenness and crime,
might be inclined to believe in Appian marvels-the seductive and power-
ful mystification of the rods of office, the corruptibility of Virginius's
upright paternity. From Lydgate's point of view, embedded narration with-
holds or obscures authorial guidance from readers, whom he imagines as
"disgarnisshed" as the daughters of the Knight of La Tour Landry. His poem
seeks assent above all else-not simply as a confirmation of his own ethical
authority, but as a condition of involvement. 45 His concern with clarity of
vision, I think, arises out of the threat embedded in the Canterbury Tales and
the Confessio Amantis and evident, too, in Boccaccio, that hiding authorial
intent-hiding endorsement and condemnation, interrupting reference,
using narrators to mediate general truths-may make for a poetics of com-
plicity, dissimulation, and fraud. Lydgate is distinctly aware of the capacity
for poetry to trick readers and seeks to cancel that possibility.
In this obsession with his own visible endorsements, Lydgate returns us
to the Roman source. 46 Livy recounts how, after the new government is
established,Appius is summoned before Virginius, now a tribune.Virginius
refuses to make the case against his enemy: "Oratory," he says, "was invented
for doubtful matters" (Oratio . . .rebus dubiis inventa est, 3.56.3). He pardons
everything except the crime against himself, and puts the burden of defense
upon the fallen decemvir. Later, in spite of an uncle's plea for pity,Virginius
insists he and his daughter are the only worthy objects of pity (3.58) and
orders Appius put on trial; in despair, the decemvir commits suicide in
prison.Virginius's authority remains unquestioned, all the more so because
he refuses to make a rhetorical claim to it.
On the one hand, Virginius's plain rejection of oratory in favor of facts
perpetuates the same alignment between facticity and Roman republican
history that Livy's account depends on. On the other hand, however,
the refusal of oratory undoes the very method Livy used to create such
alignments-the direct quotation of the rhetoric of the republican revolt
and, of course, the words of his own history. Livy's Virginius implies that
oratory is needed for the sake of clarifYing what is doubtful; his claim essen-
tially denies that there could be anything doubtful about Appius's crimes.
But Appius's fate itself produces uneasiness among the people about
whether the new government has already gone too far (3.57). By refusing
to take up doubts,Virginius actually raises them. Still, these doubts disappear
into the narrative, allayed perhaps by the competition for pity between
Appius's uncle and Virginius. The mystification of doubtful matters, it
appears, is not the sole province of tyrants.
Like Livy's Virginius, Lydgate refuses the problem of oratory. What he has
presented is a pair of set pieces on the depredations of Appius, in which the
Roman judge is exposed to endlessly reiterated slander. 47 That Lydgate

objected to the mixture of violence and compassion in other accounts of
Virginius suggests that he understood the doubt-inducing projects of
Chaucer and Gower only too well, and refuted them. Yet the fact that
Lydgate found his English predecessors complicit in Appian dissembling
suggests that his reception of the tale might serve more than simplistic
didacticism. Instead, like much of Lydgate's work, it seems designed to
demystifY as much as possible by explaining, even where competing expla-
nations of events cannot be reconciled. 48 Lydgate's urge to explain, to make
plain his own intent, however politically advantageous, creates a profound
conflict with the project of writing poetry. To refuse mystification-to
refuse, like Virginius, even to address our doubts-makes the creation of
order in art next to impossible, because, as a work like the Knight's Tale
makes us aware, order requires a certain mystification: in that tale, the arti-
fices of symmetry and pattern create order, containing the cosmic doubts
about human mutability that emerge in spite of the bestThesian efforts. The
Physician's Tale shows a failure of ordering principles, and hence it raises the
deepest and most skeptical questions about the efficacy of depicting its
central action. Lydgate's versions of the story arguably achieve an exemplary
moral order, but at the expense of expressing doubts about Virginia's brutal
death, which are central to the ethical demands of other medieval poets.
More rigorously than any other medieval author of the story, Lydgate
cancels the possibility that the story could point in the direction of the
Pardoner's Tale--the direction, that is, of aesthetic effects based on equivocation,
reticence, or suspension of moral clarity.
CHAPTERS
THE PARDONER IN THE "DOGGES BOURE":

EARLY RECEPTION OF
THE CANTERBURY TALES
A s the Host repeatedly insists, examples provoke sensory and emotional

responses in their audiences; they express the hope that involving
audiences in narrative will inspire virtue. In the Book of the Knight of the Tower,
the Conjessio A mantis, and the Physician 5 Tale, virtue is understood in largely
secular terms. Indeed, the religious character of narrative inspiration is
unpredictable; one sermon rails against the man who doesn't respond to the
Passion of Christ, but weeps when he hears the tale of Guy ofWarwick. 1 But
despite the suspicion of non-biblical examples expressed by religious
writers, many make use of the marvelous effects of narrative. We saw in
chapter 1 that Gregory the Great's oft-quoted remark provides a touchstone:
"Since examples often rouse the hearts of one's hearers to love of God and
neighbor better than words, I want to report to you a miracle." The context
is a homily on the cleansing of the temple, illustrated with a local tale about
the monk Martyrius's miraculous pity for a leper, later revealed to be Christ. 2
For Gregory, examples (especially from life) are a kind oflure, offering a par-
ticular, narrative pleasure in order to rouse (exitare) audiences to take a story
to heart. Miraculously, here, unlike in Guy of Warwick, the tale of the leper is
finally the story of Christ. The audience's response, too, is implicitly miracu-
lous, for when they are roused to love, they partake of the presence of the
divine in the world. Gregory's story, like most sermon examples, produces a
moment of moral clarity in which love for one's neighbor may be con-
sciously articulated and embraced. Chaucer's Pardoner, whose reception is
the subject of this chapter, fulfills his fellow-pilgrims' desire for just such
miraculous experiences. But because he lays bare the self-interest (or cupid-
ity) of this desire, he brings about the profound rupture in the pilgrim
community that occurs at the end of Fragment VI.
The Physician's performance sets up this rupture. We saw in chapter 4

that, for the Host, the Physician 5 Tale excites not love of God and neighbors,
but its close cousin, "pitee." He ignores the Physician's moral message,
"forsaketh synne er that synne yow forsake," in an outpouring of compassion
for the slain Virginia. If, as Gregory said, examples work by exciting the heart
to love, then they depend on the audience's emotional sensitivity. Emotion,
in turn, can mask the application of the story-that is, the local and change-
able nature of affective response can compromise the stability of the message
as it is transferred from story to reader. We might say that the Host avoids the
problem of forsaking sin by becoming absorbed in pity for the heroine. The
contingencies of an audience's inspiration may have nothing to do with
self-examination, much less virtue. At the same time, though, the Host's
emotional expressiveness helps rescue exemplary meaning from the destruc-
tive ethos of the Physician 5 Tale--an act of reception very much like his
domestication of the Clerks Tale. As we saw in chapter 1, Harry Bailly is often
understood as a flawed audience who calls upon the secondary audience-
those of us outside the Tales-to interpret better than he does. 3 But he can
also remind us of the decisions we make as we read, and his pitying response
constitutes a form of application. Wolfgang Iser has observed that reading
begins with a familiar repertoire of social and literary norms, which triggers
a kind of"matching response in the reader"-a recognition of the familiar
(99). 4 Such recognition, which includes affective identification, enables the
involvement that is a condition of reading experience; there is no new read-
ing experience without involvement or entanglement in the repertoire
(129-31). But entanglement also means setting one's old views aside. In the
moment of identification, Iser finds that "[t]he more 'present' a text is to us,
the more our habitual selves-at least for the duration of the reading-
recede into the 'past' " (131). This is where involvement entails that tran-
scendence of the familiar which, I have insisted, characterizes even the
simplest medieval exempla. Involvement, then, enables the "alteration or
falsification" of what is already known, so that "the familiar is only momen-
tarily so" (132) because its validity is suspended by the text. The process of
reading is a changing event, which renders the repertoire of norms and
expectations "past," educating the reader into a new experience. To be sure,
the Host's pity ignores the terms of involvement established by the
Physician, who demands a sterner and more explicitly moral application. But
the Host insists on falsifYing the Physician's moral terms precisely to make
the tale legible within his own mental experience. The result is that, when
Chaucer frames the Physician's narrative with the Host's pity, he alters-and
perhaps falsifies-the moral purpose ofVirginia's death.
As we saw in chapter 4, Lydgate forestalls readerly involvement by priv-
ileging authority so completely. We also saw that the Physician's exemplary
EARLY RECEPTION 113
discourse repeatedly shuts down the slightest hint of change, historical or

moral. Both Lydgate and the Physician exaggerate the importance of exem-
plary alignment, the one-to-one correspondence between text and applica-
tion. Indeed, the Physician moves to prevent alteration even at the level of
plot: Virginia must not learn the "loore I Of booldnesse, whan she woxen
is a wyf" (70-71). He stabilizes moral purity by killing off its best represen-
tative, creating a problematic connection between moral stability and death.
Essentially, the tale works against the world of time and change where read-
ing is a "new experience." In this context, the Host's "pi tee" salvages the tale
by way of involvement, insisting on affect as the way to make the story
"present." But in his very effort to place the story in a moral context of sym-
pathy (Gregory's love of one's neighbors), the Host also calls attention to its
circumstantiality. However stable and universal exemplary claims may be,
they hover between involvement based on recognition of timeless moral
truths and envelopment in a textual dynamic that entails new experience.
When the contingencies of affective absorption become the defining mode
of audience response, the variable (and educable) audience itself is providing
the morals, and the very stability that an exemplum seeks is compromised.
The Pardoner's performance-mainly because of his framing
declarations-forces an awareness of alteration upon his pilgrim audience.
At first, as if to specify the generality of sin in the Physician's concluding
"sentence," the Pardoner declares his theme to be cupiditas. He proceeds to
tell a tale whose "essentially resolved form" aligns moral with story, leaving
little room for the affective intervention that marks the Host's response to
the Physician. 5 In this tale, historical contingency gives way to timeless
fable. The consequent clarity of the moral lesson does not depend on the
narrative suppression of desire, as in the Physician 5 Tale, but on the narrative's
ability to provoke a different sort of desire-the desire for moral resolution.
Three evil rioters seek out death and find a pot of gold, and the exemplum
drives inexorably toward the equation of desire with death. Though the
Pardoner issues a fiery condemnation of appetites in his preamble, he cele-
brates and fulfills the pilgrims' appetite for "som moral thyng." His perfor-
mance refutes the Physician's idea that one should forsake desires generally,
while making all desires look both unavoidable and horrifying. The
Pardoner himself exemplifies cupidinous desire even as he tells an effective
exemplum; but his challenge to the pilgrims goes well beyond the rhetorical
problem of the bad man telling a good tale. 6
The intensity of this challenge is registered in the angry exchange
between Pardoner and Host at the Tale's conclusion, when he calls upon the
Host for donations, accusing him of greatest involvement in sin. I would
suggest, in fact, that the Pardoner's personal address here has been provoked
by the Host's effusive pity for Virginia; he is testing Harry's assertion that an
114 FALSE FA13LES AND EXEMPLARY TRUTH
audience's emotions give meaning to a story. The Host, of course, replies

with a curse: "I wolde I hadde thy coillons in myn hond I In stide of relikes
or of seintuarie. I Lat kutte hem of, I wol thee helpe hem carie; I They shul
be shryned in an hogges toord!" (952-55). Rather than give meaning to the
Pardoner's exemplum, he violently closes off the story, imaginatively enclos-
ing the signs of the Pardoner's corruption, his "coillons," in a vulgar shrine.
Despite his absorption in stories generally, he rejects the Pardoner's corrup-
tion of narrative, and reasserts audience freedom by realizing that corruption
in a strikingly concrete and vulgar sign. This entire concluding exchange,
however, leaves several lingering questions. What exactly makes moral desire
so volatile? What is the nature of the Pardoner's challenge to the pilgrims,
especially the Host? Why is the Pardoner's address so intolerable?
In what follows, I examine the reception of the Pardoner in the apoc-
ryphal Interlude and Tale of Beryn, in order to see, from a new perspective,
what one reader found so threatening in his performance. The Interlude is
inserted into the Northumberland manuscript of the Canterbury Tales,
entirely changing the order and effect of the poem. Like the Host, fifteenth-
century readers pose an interpretive problem for the literary critic. 7 Their
reading protocols differ from ours. If we imagine all readers across time to
be like us, we risk flattening historical difference and making unwarranted
assumptions about their motivations. If we differentiate ourselves too readily
from their notorious "dullness," as with Lydgate, we risk jettisoning their
interpretive insights, hence ignoring evidence of how Chaucer's poem
might have been perceived and devaluing both our historical difference
from early readers and our possible resemblances to them. 8 The dilemma
can be seen in the logic of the editorial principle of lectio d!fficilior (or durior
lectio): when faced with manuscript variants, editors generally prefer the
more difficult alternative as the original reading. This logic is based on the
judgment that authors write more difficult texts, and that scribes intervene
to make the texts "easier." At least since the 1975 publication of Kane and
Donaldson's edition of the B version of Piers Plowman, the "axiomatic
scribal debasement of texts" has had particular importance for editors
whose emendations are not based on the older stemmatic method. 9 The
principle relies on a certain congruence between what editors judge to be
difficult and what scribes choose to make easier. 10
As an interpretive model, however, lectio d!fficilior can also be suggestive: it
can help reveal what early readers might have found difficult to accept in their
exemplars. To invert Iser's terms, lectio d!fficilior can reveal what alterations and
falsifications scribes may have sought to render more recognizableY The
concept points toward a historical "logic of question and answer," wherein
the later text provides a tangible answer to a specific, less accessible question
raised in the earlier text. 12 In terms expressed by Collingwood, we can find
EARLY RECEPTION 115
out what question the text is meant to answer by piecing together what in
the exemplar might have prompted a given manuscript rearrangement.
Later readers may offer "answers" precisely because they have understood
the difficulties of the questions raised by the exemplar. In the Northumberland
manuscript, where the Interlude and Tale cif Beryn appear, we can see that the
Pardoner provoked at least one early reader to revise him into a morally
tolerable figure.
Lectio d!fficilior risks assuming that authors were uniquely blessed with the
ability to create and tolerate more difficult readings-as defined by perceptive
modern readers-and that what modern readers label "difficult" will match
what scribes found difficult. Certainly there is an inevitable hermeneutic
circularity, no less in the interpretation of manuscripts than in the interpre-
tation of edited literary texts. I rely on the notion (itself dependent on my
reading of the standard edition) that Chaucer intended to challenge the
norms of his readers; I broadly accept the view that the fifteenth century
responds to Chaucer by either avoiding or suppressing certain of those
challenges. 13 But in examining literary history as a dynamic process of
question-and-answer, we can develop our understanding of the nature of
fifteenth-century hermeneutic norms, and refine our understanding of the
connections they drew between formal and moral questions. It is important
to give fifteenth-century readers a certain credibility because they can tell
us how, historically, audiences viewed what regard as difficult interpretive
problems. 14
Rather than focusing on the Pardoner's Tale per se, I concentrate on how
the Interlude reshapes the Pardoner's role, and what this reveals about how
Chaucer's Pardoner was perceived to begin with. The Interlude is extremely
sensitive to the mobile social relationships depicted in Chaucer's work; it
corrects this flexibility by associating moral virtue with more stable status
arrangements. The tale also represents an argument with Chaucer about
exemplary method. The Northumberland manuscript as a whole rearranges
the Pardoner's role in the pilgrimage, so that the Canterbury Tales pivots on his
rather tawdry activities. In relegating the Pardoner to a dupe of the local
tavern-dwellers, the manuscript elucidates the combination of receptivity
and resistance with which the pilgrims greet the Pardoner within the
Canterbury Tales proper. This early answer to the puzzle of the Pardoner sheds
light on why envelopment in the Pardoner's exemplum proves so untenable for
the Host that he is inspired not to love of God and neighbor but to brutal rage.
The Pardoner in the "dogges boure"
Written in the early part of the fifteenth century (probably 1410-20), the
Interlude recounts the arrival of the pilgrims in Canterbury. 15 Its author has
been plausibly identified as a monk, and its occasion as that of the 1420
Canterbury Jubilee celebrating the martyrdom of Saint-Thomas though
evidence of both date and occasion is inconclusive. 16 The manuscript in
which the Interlude appears includes the rest of the Canterbury Tales, in an
order adjusted to include the return journey as originally projected in the
General Prologue. The pilgrims find lodgings at the Checker of the Hope,
then visit the shrine of Saint-Thomas, amuse themselves, dine, and go to
bed. The piece focuses, however, on the Pardoner, who visits the cathedral,
where he loudly misreads the stained-glass windows and steals tokens from
the shrine, and then spends his time trying to romance and rob Kit the
tapster. After the others have gone to bed, Kit and her lover rob and beat the
Pardoner, finally trapping him in a dog kennel where he crouches, shivering,
for the rest of the night. In the morning, the Pardoner disguises his bruises
under his hood and joins the rest of the company as they begin their return
trip. No one in the pilgrim company witnesses or finds out about his
misadventures. The remainder of the piece consists of an added Merchant's
Tale, the so-called Tale of Beryn.
The Interlude's Pardoner emerges as a rhetorical and (hetero)sexual
failure whose escapades fall safely into the category of fabliau slapstick and
therefore do not implicate his audience. From the very beginning, the
Interlude author makes the labile figures of both Pardoner and Host more
static than they are in Chaucer's Tales, which is to say, in one sense at least,
he makes them more obviously exemplary. Like Virginia in the Physician's
Tale, the characters in the Interlude act out the virtues and vices they repre-
sent, but without the destructive consequences. For the Interlude narrator,
fixing character as stereotype helps define stable and recognizable norms of
social conduct. 17
The Interlude author works throughout to establish that the Pardoner acts
in "rage" while the Host and others refrain from doing so. In contrast to the
blustering aggression of Chaucer's Harry Bailly, the Interlude presents us
with "The Hoost of Southwork, as ye knowe, that had no spice of rage I
But al thing wrought prudenciall, as sober man and wise" (380-81). 18 This
is a remarkable act of reception. It displays a familiarity with the Host-" of
Southwork, as ye knowe"-even as this Host appears far more sober and
wise than the one we have encountered in the rest of the Tales. 19 Chaucer's
Host is at his most enraged, of course, when the Pardoner calls upon him to
give an offering at the end of his sermon, and he responds with his famous
verbal violence. When the Interlude author ascribes to Harry Bailly "no
spice of rage," he rewrites him as a respectable citizen, an arbiter of virtue,
one whose affective responses are under careful and consistent governance.
The fact that the Interlude narrator regulates emotional response so strictly
suggests that rage-not the Pardoner's rage, but that of his audience-was a
EARLY RECEPTION 117
particularly distasteful ingredient in the Canterbury Pardoner's performance.

Emotional involvement threatens the consistency and universality of virtue
by subjecting it to the vicissitudes of mood. Rage is also provoked by
(disappointed) desire. The Canterbury Pardoner challenges his audience by
involving them, giving them what they want, and then defamiliarizing the
"moral thyng" they asked for, in effect taking their moral truths away. The
Interlude Pardoner evinces no such ability to manipulate desire.
From the beginning, then, the Interlude establishes two kinds of pilgrims,
the virtuous and the rowdy:
Som of sotill centence, of vertu and oflore,

And som of other myrthes for hem that hold no store
Of wisdom, ne of holynes, ne of chivalry,
Nether of vertuouse matere, but to foly
Leyd wit and lustes all, to such japes
As Hurlewaynes meyne in every hegg that capes
Thurh unstabill mynde, ryght as the !eves grene
Standen ageyn the weder, ryght so by hem I mene.
Butt no more hereof nowe at this ilch tyme,
In saving of my centence, my prolog and my ryme. (2-12)
The narrator aligns "vertu" with the production and comprehension of

"centence," or the making of meaning. Interestingly, virtue and learning
produce one form of enjoyment, as the dual pronoun suggests, while the
pilgrims of "other myrthes" (1.3) lack wisdom, holiness, chivalry, and
"vertuouse matere." Instead of placing value upon virtuous topics, they turn
both intellect and will ("wit" and "lustes") toward the tricks of Harlequin
and his demon followers. Here the syntax becomes obscure, as if to demon-
strate the intellectual and moral confusion of the foolish pilgrims. Harlequin
not only exemplifies "japes" but actually seems to lurk within the gaping
hedges of the unstable mind, an inner force of disorder. In these initial lines
the narrator spends more time on the disordered and unstable pilgrims than
on the virtuous ones, and then sets them self-consciously aside in order to
save his own "centence" from the bad material he has taken up. The narra-
tor himself, then, establishes his text in contrast to Harlequinian "japes." The
making of "centence" and the embrace of "vertuouse matere" (virtuous
subject matter) define good character; virtue is good reading.
The Interlude renders safe the gaping hedges of this opening by ascribing
harlequinian activity to one set of characters, defining them as those who
apply all their wit and desire to folly, while ascribing wisdom and self-
control to the Host, who acts as the pilgrims' father, arbiter, and governor.
Furthermore, in a particularly tight alignment among author, character,
story, and context, the Interlude text enacts the social control that its
author/narrator advocates. The narrative 'T' in the Interlude endorses the

Host's conduct: he describes him in value-laden terms, with no apparent
internal contradiction to encourage ironic or interrogative readings, as the
wise, "prudentiall" "rewler of hem al" (16). Although the Tale tif Beryn,
which follows the Interlude, carries on Chaucer's pattern of framed
narration, the Interlude itself lacks even the most rudimentary framing. Its
omniscient third-person narrator is not "Chaucer the pilgrim" but an
anonymous participant, who describes both the Host's motivations and the
Pardoner's nighttime experiences virtually without distancing mediation.
The "I" of the Interlude resembles the "I" of romance, who sometimes calls
attention to his craft ("as I telle," for example) but is not fully enough
realized to raise unanswered hermeneutic questions about his own story. 20
The Pardoner no longer stages a performance; instead, the narrator tells it,
and the Pardoner's role shifts radically. In the process, the narrator gains a
moral authority aligned with the new social authority of the Host. The
resulting association of voice with textual content cannot simply be ascribed
to lack of sophistication but, like Lydgate's refusal of narrative mediation
(chapter 4), must be seen as itself a methodological response to Chaucer.
The virtuous and vicious pilgrims engage throughout in contrasting
interpretive methods. At the Canterbury cathedral, the Pardoner and the
Miller peer at the stained glass, "Counterfeting gentilmen" (150) who read
heraldic arms by trying to explicate the "story." 21 According to the narrator,
they read about as well "as rammes horned" (152): they engage in a
hermeneutic activity that is twisted or indirect (like rams' horns). According
to the Host, they disturb the rest of the company:
Sith ye be in company of honest men and good,

Worcheth somwhat after, and let the kind ofbrode
Pas for a tyme. I hold it for the best,
For who doth after company may lyve the bet in rest. (159-62)
The Host tells the "lewd" pilgrims to set aside their usual behavior for
a time and imitate their betters. The terms of his admonition are essentially
communal: he calls on the Pardoner and the Miller to behave like the rest
of the company, not to subvert it, in order to live at peace. 22 Admonishing,
exhorting, and setting an example for the rest of the pilgrims, the Host
upholds social propriety and thus peaceful community. Through him the
narrator establishes moral standards of gentility and courtesy, which depend
on control of unruly elements-specifically those who cannot access
"vertuouse matere."
In this scene, the Interlude Host picks up the moral outrage of the
Canterbury Tales Host after the Pardoner's performance, but in an entirely
EARLY RECEPTION 119
different register. In the Canterbury Tales, as I have suggested, the Host

frequently engages in immediate and unapologetically idiosyncratic modes
of interpretation: not only does he respond to Virginia with "pitee," but he
also fans the flames of the Friar-Summoner rivalry, takes the Clerk's Griselda
to heart, jokes the Monk and the Cook into bridling responses, declares the
Monk's Tale boring. 23 The Interlude Host resembles the Canterbury Tales Host
in his conscious facilitation of the parameters of interpretation. But there is
no affective involvement, no "hogges tord" here. The Interlude Host's regula-
tory impulse in the cathedral may resemble most closely his predecessor's
estate-conscious effort to silence the Miller. But where Chaucer's Host fails,
the Interlude Host notably succeeds: the Canterbury Miller tells his churl's tale,
whereas in the Interlude, the chastised wayward pilgrims stop reading, pass on
and go up to pray as best they can (163-65).
The Interlude Pardoner, too, resembles his predecessor, but again to new
effect. His hypocrisy emerges in his counterfeiting-but here he counter-
feits a gentleman, not an intercessor, and his hypocrisy is therefore largely
material in its aims and consequences, with no spiritual component. More
strikingly, the Interlude Pardoner has become "lewd." Lewdness has by the
early fifteenth century become associated with licentiousness, but retains its
older associations with baseness and lack of learning as well. When the
Canterbury Pardoner brags about his ability to "saffron his predicacioun"
with Latin, he celebrates his own ability to manipulate texts, and with it his
moral power. Initially, he explicitly uses learning to differentiate his pilgrim
audience from the usual dupes who listen to him: he depicts himself as
preaching to "the lewed peple" (392) while addressing the pilgrims as
"lordynges." In the Prologue to his tale, the pilgrims ask him for that
"moral thyng" for their intellectual benefit, "that we may leere I Som wit"
(325-26). He is learned enough to offer them moral education, and to
depict them as the lordly audience of such education. By the end of his per-
formance, the Canterbury Pardoner's celebration of his own learning
becomes the vehicle for giving his audience what they have asked for. But
again, his perfectly resolved exemplum is in the mouth of an avowed liar,
whose reminder of his own appetite-his call for contributions from the
Host's "male"-calls attention to the appetitive character of his audience's
desire for a "moral thyng." In thus estranging them from their own desire
for a moral story, he makes them "suspect all moral discourse of being
cant." 24 By the end, they have been relegated to the status of all his other
"lewed" audiences.
The Interlude turns the tables on the Pardoner's learned manipulations by
making him "lewd"-and even by changing the sense of"lewdness" itself.
When he becomes obsessed with seducing Kit the Tapster, the Pardoner has
no corner on sermonizing to the "lewed peple." When, while traveling
among gentlemen, he conducts himself improperly in church, his "lewdness"

has as much do to with social status as with his ineffectually "learned"
manipulations of moral narratives. Indeed, rather than seducing and fulfilling
an audience's desires, the Interlude Pardoner only acts out his own charade of
moral discernment, poring over the stained glass and consciously perform-
ing "mourning" for the story pictured there. Such changes take away the
Pardoner's access to learning, reading, and "vertuouse matere." If we read
according to Collingwood's question-and-answer logic, this revision answers
the most threatening question posed by Chaucer's Pardoner: his question
about his audience's investment in the desire for virtue.
For the Interlude author, the esotericism of stained glass protects "vertuouse
matere" from interpretive depredations. Unable to derive anything close to
a story from their empty "mourning," the Pardoner and Miller proceed to
steal relics from the cathedral sanctuary. In this act, which echoes the
Pardoner's original manipulation of relics and pardons, we see a similar
insistence on the materiality of religious signs, but without the claim that
he, the Pardoner, can imbue them at will with spiritual significance. Further,
precisely because this petty thieving has no connection to storytelling,
the "lewd" pilgrims do not implicate either the Host or the rest of the
pilgrimage in their moral turpitude. It is the material value of the relics, dis-
tinct from their emblematic significance, that the thieves seek to capitalize
on. 25 The Interlude author has reduced the Pardoner to lying and thieving.
In making material sins an "answer" to the Chaucerian Pardoner's more
seductive treatment of signs, while suppressing his figurative and rhetorical
skill, the Interlude author stabilizes and clarifies his predecessor. The later
text provides evidence that the trouble with Chaucer's Pardoner was less his
own cupidity, his sexual deviance, his rhetorical manipulations, or even his
materialistic approach to sin, than his access to moral and spiritual edifica-
tion through narrative.
Meanwhile, in spite of the fact that he misses this act of petty thievery,
the Host continues to police the borders of proper social conduct even
outside the realm of the church. After supper, the men "of governaunce,
wise men and sad" go to their rooms while the Miller, Cook, Pardoner, and
others drink and holler downstairs.
The Hoost ofSouthwork herd hem wele, and the Marchaunt both,
As they were at acountes and wexen somwhat wroth,
But yit they preyd hem curteysly to rest for to wend,
And so they did .... (419-22)
Even in the activity of accounting there lies an implication of economic but

also both social and moral ordering. 26 Though the Host here has perhaps
EARLY RECEPTION 121
a "spice" of rage, he does not act on it; both he and the thoroughly
respectable Merchant restrain their anger and ask the carousers "curteysly"
to go away. Rage is treated as temporary, contingent-it waxes and wanes-
and therefore controlled by the more general and stable value of courtesy.
This Host is much more the tactful and influential burgher than Chaucer's
Host, who is not above raucous protest when the Franklin puts on airs and
has no qualms about swearing. The Chaucerian Host, of course, imagines
himself as governor of the pilgrim community, most notably in the General
Prologue. 27 But when he engages in the contingencies of affective response,
especially the attack on the Pardoner, he risks fragmenting the community.
For the Interlude author, the Chaucerian Host raises the question of where
authoritative governance lies. By making the Host behave courteously, the
Interlude author changes the terms of the community from a contingent and
shifting group bound together by the changing terms of their own tales-a
community in the process of constituting itself through language-to a com-
munity governed by the stabler norms of scheduled days, balanced accounts,
early nights, and a social courtesy that suggests moral authority as well. 28
The Pardoner, meanwhile, cannot be put to rest by a simple act of
relic-swiping. The fabliau drama staged in the bulk of the Interlude, in fact,
turns the subtle violence of Chaucer's Pardoner into a merely material mis-
adventure. His unreadable anatomy becomes a frank, and frankly mercenary,
heterosexual promiscuity. 29 When he defines the Pardoner's desire as explic-
itly heterosexual, the Interlude author answers the question raised by his sexual
ambiguity in the General Prologue. 30 Like other ways in which he stabilizes
Chaucer, this answer points to the stakes of the question in the Chaucerian
text-the relation between material and moral desires. Chaucer's Pardoner
wants money and sex (he has a woman in every town), but he weaves these
desires inextricably into his audience's desire for moral discourse. The Interlude
Pardoner wants nothing other than sex and money, and he thus exhibits a par-
ticularly definable form of cupiditas.As soon as the pilgrims have arrived at the
Checker of the Hope in Canterbury, he separates from the other pilgrims to
speak to Kit the tapster, who welcomes him warmly, "al redy for to kys" (23).
In the tradition of the fabliau clerk, he behaves "as a man i-lerned of such
kyndnes, I [and] Braced her by the myddill and made her gladly chere"
(24--25). Specifically, this moment recalls the even more forward "queynte"-
grabbing of Nicholas in the Miller's Tale. But the Pardoner engages in none of
Nicholas's elaborate biblical trickery; his learning stops short of anything close
to Nicholas's manipulations of plot. It is important that he be both learned
and ineffectual because, in his earlier incarnation, the mode of learned
discourse constitutes his challenge to the pilgrim community.
Unlike Alisoun, Kit gives no sign of resistance to the Pardoner. Showing
him her bed, she appeals to his sympathies by telling him she lies there
"myselff al nyght al naked, I Without mannes company, syn my love was

dede" (28-29). Thinking her nakedness a naked text, the Pardoner misses
her none-too-subtly hidden intentions. For the audience outside the text,
her intentions are clear at least from line 33, where she makes herself cry
(the causative "made" shows her weeping is a deliberate performance).
When the narrator says her tears are as big as millstones, he emphasizes just
how badly the Pardoner misreads the situation. Later-as it becomes
increasingly clear that the Pardoner plans to get both sex and money from
the tapster while Kit herself intends to foil his plans and rob him as well-
the narrator tells his audience quite explicitly not only what will happen
by the end of the story, but (based on this anticipated end) how both narrator
and audience should align themselves in relation to the tale:
Thoughe it be no grete holynes to prech this ilk matere

And that som list nat to here it, yit sirs, ner-the-latter,
Endureth for a while and suffreth hem that wol,
And ye shull here howe the Tapster made the Pardoner pull [peel]
Garlik a! the long nyghte, til it was nerend day,
For the more cher she made oflove, the falsher was hir lay. (119-24)
In acknowledging that his story does not partake of the preaching of holi-
ness, the narrator implicitly relegates it to marginal status, suggesting that
the reward for those "sirs" who endure the rest of it will be the proper come-
uppance of the Pardoner. (Bowers glosses "peeling garlic" as "to engage in
a long, frustrating activity with an unhappy outcome.") Although this echoes
the address to an ostensibly varied audience in the Prologue to the Miller's
Tale, where Chaucer offers the choice of turning over the leaf to those
offended by the churlish content of the tale, the Interlude's address to audi-
ence actually does not articulate a choice. Chaucer's invitation to turn
the page lays responsibility for not turning the page upon the reader. Here,
the audience is asked to endure the unholiness of the tale in order to get the
payoff, the scapegoating of the Pardoner. The aside has the benefit of dis-
tancing both audience and narrator from endorsement of unholiness while
also draining the Pardoner of all attachment to the discourse of holiness.
Instead of telling an exemplary story, the Pardoner becomes the subject of
the narrator's negative exemplification.
To be sure, the Pardoner is a negative example in the Canterbury perfor-
mance as well. He exemplifies the very sin he denounces in his sermon. But
the Interlude makes the Pardoner easier to read principally by taking story
out of his hands. In the scene of mutual seduction, Kit tells him a dream and
asks for his interpretation. In the dream, she says, she was in a church during
mass, and after the service was over, the priest kicked her out of church
angrily. Playing his role as cleric, the Pardoner offers an interpretation that
EARLY RECEPTION 123
is blatantly self-serving as well as flattering:"The preest that put yewe out of

chirch shallede yew in ageyn I And help yeur mariage with al his myghte
and mayn. I . .. Kit, how liketh thee?" (113-115). This opportunistic act of
interpretation may resemble the opportunistic storytelling of the Canterbury
Pardoner, who admits he preaches "for coveitise." Both Pardoners emerge as
examples of "coveitise" whose transparently self-serving uses of story
expose their other forms of appetite. But though the Interlude Pardoner
seeks to fulfill his audience's desire, he shows none of his predecessor's abil-
ity to tell a story and draw from it an authoritative and endorsable moral.
Instead, his interpretive methods are based transparently on personal gain.
In emphasizing the Pardoner's self-serving and materialistic hermeneu-
tics, the Interlude author stabilizes the dynamics of textual and moral desire
that so trouble the Host (and later readers) in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale.
Making the Pardoner an example of solipsism and materialism constitutes
an answer to particular questions. The fact that the Interlude author portrays
the Pardoner as a clear negative exemplum reveals that, in the Canterbury
Tales, the Pardoner's iconic status was not so clear. Indeed, the questions
Chaucer raises in the Canterbury Pardoner's performance have to do less
with the exemplary status of the Pardoner himself than with the demands he
makes upon his audience. What makes Chaucer's Pardoner so intolerable is
precisely that he entangles a "moral thyng" with his audience's self-interest.
When, in concluding his sermon, the Canterbury Pardoner turns to the Host
to demand an offering, at one level he demands only what the Host habit-
ually offers: application. That is, the Pardoner demands that the Host take
the story to heart and apply it to his own experience. We have seen that the
Host takes the Physician's Tale so much to heart that thinking about its vic-
timized character nearly gives him a heart attack. In asking him again for
just such an affective response, the Pardoner points out Harry's envelopment
in sin because the story he has told calls for the approbation of an audience
embedded in the knowledge that men are, indeed, full of cupidity. The three
rioters learn that their greed for money leads them down the road to death,
and the story, like Gregory's ideal example, is designed to inspire the heart
to virtue. In pointing out the proximity of his own hypocrisy to holiness,
then, the Pardoner also points out the proximity of his audience's eager
reception to cupidity-indeed, he shows that their desire for meaning is a
condition of envelopment in sin. Such proximities raise the question of how
virtue can emerge at all in a sinful world, and the Host's violent imagined
castration only disavows without dismissing this question.
The Interlude's answer to Chaucer, then, constitutes an argument about
exemplary method. If examples are designed to rouse the heart, the basis of
this excitement must be not only desire for narrative but also desire for
moral direction. For the Interlude author, such direction cannot be tainted
by a corrupt preacher; nor can it be contingent upon a potentially wayward

audience's affective response. In answer to the contingencies of affective
response that define not only the conclusion of the Pardoner's performance
but also the Host's conduct throughout Fragment VI, the Interlude-author
renders the Host a guardian of general rules of social conduct-rules that
provide stability and order. The impulse to limit the unpredictability of
changeable circumstance emerges also in the ways in which the Interlude
Host echoes and revises the Canterbury Host's concern with the passage of
time (for example, the Man of Law's Introduction, 1-32), guiding the
pilgrims toward afternoon rest, supper, and evening retirement. The Interlude
Host marks time as a way of conducting an exemplary, well-regulated life
himself and as a form of "rewle." In the Canterbury Tales, on the other hand,
the Host's timekeeping leads him to classical and proverbial musings on the
loss associated with the passage of time: his speech reminds the audience
outside the framework just how contingent the Canterbury community is,
and how much based on local circumstances are its rhetorical and
hermeneutic acts. The idea of time in the Interlude, in contrast, has a pragmatic
and regulatory character.
Toward the end of the Interlude, the Host's echoes of the General
ProloJ!UC even more explicitly reconfigure the Canterbury community's
impermanence. After the Pardoner's difficult night, as the return journey
begins, the Host praises the spring day in terms that echo the opening lines
of the Canterbury Tales: he praises the singing birds and celebrates "howe
the seson of the yere and Averell shoures I Doth the busshes burgyn out
blosoms and floures!" (691-92). The link between natural generation and
storytelling is quite explicit here: "sith" God has sent such a lovely day, the
storytelling "covenaunt" can be renewed. But this Host spends ten lines
considering the problem of drawing lots:
For and we shuld now begyn to draw !ott,

Peraventur it myght fall there it ought not
On som unlusty persone that were nat wele awaked,
Or semy-bousy over eve, and had i-song and craked
(half-drunk last night, and had croaked)
Somwhat over much. How shuld he that do?
For who shuld tell a tale, he must have good will therto.
So this is my conclusyioun and my last knot:

It were grete gentilnes totell without !ott. (703-716)
In the General Prologue, of course, the Host may or may not rig the drawing
of lots: he calls upon the Knight to draw first, and the Knight draws the
shortest straw, "Were it by aventure, or sort, or cas" (844), an ambiguity that
EARLY RECEPTION 125
leaves room for the Host's controlling intervention. Cheating at drawing

lots, however, is a rather different mode of regulating the storytelling game
than the Interlude Host wishes to engage in. He is worried about the con-
tingencies of "aventure, or sort, or cas," which emphasize the unpredictable,
specifically the possibility that someone inappropriate will have to tell a
tale. Finally, he decides to abandon chance and rely instead on "gentilesse."
The storytelling game is determined by general social and moral standards,
and by a closing off of unpredictable contingencies. The Host attaches the
stories that follow more closely to the goal of expressing "gentilesse" by
divorcing them from the "unlusty," the sleepy, and the hung-over.
Just as the Interlude author quiets the contingencies of affect in the Host,
so too he weaves the Pardoner's plot very tightly together with his character,
creating an exemplary causal alignment of plot and character. The bad char-
acter is punished while the gentil pilgrims sleep soundly. The Interlude
Pardoner's dream interpretation, like his bailled reading of stained glass, his
stealing of relics, and his blindness to Kit's plotting, are evidence of an astute
answer to Chaucer's doubts about exemplarity. When the Interlude author
separates the Host's moral virtue from the Pardoner's self-interested inter-
pretation, he provides a lectio facilior, an easier and more tolerable reading. He
offers a Pardoner whose moral universe is simply irrelevant. He is discon-
nected from the pilgrimage, and in fact so disconnected from human
"company" generally that he cannot even read. Throughout the Interlude, his
reading methods are contained and corrected by those of the Host, who,
rather than engage in interested and affective responses to stories, instead
defines the values of gentility and good citizenship. In the process, the
Interlude tries to make reading and storytelling themselves into simpler tasks
than they have thus far appeared to be. The story of the Pardoner's come-
uppance occurs at a level of remove that implicates only himself he gets
what he deserves. The audience within the tale sleep through his escapade.
The audience outside the tale may have to endure its moral vapidity, but is
also free to deride him as the butt of the fabliau plot. The Canterbury
Pardoner's performance implicates his audiences at both levels in whatever
judgment they impose on him: when the Host reacts with fury, he scape-
goats the Pardoner, and it is then his responsibility to initiate the kiss that-
however contingently-heals the rupture in the concluding lines of the
tale. In the Interlude, the author's plot enacts a judgment and a punishment
upon the Pardoner, letting both the other pilgrims and the external audience
off the hook.
The Interlude here engages in an elaborate lectio facilior: the destructive
potential of the Host's verbal violence in the Pardoner's Tale is deflected off
the Host and blamed completely on the Pardoner, who makes himself an
obvious scapegoat. The story's plot carries an interpretation of the Pardoner
to its clearest possible conclusion-and the conclusion that Chaucer's

Pardoner's Tale and its framework resist: punishment of a character who
exemplifies excessive appetite. That this is the content of the easier reading
suggests that neither the Pardoner's appetite nor his exemplary status
constitute the whole of the challenge he issues to the pilgrims-or to his
secondary audience. Rather, he shows them how self-interested are their
own most virtuous desires.
Ordering Hermeneutics
For twentieth-century readers, of course, the act of correcting a past author
must not be relegated to the status of bad reading and left at that. Corrective
reading is not simply a sign of readers' having overlooked the "true" meaning;
indeed, it can be a sign that they read something more troubling than they
are willing to pass on. Corrective readings can also vary tremendously. As we
saw in chapter 4, Lydgate elides the troubling paternal violence ofVirginius,
which had been so central to his English predecessors. His versions of the
Virginia story seem designed to smooth over the narrative disjunctions
opened by his predecessors, and in that sense the Fall of Princes can be
understood as a corrective to the political reticence of Chaucer and the pre-
carious political fictions of Gower. In Canterbury Interlude, however, Chaucer's
versions of Host and Pardoner are very much present; the Interlude appears
in the radically reordered Northumberland manuscript of the whole
Canterbury TalesY Even if the Interlude was originally read (or performed)
autonomously, of course, its echoes of the Canterbury Tales partake in the
prior poem in a way that Lydgate's independent compilation does not,
evoking the prior poem's multiple narrators and contested standards of
interpretation and social conduct.
The Northumberland manuscript as a whole performs a thoroughgoing,
if somewhat inconsistent, correction of the Canterbury Tales: the Interlude is
inserted to redefine and regulate the effects of the collection. In this sense,
it is a rather laborious and incomplete "answer" to Chaucerian questions.
The manuscript contains a unique ordering of the tales, in which those
following the Interlude and the Tale of Beryn are the Melibee and the Tales of
the Monk, Nun's Priest, Manciple (without the Prologue), and Parson. 32
The Tale if Beryn, a story about the control of rage required to establish
gentility, relates the long, romance-like tale of a young man who changes
from drunken, gambling aristocrat to successful and virtuous merchant.
Before he tells the Tale of Beryn, the Merchant enjoins his audience to
excuse his rudeness and seek out his "centence" (729-32), in an unusual
version of the traditional fruit-chaff image: "tell yew the yolke and put the
white away" (732).Whereas in Chaucer, the humility topos can suggest the
EARLY RECEPTION 127
interested nature of storytelling, here the humility topos is designed to bolster

the storyteller's good intentions. The Merchant, who has lost all suggestion
of the aggressive antifeminism of Chaucer's Merchant, cannot imagine con-
tradicting the Host or "peynt[ing] my tale but as it is" (730): he perpetuates
a fiction of the rhetoric-free, transparent story obedient to his own and the
Host's good intentions. That the conventional fruit-chaff image becomes a
yolk-white image-whether intended by the narrator to read this way or
not-makes it hard to "put ... away" elements of the story that follows.
Egg whites are, after all, tasty if not nourishing, perhaps like the plot of
the Pardoner-fabliau that the reader has had to endure.
In any event, the corrective impulse of the Tale of Beryn continues in the
remainder of the Northumberland manuscript. With the exception of
the Manciple's Tale, those that follow Beryn are all tales that Paul Strohm has
identified as the more generically stable, as well as the more popular in the
fifteenth century. 33 They are also overtly exemplary. The Melibee is (at one
level) an example of the development of a prudent man. The Monk's Tale
makes the explicit claim to represent examples "trewe and olde" (1998).
Both the Nun's Priest and the Manciple tell beast fables with explicit, if
problematic, morals. Copied here without its prologue, the Manciple's Tale
loses the Host's jocular but uneasy reiteration of the capacity for drink to
turn "ernest into game" (IX, 100). Of the tales that follow Beryn, the
Parson's is the exception: in refusing "fable," he creates a didactic text that
does not partake of exemplary narrative.
The Interlude, then, creates a turning point in the pilgrimage. 34 Most of
the Canterbury Tales, with their multiple narrators and multiple standards of
interpretation, precede the Interlude. Then, during the Interlude, the unruly
voice of the Pardoner is relegated to the gaping hedges while the Host
exemplifies prudence, gentility, good governance, the restraint of emotions,
and (perhaps most important) regulated, correct interpretive conduct. In this
sense, the Interlude revises not only the Pardoner but through him, the whole
of the Canterbury Tales. Still, it leaves considerable room for the audience's
self-education. If we read the manuscript as a unified whole, the Interlude asks
its audience to change their reading methods in mid-book, to understand
the tales that follow it in the light of a new restraint. The values that the
Interlude-narrator endorses give readers parameters for understanding-and
distancing themselves from-the unstable "Hurlewaynes meyne."
In such radical and unique reordering, a principle of lectio facilior is at
work. But scribal revision sometimes offers more local than synthetic
answers to manuscript questions, and I would misrepresent the sometimes
haphazard accessibility of exemplars, the piecemeal nature of copying, and
the physical character of the manuscript itself if I overstated its formal
unity. 35 Charles Owen describes the manuscript's effort to create an overall
order "fitful at best." 36 He cites as evidence the scribe's failure to create links
between tales; for instance, when the Thopas-Melibee link is broken and
Sir Thopas is followed by the Pardoner's Prologue, the scribe does not smooth
the transition. Owen takes this as evidence that the scribe copied exemplars
with only occasional concern for ordering the tales. Though Owen insists
on the contingency of the many orders in which the Tales appear in the
manuscripts, it is nevertheless possible that the manuscript might represent
a conscious (if imperfect) scribal effort to reorder the work as a whole.
John Bowers, in fact, suggests some degree of ordering intention at work
when he creates the category he calls the "Martyrdom Group" (Second
Nun's, Prioress', and Physician's Tales), though he tends to make sense of the
manuscript's ordering on the basis of time and geography rather than the-
matic moral concerns (208). 37 The manuscript's ordering seems rather to
suggest a loose genre-based arrangement, with the pivot point in the
Interlude and Tale if Beryn, where the work turns toward the explicitly
moral. Still, the looseness of this arrangement should be stressed. In the
Northumberland manuscript, the Interlude is visually set off, not completely
integrated into the Tales as a whole: it is introduced and concluded on sep-
arate folios and with more elaborate colophons and identified as the work
of one Brother Thomas, concluding, "Nomen Autoris presentis Cronica
Rome I Et translatoris Filius ecclesie Thome" (fol. 237r). In addition, the
Interlude!Beryn addition cannot be assumed to be the engine of change
here: as with many scribal interventions, more than one cause gives rise to
the reordered Tales, including the availability of exemplars.
The order of tales in the Northumberland manuscript follows Manly
and Rickert's textual affiliations only very locally. Though the manuscript
initially shares an order with their b class, it deviates after the Second Nun's
Tale, interrupting Fragment VIII (G) with the Prioress' and Physician's Tales.
The grouping of these three stories of female martyrdom (Second Nun,
Prioress, Physician-one of them a pagan, but nevertheless all virtuous
martyrs) suggests an urge toward generic arrangement akin to that of the
tales following Beryn. The saints' lives are followed by the Tales of the
Shipman, Thopas, the Pardoner, and the Canon's Yeoman-essentially
continuing fragments VII (B 2) and VI (C) without the extracted saints' lives,
before returning to fragment VIII (G) with the Canon's Yeoman's Tale.
Splitting fragment VIII (G), which normally contains the tales of the Second
Nun's Tale and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, has the effect of correcting what
may have been an uncomfortable juxtaposition between saint and sinner.
The Northumberland order creates a more gradual move from saints' lives
to equivocal secular stories (Shipman and Thopas), and thence to tales of
hypocrisy and greed (the pairing of Pardoner and Canon's Yeoman seems
particularly suggestive in this way), followed by the corrective Interlude and
EARLY RECEPTION 129
Beryn. The rest of fragment VII (B 2), including the Melibee, Monk's Tale, and
Nun's Priest's Tale, are put off until after Beryn where they appear in their
conventional order. Again, these ordering changes possibly have as much to
do with availability of exemplars as with programmatic arrangement; the
grouping of didactic tales at the end of the manuscript may be a morally
felicitous but happenstance result of this availability. But the uniqueness of
this order, the choice to insert the Interlude and Tale of Beryn, and the generic
groupings of some of the rearrangements support the idea that the manu-
script's order corrects the Canterbury Tales' habit, in most orders, of disori-
enting generic combination.
A few scribal revisions offer easier readings of the Pardoner as well. His
famous sexual ambiguity rests upon the narrator's comment in the General
Prologue, "I trowe he was a geldyng or a mare" (VI.691). In the
Northumberland manuscript, the line becomes, "I trowe he had a geldyng
or a mare" (1. 691; fol. Sr; emphasis added), which avoids the question of his
sexual anatomy by eliminating his comparison to a horse of any kind,
suggesting the unreadability of the metaphor to begin with; if the original
line were a clear indication of a specific sexual deviation, we might expect
to see it clarified, not redirected, since deviation is exactly what the Beryn-
narrator emphasizes in the Pardoner's behavior. 38 Deviation does not con-
stitute a threat, in and of itself; it is the implication of an audience in the
abnormal or the sinful that creates a challenge to interpretation. In another
telling scribal change in the General Prologue, the Northumberland
manuscript redirects Chaucer's Horatian apology. Where Chaucer excuses
himself on the basis of his duty to recount the pilgrims' words accurately, for
"The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede" (742), the Northumberland MS
has "The wordis be chosen to the dede." 39 Like the Interlude-author and
even the Beryn-merchant, the scribe here collapses the difficult relations
between word and deed, offering a transparent alignment between them
that (at least momentarily) clarifies where the audience ought to stand.
When words are cousin to the deed, their relations can be oblique and
ambiguous. Where words are chosen to the deed, such obliquity is realigned.
This gesture toward the notion that representation should create corre-
spondences between text and referent suggests a resistence to the media-
tions of rhetorical and narrative effects that we have seen become so much a
subject of the debate about the value of exemplary fiction. Lydgate's Fall of
Princes demonstrates an even more thoroughgoing resistance to mediation, as
we have seen in chapter 4.
The words of the Pardoner's Tale proper offer no more evidence of lectio
facilior than other manuscripts; "hautyn speche" becomes "haunten speche,"
(1. 330), locally increasing the Pardoner's difficulty, for it is the uncanny that
haunts. The first appearance of the sermon theme-radix malorum est
cupiditas-is delayed by about ten lines, perhaps mildly undermining the

Pardoner's rhetorical clarity. More interestingly, because of the unique order
of this manuscript, the Pardoner's Tale is framed uniquely, again compromising
the narrative frame significantly. The Physician's Tale has no link (in the
Riverside called "Introduction to the Pardoner's Tale"), so the Host's affective
response to the story of Virginia is omitted. In its place comes the Shipman's
Tale, followed by Sir Thopas (with no prologue). The Pardoner's perfor-
mance occurs, then, in a very different framework from the one modern
readers are familiar with: it is introduced by the Thopas-Melibee link in
which the Host interrupts the "dogerel" of Chaucer-the-pilgrim, and
Chaucer promises instead a "moral tale vertuous" (940/*2130). The omis-
sion of the usual Introduction to the Pardoner's Tale, where the Host swoons
over Virginia, turns the Thopas-Melibee link into a Thopas-Pardoner link.
Chaucer's self-defense and his warning that he will tell "somwhat moore I
of proverbes than ye han herd bifoore" (956/*2146, quoted from edition)
takes on a very different cast when the "proverbes" of his "moral tale vertuous"
are not the teachings of Prudence but the teachings of the Pardoner.
Most strikingly, the Pardoner's performance appears to be in the mouth
of Chaucer-the-pilgrim. Perhaps this merging of author and character-a
result of aligning words very closely with deeds, so closely that the "deed"
of authorship entails endorsement-provokes the need for the Interlude. As
has often been noticed, the imbrication of author and character constitutes
part of what is so challenging in the Pardoner's performance. 40 Donald
Howard sees the Pardoner as a "grotesque mirror-image of Chaucer him-
self" because he, too, is an "outrageous liar and role-player" (376).This mir-
roring, however, collapses in the Northumberland framework. It becomes
difficult to make any distinction between Chaucer the pilgrim, Chaucer
the poet, and the Pardoner. As we see in the Interlude and Tale cif Beryn itself,
the framing device of the pilgrimage is reasserted in the continuation. But
as we have also seen, the methods of framing are changed: framework serves
the function of endorsement, not the "role-playing," ironic distancing, or
reticence we have seen especially prominently in the Physician's Tale. The
reordering of the Canterbury Tales helps emphasize the question, "How can
we trust an author who tells an evil tale?"This is a more complex and press-
ing version of the question "How can a good man tell an evil tale?" In
readjusting the Canterbury framework, the Northumberland scribe interro-
gates the authority of narration. The Interlude answers this question, as we
have seen, by realigning the author-narrator with the well-regulated,
authoritative Host.
What I have been calling lectio facilior is not just a method of rendering
the uncanny or confusing more recognizable, although it can have that
effect in many contexts. Rather, it is a way of answering the narrative tactics
EARLY RECEPTION 131
that raise questions. Having Chaucer appear to tell the Pardoner's Tale makes
the Pardoner's performance all the more morally confusing; inserting the
Interlude and Tale if Beryn suggests just how vigorously this fifteenth-century
reader sought to compensate for the effects of his own manuscript. By
taking this hermeneutic approach seriously, we can learn about historical
standards ofliterary discernment which do, and do not, resemble our own.
What we find, I believe, is that some fifteenth-century readers saw as much
instability in Chaucer's texts-at least the Physician's Tale and Pardoner's
Tale-as modern critics do. Whereas modern criticism tends to celebrate
such instability (in the form of new critical ambiguity, deconstructive inde-
terminacy, or postmodern proliferation of meaning), fifteenth-century
readers saw instability from a different perspective. But perhaps that
perspective was not as different as we are sometimes tempted to think. We
may not articulate the desire to find "som moral thyng" in what we read in
terms of expecting a miracle, as in Gregory's formulation, but surely we too
seek determinate morals, social convictions, or political ideologies in the
texts we read; and surely twentieth-century desires for "som moral thyng"
sometimes remain bound by intellectual self-interest.
CHAPTER6
MEMORY AND RECOGNITION IN

HENRYSON'S TESTAMENT OF CRESSEID
C haucer's poetry continually raises the question of how poetic delight

might have moral consequences. But despite his many explorations of
the relationship between "sentence" and "solas," he repeatedly depicts
exemplarity per se as a limited conceptual model. This is most striking in
the Physician's Tale, where, as we saw in chapter 4, the narrator makes
Virginia exemplary by killing her off. The Physician rejects natural bodily
mutability-Virginia's growth into a woman-which he associates with the
unpredictable and multiplicitous effects offabula. His laborious efforts reveal
that, for Chaucer, moral ideals provide too fixed a way of understanding
human action, or of representing that action in poetry. When, in response,
the pilgrims desire "some moral thyng" from the Pardoner, he demonstrates
the compelling moral logic that equates desire with death; as we saw in
chapter 5, the Pardoner's performance turns that logic against his desiring
audience. Elsewhere, in the Clerk's and Man of Law's Tales and the Legends of
Good Women, Chaucer repeatedly examines the costs of imposing abstract
moral rules, especially upon women. 1 These examinations occur in different
formal registers, invoking a range of discourses-the hagiography of the
Man of Law, the domestic advisory discourse of the Clerk's Tale, the courtly
love of the Legends. In each context, female virtue is achieved through
visible narrative manipulations, hinting at how feminine will may exceed
available parameters. Constance's perfect submission to her fate is depicted
through the continual narrative interventions of the Man of Law, whose
overweening presence calls attention to her passivity and obscures her will. 2
Medea's virtuous womanhood fits uneasily with her violent back-story,
which indicates that her will exceeds the hagiographical parameters of the
Legends. Indeed, in that text, the God of Love's exemplary imperative to tell
stories of virtuous women has been an interpretive crux precisely because
134 FALSE FAilLES AND EXEMPLARY TRUTH
of its radical reductiveness. Chaucer contributes to the late medieval debate

about the moral purposes of storytelling by making rigid formulations of
female conduct a source of female suffering, and by suggesting the possibility
of as-yet-unrepresented female will. In Chaucer (and in Gower as well),
narrative itself can work against didactic reductiveness by representing the
"ambiguous particularity" ofhuman actions in time. 3 Thus, for instance, the
story of Constance calls attention to the awkward violence of the heroine's
resistance to her rapist when she throws him overboard, even as the Man of
Law's narration suppresses her responsibility, mystifYing the source of her
ideal faith. At the same time, the engine of the Constance plot, the worldly
concerns of the merchants from whom the Man of Law learned it, under-
mines the heroine's expression of eternal, universal truth. 4
The reductiveness of exemplarity as Chaucer depicts it emerges
nowhere more forcefully than in Troilus and Criseyde. Pandarus defines the
love story in an elaborately allusive context, citing an array of classical lovers
and other imitable figures in his effort to persuade the lovelorn Troilus to
action. This context maps out a discursive terrain within which the poem
develops, and out of which arises a portrait of Criseyde marked by devia-
tion from exemplary stereotypes of women. 5 In Books 2 and 3, the poem
depicts a woman whose thoughts, dreams, and actions suggest the presence
of an idiosyncratic consciousness irreducible to exemplary patterns. Much
as Pandarus attempts to make her into the courtly beloved, the poem
provides so much access to her inner state through monologues, thoughts,
and dreams, that feminine stereotypes of "daunger" and "pitee" do not
adequately describe her response to Troilus. By Book 5, however, readers are
thrown back upon stereotyped interpretations of Criseyde's betrayal
because there is no sufficient explanation for her failure to return to Troilus.
After having accepted Diomede, she herselflaments that she will be "rolled
on many a tongue," subject to the public association between her character
and the general attribute of infidelity. Even feminine infidelity, however,
does little to explain her actions, with the effect that moral generalizations
come to seem hopelessly inadequate to the task of explaining her idiosyn-
cratic will. In Book 5, exemplarity registers loss: it is all that is left when
Criseyde herself has disappeared from Troy and, essentially, receded from the
poem as well.
Robert Henryson's Testament of Cresseid revises Chaucer by insisting that
poetry's value lies in its exemplary significance. I conclude this book with
Henryson because, like many fifteenth-century readers, he objects to
Chaucer's interrogations of exemplary morality; but more than Lydgate or
the Beryn-author, he insists on the formal basis of moral interpretation.
Henryson does not deny the deceptive effects of poetic representation; nor
does he deny that making a character exemplary reduces her to a stereotype.
MEMORY AND RECOGNITION 135
Indeed, he emphasizes a crucial distinction, between Cresseid's experience

of suffering and the meaning she and others attach to it. The poem enacts
interpretation in several stages: the framing fiction of reading; Cresseid's
dream of the gods; and the encounter between the leprous Cresseid and the
grieving Troilus, which produces mutual recognition, culminating in the
stark commemoration Troilus has engraved upon her tombstone. This series
of interpretations resembles, to a degree, the repeated explanatory acts
depicted in many exempla, like those in Handlyng Synne or The Book of the
Knight of the Tower. In the "dirty tablecloth" exemplum from The Book of the
Knight of the Tower, the wife's disobedience is explained and punished by her
having to sit at the dirty table with the dirty churl; her own shame and
anger corroborate the nature of the transgression, and her husband's expla-
nation of the punishment repeats and completes the story's meaning. We
saw in chapters 1 and 2 the ways in which such redundancy foregrounds
interpretation and application. In Henryson, the series of explanatory inter-
pretations is far less redundant, but tends to concentrate moral meaning on
a single heavily laden sign. Each new scenario produces a new sign of
Cresseid's betrayal (the dream of the gods; the leprosy; the jewels Troilus
throws in her lap), calling upon the reader to discover its correspondence to
emotional and ultimately moral experience. Henryson's poem relies on
poetic artifices that differ substantially from Chaucer's. In the argument
between them lies the kernel of late-medieval debate about the moral
effects of exemplary narrative-a debate poised between emphasizing
readers' freedom of judgment, on the one hand, and offering them tools of
moral definition, on the other. In combining elaborate artifice with didac-
tic clarity, Henryson argues that Chaucer leaves readers with inadequate
moral distinctions; unlike Lydgate or the Beryn-author, however, he pro-
vides a model of how poetic or pictorial forms, internalized in the memory,
can provide structures for moral judgment.
The Exemplary Criseyde

Chaucer by no means rejects the exemplary mode outright. In Book 1 of
Troilus and Criseyde, Pandarus cites myriad examples in the process of per-
suading Troilus to confide in him and to allow him to be messenger to
Criseyde. Pandarus's discourse evokes an expansive context-figures from
Bayard the proverbial horse to Paris's wife Oenone, from the suffering
Niobe to the story of Thebes. The gradual narrowing of allusive horizons
in the last books of the poem, the reduction of the intertextual world to the
"recursive" The ban story, provokes Criseyde's lament about her reputation
in Book 5. 6 By then, the range of allusion throughout the poem comes
down to a stereotype of feminine conduct. But for most of the poem, the
love story far outreaches its models. Pandarus fills his persuasive discourse
with allusions invoked as examples for both himself and the lovelorn
Troilus. Though unsuccessful in love himself, like the poem's narrator,
Pandarus insists he can be a servant oflove's servants-he need not, indeed
must not, resemble them if he is to shape skillfully the development of their
love affair.
"Ye, Troilus, now herke," quod Pandare;

"Though I be nyce, it happeth often so,
That oon that excesse doth ful yvele fare
By good counseil kan kepe his frend therfro.
I have myself ek seyn a blynd man goo
Ther as he fel that couthe Ioken wide;
A fool may ek a wis-man often gide." (I.624-30)
Pandarus here unfolds an essentially exemplary claim: the good counselor

who fares ill uses his own experience as a negative model, keeping his friend
from similar troubles. As his argument continues, in proverbial terms, he
claims that resemblance need not be the defining element of good counsel,
just as the whetstone need not be sharp to sharpen the knife. The argument,
of course, depends upon an analogy between one experience and another
that lies at the heart of exemplarity. The whetstone-knife metaphor con-
denses a problem that actually unfolds through the vicissitudes of narrative:
the ideals of love Pandarus evokes are a network or succession of actions,
not a single virtuous picture that can be imitated exactly.
At the same time, however, Pandarus's rhetoric admits the "excesse" of
his own experiences, pointing out the difficulty of achieving an ideal love
affair. In the course of the poem, as Pandarus guides Troilus and Criseyde
into the roles of lovers, he tries to hold them to courtly romantic ideals,
even as he complicates the apparently coercive capacity ofhis master narra-
tive by calling attention to his own interests. When he points out his own
dissatisfaction in love, he reveals his need for vicarious romantic satisfaction.
In Book 3, notoriously, this vicarious desire comes to the fore when, during
the love scene, he looks upon an "old romaunce" (3.980)-which could
refer to a book or to the lovers themselves. His uses of examples, in fact,
highlight the more general fact that reading is specific, circumstantial, and
can (therefore) be changed in the telling. This consciousness ofhow his own
interests affect the story, paradoxically, prevents Pandarus from having total
control over the lovers. His emphasis on the changeable application of
stories also prevents either Troilus or Criseyde from simply acceding to his
models. Inasmuch as the lovers, too, are engaged in the process of applying
conventions of love to their own situation, Troilus and especially Criseyde
decide how past examples might apply to their present actions. Allusions to
the past, then, call attention to the changeable will of both characters and
readers-to interpretive choice. And in the end, of course, Pandarus's best
efforts to fit Troilus and Criseyde into a happy love story are futile in the
face of martial circumstances. However forceful Pandarus's exemplary activity
may be, its efficacy is finally limited by time and place.
In Book I, Pandarus already manipulates models when he cites Oenone's
letter to Paris to praise his own efficacy as a go-between:
"I woot wel that it fareth thus be me

As to thi brother, Paris, an herdesse
Which that icleped was Oenone
Wrot in a compleynte ofhir hevynesse.
Ye say the lettre that she wrote, I gesse?"
"Nay, nevere yet, ywys," quod Troilus.
"Now," quod Pandare, "herkne, it was thus:
" 'Phebus, that first fond art of medicyne,'
Quod she, 'and couthe in every wightes care
Remedye and reed, by herbes he knew f)rne,
Yet to hymself his konnyng was ful bare,
For love hadde hym so bounden in a snare,
AI for the daughter of the kyng Amete,
That a! his craft ne koude his sorwes bete.'
"Right so fare I, unhappyly for me.
I love oon best, and that me smerteth sore;
And yet, peraunter, kan I reden the
And nat myself." (2.652-69)
The water nymph Oenone (rationalized as "herdesse") was Paris's wife

before his rediscovery as a son of Priam, whereupon he abandoned her for
Helen. In the Heroides, Ovid has Oenone complain that her skills in healing,
taught her by Apollo, are now ineffective in curing her love for the unfaith-
ful Paris. 7 Pandarus changes her first-person complaint into a third-person
quotation of Apollo. Oenone does not voice a complaint of her own, but
displaces her grief for Paris onto the god. The "I" who compares himself to
Apollo (1. 666) is Pandarus; Oenone has merely narrated what Apollo said.
The sick-physician topos does, in fact, originate with Apollo when he
laments the loss ofDaphne (Metamorphoses1.521-24). Pandarus has Oenone
displace even this moment, though, by alluding to another of Apollo's
beloved mortal women, the daughter of Admetus. The god's love for her
distracts him from tending his herds, whereupon the newborn Mercury
steals his cattle, covering his tracks by pulling them backward into a cave.
Both Daphne and the daughter of King Admetus show the god's impotence
in the face of his love for mortal women. But unlike Daphne, the king's
daughter does not turn into a tree; by switching the reference point of
Apollo's sick-physician lament, Pandarus has Oenone avoid all reference to
the suffering of women and emphasizes the god's suffering instead.
At the same time, of course, Pandarus does not need to cite Oenone at
all in order to engage the sick-physician topos. In invoking her as a
momentary "narrator," he engages the iterative Heroidean narrative of
betrayed womanhood. 8 Further, Oenone suggests a prewar pastoral world
that has been lost-the world before Paris's royal identity became known.
Her sorrow recalls the origins of the war in the "ravysshyng of Helen"
(TC 1.62). In this way, Pandarus's reference joins a network of intertextual
allusion that points out the costs of war to women throughout the poem.
Oenone gives a hint of the precariousness ofCriseyde's circumstances-she
too could become one of the abandoned Heroidean women (in fact, Briseis
is one of them). 9 Yet in displacing Oenone's grief, and in burying any
reference to Daphne, Pandarus downplays feminine suffering and empha-
sizes instead the subjection of a helpless male figure to love. Pandarus at
once refers to female vulnerability and recuperates women into a master-
narrative where masculine suffering takes precedence.
Rhetorically, Pandarus uses Apollo to encode his own lovelorn state and
make it applicable to the lovelorn Troilus. But when he makes Oenone the
intermediary for the analogy between Apollo, himself, and Troilus, he regis-
ters, however briefly, the potentially destructive consequences of male
love. Precisely in the process of suppressing Oenone's grief, Pandarus
momentarily reveals that feminine suffering might exceed the perspective
of love-struck masculinity; he disrupts the clear analogy between Apollo
and Troilus. In many other texts, we have seen how the ostensible alignment
between past and present can be undermined by a consciousness of how
stories change-Gower's argument against Livy, for instance, emphasizes the
contingencies that cause Virginia's death rather than glorifYing Livian
republican virtue. Here, the ideal of correspondence dissolves almost imme-
diately into Pandarus's rhetorical machinations. Oenone appears in evoca-
tive shadow, exposing his interests and the ways in which the allusion also
exceeds his interests. By mentioning Oenone at all, Pandarus implies a rela-
tion to past stories that undermines any aspiration to timeless truth, and
puts into question the applicability of past stories to the present.
Before Book 5, this interrogation of characters' exemplary status
highlights their freedom to act according to experiences that are not
encompassed by convention. This is especially true of Criseyde. Recent
assessments have emphasized Criseyde's role as a female "chivalric subject,"
her perceptions and actions formulated either in responsive acquiescence to
the needs of chivalric men (Fradenburg), in opposition to the disavowals of
men (Margherita) or, finally, in avoidance of the high costs of loyalty to
those men (Sanok). These readings do a great deal to complicate critical

assessments of her conduct, but sometimes underemphasize the significance
of her choices-and, ultimately, the interpretive choices of readers. 10
Criseyde's precarious status is a far cry from Oenone's helpless abandonment;
the elegiac complaint of the water nymph who cannot cure herself of love
may point as easily to Criseyde's difference from the Heroidean model as to
her resemblances to it. For Criseyde, of course, insists upon her capacity to
choose love deliberately: "For man may love, of possibilite, I A womman so,
his herte may tobreste, I And she naught love ayein, but if hire leste"
(2.607-609). Even though Criseyde's freedom of choice might be con-
strained by other forces, the possibility of an unconstrained-that is, in
some degree, free-feminine will is insistently raised throughout the text,
most prominently in Book 2.As Karla Taylor puts it, throughout the poem
Chaucer "gestures toward a female autonomy not wholly confined by the
strictures of romantic love, without, however, actually representing it." 11
Indeed, Pandarus's machinations arguably reveal just how difficult it is-
perhaps impossible-to suppress a feminine will that refuses the influence
of even the most compelling love story. Criseyde's awareness that "unhappes
fallen thikke I Alday for love" (2.456-57) cannot simply be taken as an indi-
cation that she knows her own precarious situation, though certainly it is
partly that. She also knows the available set of past stories-the narratives of
"unhappes," like those in the Heroides, but also the song in praise of love
sung by Antigone-and regards herself as having a choice about which
one(s), if any, to place herself within.
In Book 5, as her expressions of choice diminish, Criseyde becomes
increasingly the exemplar of inconstant womanhood, "rolled on many a
tonge": she fits one narrative that makes her freedom of will look like
inconstant will, and thus subsumes the previous complexity of her character.
She emerges as painfully "slydyng of carage" in a world of mutability, and
the poem creates analogies between her instability and that of readers' expe-
rience in the reading of the poem. 12 Troilus and Criseyde suggests that poetry
calls into question the ready formulations of conventional moral judgment,
and points out the dependency of such judgment upon the contingencies
of time, place, and point of view. This interrogative purpose is particularly
clear in the three portraits of the lovers (5.799-840). After the love affair
and Criseyde's departure, after Diomede has begun to woo Criseyde, and
after it becomes clear that she will not return to Troy, the narrator pauses to
describe each lover in turn, as if to introduce them to readers for the first
time: "Criseyde mene was of hire stature ..." (5.806). The conspicuously
belated pictorial descriptions, as many have noted, interrupt the narrative
and serve more to raise questions than to clarifY the characters' actions by
reference to types. To what degree is Criseyde's conduct legible in her
countenance? By this point, learning that her eyebrows are joined only calls
attention to the limitation of physical signs. In staging this last (mis)align-
ment between preconceived type and the particular will of a character,
Chaucer depicts the exemplary mode itself as a conceptual failure. Criseyde's
fame in Book 5 is figured as inadequate to the love she chose and shared
with Troilus in Book 3.
Henryson's Cresseid in the Polished Glass

When Henryson has Cresseid punished with leprosy, he responds to the
disappearance of Chaucer's Criseyde, filling in a moral and narrative blank
by reforming the plot. Henryson's Cresseid becomes an example of femi-
nine inconstancy, "brukkil as glas," and therefore a "poleist glas" in which
readers see their own brittle situation. As is well known, the Testament takes
up Chaucer's story at its conclusion, after Diomede abandons Cresseid; she
bemoans her fate, becomes a leper, and after encountering Troilus one last
time, mourns her own infidelity and dies. 13 The mirroring encounter
between the leprous Cresseid and Troilus reveals the lack of any such
encounter-and the lack of definitive moral recognition granted to Pandarus,
narrator or readers-in the final book of Troilus and Criseyde. Henryson thus
emphasizes the links in Troilus and Criseyde between poetic indeterminacy
and mutability; he wants art instead to shape, contain, and clarifY worldly
existence. His Cresseid, instead of bemoaning her fate, enjoins women read-
ers to make an example of her. In providing a morally conclusive, though
not simplistic, version of Cresseid, he recognizes the significance of
Chaucer's refusal to judge her, but argues that poetry should not refuse so
much. 14 Chaucer's interpretive and moral choices appear to him an intoler-
able burden. Poetry's task, for Henryson as for Lydgate, is not to call into
question the terms of moral judgment but to express moral order.
The opening lines of The Testament of Cresseid establish a language of
reflection that recurs throughout the poem:
Ane doolie sessoun to ane cairfull dyte

Suld correspond and be equiualent .... (1-2)
The creation of correspondence or alignment between weather and poetic

mood is a patently artificial claim. Henryson establishes an entirely different
world from that of Troilus and Criseyde's exemplary misalignments. 15 In its
correspondence to an inner reality, Henryson's weather is akin to the
manifestations of sin and grace in exemplary collections (the witch's bag in
Handlyng Synne, the dirty tablecloth in The Book of the Knight of the Tower).
Like those signs, Henryson's weather is remarkable in itself-hot, and then
cold and full of hail, what Fox calls a "blighted spring" (1. 236); the poem's
meaning is concentrated in the physical sign, which intensifies by making
material its theme of sorrow. As the stanza continues, this weather comes to
express the narrator's discomfort as well as Cresseid's tragic narrative itself.
In effect, the weather warns readers that a stormy or disordered presence is
mediating the story of Cresseid, complicating the "correspondence"
between season and sorrow. The work of the poem lies not so much in cre-
ating unencumbered analogies between physical signs and emotional effects
(weather and sorrow) as in creating "resonant" patterns out of otherwise
disordered or inexplicable experience. 16 The weird weather asserts such a
pattern: sensory experience, in manifesting an emotional state, creates a
conceptual order, an equivalence, that begins to define the narrator's rela-
tion to his subject.
The central focus of this impulse toward order, of course, is Cresseid. Her
leprosy, like the weather, makes concrete her emotional suffering. In
manifesting her anger and outrage as physical disease, the poem seeks to
define a conceptual problem, her moral offense. Critics generally find that
Cresseid undergoes a process of increasing self-recognition, what Jennifer
Strauss has referred to as the "getting of wisdom reading" of the poem,
though they do not agree on her ultimate Christian redemption. 17 Douglas
Gray for instance describes her progress toward "a spiritual change of some
kind" (205), and Lee Patterson makes the strongest case that Henryson
"allows her to move from the objective pagan world of crime and punish-
ment to the subjective Christian world of sin and repentance" (703).
Certainly, the poem charts Cresseid's interior progress; it demands that its
readers reconcile (or at least bring into relation) the narrator's version of
her, Troilus's perception of her, and the series of interpretations of herself in
her own dream, complaint, and testament. 18 By depicting a change-from
lamenting her blasphemy to acknowledging her infidelity-the Testament
retains much of the complexity of Chaucer's poem and encourages pathos.
But the "getting of wisdom reading" underestimates both the value of
external, physical signs in the poem and the importance of Cresseid's ability
to become such a sign herself.1 9 Rather than creating an opposition
between what Patterson calls "the spirit" and the "crude physical dimension"
of experience (700), Henryson draws on resonant physical experiences to
indicate principles of moral understanding. Much of the poem's energy is
directed toward making Cresseid's experience emblematic; by the end of
the poem, Cresseid's internal "recognition" has become subordinated to the
stylized exemplum through which she becomes morally legible to readers. 20
In contrast to Chaucer, Henryson's primary concern is not to indicate the
fullest complexity of Cresseid's inner state, but to make her legible to future
readers.
The terms of this legibility begin to emerge in the emotionally charged but
morally unclear figure ofHenryson's narrator, who sympathizes with and even
resembles Cresseid. 21 The narrator recalls the "compassioun" of his predeces-
sor, but qualifies it with his well-known question about Chaucer's reliability:
Quha wait gif all that Chancier wrait was trew?

Nor I wait nocht gif this narratioun
Be authoreist, or fenyeit of the new
Be sum poeit, throw his inuentioun
Maid to report the lamentatioun
And wofull end of this !us tie Cresseid,
And quhat distres scho thoillit, and quhat deid. (64-70)
This stanza makes room for Henryson's poem by acknowledging its

fabrication, pointing out how little Chaucer's narrator knew of the "wofull
end" of Criseyde but using an equivocal word ("fenyeit") to describe the
act of filling in what Chaucer left out. 22 The stanza hovers uneasily between
truth and deception, implicitly granting Chaucer authority, if not "trewth,"
in order to invent a new and revised "report" upon Cresseid. In Book 5 of
Troilus and Criseyde, the narrator repeatedly attempted to "excuse" Criseyde
for the sake of pity or "routhe," but simultaneously implied that, without
any clear account of her actions, such sympathy had become increasingly
difficult to defend. In citing her distress, the new poem seems to offer a res-
olution to this problem of narratorial sympathy: we will now get inside
Cresseid's experience. Reporting her woeful end in a new poem promises
to enable sympathetic response based on more detailed knowledge.
But the sympathy of Henryson's narrator rapidly veers toward aggression,
in an exaggerated imitation of the Chaucerian narrator's ambivalence; and the
meaning of Cresseid's suffering becomes inconclusive. He reminds us five
times in ten lines that she suffered wretchedly and died (62, 63, 68-70). Even
though he ostensibly identifies with her plight, his apostrophe to her impli-
cates him in the satisfactions available through witnessing her punishment:
0 fair Cresseid, the flour and A per se

Of Troy and Grece, how was thaw fortunait
To change in filth all thy feminitie,
And be with fleschelie lust sa maculait,
And go amang the Grekis air and lait,
Sa giglotlike takand thy foul! plesance!
I haue pietie thaw suld fall sic mischance! (78-84)
The extremity of the narrator's language here juxtaposes pity with

condemnation in the morally charged terms of filth, corruption, and foul
pleasure. Its language veers awkwardly between active and passive verbs,
associating the narrator's condemnation with Cresseid's activity in her fate
("change," "go," "takand") and his sympathy with her passivity ("how was
thow fortunait," "I haue pietie thow suld fall sic mischance!"). By the end
of the poem, sympathy and condemnation coexist, but here their conflict
prevents clear moral judgment about her actions. Even in the last line, after
the rest of the stanza's crescendo of blame, the narrator's sympathy
reemerges as if to disavow his own intimate hostility. The narrator's dichoto-
mous assessment of Cresseid makes sympathy seem like a thin veneer over
his masculine outrage, and makes telling the story of her suffering look like
an act of antifeminist violence.
It is worth recalling that this affective structure typifies exemplary
morality in many other texts. We have seen examples of sympathy based on
the disavowal of violence many times throughout this study: from the
solicitous didacticism of the Knight of La Tour Landry's prologue to the dis-
avowal of desire in Chaucer's Physician 5 Tale, sympathy for vulnerable
women allows narrators to construct a masculine authority that apparently
avoids, but actually exposes, the coerciveness or violence of their own moral
judgments. In The Book of the Knight of the Tower, spectacular examples are
designed to educate women even as they also severely constrain feminine
conduct. In Chaucer's story of Virginia, the Physician's excess of identifica-
tion with the vulnerable virgin ostensibly avoids his implication in the very
violence that makes her exemplary. The affective claims evinced by both
Knight and Physician encourage sympathy for vulnerable women, even
while they endorse the severest limitations upon women's conduct. They
curtail lived existence for the sake of articulating their exemplary meaning.
When the Physician or the Knight try to disavow the violence of their
narration, they expose it instead. The combination of"pietie" and denigra-
tion expressed by Henryson's narrator suggests a similarly tense proximity
between compassion and aggressive judgment. The stanza, in short, expresses
a dichotomous view of women characteristic of antifeminism. 23
Yet at the outset of the poem, this antifeminism seems far from settled.
Like other unreliable narrators-especially the Physician-rather than clar-
ifYing Cresseid's exemplary status as unfaithful woman, Henryson's narrator
raises questions about her meaning instead. Echoing the Troilus narrator, he
claims he will "excuse" Cressied "als far furth as I may" (87) and laments
that she is reduced and even destroyed by "wickit langage" (91). But wicked
language, which implies a general agreement among those who circulate a
story, establishes exemplary value; ill repute makes her a model of infidelity.
It is this agreement about her that Chaucer's Criseyde lamented in Book 5.
Wicked language expresses a view of the exemplar from the outside, regardless
of her inner state-a view the Henryson narrator disavows (he regrets its
power). Here as in Chaucer, the desire to excuse her highlights the

difficulty of excusing her, and the narrator is rendered unreliable-not only
because of his age and identification with his character, but also because of
his self-contradictory description of her fate. Henryson's narrator mediates
the antifeminist discourse according to which Cresseid is emblematically
unfaithful, continuing the interrogative stance toward exemplarity expressed
by Chaucer's narrator. Unlike Chaucer's narrator, however, Henryson's
serves to catalyze the poem's effort to make her exemplary. By exposing the
narrator's affective conflict, the poem distinguishes this process of achieving
exemplarity from simple antifeminism. 24
Cresseid's dream of the gods provides the first of several "mirrors," which
like the weather, signifY Cresseid's emotional disorder (both are described as
"doolie," 1 and 344). The dream realizes Cresseid's suffering in sensory
terms, which allows her a degree of self-regard that she could not achieve
in the emotional abstractions of her lamentation. Saturn's association with
the ice and hailstorms that opened the poem suggest that the gods control
not only the seasons but the "cairfull dyte" itself. Yet the gods convey no
clear or singular analogy to human life; the way in which they" correspond"
to Cresseid's suffering is general, even inexact. 25 Other gods contrast to
Saturn-Jupiter, with his clear voice and glittering hair; Mars, armed and
glowering; Apollo, associated with the life-giving sun. Nevertheless, the
gods produce an "impression of balance" (Patterson, 701). Their visual
coherence emphasizes the representation of experience in determinate
material terms. When the gods accuse Cresseid of blasphemy, they offer a
severely limited account of her moral state; Pearsall remarks that they con-
vict her "on a technicality" (176). 26 Though the dream is patently fictive,
the set pieces of Cresseid's transgression, judgment, and punishment concretize
and restrict the profound indeterminacy of Chaucer's Criseyde.
Jill Mann has pointed out that the parliament of the gods, mediated as it
is by Mercury, eschews "the pretence that it emanates from any higher
moral authority" than that of the poet (101-102). Indeed, the dream estab-
lishes Henryson's argument about the function of poetry. Primarily, this is a
moral function: the gods assign blame to Cresseid and make her fault man-
ifest in her punishment. But the dream's moral import emerges indirectly,
through the highly patterned description of each god and the interlocking
of their respective attributes, which suggest not simply blasphemy but the
world of betrayal and abandonment Cresseid has articulated. The gods pro-
vide a mental diagram of her inner world, a way of understanding visually
her emotional state. 27 The images of a fearsome cosmos arrayed against an
outcast woman emphasize her vulnerability, calling for the reader's dread
and sympathy. While the dream makes Cresseid's state more determinate
than did the final books of Chaucer's Troilus, it also counters the narrator's
antifeminist moral judgment with a more ambiguous basis for judgment in
the world of the unjust gods. The dream works aesthetically, in the
Aristotelian sense, through sensory and emotional impressions. It represents
the fault of Cresseid, not through a generalization about fickle femininity,
but through a highly wrought emotional image .The realm of the fabulous-
associated, as we have seen, with artifice and rhetorical mediation-becomes
integral to the poem's argument for a concrete, and conclusive, kind of
exemplarity.
Cresseid's response to her dream calls attention the making of an exem-
plary figure. She immediately takes up a mirror in which she sees her
destroyed face: "than rais scho vp and tuik I Ane poleist glas, and hir schad-
dow culd luik; I And quhen scho saw hir face sa deformait, I Gif scho in
hart was wa aneuch, God wait!" (346-SO).This moment supports the valid-
ity of the getting-of-wisdom reading: the limits of her understanding are
apparent in the fact that she sees only a physical deformity, without
connecting it to the wrong she committed against Troilus. 28 "Schaddow"
denotes reflection, but also implies a lack of illumination that works against
the polish of the glass, and indicates her limited vision. Still, her regret for
having offended the "craibit gods" (353) encourages readerly sympathy. The
gods' brutality has redirected the moral problem away from her infidelity to
Troilus, opening space for Chaucerian "compassioun" for her woe. 29 When
Cresseid looks at her shadow she is already on her way toward making an
example of herself. Like the weather and the gods, the polished glass mani-
fests not just leprosy itself but the possibility of interpreting its causes. The
physical world indicates Cresseid's limited view, since at this point she
registers only her illness, but this reflection of deformity also suggests that
she-and her audience-might seek out a "correspondence" between
the mirror and the moral significance of her suffering. In the course of the
poem, the process by which this polished glass becomes a figurative mirror
shows how the concrete sign identifies exemplary meaning.
This significance emerges in Cresseid's formal complaint in the leper
house. The ubi sunt language, the elaborate rhyme scheme and increased use
of alliteration, and the second-person address of the complaint lend
Cresseid a distance from herself and a consciousness of audience that were
lacking in the earlier lament and dream vision. Like the symmetrical parlia-
ment of the gods, the prosody here also calls attention to Henryson's central
concern with principles of poetic order. 30 As ever, Cresseid perceives her-
self here as defined by material loss; she also echoes the loss of reputation
that focused Criseyde's lament at the end of the Troilus. The second-person
address to herself as a figure of such loss, however, generalizes and moralizes
her fate in a way entirely foreign to her predecessor:
Thy greit triumphand fame and hie honour,

Quhair thou was callit of eirdlye wichtis flour,
All is decayit, thy weird is welterit so;
Thy hie estait is turnit in darknes dour;
This Iipper ludge tak for thy burelie bour,
And for thy bed tak now ane bunche of stro,
For waillit wyne and meitis thou had tho
Tak mowlit breid, peirrie and ceder soure;
Bot cop and clapper now is all ago. (434-42)
Cresseid has redefined her life in terms of conventional broad oppositions

(high estate and darkness, leper lodge and bower, meat and moldy bread),
rather than viewing it in the specific personal terms of blasphemy and
punishment that defined her initial understanding of the dream. Although
she does not yet acknowledge her active part in her fate, the ubi sunt for-
mula describes her suffering in conventionalized terms. This universalizing
impulse, far from allowing her to "neatly avoid ... personal responsibility"
(Patterson, 707), makes her available to public judgment, so that Cresseid's
downfall becomes the occasion for the reader's recognition of human
mutability. The act of making herself conventional gives her life commu-
nicative power: the function of her complaint is not only self-expression but
self-portrayal, akin to the best efforts of Amans to place his experience of
love within the defining terms of Genius's exemplary tales. In making the
specific signs of her suffering (moldy bread and cup and clapper) fit into a
general framework, Cresseid relates her experience to a pattern-a stanzaic
pattern and a set of predictable relations between good fortune and
deterioration-at once formal and moral.
The complaint culminates in another "mirrour," this time a figurative
one. Cresseid returns to first-person speech in the last three stanzas, recalling
Books 2 and 3 of Chaucer's Trail us, when Criseyde's inner life seemed both
idiosyncratic and intimate:
My cleir voice and courtlie carolling,

Quhair I was wont with ladyis for to sing,
Is raw and ruik, full hiddeous, hoir and hace;
My plesand port, all vtheris precelling,
Oflustines I was bald maist conding-
Now is deformit the figour of my face;
To luik on it na leid now lyking hes.
Sowpit in syte, I say with sair siching,
Ludgeit amang the Iipper leid, "Allace!"
0 ladyis fair ofTroy and Grece, attend

My miserie, quhilk nane may comprehend,
My friuoll fortoun, my infelicitie,
My greit mischeif, quhilk na man can amend.
Be war in tyme, approchis neir the end,
And in your mynd ane mirrour mak of me:
As I am now, peraduenture that ye
For all your micht may cum to that same end,
Or ellis war, gif ony war may be. (443-60)
Earlier in the complaint, Cresseid laments the lost "garding with thir greissis
gay" where she used to walk in May, singing with her "ladyis fair" (425-31);
now the first-person perspective makes that companionable singing
intimate and perhaps recalls the love song Antigone sang in the garden in
Book 2 of Troilus and Criseyde. 31 Henryson's stark juxtaposition between
song and lament, beauty and deformity, reform the dilated narrative of
Chaucer's poem into a set of near-pictorial oppositions. The crescendo of
alliteration in these stanzas gives the language formality and stasis, and
emphasizes the structural oppositions ("plesand port ... precelling" and
"deformit ... figour. .. face"). Finally, the envoy registers her new role: no
longer the courtly lady, she now becomes a mirror to "ladyis fair of Troy
and Grece." She makes herself a particular image available as an instrument
for recognizing the general structure of human deterioration. To be sure,
Cresseid's comprehension of her part in her misfortune remains incom-
plete. Her misery remains largely a matter of ill fortune, and she uses words
("infelicitie,""mischief") that hover between assigning blame and accepting
her fate. But this "personal" or interior understanding differs from the more
public, objective image of herself she begins to imagine here. The poem's
emphasis shifts away from her self-recognition and toward the figure she
makes of herself for others. Indeed, the "spiritual change of some kind"
which Gray and others argue she undergoes seems to me ambiguous
precisely because the poem itself turns attention toward her exemplary
value instead. She becomes one of the concrete signs that structure the
poem: her "figour" is both physical and moral, in the sense that her appear-
ance appeals to (or repels) the senses and emotions in order to create an
avenue for judgment. 32 Seen in this way, Henryson's poem depicts the mak-
ing of a memory-image. Such images were stored in particular places in the
mind: they "were thought in some way to occupy physical space"
(Carruthers, 27) and to have material existence in time. They were also
affective, "sensorily derived and emotionally charged ... not simply abstrac-
tion[s] or mental ghost[s]" (59). Henryson's poem obviously does not cre-
ate a full memorial architecture, but in response to Chaucer's patently
inadequate portraits of the lovers, he insists upon the material and emotional
"equivalences" that make Cresseid both an aesthetically visible and a

morally comprehensible figure.
The complaint makes Cresseid memorially available to an audience,
whose mental image cannot be an exact replica of Cresseid herself; there is
a gap, here, between her suffering and the meaning it may have for others.
On one hand, she seems almost to threaten other women with the immi-
nent passing of their beauty; on the other hand, her lament prompts sym-
pathy and fear more through the vivid particulars of her loss than through
the "doctrine" of her error. In enjoining women to make a mirror of her,
she brings an image of herself into what Carruthers calls "a temporal and
spatial meeting ground, a 'common place' " (181), a public arena where a
remembered image becomes the engine of a person's rhetorical and ethical
action. 33 What sort of action this might be, or even the exact parameters of
mental activity demanded of readers, remains only suggested. In the last
stanza of her complaint, Cresseid reiterates the call to make a mirror of her:
"Exempill mak of me in your memour I Quhilk of sic thingis wofull witnes
beiris" (465-66). This memory-image of Cresseid, as distinct from her
"personal" experience, can bear witness to woeful things in the wider world
of her readers as well. Although it seems worth taking seriously the exem-
plary injunction to avoid imitating Cresseid's fate, the notion of "wofull
witnes" here asserts the primary importance of emotional response, and "sic
thingis" hints at the variety of experiences to which Cressied's woe might
be applicable. The exact shape of a reader's application depends on how the
reader makes the memory-image his or her own. Cresseid prompts imitation
as internal reflection (making a mirror of her in one's mind) rather than
exact replication.
In making the distinction between Cresseid's inner experience and others'
readings of her, Henryson does not favor either as primary but arranges
them in a" correspondence;' placing considerable value on both her experience
and others' imaginative response-both the "getting-of-wisdom" and the
exemplary image. Cresseid undergoes terrible suffering and self-recognition,
and thereby engages the emotional perceptions of her audience, especially
in lines emphasizing the incomprehensibility and inalterability of her fate.
She also thereby becomes an image susceptible to appropriation and
change. When she highlights her audience's active part in formulating an
example of her, she also highlights the difference between her lived experi-
ence, "quhilk nane may comprehend" (453), and the image of her life avail-
able to the imaginations of her readers. 34 This differentiation between
Cresseid's suffering and her exemplary meaning also begins to clarifY and
resolve the poem's tension between sympathy and condemnation. Cresseid's
increasingly figurative and audience-conscious interpretation of her own
image in the glass indicates the poem's development of an exemplarity that
admits both the sympathy inspired by her particular suffering, and the
condemnation resulting from general moral judgment.
Cresseid's public meaning comes to fruition in the poem's climax and
denouement: the rills-recognition between the two lovers, Troilus's
generosity, and the concluding mutual recognition expressed in Cresseid's
testament and Troilus's epitaph on her tomb. While Cresseid is begging in the
streets, Troilus returns from battle, and as he passes by, she looks up at him:
Than vpon him scho kest vp baith hir ene,

And with ane blenk it come into his thocht
That he sumtime hir face befoir had sene,
Bot scho was in sic plye he knew hir nocht;
Yit than hir luik into his mynd it brocht
The sweit visage and amorous blenking
Of fair Cresseid, sumtyme his awin darling.
Na wonder was, suppois in mynd that he
Tuik hir figure sa sone, and lo, now quhy:
The idole of ane thing in cace may be
Sa deip imprentit in the fantasy
That it deludis the wittis outwardly,
And sa appeiris in forme and lyke estait
Within the mynd as it was figurait. (498-511)
Troilus makes a mirror of Cresseid: the eyes of the leper trigger the memory
of his lover, so that he makes sense of his present experience in the terms of
his past. 35 Troilus's image of her "sweit visage" is so deeply imprinted in his
imagination ("fantasy") that it deludes his outward wits or senses, appearing
within his mind just as it was first formed ("figurait"). Instead of registering
the change Cresseid has undergone, he reexperiences the love he felt for
her, complete with the symptoms of the courtly lover: fever, sweat, and
trembling (513-514).Yet he experiences this love as a memory, even a delu-
sion; an approximation, not a replication of what he sees before him. He
throws down his purse for the sake of Cresseid, assuming that she is "figurait"
only in a mirror-that she is present only to his own passionate memory.
It is crucial to Henryson's poetic argument that Troilus performs his act
of charity in a state of delusion. His understanding of Cresseid is shaped by
the power of his mind in the act of recollection. This mental power derives
from the figure imprinted on his fantasy, an image so palpably present that
it takes on the characteristics of material experience, like the weather or the
emblematic gods. In portraying Troilus's action with such striking interior-
ity, Henryson emphasizes the influence of mental forms upon human moral
action. He insists, that is, that Troilus's act of charity occurs not through
direct apprehension of the leprous Cresseid but through the equally vivid
and highly charged sensory experience of her "figure." Or, to put it another
way, the literal "figure" (face) of the present Cresseid prompts the act of
charity by corresponding to the mental "figure" (image). But within
Troilus's experience, the relationship between Cresseid's leprous eyes and
the image of her amorous blinking is by definition a metaphorical one, an
approximation, not an exact identity. Inasmuch as Cresseid's moral status
remains unresolved, her present state is not the reason forTroilus's compas-
sionate act, which is based upon loss and remembrance; Troilus gives his
jewels because of the connection he makes internally between two sensory
experiences (the leper's eyes, the memory of Cresseid's eyes). The moment
is a powerful argument for the capacity of figures-in their imaginative,
even illusory status-to order, inspire, and direct compassionate action.
The reader's knowledge that the leper lady is, in fact, Cresseid imbues the
scene with a haunting irony and calls attention to the imaginative character
ofTroilus's act.
Far from isolating the lovers, Troilus's act occurs in public and initiates a
public recognition of Cresseid's fate, not just an inner recognition on
her part. 36 Troilus acts out of"knichtlie pietie" (519), combining his interior
courtly suffering with chivalric duty and charity. Through his gift, each
becomes known to the other, and the work of the rest of the poem
enters both of them into a "common place" where his truth and Cresseid's
betrayal become clearly articulated and morally applicable. After she has
recognized her benefactor, Cresseid's lament pivots on the concise refrain,
"0 fals Cresseid and trew knichtTroylus!"The refrain frames loss in terms
of clear moral categories, truth and falsehood, pairing the lovers in emblem-
atic contrast. In the last two stanzas, directing herself to lovers, she implic-
itly returns to the antifeminist stereotype of fickle womanhood, warning
against women's inconstancy and advising lovers to praise those few who
are true. Citing her own instability, she imbues the antifeminist stereotype
with the vividness and intimacy of self-knowledge: she makes herself the
exemplary particular designed to send home the truth of the generalization.
The moral opposition (false/true), far from being inadequate to the
complexity ofCresseid's suffering, condenses and repeats the poem's formal
structure as well as its moral point. Binary oppositions are at the heart of the
poem's pattern, as Mann points out. The gods are described according to a
"binary principle of contrast, which juxtaposes youth and age, benevolence
and cruelty, beauty and ugliness, sweet and sour, without diminishing or
blurring the opposition between them" (Mann, 98). Even the jewels thrown
to the leprous Cresseid partake in this contrastive pattern. 37 Felicity Riddy's
analysis of the poem, which traces its gender and sexual oppositions, simi-
larly finds that the poem is structured around dualities, principally the
stable, pure masculine and the heterogeneous, impure feminine. For Riddy,
the poem renders the feminine not only unclean and immoral but "excludit"
from masculinity and truth. This deep misogyny emerges in the direct
address at the end of the poem: ostensibly, Cresseid is an example only for
women, who are implicated in the corruption and dissolution she
represents. Cresseid's feminine disease and exile help constitute the stability
and truth of the masculine Troilus, and such outcasts are necessary for
the sustaining ideals of gender difference? 8 Surely Riddy is right about
the gendered character of these terms, and their costs to the female figure
in the poem (and to women in general). But the poem defines stark gender
codes in the service of making vivid a contingent error. In this sense,
Cresseid is useful to readers not because she reiterates misogynistic norms
but because the specific signs of her distress make sense of those norms to
"inspire" others.
Riddy's analysis, however, does much to counter the optimistic reading
of the poem's ending because, unlike getting-of-wisdom readings, she
emphasizes Cresseid's role in a social (and moral) structure rather than her
internal progress. Many have argued that Cresseid's final statement, "Nane
but my self as now I will accuse" (574), finally acknowledges that she is
author, rather than victim, of her own misfortune, and sees leprosy as a con-
sequence ofher betrayal ofTroilus. 39 While this is certainly true, and central
to the getting-of-wisdom strand of the poem, the second complaint actu-
ally serves to externalize, rather than internalize, Cresseid's self-recognition.
It reframes the love affair: both she and Troilus become more static, more
pictorial than they have been before. Whereas the first, ubi-sunt complaint
bemoaned the reduction of her leisured life to leprous suffering, this
complaint embraces another kind of reduction, the narrowing of moral
judgment into exemplary categories. With such narrowing comes a moral
order constituted through, but moving explicitly beyond, inner recognition.
In making herself exemplary, Cresseid subsumes her particular sufferings
into the general image of feminine instability. 40
In her final complaint, then, Cresseid reinscribes the antifeminist polari-
ties voiced by the narrator earlier in the poem precisely in order to paint a
clear picture of herself. She embraces what Chaucer's Criseyde resisted, the
"rolling" of her story "upon many a tongue." Henryson's poem argues that
the available language of feminine instability offers a broadly comprehensi-
ble framework in which to place her particular culpability; it gives her and
her readers the terms to condemn her actions, setting her in contrast to the
ideal knightly lover, "Of all wemen protector and defence" (556), who
suffered such pain for his "trew lufe" (564).The poem's exemplary simplifi-
cation makes Cresseid the spokeswoman for the gender polarity that
consigns her to leprosy and death. Thus, when Henryson puts moral
condemnation into the mouth of Cresseid, he disavows but does not finally
avoid the antifeminism we saw earlier in his dichotomous narrator. Still, the
depiction of Cresseid's inner life complicates Henryson's antifeminism by
showing the process by which she reduces herself. 41 Her narrative reveals
the costs of exemplary clarity for women, as did Chaucer's and Gower's
Virginia narratives. Henryson is more willing to accept those costs, for the
sake of offering a determinate and applicable "mirror" to readers. 42 But still,
reduction of her grief to bald refrain- "0 fals Cresseid and trew knicht
Troilus!"-marks how much her experience exceeds the concise moral
parameters of her image. Like Virginia, albeit in less murderous terms,
Cresseid becomes exemplary by dying.
In the face of Chaucer's apparent effort to avoid such reduction, Henryson
gives Cresseid's experience determinate significance by completing it. In her
testament, before she dies, she consigns her material things to their proper
places, as she has also consigned herself and Troilus to moral categories. The
testament, then, brings to fruition the poem's insistence on the material
manifestations of inner experience; it ends, in fact, with an instance of the
figuration-here, "takning" (590)-that has defined Henryson's poem
throughout: "0 Diomeid, thou hes baith broche and belt I Quhilk Troylus
gaue me in takning I Of his trew lufe" (589-91).The brooch and belt sig-
nifY Troilus's truth in love, and also indicate Cresseid's falsehood; the fact
that they are in the hands of Diomede indicates the loss of the lovers'
worldly bliss. Like the figuration that occurs in Troilus's mind upon seeing
the leprous Cresseid, the love tokens here make concrete both an emotional
ideal and its loss. Indeed, these tokens are a kind of material manifestation
of Troilus's mental image, the memory of the beloved Cresseid. They
emphasize the vivid physicality of signs like the weather, the planetary gods,
and the leprosy itself, which have corresponded to emotional and concep-
tual disorders throughout the poem. The formal concentration of the
brooch and belt produces moral clarity, sending home the value ofTroilus's
truth. These last lines of Cresseid's testament, followed by Troilus's inscrip-
tion on her tomb, clinch Henryson's argument that it is the task of figura-
tion to bring about both formal and moral order, rather than (as in
Chaucer) to raise multiple unanswered questions.Yet the lines also suggest
the inadequacy of physical tokens. In a sense, the brooch and belt no longer
symbolize Troilus's truth when they are in the hands of the wandering
Diomede. This final act of tokening suggests both the resonance and the
limitations of poetic symbols, insisting on their materiality precisely in
order to consign them to a world in which they are misappropriated and,
upon Cresseid's death, left behind in the wrong hands.
Through Cresseid's testament, Troilus learns of her illness and death, and
articulates the moral and emotional facts without further figurative
adornment: "I can no moir; I Scho was vntrew and wo is me thairfoir"
(60 1-602). Troilus's final, literal inscription on Cresseid's tomb encapsulates

her life in exemplary terms:
Lo, fair ladyis, Cresseid of Troy the toun,

Sumtyme countit the flour of womanheid,
Vnder this stane, lait Iipper, lyis deid. (607-609)
These lines faintly resemble the narrator's earlier apostrophe to her, which
also juxtaposed her status as "flour and A per se I Of Troy and Grece" with
her "fleschlie lust" and "foull plesance" (78-84). But the morally laden
vocabulary is gone, and instead the mostly literal facts are recounted and
directed to other fair ladies. Troilus's epitaph condenses her narrative into a
triptych: flower of womanhood, leper, dead. From one angle, again, Cresseid's
exemplary status depends on her death, much as Virginia's exemplary status
depended upon the preservation of her static state of virginity through
death. But from another angle, Cresseid's destruction is given value as she is
reduced to an exemplum. Henryson insists that Cresseid's value to readers
lies in her finished story of error, punishment, and recognition. Her evanes-
cence, and more broadly the passing away oflove's bliss, is overcome through
the creation of an example, carved into stone as a lasting memorial.
Henryson's poem, then, calls attention to relatively static emblems that
encapsulate the past, while Chaucer's poem frames exemplarity in terms of
fluid narration-like the half-realized narrative of Oenone and Paris, or
(in contrast to Cresseid's dream of the planetary ceremony) the sudden evoca-
tions of cosmic forces in the midst of worldly events like the rain storm that
first brings Troilus and Criseyde together. The difference between the two
poems can be understood as a matter of temporality: Chaucer's poem
emphasizes the way the narrative unfolds, from the perspective of characters
who do not know the end of their own story, and draws readers into com-
passionate involvement in the processes of plot; Henryson responds by
making the characters know their own ends. 43 To be sure, Troilus and
Criseyde is framed as a finished narrative of the "double sorwe" ofTroilus
and concluded by Troilus's cosmic laughter at the end. But as Taylor points
out, the "view from the end does not suffice to understand the story.. .It
isn't true to human experience as it is known in its temporal unfolding"
(205), and the cosmic perspective exists in tension with local absorption in
the temporal process of plot throughout the poem. 44 Such absorption,
arising from compassionate identification, works against gestures of moral
judgment in the poem. Chaucer makes exemplarity a result of retrospection-
Criseyde bemoans the way in which her future readers will look back upon
her, and the portraits of the lovers in Book 5 suggest utterly inadequate
views from the end. In effect, the Testament answers Chaucer by insisting
that poetry should enable, not undermine, such retrospection. His poem
offers a determinate figure located in the past, a memory-image available
for the subsequent general use of readers. For Chaucer, the divorce between
exemplary figuration and idiosyncratic experience in time renders exem-
plarity itself inadequate, a poor cousin of poetic indeterminacy and sugges-
tiveness-creating a conflict between exemplarity and poetic narrative that
resembles the modern assumption that didacticism in general is aesthetically
impoverished. 45 For Henryson, the divorce between figuration and experi-
ence is a defining element of poetry; indeed, poetry is useful precisely
because it is stylized, compressed, and patterned-not the same as other
experience, but aesthetic in the Aristotelian sense, memorable, and therefore
useful as a moral structure. Henryson's Cresseid becomes understandable to
others through a process of mental appropriation, in which poetic signs
serve to make past suffering into a meaningful moral truth in the present.
The Testament registers a powerful disagreement with Chaucer about the
obligations of poetry to create conceptual and moral order. Still, Henryson
cannot really be read on a model of competition between poet and source
fathers. 46 Nor does here-familiarize what Chaucer leaves open to question,
as the Beryn-writer does with the Pardoner. His completion of Chaucer
suggests a kind of filling-in of a blank in the source text, but not the full
assent to the Chaucerian worldview that such completion might be
thought to imply. 47 Henryson acknowledges the value of Chaucerian
indeterminacy ("Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?") and
compassionate involvement ("I haue pietie thow suld fall sic mischance!")
and resolutely makes Chaucer's character into a thing of the past. To use the
language of reflection that structures the Testament, Henryson holds a mir-
ror to Chaucer in which the disappearance of Criseyde in the final books
looks like a cruel withdrawal from poetic judgment, even an abrogation of
the moral obligation of poetry. 48 Henryson's poem supplies what Chaucer
asked for when, at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, he invited the "correc-
tioun" of Gower and Strode. Indeed, Chaucer's poem seems to demand cor-
rective reading. The earliest copy of Henryson's poem, in Thynne's edition
of Chaucer, directly follows Troilus and Criseyde. 49 In attributing the
Testament to Chaucer, Thynne makes it seem that Chaucer restricted his
own indeterminacy, narrowed his own poem's "refusal to judge" (Pearsall).
Troilus is of course integral to the Testament; but Thynne's edition indicates
that Henryson's poem is also, in a sense, integral to its predecessor.
Henryson's poem, however, makes different demands upon readers. If we
take seriously his concluding moralitas, then the imperative to "worthie
wemen" not to engage in "fals deceptioun" (610-613) shows the poem's
primary purpose, encouraging imitation of virtue (or, in this instance,
avoidance of vice). Throughout this book, I have taken as a basis for analysis
the notion that explicit moralizations should not simply be regarded as

extraneous to stories, but as serious indications of exemplary aspirations to
timeless and univocal truth. Certainly Henryson shares with Lydgate and
the Beryn-writer a conviction that Chaucer (and Gower) leave moral prob-
lems too open to interpretation; later writers reduce the possibilities for
moral misunderstanding by clarifYing vices and virtues, offering "conclu-
siouns" (614).The call to "fair ladyis" in Troilus's epitaph ostensibly demands
exemplary alignment between story and readers, whose experience will
ostensibly replicate the text.
But we have seen that Cresseid demands "wofull witnes" more explicitly
than exact imitation. In addition, the difficulty of assessing her sin-
blasphemy and the inevitable vanity ofhuman desires interrupt the simple
narrative of infidelity-demands more than sheer imitative acceptance. The
reader's response to the story of Cresseid must lie in the mental activity
required for a clear view of her "untruth" delineated finally at the poem's
end. This effort does not take the shape of exact replication, any more
than any remembered image or text was thought to be exactly repeated
when applied to the present. In exhorting women to hold the fate of
Cresseid in "in your mynd" (614), Henryson also recalls the meeting with
Troilus, in whose "mynd" (505) the image of her prompted the charitable
action that brought the poem to an end. Troilus's charitable reading, in fact,
indicates the moral possibilities afforded by the poem. When he "reads" the
scene of the leprous Cresseid, he brings his emotional memory to bear
upon the present circumstance; his alms express a judgment not limited to
the imitation of virtue or the avoidance of vice. Once he knows Cresseid's
actual fate, he makes the classic exemplary gesture toward imitation by
addressing "fair ladyis," but actually avoids any direct mention of the moral
import of her life and death. She was the flower of womanhood, turned
leper, and died: what each of these steps means can be reconstructed in the
mind of the reader-the image of Cresseid is now available for storage in
the mind, and for re-picturing, or representing, when the contingencies of
any given audience's lived existence call for it. Such contingencies are left
open to the "fair ladyis" to discern.
Finally, then, despite his insistence upon clarity and closure, Henryson
shares something normally celebrated in Chaucer: the call to audience
judgment, which is not simply a matter of reiterating timeless exemplary
morals but is understood to be contingent upon time, place, and point of
view. For both poets, the exemplary mode of address calls special attention
to audience response-albeit for Chaucer that mode of address is figured as
severely limited, and set against the call to compassionate identification. We
have seen throughout this book that the call to judgment in exemplary texts
actually stretches well beyond the expectation that readers will imitate
characters. A restricted notion of imitation-as alignment between story

and reader-does not cover the terrain that exemplary narratives, in prac-
tice, actually ask readers to traverse. The danger of narratives, articulated by
those who objected to their use in sermons, was precisely that they would
seduce audiences to vice rather than enact virtue. In the vernacular poetry
of Chaucer and Gower, departures from exact replication of past stories
become the source of readerly engagement and application. Implicit in
Henryson's differentiation from Chaucer, likewise, is the differentiation of
any single reader from the exemplar; application of a past narrative is an act
contingent upon the specificity of the reader's circumstances and needs. 50
Imitation of conduct provides only a backdrop for imagining audience
response. The real force of the exemplary mode lies in its dynamic recasting
of readerly alterity-in Robert Mannyng's text, the reader's inevitable
involvement in sin; in Chaucer, the reader's idiosyncratic circumstances and
desires; in Gower, the reader's imaginative and ethical misunderstandings.
When Chaucer's Troilus goes so far as to divorce compassionate readerly
judgment from the exemplary mode, Henryson pulls the story back from
the brink of indeterminacy to reinvest Cresseid with the vivid and
emblematic power of an exemplary figure. But it is crucial to recognize the
degree to which Henryson's concrete and relentlessly enclosed version of
Cresseid nonetheless demands the interpretive phronesis which is, despite
its most compelling universal claims, the characteristic mode of medieval
exemplarity.
Readerly alterity underlies the apparent unifying claims of exemplary
morals precisely because examples are not just moral generalities but rely
upon particular narratives whose effects disavow, exceed, or undermine the
effort to achieve unified general truths. To a degree, disunity is inherent to
the exemplary structure of general plus particular. For the sixteenth- and
seventeenth-century European texts that]. D. Lyons examines, the hopeless
contingency of exemplary particulars comes to disable the possibilities of
judgment rather than point toward readerly responsibility or freedom.
Lyons finds a more embarrassed form of exemplarity than I have found in
medieval exemplary works. In his texts, examples are depicted as subordi-
nate to the general truth they are to clarify or demonstrate and at the same
time, ineffectual at demonstrating such truths: "The rise of irony and the
appearance of the reader as free agent removed from example not only its
imitative or injunctive force but even its role as embodiment of abstract
truth" (239). When particulars come to the fore in all their variety and
excess, in works from Machiavelli to Descartes, they seem to compromise
the educational and even communicative value of exemplarity. Timothy
Hampton's account of renaissance writing also comes up against the
"impossibility of exemplarity," the ultimate erosion of the authority of
exemplary figures, especially in Julius Caesar and finally in Cervantes. Yet,

although the differences between medieval and early modern exemplary
texts must be acknowledged, the difficulties of bringing together abstract
truth, particular narrative, and variable audience are inherent to the exem-
plary mode in medieval contexts as well as early modern ones.
Nevertheless, I find that medieval writers, who are highly aware of the
mismatches between moral and story, the contradictory effects within
stories, and the acts of reconciliation thus demanded of readers, still do not
emphasize the impossibility of exemplary application. They are invested,
instead, in the dynamic process of internalizing a text, different though the
internalization might be from the source. This difference, and the inade-
quacy of exemplarity, are most problematic in Chaucer, and at the other end
of the spectrum lie Henryson and, even further, practical religious manuals
like Handlyng Synne and Jacob$ Well. Medieval writers, though, in a radically
inductive approach to exemplarity, use moral generalization as the stage for
phronesis, not the static or even consistent end. This inductive, experiential
understanding of reading places enormous emphasis upon poetic form,
nowhere more than in Henryson's Testament. The importance of emotion-
ally charged signs in the Testament calls special attention to the role of the
aesthetic in creating exemplary clarity. Elsewhere, too, formal patterns
(rhyme in the Clerks Tale, or the metonymic dripping sword in Gower's
"Virginia") are the contingencies which require aisthesis: they are the mate-
rial on which sensory and then moral judgment is based. In this respect,
perhaps we might say that the late medieval is a period during which liter-
ary understanding depended so much upon contingencies that the local
aesthetic potential of moral reading could be activated without rendering
exemplary aspirations to timeless truth impossible or meaningless. Medieval
exemplary texts do not evince a simple faith in timeless truths or quiet
orthodoxies, but engage in vigorous debate about the exemplary mode as a
way of linking moral and aesthetic meaning. The continued vitality of
exemplary structures into the renaissance-in texts like the Mirror for
Magistrates, Painter's Palace of Pleasures, and many of the lesser-known dra-
mas, as well as Machiavelli and Montaigne's more self-conscious and ironic
texts-this ongoing concern with exemplarity attests to the ways in which
"taking ensample" remained a flexible and provocative, if always tense, way
of formulating audience activity.
Acknowledging the deeply contingent nature of medieval exemplarity,
of course, counters the older supposition that stability and orthodoxy char-
acterize medieval culture. Many other scholars of later Middle English
literature have demonstrated the ways in which unrest underlies documen-
tary and literary activity in the period; it has become a truism of the field
that variety, heterodoxy, and dissent define reading activity, especially during
the later fourteenth century. 5 1 Critical attention to affirmation of, or rebel-

lion against, institutional authority can sometimes underplay the tense
adjustment between authority and audience that is fundamental to
medieval exemplary literature. Inasmuch as narratives aim to inspire or
seduce their audiences, their claims are not so much authoritative as rhetor-
ically persuasive; exemplary texts evince less concern with their own
cultural power than with the transformations they wreak upon their
sources, and the changes they (hence) expect from their audiences in turn.
In this regard, the transmission of exemplary truths is subject to a continual
process of modulation within, and redefinition of, local acts of virtue rather
than the clear establishment of either institutional authority or universal
truths. A deeply contingent mode of reading, and a pervasive consciousness
of the mediating function of literary examples themselves, define the most
authoritative sermon contexts as well as the ironizing poetry of Gower and
Chaucer. Even in Henryson's explicit effort to make Cresseid a clear and
stable exemplary figure, the formal texture of the poem betrays a sense of
the limits of exemplarity itself. In Cresseid's final complaint about her fate,
after she discovers Troilus's compassionate gift, the poem's recurring mirror
metaphor reappears, in a new guise:"I knaw the greit vnstabilnes, I Brukkill
as glas, into my self" (568-69). Cresseid now knows her own instability,
and as a result, regards herself as an image of such instability. Again, self-
knowledge here emerges not as a purely subjective experience, but quite
the opposite: her self-recognition enables her to externalize or objectifY her
moral status for the sake of others. Moreover, by recasting the mirror of
exemplarity as a metaphor for the fragility of virtue, Cresseid reveals the
sheer effort involved in the moral clarification of such a brittle glass as her-
self. By appropriating the exemplary mirror to a metaphor ofbrittleness, the
complaint points to the very heart of exemplarity's simultaneous aspiration
toward timeless, stable truths and dependence upon changeable particulars.
Making the exemplary mirror frangible suggests the ease with which exem-
plary communication can break down, in the face of unstable human con-
tingencies. Henryson argues that the poet's task lies in creating this brittle
artifice, from which the muddled particulars of lived existence might gain
some degree of momentary clarity. The demand he makes upon the reader
lies in giving such signs their fullest possible weight while, like Cresseid
unable to retrieve the brooch and belt from Diomede, recognizing the
limitations of the "tokens" that provide conceptual inspiration but cannot
finally control their own reception.
NOTES
Chapter 1 Introduction: Toward a

Poetics of Exemplarity
1. This is the exemplum in full, quoted from Robert of Brunne's Handlyng
Synne, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS o.s. 119 and 123 (London: Kegan Paul,
Trench, Trubner & Co., 1903), lines 8937-76. I have silently normalized yogh
and thorn. All further quotations from the text are from this edition.
Thyr was a man, and hyght Rychere,

A ryche of pens and of powere;
Hyt telleth algate he hadde enmys,
Other for hys gode, or for folys;
Of hem hadde he swyche drede & eye,
He fled and waned yn an abbeye.
The abbot ded hym a chambre werche
For hys ese, fast by the cherche;
And he and hyse hadde here wonnyng,
Wyfe and chylde, and outher thyng.
0 night thyr was, he knewe hys wyfe
Of flesshely dede, as fyl here lyfe;
And God was nat payd, and wide hyt noght,
So ny the cherche, swyche dede were wroght;
They myghte no more be broghte a-sondre
Than dog and bych that men on wondre.
Betydde a shame, they gun to crye,
That wundyr fyl on here folye.
Men asked sone what was that drede;
At the laste, hyt shewed yn dede.
Sone oueral yede that fame;
Yow thar nat aske yif they thoght shame.
Thys man dyd the munkes to kalle,
And specyaly besoghte hem alle
To praye for hem yn orysun
That they myghte be undoun.
160 NOTES
"And largely we wul yow yive,

And wurschyp thys stede why! that we lyve;
That God almyghty graunte it be so
That oure synne he wyl undo."
These munkes besoghte for hem a bone,
And God almyghty graunted hyt sone.
There, thurgh aile here ordynaunce,
They ded to wryte in boke thys chaunce,
For to shewe hyt euer more,
That outher myght beware thar-fore.
Thys chaunce fYI nat for hem allone,
But for to warne us euerychone,
That we shu! euermore drede,
Y n holy place to do that dede.
2. See Joseph Albert Mosher, The Exemplum in the Early Religious and Didactic
Literature of England (New York: Columbia University Press, 1911; repr. New
York: AMS Press, 1966), ch. 3, and Frederick Crane, ed., The Exempla or
Illustrative Stories From the Sermones Vulgares ofjacques de Vi try (London: D. Nutt
for the Folklore Society, 1890), pp. xv-cxvi. Larry Scanlon traces the devel-
opment from monastic to lay exempla during this period; see Narrative,
Authority, and Power: The Medieval Exemplum and the Chaucerian Tradition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 57-80.
3. John Ganim remarks upon the "anti-fabliau" quality of this exemplum in an
analysis of the way in which Robert's "examples struggle against the structure
imposed on them" (25). See Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1990).
4. On the proliferation of conduct books, see Kathleen Ashley and Robert L.A.
Clark's introduction to Medieval Conduct, ed.Ashley and Clarke (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2001), p. x. On the production of vernacular
guides to religious devotion, see Vincent Gillespie, "Vernacular Books of
Religion," in Book Production and Publishing in Britain 1375-1475, ed.Jeremy
Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
pp. 317-44.
5. Alistair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship, 2nd edn. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988).
6. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1982).
7. On English political poetry, see Janet Coleman, Medieval Readers and
Writers, 1350--1400 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981) and
V. J. Scattergood, Politics and Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (London:
Blandford, 1971).
8. Here and throughout, I use "exemplum" to indicate a specific form, the brief
moral narrative, which implicitly or explicitly urges audiences to virtue or
warns them against vice. The form is typified by the narratives collected for
NOTES 161
use in sermons but also includes the narratives in secular books like mirrors
for princes and the conduct books I examine in chapter 2. H.R.Jauss lists
exemplum as one of the "little forms" available for the formation of medieval
genres; see "The Alterity and Modernity of Medieval Literature,"
New Literary History 10 (1979): 181-229. I use "example" and "exemplary"
more broadly and, as we shall see, not necessarily in reference to either
rhetorical device or narrative form, but as a term indicating literary mode.
There is another word, "exemplar," which usually refers to the exemplary
figure taken as an image or ideal: what Aristotle calls a "witness" (2.20.9). On
the exemplar as descended from paradeigma, see the useful encapsulation by
Alexander Gelley, "Introduction" to Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of
Exemplarity, ed. Gelley (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 1-2.
An exemplar is generally a character, not a narrative.
9. Timothy Hampton makes a similar point: "The use of models to teach or
indoctrinate is, of course, a universal phenomenon, as is imitation as a
response to texts .... from Plato's discussion of education in the Greater
Hippias, to the search by contemporary liberation movements such as feminism
for historical 'role models' " (5-6). See Writing From History: The Rhetoric of
Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990).
Television, strictly speaking, is not narrative but drama; this makes it all
the more susceptible to analysis as exemplary because it usually relies on
internal acts of "shewing" the moral valences of action, instead of providing
an injunctive framework.
10. Inasmuch as verbal moods indicate various degrees of certainty, exemplarity
might be understood as an "imperative mood," asserting a high degree of
referentiality berween text and extra-textual world.
11. On mode as atmosphere or temper, see Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 33-70. Frye classifies modes based on
the hero's relation to the audience (his power of action can be greater than
ours, as in epic; lesser than ours, as in the ironic mode; or the same, as in the
mimetic mode). In these terms, exemplarity can be characterized by an
intensification of mimetic similarity berween character and reader, to the
point of creating apparently direct correspondence between one and the
other (imitability).
12. Karl-Heinz Stierle distinguishes berween "the case that is offered for judgment
and the example that is meant directly or indirectly to inspire imitation"
(404). In separating these two effects, he artificially draws a line between
conceptual generalization and particular application, two activities that
coexist, often in tension, in any exemplary narrative. See Stierle, "Story
as Exemplum-Exemplum as Story: On the Pragmatics and Poetics of
Narrative Texts;' in New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism, ed. Richard
E ..Amacher and Victor Lange, trans. David Henry Wilson et a!. (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 389-417. Originally published as
"L'Histoire comme Exemple, l'Exemple comme Histoire: Contribution aIa
pragmatique et aIa poetique des texts narratifs;' Poetique 10 (1972): 17 6-98.
162 NOTES
13. J. D. Lyons notes that "example" is thus a "fragment of another whole,"

indicating "a separation within the domain of what the ancients conceived as
res or matter. .. .All examples are chosen, isolated from a context and placed
into a new context" (31). See Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in
Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
14. Aristotle, De Rhetorica, 2.20. The word is Greek "paradeigma." In Aristotle's
account of rhetoric, examples are tools of the larger argumentative purpose.
But at the same time, in 1.2.19, Aristotle says that examples require
"reasoning... from part to part, like to like, when two things fall under
the same genus but one is better known than the other" (44). The notion that
the "part" is subordinate to the "whole" or general truth arises when there
is an expressed enthymeme: "if there are enthymemes, paradigms should
be used as witnesses, [as] a supplement to the enthymemes" (181, 2.20.9). The
difficulty here, and inherent in the concept of example, lies in the degree to
which we can say one element is subordinate or supplemental to the other.
I quote from Aristotle, On Rhetoric, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1991).
15. The subordinate status of the example is implicit, for instance, in Cicero's
account of the uses of narrative in judicial oratory: "one must also be on
guard not to insert a narrative when it will be a hindrance or of no advantage,
and also not to have it out of place or in a manner other than that which
the case requires" (1.21). I cite the Loeb translation of De Inventione, trans.
H. M. Hubbell (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1949).
16. Lyons points out that example broadly conceived need not be narrative; it can
be descriptive, expository, or pictorial (20-25). Many such types do carry
implicit narratives; as Timothy Hampton points out in Writing From History,
even the name of an exemplary hero implies an unfolding into narrative
action (25-26, following Barthes). Hampton emphasizes the tensions between,
on the one hand, a notion of narrative as ideological construct of an
Aristotelian "complete life," and on the other hand, narrative as "an infinite
variety of actions; the life of the hero can easily be sliced into a multitude of
discrete metonyrnically related segments or moments" (26).
17. Frederick Crane, who collects the sermon apologues (as he initially calls
them) of Jacques de Vitry, defines exempla as "stories capable of use for
moral instruction," and explains that ecclesiastical writers use the term to
indicate an "illustrative story" (Exempla ofjacques de Vitry, xvii-viii).
18. An exemplum is "un n~cit bref donne comme veridique et destine a etre
insere dans un discours (en general un sermon) pour convaincre un auditoire
par une le-;:on salutaire," in Claude Bremond, Jacques Le Goff, and Jean-Claude
Schmitt, L' "Exemplum" (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1982).
19. "Exempla in the Decline," Traditio 18 (1962): 407-417.
20. On the ways in which plot organizes the "basic story stuff" or "referents" of
narrative, see Victor Erlich, Russian Formalism: History and Doctrine
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 239-50.
21. Susan Rubin Suleiman writes that redundancy is a defining feature of
didactic texts in Authoritarian Fictions: The Ideological Novel as a Literary Genre
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1983; repr. Princeton: Princeton
NOTES 163
University Press, 1993). According to Suleiman, the staged interpretations

that occur within the parable of the Prodigal Son are redundancies (41, 55)
that serve to close off ambiguity and make stable, univocal meaning possible,
"as if the parable wished to underscore its own meaning by introducing a
sequence whose principle function is to produce a supplementary (and
redundant) gloss on the story.... This redundancy seems all the more necessary
since the parable contains no interpretive statements on the part of the
narrator" (41).
22. Among recent critics writing about exemplarity, Timothy Hampton, Writing
From History, is the most explicitly interested in the way example places pressure
on the reader's social action: "the evocation of the exemplary.. .is distinct
from other rhetorical gestures of citation and allegation in that the exemplar
makes a claim on the reader's action in the world" (3).
23. On the "communicative function" of language derived from its primary
function in pointing to things, see Jan Mukarovsky, Aesthetic Function, Norm
and value as Social Facts, trans. Mark E. Suino (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1970), pp. 70-71. Mukarovsky opposes the communicative
or didactic function to the aesthetic function, whose mode of reference is
less direct. Through a post-structuralist lens it may seem obvious that such
direct referentiality is undercut by the very nature oflanguage. But the aspi-
ration toward direct referentiality, or communication, must be taken seri-
ously in order to understand the problem of exemplarity as both
communicative and-I shall suggest later-aesthetic phenomenon.
24. Bremond and his collaborators suggest a stasis in antique exempla, replaced
with the more dynamic medieval exempla, which are driven primarily by
the aim of transformation or conversion of the reader (4 7). Different authors
locate "stasis" in different eras-for instance, Tubach finds early medieval
exempla static-because exemplary generalization always gestures toward
stasis or consistent moral truth; it seems to me that ancient rhetoric and early
medieval example share this gesture, but that neither is completely "static."
25. Lyons, like Stierle, finds that this chronology reaches a special crisis with the
radically skeptical and finally fragmented ethics of Montaigne; see
Exemplum, 118-53 and 237-40.
26. With regard to the distinction between correspondent and constitutive
modes of representation I am especially indebted to Victoria Silver, in
private communication.
27. See Bremond eta!., who trace the vernacularization of the form in the thir-
teenth and fourteenth centuries and remark on its association not only with
clerics but lay elites, noble, and bourgeois, especially in urban contexts
(59-63).
28. Elliott, "Sex in Holy Places: An Exploration of a Medieval Anxiety," journal
of Women's History 6 (1994): 6-34.
29. Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics if Counsel in
Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1996) is
especially sensitive on the ways in which such exemplary texts shift between
criticism of authority and subordinate flattery, and between expressions of
affirmation and expressions of dissent.
164 NOTES
30. Examples are useful "non solum ad edificationem sed ad recreationem,

maxime quando fatigati et tedio affecti incipiunt dormitare" (Crane, xlii n.).
31. On the ways in which ecclesiastical reform shaped the discourse of con-
fessional manuals, see Judith Shaw, "The Influence of Canonical and
Episcopal Reforms on Popular Books of Instruction," in The Popular
Literature cf Medieval England, ed. Thomas]. Heffernan (Knoxville: University
of Tennessee Press, 1985). See also Lee Patterson, "The 'Parson's Tale' and the
Quitting of the 'Canterbury Tales,' " Traditio 34 (1978): 332-80.
32. Nancy Mason Bradbury, "Popular-Festive Forms and Beliefs in Robert
Mannyng's Handlyng Synne," in Bakhtin and Medieval Voices, ed. Thomas ].
Farrell (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1995), pp. 158-79 and Mark
Miller, "Displaced Souls, Idle Talk, Spectacular Scenes: Handlynge Synne and
the Perspective of Agency," Speculum 71 (1996): 606-32.
33. Legally, sanctuary was specifically a retreat from criminal prosecution,
though it could also be a retreat from war (MED s.v. "sanctuary"). On the
role of scandal in mediating the tale's concern with inward intention, see
Elliott, "Sex in Holy Places," 18-22.
34. On the complex ways in which the "Dancers of Colbek" calls clerical
authority into question, and on the implications of this interrogation
for Robert's own clerical project, see Miller, 616-28. Scanlon finds "anti-
clericalism" an essential part of Chaucer's and Gower's contributions to lay
political authority; see esp. 147-59 and 248-66.
35. On defenses of the use of exempla in sermons, see H. Leith Spencer, English
Preaching in the Late Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), esp.
pp. 78-88.
36. Eric A. Havelock, Preface to Plato (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1963).
37. On suspicion and recuperation of pagan fobula, see Paule Demats, Fabula:
Trois Etudes de Mythographie Antique et Medievale (Geneva: Droz, 1973).
38. Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century: The Literary
Influence cf the School of Chartres (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972).
39. Mosher, Exemplum in England, 14-16; Tubach, "Exempla in the Decline,"
412. On the use of examples in sermons see also G. R. Owst, Literature and
Pulpit in Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966).
40. C. H. Lawrence, The Friars: The Impact of the Early Mendicant Movement on
Western Society (London: Longman, 1994), at 122.
41. Penn R. Szittya, The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1986).
42. Quoted in Mosher, 18. This can be seen as part of a larger evolution.
The councils at Sens, Milan, and Bruges in the sixteenth and early seventeenth
centuries took measures to prohibit the use of exempla; see Crane, lxix-lxx.
Spencer remarks that "(t]he problem of how justifiable it was to pander
to the worldly tastes of an audience, even if only to gain their attention, is
fundamental to the genre of preaching" (English Preaching, 79).
43. The English W<:>rks cfWyclif, ed. F. D. Matthew (Oxford:Triibner, 1880). I have
regularized thorn and yogh.
NOTES 165
44. Ironically,Wyclif and his followers faced opposition when they translated the
Bible into English. He is not atypical in his antifraternalism, though of
course in other matters he and his followers are finally coded as heretical.
See Margaret Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late
Medieval Religion (London:The Hambledon Press, 1984).
45. Anne Middleton, "The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs: 'Ensamples Mo
Than Ten' as a Method in the Canterbury Tales," Chaucer Review 8 (1973): 9-32.
46. David Wallace," 'Whan She Translated Was': A Chaucerian Critique of the
Petrarchan Academy," in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain,
138~1530, ed. Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1990), pp. 156-215, revised in Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and
Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997), ch. 10.
47. Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, 27.4, trans. Aldo S. Bernardo, Saul Levin, and
Reta A. Bernardo, 2 vols. (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1992). I have also consulted the Latin text in J. Burke Severs, The Literary
Relationships of Chaucer's Clerkes Tale (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1942).
48. Linda Georgianna points out that the term "numinous" distinguishes
between the moral and the holy, the latter understood as excessive, above
and beyond the rational. "The Clerk's Tale and the Grammar of Assent,"
Speculum 70 (1995): 793-821, at 805.
49. "(A]d amorem dei et proximi plerumque corda audientium plus exempla
quam verba excitant," Homiliae, Patrologia cursus completus, series latina LXXVI,
ed. J.-P. Migne (Paris: Migne et a!., 1841-64), p. 1300; in translation,
Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. Dom David Hurst (Kalamazoo: Cistercian
Publications, 1990), Homily, 39.
50. This is not to imply that Gregory's formulation is derived from Aristotle, but
rather that the philosophical tradition initiated by Plato and Aristotle pro-
vides a useful model for understanding the tensions inherent in the exem-
plary mode. Aristotle's Ethics and Politics were circulating in Europe by the
fourteenth century; Book 7 of Gower's Confessio is loosely based upon
Aristotelian texts, and Chaucer's Clerk is described as valuing his Aristotle
over clothes and food. My aim here, however, is not to establish influence
but to suggest how Aristotelian ethics can clarifY the stakes of the late
medieval debate. On Aristotelian practical wisdom, see Martha C. Nussbaum,
The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
51. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a11-b25. I have consulted the translation
ofTerence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1985).
52. For an instance of this assumption at work outside the field, see Hampton's
otherwise rich and provocative Writing From History, 28-29.
53. On rumination as a monastic method of reading see Jean Leclercq, The Love
of Learning and the Desire for God, trans. C. Misrahi (New York: Fordham
University Press, 1961); see also Carruthers on meditative reading as essential
to all kinds of memorial and inventive activity, Book of Memory, 164-69.
166 NOTES
54. Bremond et al. point out that many vernacular exempla hover on the
boundary between oral and literate. But given the scholastic origins of the
vernacular example beginning in the thirteenth century, Carruthers's analy-
sis of scholastic texts provides a crucial context within which debate about the
uses of examples took place, especially in the more self-consciously learned
poems that I examine in this study.
55. Hans-Georg Gadamer finds in Aristotelian ethics a model of this hermeneutic
insight:"application is neither a subsequent nor merely an occasional part of
the phenomenon of understanding, but codetermines it as a whole from the
beginning" (324). See Truth and Method, 2nd revised edition, trans. Joel
Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994).
56. Copeland traces the rhetorical character of exegetical hermeneutics in order
to show the ways in which translation becomes "an art whose end is realized
in a kind of action" (64). See Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
57. A generalization provides a mental way station, a depository for particular
pasts and particular present experiences. See The Book of Memory:A Study of
Memory in Medieval Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).
On cognitive integration between general and specific, see also Trimpi,
Muses of One Mind: The Literary Analysis of Experience and Its Continuity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), esp. p. 375.
58. On some of the distancing effects of framing Franz H. Baiiml, "Varieties and
Consequences of Medieval Literacy and Illiteracy," Speculum 55 (1980):
237-65.
59. "Literate practice" is Rebecca Krug's felicitous phrase, in Reading Families:
Women's Literate Practice in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2002). Her premise is that literate practices include "a range of disparate,
text-based practices, including literary patronage, dictation, memorization,
and recitation" (8). I am interested in how exemplarity registers the range
and variety of the reception implied in these various literate practices.
60. On the Host's interpretative limitations, see Alan Gaylord, "Sentence and
Solaas in Fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales: Harry Bailly as Horseback
Editor," PMLA 82 (1967): 226-35. Even Anne Middleton, who seeks to
describe the Host's interpretative complexity, discusses the "strictures" he
places on the Clerk as a sign of his ordinary, unexamined vernacularity. See
"The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts," SAC 2 (1980): 121-50,
at 136.
61. Letters qf Old Age, XVII.3.
62. Wallace," 'Whan She Translated Was,' "156-215.
63. For an influential account of how the Clerk presents (at least) two interpretive
possibilities, thus making readers aware of their own interpretive principles,
see Elizabeth Salter, Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale (London:
E.Arnold, 1962).
64. For Wolfgang Iser, the reader's activity arises when literature invalidates
norms, an experience that "draws the reader into the text but also away from
NOTES 167
his own habitual disposition" (218) and shows him "the extent to
which ... mental images depend upon a fictive element" (225). For Iser, the
degree of challenge to readers' expectations is a criterion for evaluating
literature as "light reading" or otherwise. See The Act of Reading: A Theory of
Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
65. ]. A. Burrow, Ricardian Poetry: Chaucer, Gower, Langland, and the "Gawain"
Poet (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1971; repr. New York: Penguin,
1992), p. 80.
66. In this the Clerk resembles some of his scholarly predecessors; Copeland
remarks that "when medieval exegesis professes its subservient and supple-
mentary relation to master texts is when it most threatens to overtake and
displace those texts" (Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, 221).
6 7. Scholars usually describe acts of imitation according to hierarchies of sophis-
tication. Most famously, see Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1973) and also Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy:
Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1982). Such hierarchies tend to devalue acts of imitation that do not
compete with their sources, but instead accept, gloss, or correct them. See
Copeland, Rhetoric, Hermeneutics, and Translation, on "secondary" translation
based on rhetorical invention, "that is, discovery of one's own argument or
subject out of available topics of commonplaces" (7). Acts of imitation and
translation, in any age, vary enormously. My point here is that the indebtedness
of medieval authors to their predecessors tends to pave the way for a more
powerful sense of readerly contribution than the emulative models of
Bloom and Greene can acknowledge.
68. For Gadamer, the reader's encounter with a text is a process of testing prej-
udices: "[e]very encounter with tradition that takes place within historical
consciousness involves the experience of a tension between the text and the
present" (Truth and Method, 306).
69. I use the term "aesthetic" advisedly. It derives etymologically from Aristotle's
notion of perception, an element ofphronesis, and in that regard does not imply
the detachment from the social world sometimes associated with the term
(often via readings of Kant). I also have in mind the formalist Mukarovsk-y,
who defines the aesthetic in distinctly social terms (see note 23).
70. Paul Strohm, Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000), p. 19.
71. Mukarovsky points out, for example, that even the notion of timeless
endurance is not inherent to all ideas of aesthetic value (Aesthetic Function, 62).
72. Poetry is "not literature, but ethics" (xiii) according to Judson Boyce Allen,
The Ethical Poetic of the Later Middle Ages: A Decorum of Convenient Distinction
(Toronto: University ofToronto Press, 1982). See also Olson, Literature as
Recreation. With others in the so-called exegetical school, Allen empha-
sizes that the normalizing function of ethics governs literary expression,
a conclusion that this project calls into question. Olson examines justifications
of literary pleasure and finds that they are inextricable from notions of
168 NOTES
utilitas; though he privileges literary pleasure or delight, Olson finally also

emphasizes the degree to which moral benefit governs literature in the
period.
73. Mukafovskfs relatively late contribution to Slavic formalist theory was
something of a corrective to earlier claims about the autonomy of the literary
system. On the historical development of formalist theory, see Erlich,
Russian Formalism, and on Mukafovsky, see esp. 256-57.
74. Estrangement of signs from their referents as a characteristic of" literariness"
is a fundamental insight of the formalists, including Jakobson: "Poeticity is
present when the word is felt as a word and not a mere representation of the
object being named .... Why is it necessary to make a special point of the
fact that sign does not fall together with object [referent]? Because, besides
the direct awareness of the identity between sign and object ... there is a
necessity for the direct awareness of the inadequacy of that identity.... The
reason this antinomy is essential is that without contradiction there is no
mobility of concepts, no mobility of signs, and the relationship between
concept and sign becomes automatized. Activity comes to a halt, and the
awareness of reality dies out" (378). See Romanjakobson, "What is Poetry?"
in Language in Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy, trans.
Michael Heim (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987).
75. Both "formalism" and "historicism" can refer, of course, to a range of
approaches, but the tension between them has arisen especially in the wake
of American New Criticism, which has been attacked by both Marxist and
New Historicist scholars. For an argument that the tension between formal-
ism and historicism started earlier in medieval literary study, see Lee Patterson,
Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), esp. chs. 1 and 2.
76. Susan J. Wolfson answers such attacks in her introduction to a special issue
on the subject, "Reading for Form," Modern Language Quarterly 61 (2000):
1-16.The effort to discover ways in which aesthetic form may be enmeshed
in social and historical conditions has recently been of interest among
medievalists in particular, as evidenced in several sessions of the New
Chaucer Society on "Chaucer and Aesthetics" in Boulder, 2002 and in
London, 2000.
77. Most kinds of texts can exhibit these effects-an insight that governs many
recent historicist approaches. See, for example, Strohm's argument for
"the most inclusive interpretative and interdisciplinary models" (Theory, 19).
My point here is that exemplarity stages a struggle between literary interro-
gations and moral affirmations.
78. Before the repeated rhyme, in fact, and embedded in the middle of a line in
the middle of a stanza, Griselda's obedience is attributed to her will. She
declares that she desires nothing but what Walter desires; "This wyl is in myn
herte, and ay shal be" (509).
79. Some recent accounts of the Clerk's Tale have argued that Griselda's conduct
suggests that Walter constrains her; see Lars Engel, "Chaucer, Bakhtin, and
Griselda," Exemplaria 1 (1989): 429-59 and Kathy Lavezzo, "Chaucer and
NOTES 169
Everyday Death: The Clerk's Tale, Burial and the Subject of Poverty," SAC 23
(2001): 255-88.
80. For a particularly sensitive reading of Griselda's assent to Walter in Part 3,
see Georgianna, "Grammar of Assent," 808-809.
81. Leonard Koff, "Imagining Absence: Chaucer's Griselda and Walter without
Petrarch," in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old
Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (Madison
and Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press and London: Associated
University Presses, 2000), pp. 278-316.
82. In any work, Mukarovsky proposes, there is a "hierarchy of functions" (8) in
which either communicative or aesthetic predominates, but in which both
coexist: "Thus the aesthetic area is not torn apart by two mutually impene-
trable segments, but rather it resembles a whole which is influenced by two
opposing forces which simultaneously organize and dis-organize it" (8). This
account of the communicative and aesthetic functions oflanguage suggests
the extent to which exemplary discourse relies upon both impulses for its
efficacy, even while the two may be in various forms of conflict. There is not
always a heavy line between one form of reference and the other; certainly
they coexist in medieval exemplary works.
83. Robertson, Prefoce to Chaucer (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963)
and "The Cultural Tradition of Handlyng Synne," Speculum 22 (1947):
162-85.
84. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1989) and Lee Patterson, Negotiating the Past, articulate the limits
of Robertson's exegetical criticism, but his work influenced a generation
of scholars such as J. B. Allen and Robert Kaske, among others. "Ruthless
totalizing" is Patterson's phrase, 34, also quoted in Dinshaw, 35.
85. E. T. Donaldson, Speaking of Chaucer (Durham, NC: The Labyrinth Press,
1983); Derek Pearsall, The Life of Geciffrey Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
86. Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1989); Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry
(Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1976).To be sure, many other
critics implicitly associate Chaucerian ironies with moral positions-see,
for instance, Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1976), and Donaldson esp. on the Merchant's
Tale, in Speaking of Chaucer, 30-45. But David's particular contribution lies in
his exploration of the methods by which such moral positions are not just
expressed but investigated in the poetry.
87. Efforts to complicate the remarkably tenacious epithet "moral Gower"
include a range of scholars from Charles Runacres, "Art and Ethics in the
Exempla of the Confessio A mantis," in Gower's Confessio Amantis: Responses and
Reassessments, ed. A. J. Minnis (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 106-34,
to DavidAers, who has recently asserted that Gower's art has been overvalued,
in "Reflections on Gower as' Sapiens in Ethics and Politics,' "in Re- Visioning
Gower (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998), pp. 185-202. See also Frank Grady's
suggestion that critical acceptance of Gower's historical truth claims, and of
170 NOTES
the "moral Gower" appellation, may be a precondition for understanding

Chaucer as more historically sophisticated, in "Gower's Boat, Richard's
Barge, and the True Story of the Confessio Amantis: Text and Gloss," Texas
Studies in Literature and Language 44 (2002): 1-15.
Chapter 2 Anticipating Audience in

The Book of the Knight of the Tower
1. On handbooks for women, see Alice A. Hentsch, De Ia litterature didactique de
moyen age s'adressant specialement auxfemmes (Geneva: Slatkin Reprints, 1975)
and Diane Bornstein, The Lady in the Tower: Medieval Courtesy Literature for
Women (Hamden: Archon Books, 1983).
2. With the rise of grammar schools, boys received schooling whereas girls were
educated in the home. On the education of girls in England, see Jo Ann
Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling 1340-1548: Learning,
Literacy, and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1985). In France, see Alain Derville, "L'Alphabetisation du
peuple ala fin du Moyen Age," Revue du Nord 26 (1984): 761-76.
3. Jonathan Nicholls, The Matter of Courtesy: Medieval Courtesy Books and
the Gawain- Poet (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1985), ch. 4.
4. On widening audiences among merchants in England, see Sylvia Thrupp, The
Merchant Class of Medieval London, 1300-1500 (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1948; repr. 1962), pp. 234-87; on the shared values of
merchant elites and artisanal classes, as distinct from aristocratic values, see
Felicity Riddy, "Mother Knows Best: Reading Social Change in a Courtesy
Text," Speculum 71 (1996): 66-86. For France, on the connection between
conduct books and other bourgeois commodities, see Roberta L Krueger,
" 'Nouvelles choses': Social Instability and the Problem of Fashion in the
Livre du Chevalier de Ia Tour Landry, the Menagier du Paris, and Christine de
Pizan's Livre des Trois Vertus," in Medieval Conduct, ed. Ashley and Clark
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 49-85.
5. Claire Sponsler, Drama and Resistance: Bodies, Goods, and Theatricality in Late
Medieval England (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 51.
6. See Ashley and Clark, "Introduction" to Medieval Conduct, xv.
7. Hentsch, in De Ia litterature didactique, remarks that the Knight has even been
thought obscene, but finds him well-intentioned, if narrow-minded (borne),
127-35. In the words of a sixteenth-century English reader, "[T)he knyght of
the toure ... hath made bothe the men and the women to knowe more vyces,
subtyltye, and crafte, than euer they shulde haue knowen, if the boke had not
ben made." From Fitzherbert's Book of Husbandry, quoted by the Book of the
Knight of the Tower's editor, M. Y. Offord (London: Oxford University Press,
1971), at xviii, and by Anatole Montaglion, ed., Le Livre du Chevalier de Ia Tour
Landry pour l'enseignement de ses filles (Paris: P. Jennet, 1854), pp. xlix-L
Montaglion takes exception to the notion that the Knight's tales are obscene,
NOTES 171
claiming that this notion is based mostly on two tales of fornication on the
altar, and arguing instead that the book has a certain delicacy of style
(xxxiii-iv).
8. Readers whose activity is implied by the rhetoric of a text are not always the
"ideal" readers Wayne Booth delineates: "Regardless of my real beliefs and
practices, I must subordinate my mind and heart to the book" (The Rhetoric
of Fiction [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961], p. 138). The problem
with the Book of the Knight of the Tower is precisely that his text anticipates the
variable, nonideal activity of his readers. See Wolfgang Iser, The Implied
Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett
(Baltimore:The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Iser says the implied
reader refers to "both the prestructuring of the potential meaning by the
text, and the reader's actualization of this potential through the reading
process. It refers to the active nature of this process ... not to a typology of
possible readers" (xii).
9. In "Mother Knows Best," Riddy argues that "Anxiety about bringing up
children .. .is obviously one of the occupational hazards of upward mobility"
(83). Anxiety is an outgrowth of threatened aristocracy, in the case of the
Knight of La Tour Landry.
10. On the narrative frame's avoidance of overt coercion, see Sponsler on How
the Goodwife Taught Her Daughter in Drama and Resistance, esp. 68-72. For
John Russell's Boke of Nurture, see Early English Meals and Manners, ed.
Frederick J. Furnivall (London: N. Triibner & Co., 1868; repr. Detroit:
SingingTree Press, 1969),pp.1-112.
11. On the excessive character of exempla, see Lyons, esp. Introduction and, on
Machiavelli, 47-63.
12. As we saw in chapter 1, Scanlon (among others) insists that the exemplum's
"claims are not tacked onto the narrative; they are driven by it" (62).
My point here is that, while narratives do produce morals, the inherently dis-
junctive structure of narrative-plus-frame stages an important fictive relation
between authority and audience.
13. The two daughters are, in effect, an "inscribed" audience, in the sense of the
term as used by Roberta Krueger, Women Readers, 28. See also Strohm,
"Chaucer's Audiences: Fictional, Intended, Implied, Actual," Chaucer Review
18 (1983), at 138.
14. Krueger remarks that conduct books for women enact the very eroticism
that they seek to curtail (Women Readers and the Ideology of Gender, 161).
See also "Intergeneric Combination and the Anxiety of Gender in Le Livre
du Chevalier de Ia Tour Landry pour l'enseignement de sesfilles," L'Esprit Createur
33 (1993): 61-72.
15. Cynthia Ho, "As Good As Her Word: Women's Language in The Knight of
the Tour de Landry," in The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideas of Order and Their
Decline, ed. Liam 0. Purdon and Cindy L.Vitto (Gainesville, 1993), p. 100.
16. English translations are from Caxton's text, The Book of the Knight of the
Tower, ed. M. Y Offord, EETS ss. no. 2 (London: Oxford University Press,
172 NOTES
1971), cited by page and line numbers. I have also consulted Montaglion's
edition.
17. See Montaglion, xxix, which prints the opening 22 lines in couplets (not
retaind by Caxton).
18. He is recorded in battles from the 1340s to 1383. See Offord, xxxv and
Pierre Boisard, "La vie intellectuelle de Ia noblesse Angevine aIa fin du XIVe
siecle d'apres le Knight de Ia Tour Landry," in La litterature angevine medievale:
actes du colloque du samedi 22 mars 1980, Centre de Recherche de Litterature
et de Linguistique de l'Anjou et des Bocages, Universite d'Angers
(Maulevrier: Herault, 1981), pp. 135-54, at 136-37.
19. The father of the Knight's first wife was a prisoner of the English with
King John, and later became a counsellor to Charles V. The two daughters
married sons ofLouis de Rochechouart (Boisard, 143-44).
20. On the Knight's youth in Poitou, see the Prologue to the Livre, Montaglion
2 (Offord 12/3); on his travels, see Boisard, 135-45.
21. Riddy observes, for example, that How the Goodwife denigrates ladies in favor
of a "homely" ideal of feminine conduct, 76-80; compare the Knight's
defense of aristocratic insularity in Krueger, "Nouvelles Choses," 59.
22. On the fundamental ambiguity about the line between flirtation and serious
love declarations see Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature
and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1980), pp. 101-34.
23. On how women are commonly typed as literalists, see Helen Solterer,
The Master and Minerva: Disputing Women in French Medieval Culture (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995).
24. ]. A. Burrow remarks upon the "predilection for the literal" expressed
through exemplarity, in Ricardian Poetry (London: Routledge, 1971; repr.
London: Penguin, 1992), pp. 80-81. The explicit claim of exemplary works
is that their interpretations are not shrouded in allegory but exist on the
surface, as givens.
25. This is Caxton's translation of what in the French is more obviously an act
of translation; a better reading would be "I made them put before me and
translate books that I had." It seems he has them translate aloud to him; later
in the sentence, he mentions "chascun livre je fis lire" (every book I had read
[to me]).
26. On the cooperation between clerical and lay authority in How the Goodwife
Taught Her Daughter see Riddy, "Mother Knows Best," 73-74. In contrast,
see Scanlon, who finds that Chaucerian texts appropriate clerical authority
to claim "a specifically lay textuality" (144).
27. The French is more explicit: "Si leur fiz metter avant et traire des livres que
javoye, comme Ia Bible, Gestes des Roys et croniques de France, et de Grece,
et d' Angleterre, et de maintes autres estranges terres; et chascun livre je fils
lire, et Ia ou je trouvay bon exemple pour extraire,je le fis prendre pour faire
ce livre," Montaglion, 4.
28. The Knight later argues explicitly against the necessity of teaching girls to
write. In this he is far less extreme than, for example, Philippe de Navarre,
NOTES 173
who earlier in the century insisted that laywomen's reading and writing come
inevitably to a bad end: "One should instruct women neither in writing nor
in reading, unless it is especially for nuns; for women's reading and writing
come to a bad end," quoted and translated in Solterer, 243, n49, from Les
Quatre Ages de l'homme: Traite moral de Philippe de Navarre, ed. Marcel de
Freville (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1888), p. 16.
29. Old French romancer, of course, usually means to write in the vernacular or
to understand the vernacular. In Caxton's translation, the specification of the
vernacular drops out, but the implication of inner advisement is stronger;
"reden" refers to both accepting and offering advice (MED sv. "reden").
Both words denote both interpretation and invention.
30. The threat of ill repute is of course omnipresent in discourse for and about
women. For an account of the violence of such discourse, see Solterer, Master
and Minerva, chs. 5-7.
31. On scandal as a societal regulation of the public confession of sin, see Elliott,
"Sex in Holy Places."
32. The Knight specifies, but Caxton does not translate, that children should be
taught "Ia vie des peres et des sains" (lives of fathers and saints) and not "des
livres de lecheries et des fables du monde" (books of lechery and fables of
the world). The French specificity suggests that proper reading material for
women may have been more of a contentious issue for the Knight than for
Caxton; and that for the Knight, perhaps there was a greater distinction
between what men could read and what women could read.
33. Baiiml argues that a written text institutes "distance between author, narra-
tor, text, and public" (253), and that late medieval vernacular works take
advantage of these distances in producing irony and accentuating the fictive
status of narrators and characters. Similarly, Paul Saenger, in "Silent Reading:
Its Impact on Late Medieval Script and Society;' Viator 13 (1982): 367-414,
argues that increasingly independent reading of texts encouraged "critical
thinking" (399). The Knight attests to the flip side of this development: a con-
sciousness of the possibility that written texts can more easily be misread.
34. The Book's structure has at its core an earlier exemplary book, the late
thirteenth-century Franciscan Miroir des bonnes femmes, which the Knight
borrows closely and which comprises almost half of the text. Chapters
37-112 in the Livre du Chevalier consist mainly of Biblical examples from
this text, first bad women and then good women, interrupted by a version
of the fabliau Les Braies du cordelier and several chapters on cointise. On the
Miroir, see]. L. Grigsby, Romania 82 (1961): 458-81 and 83 (1962): 30-51.
On the structure of the Knight's borrowings, see Grigsby, "A New Source of
the Livre du Chevalier de Ia Tour Landry," Romania 84 (1963): 171-207.
On structure, see also Krueger, "Anxiety of Gender," 62-65.
35. The prior is a church father, and the Knight capitalizes on the notion that
his relations with a parishioner constitute a form of incest-suggesting that
the whole fabliau reworks the troubling story of Tamar. On spiritual kinship
and incest, see Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), pp. 31-33,37-40.
174 NOTES
36. Krueger shows how the Knight's violent additions to the original fabliau
impose clerical piety upon the tale and, in their very violence, invite readerly
resistance ("Anxiety of Gender," 65-69).
37. In Caxton, the incident occurs under the altar. The church is identified in
Montaglion as "une eglise qui est en rna terre, et a nom Nostre-Dame de
Beaulieu" (79). Offord notes that this was a priory on the Knight's own land.
38. Elliott, "Sex in Holy Places," argues that the Rychere/Perrot story's older
concern with punishing adultery gives way in the later Middle Ages to a
concern with intentionality; it expresses anxiety about the rendering of
marital debt in sacrilegious circumstances, "the sinless performance of a
sinful act" (16).
39. According to one manuscript, Perrot is "sergent de celle eglise celle annee,"
implying temporary service, perhaps as defender of the church against
wartime attack. In England and France, the role of sergeant implies armed
service to a secular or ecclesiastical lord; see Marc Bloch, Feudal Society, vol. 2,
trans. L.A. Manyon (Chicago: Chicago University Press, for Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 337-44.
40. This procession ameliorates the joined couple's situation, but also responds
to the moral problem of the Knight's previous exemplum, which advised
against going on pilgrimage for the wrong reasons. In that tale, a married
woman goes on pilgrimage to a church of our lady, accompanied by an
amorous squire, "pour plus avoir d'aise et de lieu pourparler et pour bourder
ensemble" (73; "for to haue ease and delyte for to speke and bourde to
geder;' 54/33-34).After having a vision in the church, the woman leaves all
her "folie plaisance" and returns to her husband. The Knight concludes that
one should not go on pilgrimage for pleasure but for the love of God, and
emphasizes her penance before launching into the story of Perrot Lenart.
41. The crime of sacrilege required reconsecration by the priest, reconciliation
by the bishop, and perpetual penance of the sinner; see Elliott, 9-12.
42. Unlike Our Lady of Beaulieu, the reference to this abbey remains obscure
(Offord, 212). But the sense of the war's encroachment upon the physical
locales of both churches seems to underpin the threat that both men pose
against holiness. Montaglion notes that churches would have served as a
refuge in war, and that the church therefore had to accord permission for
sex, which would have been enacted illicitly if permission had been refused
(Montaglion, 293-94, n81). But presumably, when the monk takes to heart
such permissiveness, usually for"people with nowhere [else] to go" (Elliott, 12),
sanctuary is compromised at both physical and spiritual levels.
43. Seth Lerer describes a similar blurring of the lines between spectator and
participant in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; see "'Representyd now in
yower syght': The Culture of Spectatorship in Late-Fifteenth-Century
England," in Bodies and Disciplines: Intersections of Literature and History in
Fifteenth-Century England, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace
44. Krueger suggests that the Knight's book anticipates "resistance" to the moral
ordering he imposes ("Anxiety of Gender," 70). I think the problem is less a
NOTES 175
matter of resistance than a problem of the consequences of assent: the moral

terms of these tales depend upon participation in voyeuristic experience.
45. "Contamination" is Peter Brooks's word in Desire for the Plot: Desire and
Intention in Narrative (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 221.
46. R. F. Green, "The Familia Regis and the Familia Cupidinis," in English Court
Culture in the Later Middle Ages, ed. V. J. Scattergood and J. W Sherborne
(London: Duckworth, 1983), pp. 87-108, at 104.
47. Cynthia Ho, "As Good As Her Word: Women's Language in The Knight of
the Tour de Landry;' in The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideas of Order and Their
Decline, ed. Liam 0. Purdon and Cindy L.Vitto (Gainesville: University Press
of Florida, 1994).
48. I have in mind here David Wallace's analysis of Prudence in Chaucer's
Melibee, a sustained exploration of feminine advice as shaped by rhetorical
eloquence. Wallace stresses Melibee's attention to circumstances that qualifY
his masculine violence. Here, the Knight's wife restrains him not through
appeals to contingency-the right time and place for action-but through
the opposite, reclaiming univocal moral judgment which seeks to gloss over
or render marginal the excitements of his narrative. What she does share
with Prudence is an insistence upon the control of affect appropriate to
authoritative action. See Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and
Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1997), ch. 8. Interestingly, the first French printing of the Livre in 1514
contains a version of the "Melibee" in the mouth of the Knight's wife
(Montaglion, liii-iv).
49. Solterer shows the ways in which Christine de Pisan objects to the Roman
de Ia Rose on the basis of prophetic, ethical truth as opposed to the" 'fictive'
autonomy" of Pierre Col's defense of the Roman (163-71). Solterer charac-
terizes the playful indeterminacy privileged by Col and others as privileging
fiction over truth, and Christine insists that even such fictions have reference
to, and consequences in, the lives of women (they are not "autonomous").
This insistence on the ethical effects of the Roman's fictions arises from a
consciousness of ever-present potential for damage to women's reputations,
which permeates early lyric as well as love-debate. The Knight's counsellor-
wife exhibits a logic similar to Christine's: the danger to women's reputa-
tions means that women do not have the interpretative "license" available to
men (Solterer, 159). Though he draws upon an ironic mode like Col's, the
Knight does not quite endorse it. See also Eric Hicks, "Situation du Debat
sur le Roman de Ia Rose," in Une Femme de lettres au Moyen Age: Etudes au tour
de Christine de Pizan, ed. Liliane Dulac and Bernard Ribemont (Orleans:
Paradigme, 1995), pp. 51-67.
50. See Madeleine Caviness on the Hours of Jeanne d'Evreaux in "Patron or
Matron? A Capetian Bride and a Vade Mecum for her Marriage Bed,"
Speculum 68 (1993): 333-62.
51. On antiphrasis as a characteristic trope of antifeminism more generally, see
Catherine Sanok, "Reading Hagiographically: The Legend of Good Women
and Its Feminine Audience," Exemplaria 13 (2001): 323-54.
176 NOTES
52. See Norman F. Blake, 'The 'noble lady' in Caxton's The Book of the Knyght
of the Towre," Notes and Queries 210 (1965): 92-93.
53. The translation had been finished by June, 1483. Edward IV died in April
1483, and in the ensuing power struggle his brother became Richard III.
Elizabeth, his queen, took sanctuary in Westminster with her children. Her
brother, Earl Rivers, a principal patron of Caxton, was executed in June
1483, and her two sons were later killed. Caxton did not print the translated
Book until January 1484. Blake at first suggests that Caxton published the
text despite the queen's impoverishment, but withheld her name in order to
avoid offending those in power. See Caxton and His World (London: Andre
Deutsch, 1969), pp. 90-94. Blake has since changed his mind and argues that
Caxton translated the book on his own initiative, invoking Elizabeth
Woodville only after she had taken sanctuary; see "Continuity and Change
in Caxton's Prologues and Epilogues," in William Caxton and English Literary
Culture (London: The Hambeldon Press, 1991 ), p. 105. The latter interpretation
is closer to that of George D. Painter, who depicts Elizabeth as "a prisoner
but invulnerable, seemingly powerless but in fact one of the most dangerous
persons in England as a nucleus for opposition to the usurper" (123).
Further, the daughters themselves were a danger to Richard, especially given
Elizabeth's plans to marry her oldest daughter to Henry Tudor. Painter con-
tends that Caxton chose to print the Book after the collapse ofBuck:ingham's
rebellion, as a way of "raising the price of her daughters" (129-30).
See Painter, William Caxton: A Quincentenary Biography of England's First
Printer (London: Chatto & Windus, 1976), pp. 121-31. For an account of
Caxton's relation to the Woodvilles which makes an even stronger argument
for his factional loyalty, see Louise Gill, "William Caxton and the Rebellion
of1483," The English Historical Review 112 (1997): 105-29.
54. For a provocative reading of how the Book helped Elizabeth justifY her position
as queen after Edward's death, see Teresa D. Kemp, "The Knight if the Tower
and the Queen in Sanctuary: Elizabeth Woodville's Use of Meaningful
Silence and Absence," New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 171-88.
55. On the humanist literary transmission at the center of other prefaces, see
Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval
England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), ch. 5, and "William
Caxton," in Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace
56. On Caxton's Book and "the new urban elites" who "make the female the
ideological locus of social prestige" (1 02), see "The Miroir des bonnes femmes:
Not For Women Only?" in Medieval Conduct, 86-105.
57. On Caxton's marketing to noble and mercantile audiences, see Blake,
Caxton and His World, esp. 79-100. On his "appeal to all potential readers,
without recognition of a specific genealogy or patronly faction" (168),
see Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers. On the contingent status of his bourgeois
audience, see William Kusk:in, "Caxton's Worthies Series: The Production of
Literary Culture," ELH 66 (1999): 511-51.
NOTES 177
58. On Caxton's complex synthesis of patronage and commerce see Kuskin,

"Reading Caxton: Transformations in Capital, Authority, Print, and Persona
in the Late Fifteenth Century," New Medieval Literatures 3 (1999): 149-83.
59. On female patronage, especially linked with vernacular piety, see the classic
article of Susan Groag Bell, "Medieval Women Book Owners: Arbiters of
Lay Piety and Ambassadors of Culture," in Women and Power in the Middle
Ages, ed. Mary Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 1988), pp. 149-87. See also Carol M. Meale," ' ... alle the
hokes that I haue of latyn, englisch, and frensch': Laywomen and Their
Books in Late Medieval England," in Women and Literature in Britain, 128-58.
60. On Margaret Beaufort's contribution to the notion that women's patronage
was a kind of public service, "spiritually and intellectually edifYing" (112) to
others, see especially Rebecca Krug, Reading Families, ch. 2. Elizabeth
Woodville can be linked with only a few texts; on her responsibility for
an Hours of the Guardian Angel, see Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs,
"The Cult of Angels in Late Fifteenth-Century England: An Hours of the
Guardian Angel Presented to Queen Elizabeth Woodville," in Women and the
Book: Assessing the Visual Evidence (Toronto: The British Library and
University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 230-65.
61. Caxton elsewhere plays the role of gentleman lover; see Jennifer Summit,
"William Caxton, Margaret Beaufort & the Romance of Female Patronage"
in Women, the Book and the Worldly: Selected Proceedings of the St. Hilda's
Conference, 1993, vol. 2, ed. Lesley Smith and Jane H. M. Taylor (Cambridge:
D.S.Brewer, 1995),pp.151-66,at 160.
62. Information forms or even imbues one with moral judgment, according
to James Simpson, Sciences and the Self in Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's
Anticlaudianus and john Gower's Confessio Amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995),pp.1-16.
63. On Caxton's tendency to raid the vocabulary of the texts he translates,
see Blake, Caxton and His World, 152.
64. Kemp, "The Queen in Sanctuary," also remarks upon the frequency of these
prayers in the preface, 180.
65. For the role of books as remembrances, see Meale, "Laywomen and Their
Books." The preface to The Book of the Knight of the Tower suggests that
circulation makes books into such remembrances in a more public sphere.
66. Elizabeth Woodville was not simply in danger of death; she also released her
sons to Richard, who probably had them killed, and plotted to marry her
daughter to Henry Tudor (the plot initially failed but later came to fruition).
Chapter 3 The Costs of Exemplary History in

the Cotifessio A mantis
1. The story was told frequently in the later Middle Ages: for example, by
Boccaccio in De mulieribus claris, 56 and De casibus virorum illustrium, 3, by
Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate; and by Christine de Pizan in Le Livre de Ia Cite
178 NOTES
des Dames, 2.46.3. In the sixteenth century, the story continued to circulate in
compilations like Painter's Pastime of Pleasure and the 2\1'irror for Magistrates
(heavily reliant on Lydgate) and was dramatized in "R. B"s A New Tragicall
Comedic of Apius and Virginia (1575) and Webster's Appius and Virginia:
A Tragedy (1654) and in later plays as well. Nevertheless, the story does not
achieve the paradigmatic status of the rape of Lucrece.
2. Jean de Meun puts it in the mouth of Reason, who makes it exemplifY
corrupt justice (Roman de Ia rose, 5589-659). Jean's version is important for
Chaucer, as we see in chapter 4.
3. Contrast the breakdown of historical coherence in Machiavelli, for whom, as
Hampton puts it, "the similitude linking exemplar and imitator is rendered at
the very least useless and at the most a dangerous illusion" (71); see Writing
From History, 62-80 and Lyons, Exemplum, 35-71.
4. For imitation as a form of estrangement, I draw on Thomas M. Greene,
T11e Light in Troy, esp. 4-27.
5. Livy's account of Virginia appears in Ab Urbe Condita 3.44ff. The account
serves to justifY the Third Roman Revolution of 449 BC, which won
concessions for the plebs, including tribunal representation and the right to
judicial appeal, during the establishment of the laws of the Twelve Tablets, the
first written Roman law. Appius is chosen as a decemvir specifically to
formulate the last two tables of the law. See R. M. Ogilvie, A Commentary
on Livy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965); David Stockton, "The
Founding of the Empire," in The Oxford History of the Roman World, ed. John
Boardman et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 146-67; and
Sheila Delany, "Politics and the Paralysis of Poetic Imagination in The
Physician's Tale," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 3 (1981): 47-48.
6. Livy's endorsement of revolt and reinstitution of tribunal government is
somewhat ironic given his suspicion of tribunes on the one hand, and his (not
at a1l explicit) situation within Augustan empire on the other. For an argument
that Livy supported patrician senators and resisted tribunal government,
see Andrew Lintott, "Roman Historians" (Oxford History, at 278-79). For a
useful survey of the range of scholarship on Livy's affiliations, see Andrew
Feldherr, Spectacle and Society in Livy's History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1998), p. 19, n51. On Roman foundationalism, see also
Michel Serres, Rome: The Book of Foundations, trans. Felicia McCarren
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991).
7. On the legal situation of Virginia, see Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy, 483;
Feldherr, Spectacle and Society, 206-207.
8. Middleton has argued that "Virginius' view of his action is practically identical
with Livy's: it defines a stern patrician honor of which he is the dramatic
representative." See "The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs," 20. On the
rhetorical detachment associated with victimization, see Stephanie H. Jed,
Chaste T1zinking: T11e Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 1-17. For a useful
corrective see Deborah Shuger, "Castigating Livy:The Rape of Lucretia and
The Old Arcadia," Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 526-48.
NOTES 179
All quotations from Livy are from the Loeb edition of Ab Urbe Condita III,
ed. B. 0. Foster (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1922). I quote the
Loeb translation unless otherwise indicated.
9. The first sign thatAppius is treating his elected office as a monarchical rather
than judicial form of power comes in the procession following his reelection,
when all ten judges appear with their twelve lictors, all carrying the fasces or
rods of office and axes as well: "For whereas the former decemvirs had kept
to the rule that only one should have the fasces, and that this regal emblem
should pass from one to another in rotation, so that each should have his turn,
they suddenly appeared in public, every man with his twelve fasces. A hundred
and twenty lictors crowded the forum, and before them, bound up in the
rods, they carried axes ... They seemed like ten kings" (3.xxxvi.3-5).
10. Icilius challenges Appius to "call together all your colleagues' lictors too; bid
them make ready rods and axes: the promised wife oflcilius shall not pass the
night outside her father's house" (xlv.7-8).
11. Argumentum, like fabula, refers to rhetorical process, but also to plot; in textual
contexts it can mean the theme or subject of artistic representations; in a
judicial context, it refers to evidence or proof. Essentially, Appius's perfor-
mance of his own invented rhetoric (his fabula) turns the meaning of the word
argumentum from court evidence into fictional plot. The word fabula means
both drama and fiction, and therefore has links to both the world of perfor-
mative rhetoric and the unreliable world of poetry. Cicero divides narration
into three types: "Fabula, . .. a narrative in which events are not true and
have no verisimilitude ... .Historia, . .. an account of actual occurrences
remote from the recollection of our own age ... .Argumentum, . .. a fictitious
narrative which nevertheless could have occurred" (de Inventione I.xix).
12. Jan Mukarovsky writes that the "aesthetic function;' here fabula, interrupts
the relationship between language and its referents: "Genuine communica-
tion refers to an actual concrete reality... about which the one to whom the
sign is given can be informed. In art, however, the reality about which the
work directly provides information .. .is not the real source of the material
connection, but only its intermediary" (82). The work of art evokes a reality
that is generalizable and points indirectly or figuratively to "realities known
to the viewer," which are therefore contingent upon the idiosyncracies as
well as social norms of the viewer (or reader; Mukarovsky, 82-89).
13. Much has been written on Gower and the Aristotelian analogy between ethics
and politics. See especially Michael P. Kuczynski, "Gower's Metaethics," in John
Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo: The Medieval Institute of
Western Michigan University, 1989); A. J. Minnis, "John Gower, Sapiens in
Ethics and Politics," Medium Aevum 49 (1980): 207-29; and Elizabeth Porter,
"Gower's Ethical Microcosm and Political Macrocosm" in Responses and
Reassessments, ed.A.J. Minnis (Woodbridge: D.S. Brewer, 1983), pp. 135--62.
14. Quod principi placuit legis habet vigorem, what pleases the prince has the force
of law. On the genesis of this phrase, see P. G. Stein, "Roman Law," in
The Cambridge History of Medieval Political Thought 35(}-1450 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 36.
180 NOTES
15. The notion that women are the cause of impure desires is, of course, a
medieval commonplace; for a useful compilation of such attitudes, see Woman
Difamed and Woman Difended, ed.Alcuin Blarnires (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1992). Here, Genius is careful to avoid placing blame upon women for their
desirability, thereby disavowing clerical antifeminism (4262-91); instead,
he insists that "The man is cause" (4289) of the failure of chastity, defined
essentially as a failure of will.
16. On how women represent individual, mutable human will, see Olsson,
"Love, Intimacy, and Gower," Chaucer Review 30 (1995): 71-100.
17. On the will as an imaginative faculty, and on the Confessio's project of shaping
it through calls to imaginative activity, see Simpson, Sciences and the Self in
Medieval Poetry: Alan of Lille's Anticlaudianus and john Gower's Confessio
Amantis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
18. The epithet "moral Gower" has, of course, defined the poet's reputation
since Chaucer attached it to him at the end of Troilus and Criseyde. On
the connections between the didactic and poetic in Gower, see Charles
Runacres, "Art and Ethics in the Exempla of the Confessio Amantis" in
Responses and Reassessments, 106-34; Wetherbee, "Latin Structure and
Vernacular Space: Gower, Chaucer and the Boethian Tradition," in Chaucer
and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Victoria, BC:
University ofVictoria, 1991), pp. 7-35;A.J. Minnis, "De vulgari auctoritate:
Chaucer, Gower, and the Men of Great Authority," in Chaucer and Cower,
36-74; Kurt Olsson, "Rhetoric, John Gower, and the Late Medieval
Exemplum," Medievalia et Humanistica n.s. 8 (1977): 185-200; and Robert F.
Yeager, john Cower's Poetic: The Search for a New Arion (Woodbridge, Suffolk:
D.S. Brewer, 1990). For a bracing reassessment of such claims, see David
Aers, "Reflections on Gower as Sapiens in Ethics and Politics," in
Re- Visioning Cower, ed. R. F. Yeager (Asheville, NC: Pegasus Press, 1998),
pp. 185-201.
19. For Livy's absence from the curriculum, see Beryl Smalley, English Friars
and Antiquity in the Early Fourteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1960), p. 87.
For the circulation of manuscripts of Ab urbe condita, see G. Billanovich,
"Petrarch and the Textual Tradition of Livy," journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes 14.3 (1951): 137-208.
20. Smalley, English Friars, 58-65; Ruth J. Dean, "The Earliest Known
Commentary on Livy Is by Nicholas Trevet," Medievalia et Humanistica 3
(1945): 86-98.
21. The friar Pierre Bersuire translated Livy into French in the early fourteenth
century, at the request of King John; it is not known whether Gower
or Chaucer had access to Bersuire, but their narratological concerns do not
come only from Jean de Meun. I am convinced that Gower's plot structure
contains evidence of self-conscious response to Livy. His lack of verbal
echoes may mean he found the tale in translation, and certainly the dearth
ofLivian material elsewhere in his work argues against his knowledge of the
whole Ab urbe condita. See Smalley, English Friars, 361-64; and William H.
NOTES 181
Brown, Jr., "Chaucer, Livy and Bersuire: The Roman Materials in the
Physician's Tale," in On Language: Rhetorica, Phonologica, Syntactica, ed.
Caroline Duncan-Rose and Thea Vennemann (London: Routledge, 1988),
pp. 39-51. See also ch. 4, n9.
22. Gower's construction of Rome is drawn from a variety of senatorial and
monarchical scenes from many different times in Roman history, and does
not constitute a synthetic chronology. This does not create the "diachronic
innocence" (Greene, 30) or "lack of historical consciousness" (Erich
Auerbach, Mimesis, 321) often attributed to the Middle Ages, but instead
what Jennifer Summit felicitously describes: "a form of conversion that did
not so much destroy or supplant the past as conserve its outward forms while
assigning them new meanings" (214); see "Topography as Historiography:
Petrarch, Chaucer, and the Making of Medieval Rome," Journal of Medieval
and Early Modern Studies 30 (2000): 211-46.
23. On the utilitas publica, see Walter Ullmann, Principles of Government and Politics
in the Middle Ages (London: Methuen, 1961), pp. 117-37. On the political
fictions surrounding kingship and tyranny, see Margaret Schlauch, "Chaucer's
Doctrine of Kings and Tyrants," Speculum 20 (1945): 133-56. The classic
study of common profit in Gower is Russel Peck, Kingship and Common
Profit in Cowers ConfessioAmantis (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1978). I have also drawn on Antony Black, Political Thought in Europe,
125()-1450 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
24. Common profit "seemed to raise the feudal idea of cooperation to the
pedestal of a general governmental principle: what the communis utilitas regni
consisted of, what it demanded, what it stood for, what was dictated by it,
and so forth, was a matter to be treated by both king and community of
the realm ..." (Ullman, 186). In this formulation, common profit not only
legitimizes the king's theocratic power but also limits it; but as John Watts has
recently suggested, the idea of imposing restrictions or limitations upon the
king's power was foreign to medieval monarchical ideals: "In such a polity
[as Edward Ill's], the idea that the king and the common interest could ever
be in opposition simply does not work at a theoretical level: the king was no
separate entity, but a limb of the body politic" (30). See Henry VI and the
Politics of Kingship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
25. On the general "sense of deracinated instability" Gower generates in his
Latin poem Vox Clamantis, see Andrew Galloway, "Gower in His Most
Learned Role and the Peasants' Revolt of 1381," Mediaevalia 16 (1993):
329-47.
26. "The Idea ofPublic Poetry in the Reign ofRichard II," Speculum 53 (1978):
94-114.
27. On horizontal versus hierarchical social ties, see Strohm, Social Chaucer
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. chs. 1-2.
28. Quillet, "Community, Counsel and Representation," in Cambridge History of
Medieval Political Thought c. 35o-c. 14 50, ed.]. H. Burns (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988), pp. 520-72. See also Watts, Politics of Kingship:
182 NOTES
"The reason why virtue was so important ... was that it bound the king inter-
nally to exercise his powers according to the common interest" (25).
29. Monarchical theory rests on the notion that the king's pleasure has the force
oflaw; see n3. Ideally, the king is responsible for governing his pleasures, as
Ullmann puts it: "The sense of reponsibility which the operation of [the]
principle [of common profit] implies, is clear: it presupposes a maturity of
judgment which, eventually arising from feudal needs, extends in the course
of time to the 'great matters of State'" (186). Common profit naturalizes the
king's "sense of responsibility" in its idealization of the movement from
inner maturity to public judgment.
30. Aquinas, On Kingship 1.1, 1.3, in Medieval Political Theory:A Reader:The Quest
for the Body Politic, 11 0()-1400, ed. Cary J. Nederman and Kate Langdon
Forhan (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 101-104. See also the translation
of On Kingship by Gerald B. Phelan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of
Medieval Studies, 1949). For more on personal desire as the basis of tyranny,
see Schlauch, "Chaucer's Doctrine of Kings and Tyrants," 134-45.
31. My description of the mutability of the king's will here complicates the
opposition between a "totalizing" discourse of sovereignty and "pluralized
discourse" of conm1on profit described by Louise Fradenburg, "The
Manciple's Servant Tongue: Politics and Poetry in The Canterbury Tales,"
ELH 52 (1985): 85-118, at 89. Many critics (and some political theorists)
rely upon the notion that ideals of monarchy were totalizing and that plu-
rality existed only in opposition to sovereigns; see, for example, Ferster, who
argues that after the Magna Carta the language of "the community as a
whole" was used both to participate more fully in and to resist the govern-
ment of the realm (Fictions cifAdvice, 15-38). In my view, common profit as
invoked in Gower both fractures and reunifies the polity, and can always
reconstitute the king as gatherer of multiplicity. It is hence always a term of
revision, a dynamic not static state of affairs, and not necessarily an indication
of opposition or dissent against the king.
32. This is the revised prologue, which Macaulay dates 1393; the earlier pro-
logue, from 1390, opens with the well-known staging of Gower's meeting
with Richard II on the barge in the Thames, and emphasizes the newness of
Gower's project, whereas the later revision reframes the poem as a somewhat
more traditional text. See Dhira Mahoney, "Gower's Two Prologues to the
Confessio A mantis," in Re- Visioning Gower, 17-37.
33. The full complexities of the Cof!fessio's framework are not my subject here;
but the poem represents politics as mediated through the explicit and often
inconsistent fiction of Amans's love affair and the attendant quasi-dream
vision in which Genius tells his tales. On the Ovidian character of this
frame, see Simpson, Sciences and the Self, 134-66, and for a useful history of
the scholarship on the morality of love in Gower, 136-38. For a different
view see Kathryn Lynch, The High Medieval Dream Vision: Poetry, Philosophy,
and Literary Form (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 163-98.
34. I use "recreation" in the sense developed by Olson, Literature as Recreation in
the Later Middle Ages; for the Aristotelian context, see esp. 93-109. At the end
NOTES 183
of Book 6 Genius tells the tale of how the sorcerer Nectanabus pretended to
be a god in order to father Alexander, and became his tutor; later, in order to
prove wrong the prophecy that Nectanabus would die at the hands of his
own son, Alexander pushed his tutor off the roofto his death. This exemplum
about the tricks of sorcery prompts Amans's desire for political narratives.
Book 7 is framed within the suspect discourse of magic; Aristotle's lore
replaces magic with philosophy, but the association of skill with deceit
remains. Scanlon has a different perspective on Nectanabus (Narrative, Authority,
and Power, 277-82).
35. These associations are usefully teased out by John Alford, ed., A Companion
to Piers Plowman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 39-44;
and Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer, esp. ch. 4. See more recently Richard Firth
Green's A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999).
36. According to the Middle English Dictionary, "it is difficult to distinguish" the
two words in Middle English (as in French as well). SeeMED, s.v. "plain(e)"
and "plein(e)."
37. Ullmann views the mutual exchange between king and subjects as a com-
promise of interests, especially in England (Principles of Government, 150-92).
But Gower's notion of good counsel does not evoke compromise so much
as internal motions of will on the part of both king and counselors/ subjects.
Watts stresses the intimate involvement of medieval counsel in the king's
household (82-90) and informal access to the king (90-101), but insists that
"the governance of England was ... ultimately dependent on the existence
of a right and independent will in the king" (1 01). It is worth noting that for
Gower as for Dante, Caesar is a representative monarch; he therefore
provides a somewhat different model of Rome from exemplary senators like
Carmidotirus.
38. The structure of Book 7 bears out this ideal plainness. The bulk of the Book
concerns five points of policy-truth, largesse, justice, pity, and chastity--set
forth as ideals of monarchy. The first three of these concern the king's ability
to match words with deeds.A king's speech must be "trew and plein," such that
"The word is tokne of that withinne" (1731-37). Largesse is figured as a virtue
that arose historically to prevent the avarice that would otherwise govern soci-
ety. The king's proper control of goods consists of distributing them justly, and
thus requires the proper reading of his subjects' just deserts (2025-60). Justice
consists of aligning present events with law, and by extension aligning leader-
ship with the public good: here Rome is explicitly the ideal where every judge
unfriendly to "comun riht" (2821) is refused, and where law upholds "comun
profit" (2828). Pity complicates these notions of alignment because it arises
from a breach of absolute justice; it is undeserved, and in that sense "untrue";
but it is essential to good governance, the succoring of the common right
(3622). In the last point of policy, chastity, alignment between king and people
is apt to break down, as we see in the Virginia narrative.
39. For Carruthers, copious examples finally constitute general truths rather than
exist in tension with them (181ff.). For Gower, however, generalizations
184 NOTES
coexist uneasily with specific exempla, so that examples in all their variety
pose problems for interpretation.
40. Gower's use of "rhetoric" here requires some modification of the term.
In my discussion ofLivy, "rhetoric" refers to communicative oratory, closely
tied to judicial argument. Here Gower constructs rhetoric as aesthetically
motivated, a set of colors or figures-the very notion Livy seeks to avoid.
41. On "enformacion" see Simpson, "Genius's 'Enformacioun' in Book III,"
Mediaevalia 16 (1993, for 1990): 159-95, and Sciences and the Self in Medieval
Poetry, ch. 1.
42. As Macaulay points out, law was actually on Caesar's side, and Caesar of course
won the argument; Gower makes it the senators who cite legal precedent.
43. For example, Cicero begins the De Oratore with this claim: "What other
power could have been strong enough either to gather scattered humanity
into one place, ... or, after the establishment of social communities, to give
shape to laws, tribunals, and civic rights? ... [T]he wise control of the complete
orator is that which chiefly upholds ... the safety of countless individuals
and of the entire state" (De Ora tore, 1.8.33-34).
44. On Aristotle's construction of equity as a specifically imaginative mitigation
of justice, see Kathy Eden, Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), pp. 25-61.
45. In Middle English, "pite" did not necessarily carry the condescension of the
present-day word, but did indicate shared feeling or at least a knowledge of
another being-by definition, that is, the word refers to one person's recog-
nition of the needs of another. SeeMED, s.v. "pite." The word can also mean
piety or righteousness (MED s.v. "pite" 4) and can refer to one's own sorrow,
grief, or distress (MED, s.v. "pite" 3), but its oldest meaning is compassion
or mercy.
46. At one level, the consuls' argument is "true" because of their adherence to
the obligation of common profit; the importance of eloquence, however,
emerges increasingly in the course of the exemplum, so that in the end the
story is really in praise of argument per se. By the end, the "pleine trouthe"
(1638) is the full truth, the whole (unresolved) story with arguments on
both sides. Establishing interpretative coherence depends upon the reader's
acceptance of both possibilities.
47. The whole passage is this: "Supinas deinde tendens manus commilitones
appellans orabat ne quod scelus Ap. Claudi esset sibi attribuerent neu se ut
parracidam liberum aversarentur. Sibi vitam filiae sua cariorem fuisse, si
liberae ac pudicae vivere licitum fuisset: cum velut servam ad stuprum rapi
videret, morte amitti melius ratum quam contumelia liberos, misericordia se
in speciem crudelitatis lapsum .... Haec Virginia vociferanti succlamabat
multitudo nee illius dolori nee suae libertati se defuturos." Notice that
Virginius's hands are in an attitude of prayer here (supinas).
48. Alexander Gelley, "Exemplum," in Encyclopedia ofAesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly,
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 155.
49. In this regard, Gower's tyrant (like Chaucer's in the Legend of Good Women)
differs in degree from the renaissance versions, whose attraction to Lucrece
NOTES 185
lies explicitly in the coincidence of beauty with virtue. In Gower, Aruns

thinks Lucrece is "the beste I And the faireste forth withal" (4872-73) and
also considers not only her womanly beauty and yellow hair but also her
speech, her work, and her weaving; but the emphasis is on his aesthetic not
moral attraction to her. Compare, for example, Shakespeare's "Rape of
Lucrece," where defiling virtue is precisely the source of attraction.
50. Karla Taylor has observed in private correspondence that Gower's Lucrece
embraces an integrity of representation that is itself a cause of her death; for
Taylor, the resulting suspicion of absolute integrity is part of Gower's critique
of Lollard rhetoric against images.
51. "Stod" reverses the usual use of the word with weapons that stand in the
bodies of their victims (MED, s.v. "stonden" 19d), a somewhat strange usage
that calls attention to syntactic ambiguity.
52. Aquinas, On Kingship 1.1, 1.3, in Nederman and Forhan, 101, 104, and
Latini, Tresor 3.96, in Nederman and Forhan, 91.
53. Northrop Frye, The Secular Scripture: A Study of the Structure of Romance
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), pp. 28-31.
54. There is much written on the tensions between Richard II and Parliament
in the 1380s, when Gower would have been writing the Confessio, as well as
on his later political engagements. Recent analyses include Galloway,
"Learned Role"; Frank Grady, "The Lancastrian Gower and the Limits of
Exemplarity," Speculum 70 (1995): 552-75; and Paul Strohm, "Saving the
Appearances: Chaucer's Purse and the Fabrication of the Lancastrian Claim,"
in Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt
55. Lynn Staley, "Gower, Richard II, Henry of Derby, and the Business of Making
Culture," Speculum 75 (2000): 68-96, argues that Gower's affiliations with
Richard were qualified by Lancastrian affiliations beginning as early as 1389,
and Grady argues that his later Lancastrian endorsement, in the early fifteenth
century "In Praise of Peace," appears deeply contradictory: "it is precisely
Gower's twenty-five years' hard experience as a poet writing to kings about
kingship that makes him simultaneously so conventional in his praises and so
subtle in his exasperation" (570). The Virginia story suggests that Gower's
exemplary effort is tempered by skepticism about the capacity of examples to
educate the princes ofEngland, even as early as Book 7 of the Confessio.
Chapter 4 Framing Narrative in

Chaucer and Lydgate
1. Anne Middleton, "The Physician's Tale and Love's Martyrs." Middleton paints
a rather rosier picture than I do of the consequences of exemplary method
in the Physician's Tale. For her, "the inevitable discrepancy between intent and
performance, principle and practice" are the ingredients for engaging readers'
responses, entering them into the Canterbury "game" (30-31).
2. Iser describes this in terms of the raising and thwarting of readerly expectations,
which demands mental acts of reconciliation (see The Act of Reading,
186 NOTES
86-103). In Joyce's Ulysses, Iser writes, reference to the extratextual world

becomes "virtually impossible, and in its place is a continual process of trans-
formation that leads back into [the text] itself and not into a composite image
of reality.... [TJhe reader, in striving to produce the aesthetic object, actually
produces the very conditions under which reality is perceived and compre-
hended" (102-103). In Chaucer as well, reading does not only refer to but
constitutes the reader's mental experience.
3. This is a position typified by Derek Pearsall,John Lydgate (Charlottesville:
University Press ofVirginia, 1970). On the ways in which A. C. Spearing and
Seth Lerer have also perpetuated an image ofLydgate's failed imitative ambition,
see James Simpson, "Bulldozing the Middle Ages: The Case of John Lydgate; "
New Medieval Literatures 4 (2001): 213-42.
4. The locus classicus of the argument that the tales are expressions of their tellers
is George Lyman Kittredge, Chaucer and His Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1915). For seminal revisions, see David Lawton, Chaucer's
Narrators (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1986) and C. David Benson, Chaucer's
Drama of Style: Poetic variety and Contrast in the Canterbury Tales (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1986).
5. On the Physician's profession and social role see Marta Powell Harley, "Last
Things First in Chaucer's Physician's Tale: Final Judgment and the Worm of
Conscience,"]ournal of English and Germanic Philology 91 (1992): 1-16; John C.
Hirsh, "Modern Times: The Discourse of the Physician's Tale," Chaucer Review
27 (1993): 387-95; Lee Ramsey," 'The Sentence of it Sooth Is': Chaucer's
Physician's Tale," Chaucer Review 6 (1972): 185-97; and Beryl Rowland, "The
Physician's 'Historial Thyng Notable' and the Man of Law," English Literary
History 40 (1973): 165-78.
6. Psychoanalytic discourse describes disavowal as a simultaneous recognition
and denial ofloss.A fetish substitutes for a lost phallus, thereby marking what
has been lost and trying to undo or resolve the loss. In the case of the
Physician, it might be possible to argue that virginity itself is a kind of fetish,
but I would hesitate to ascribe such a psychological force to his discourse.
I find useful the broader notion that disavowal indicates the presence of the
very thing it denies. See Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of
Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Hogarth Press,
1973), pp. 118-21 and Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psychoanlysis, standard
edition 23, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1949), p. 203.
7. Brian Lee remarks that "among critics of Chaucer it is a truth universally
acknowledged that the Physician's Tale is not one of his most successful
achievements" (141). See "The Position and Purpose of the Physician's Tale,"
The Chaucer Review 22 (1987): 141-60.
8. As with Gower, it is not clear whether Chaucer read Livy, directly or in
translation, perhaps by Bersuire. E. F. Shannon makes a case for a number of
textual borrowings, based on moments when Chaucer echoes Livy but
diverges from Jean de Meun, or contains elements that Jean left out. See
Shannon, "The Physician's Tale," in Sources and Analogues ~f Chaucer's Canterbury
Tales, ed. W F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of
NOTES 187
Chicago Press, 1941), pp. 398-408. I am grateful to Kenneth Bleeth for

sending me the materials for his Annotated Bibliography of the Physician:1 Tale,
including correspondence on the sources of the Tale, which he (doubtfully)
suggests could be Simon of Hesdin's 1376 French translation of Valerius
Maximus's Memorabilia. The only other material Chaucer may have derived
from Livy is the story of Lucretia in The Legends of Good J.vbmen; here the
case for his direct access to the Roman author is even weaker, but see
Shannon, Chaucer and the Roman Poets (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1929), pp. 220-28. Most critics remain equivocal on Chaucer's access
to Livy. An exception is Sheila Delany, "Politics and the Paralysis of Poetic
Imagination in The Physician's Tale."
9. R. Howard Bloch, "Chaucer's Maiden's Head: 'The Physician's Tale' and the
Poetics ofVirginity," Representations 28 (1989): 113-34, argues that virginity
is inevitably defined by violability.
10. On the relationship between the cosmological figure of Nature and human
sexuality, see Winthrop Wetherbee, Platonism and Poetry in the Twelfth Century:
The Literary Influence of the School of Chartres (Princeton: Princeton
11. The phrase is Dante's, in lf!ferno II.
12. In the Roman de Ia Rose, the opening concentrates on Appius's evil, not
Virginius's worthiness. "Wouldn'tAppius have done well to hang? According
to Titus Livius, who knows well how to recount the case, Appius had
his sergeant institute a trumped-up case ... against Virginia, daughter of
Virginius." I quote the translation of Charles Dahlberg (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971; repr. Hanover, NH: University Press of
New England, 1983), pp. 5589-658, at 5564-65. The key details taken from
Jean de Meun include Appius's status as judge, not king or decemvir; and
Virginia's death by beheading, not stabbing as in Livy and Gower.
13. On the inappropriateness of this moralizing to the problems of the narrative
proper, see among others Emerson Brown,Jr., "What is Chaucer Doing with
the Physician and His Tale?" Philological Quarterly 60 (1981): 149-69, at 133.
14. On the tale's effort to "contain and control the bodily" (23) see Linda
Lomperis, "Unruly Bodies and Ruling Practices: Chaucer's Physician's Tale as
Socially Symbolic Act," in FeministApproaches to the Body in Medieval Literature,
ed. Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1993), pp. 21-37.
15. This moment offers evidence of Chaucer's access to Livy, not necessarily in
Latin but perhaps via French. Shannon cites only one unequivocal verbal
borrowing-"excellent beaute," echoing Livy's forma excellentem (44)-
hardly proof in itself of Chaucer's access to the Latin text. To Shannon's
analysis, I would add that the Physician's parenthetical disavowal of" fable" in
the midst of his narration echoes Livy's use offabula (3.54.9) to refer to
Appius's publicly enacted falsehood. The nuances of Chaucer's borrowings
are tantalizing; if Chaucer did indeed read Livy in Latin, then these borrowings
argue directly against Livy's alignments between outward form (excellent
beauty) and moral content, and between history and truth. I am still not
188 NOTES
finally convinced that Chaucer read Livy, but "fable" provides stronger
evidence for the possibility. Nevertheless, Chaucer need not have had Livy's
Latin before him to inherit the history-fable dichotomy that Livy clearly
established as essential to the tale.
16. Catherine Sanok describes how the tale invokes, but undermines, the timeless
hagiographical value of Virginia's sacrifice in "The Geography of Genre in
the Physician's Tale and Pearl," New Medieval Literatures 5 (2002): 177-201.
17. Many others have commented on the repetition of"sentence" in the tale.
See most recendy Angus Fletcher, "The Sentencing ofVirginia in the Physician's
Tale," The Chaucer Review 34 (2000): 300-308.
18. Pearsall finds that the principle of the "inadequate narrator" does not reha-
bilitate the Physician's Tale from aesthetic failure (278). See The Canterbury Tales
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1985), pp. 277-79.
19. See Salter, Chaucer: The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale, 67.
20. The line in Jean seems ultimately to derive from Virginius's self-defense in
Livy, long after Virginia is dead. He recounts to his men how, "when he saw
her being carried off like a slave to be dishonored, thinking it better to lose
his children by death than by outrage, he had been impelled by pity (miseri-
cordia) to an act of seeming cruelty" (cum velut servam ad stuprum rapi
videret, morte amitti melius ratum quam contumelia liberos, misericordia se
in speciem crudelitatis lapsum, 3.50.6). To place this pity in the midst of the
death scene enhances the anguish ofVirginius and the internal contradiction
of his action.
21. On the effects of the Jephthah reference, see Richard L. Hoffman, 'Jephthah's
Daughter and Chaucer's Virginia," The Chaucer Review 2 (1967): 20-31.
22. On the failure of meaning in the tale, see Sanok, "Geography of Genre."
23. Pearsall, The Life cif Geoffrey Chaucer: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell,
1992), p. 147.
24. In a later essay, Strohm remarks that Chaucer "shows a marked tendency to
suppress the particular coordinates of his own worldly situation, and to connect
his work with a tradition of'poesye' "(109); see "Politics and Poetics: Usk
and Chaucer," in Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1375-1475, ed.
Lee Patterson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 83-112.
25. The Physician's Tale has been assumed to have been written before 1390
because it shows no evidence of Gower's influence (see the explanatory note
in the Riverside Chaucer, 902). One could, of course, make the reverse
argument on this basis-that since Gower shows no influence from
Chaucer, the version in the Confessio must have come first. Chaucer proba-
bly wrote the Physician's Tale after 1386, since it is not mentioned in the list
of his works in the Prologue to the Legend of Good U0men (902). Though
Gower had begun the Confessio before 1386, there is finally no evidence of
the order in which the two poets produced their versions of the tale.
26. For a recent account of the vagueness and inappropriateness of this and
other morals in the tale, see Andrew Welsh, "Story and Wisdom in Chaucer:
The Physician's Tale and The Manciple's Tale," in Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon:
Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton,
NOTES 189
ed. Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University
Press/ Associated University Press, 2000), pp. 76-95.
27. Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History, 370, finds the Host's excess of
pity deliberately humorous.
28. Allen, "Chaucer Answers Gower: Constance and the Trouble With
Reading," ELH 63 (1997): 627-55.
29. On the relationship between Duke Humphrey and Lydgate, see Eleanor
Hammond, "Poet and Patron in the Fall if Princes: Lydgate and Humphrey
of Gloucester," Anglia 38 (1920): 121-36; Lydgate's Fall of Princes, ed. Henry
Bergen, EETS no. 121 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), pp. ix-xxiv; and
Pearsall, john Lydgate, 70, 223-54. Scanlon argues in Narrative, Authority, and
Power that Humphrey, ambitious for monarchical stature, makes "more
promiscuous than ever" the identity between reader and monarch in the
mirror for princes (326). Quotations from Lydgate are cited by book and
line number from Lydgate's Fall of Princes, 4 vols, EETS e.s. nos. 121-24,
ed. Henry Bergen (London: Oxford University Press, 1924).
30. Bergen's edition ofLydgate's works contains excerpts from Premierfait, but
does not include Virginia (vol. 124); for comparison I have consulted
Huntington Library MS. HM 937. Bergen does excerpt Boccaccio's second
(and longer) version of the Virginia story, 195, vol. 124. For Boccaccio's De
casibus virorum illustrium, see the edition of Vittore Branca (Milan: Arnoldo
Mondadori, 1983).
31. For Lydgate's illumination of truth see Lois Ebin, Illuminator, Makar, vates:
Visions of Poetry in the Fifteenth Century (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1988).
32. Similarly, Nicholas Perkins, Hoccleve's Regiment of Princes: Counsel and
Constraint (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2001) argues that for Hoccleve's
Regement of Princes, the notion of interpreting according to the writer's
intentions, "not the unchecked desire of the reader, is the key to this particular
text" (76).
33. Quotation from Simpson, "The Other Book of Troy: Guido delle Colonne's
Historia destructionis Troiae," Speculum 73 (1998): 397-423, at 411. On the dif-
ficulties ofbringing"poetry and power. .. to a perfect identity of purpose"
(93) see Lee Patterson, "Making Identities in Fifteenth-Century England:
Henry V and John Lydgate," in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on
Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J.
Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 69-107, and
Paul Strohm, "Hoccleve, Lydgate, and the Lancastrian Court," in The
Cambridge History if Medieval English Literature, ed. David Wallace (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 640-61.
34. For Lydgate's response to Chaucer in particular, see esp. Simpson, "Dysemol
daies and fatal houres': Lydgate's Destruction ifThebes and Chaucer's Knight's
Tale," in The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper
and Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 15-33, at 29.
35. On the poet's obligation to provide stable clerical authority in a changeable
world, see Scanlon, 322-50. On his clerical self-authorization see also Lerer,
190 NOTES
Chaucer and His Readers, ch. 2. In contrast, Simpson views Lydgate's clerical
voice as "partly oppositional" ("The Other Book of Troy," 422).
36. Only Premierfait's second account refers to Virginius as "chevalier" (HM
937, fol. 94.2v). The story is situated historically: the decemvirate follows
chronologically from the exile of the Tarquins-"Car apres ce que les rois
furent gectez hors de Rome .. .le peuple se gouverna par dix hommes
appellez les diximviere" (because after the kings were thrown out of Rome
the people were governed by ten men called the decemvirs)-and, with a
humanist historical authenticity, Virginius is identified as a "laboureur de
honneste estat de peuple" (fol. 46.1r).
3 7. In the first, shorter account of Virginia in Premierfait, her father kills her to
save her from defilement, not to assert his paternity (fol. 46, col. 1).The con-
cern with paternity appears only in Premierfait's second account, where the
fact of her engagement to Icilius is equally important. In the climactic scene
in Livy, of course, Virginius explicitly asks to speak to his daughter in order
to affirm his paternity; but in Premierfait he simply asks to "enquerir Ia
verite de Ia chose," and when he kills her, he says, quoting Livy, 'je garde ta
franchise par telle avie conm1e je puis" (fol. 95, col. 2). Thus, even compared
with Livy, Premierfait seems to downplay the problem of paternity while
emphasizing instead the sacrificial political gesture of Virginia's death.
Lydgate's emphasis on Virginius's paternity responds directly to Chaucer and
Gower.
38. Premierfait is far more blunt: "Ly mist ung coutel dedans Ia poi trine et loc-
cist" (He put a knife into her breast and killed her, fol. 46, col. 1). Even the
"hasti violence" by which she dies (Fall, II.3068) is associated grammatically
with Appius, not Virginius.
39. "Poraile" translates Latin plebis: "He smoot of the puple seuenti men, and
fifty thousynde of the porail" (Wyclifiite Bible, 1 Kings 6.19, from MED s.v.
"poverail (e) (n)"). Lydgate's outcry is less against the suffering of the poor
than against tyranny. He concludes by calling for governance that will
encourage obedience in the hearts of subjects.
40. On Lydgate's concern with "trouthe," see Patterson, "Making Identities," 75.
41. "Appius estant en ma p[rese]nce pour sa honte couvrir baissast sa teste
enveloppe dun manteau et qu[e] estoit vestu dune orde robe il ne sonnoit
mot afin que par adventure je ne le cougneusse. mais je me delitay en Ia
misere de lui" (Appius, appearing before me, ducked his head under a veil to
cover his shame, and, dressed in a filthy robe, said no word so that perchance
I wouldn't recognize him. But I delighted in his misery... , fol. 93v, col. 1).
Many of the figures in the Fall follow Boccaccio's device of appearing before
the author's mind's eye. In Livy, it is worth recalling, Appius's ill intentions
are described as "celari," hidden.
42. "On the one hand, argues [the Siege of Thebes], is integrity, simplicity, consis-
tency, and self-identity; on the other is duplicity, complexity, variability, and
self-contradiction" ("Making Identities," 75). Patterson finds that Lydgate
misrepresents Chaucer in order to bolster his own authorial integrity.
NOTES 191
43. Prcmicrfait (who, following Boccaccio, in turn considerably abridges Livy)

tells of how Appius came to power, was reelected to the senate's surprise,
halted the right of appeal, tried to consolidate his power through battle, and
finally came to ruin through the outrage against Virginius. In this more
sustained version, Appius 's abuses of power come more vividly and logically
to the fore.
44. Prelllierfait translates Livy'sfabula as "marvel": in the courtroom, the Romans
are astonished, "ses merveillerent pour Ia desloialle sentence" (they marvel at
[Appius'sj untrue sentence, fol. 95.2r).
45. Lydgate resists the "alteration or falsification" (The Act of Reading, 132) of the
already known which Iser sees as essential to the reading process.
46. I mean to make no claim here that Lydgate was reading Livy directly, though
Boccaccio was. Instead, I want to make the looser intertextual claim that a
concern with rhetorical effects was embedded in the Virginia story from its
inception, traveled with the story through its medieval permutations, and
emerged (albeit in general terms) in Lydgate's desperately anti-rhetorical
poetic method.
47. For a different reading of Lydgate's attitude toward rhetoric see Copeland,
"Lydgate, Hawes, and the Science of Rhetoric in the Late Middle Ages,"
Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992): 57-82.
48. Pearsall remarks that Lydgate tried to surpass Chaucer ("Innovator," 7);
I would suggest he seeks to explicate Chaucer, in the sense of unfolding or
laying bare what is folded into Chaucerian texts. The Troy Book explicates
the background of Troilus and Criseyde and the Sege ofThebes explicates the
story behind The Knight's Tale.
Chapter 5 The Pardoner in the "dogges boure":

Early Reception of the Canterbury Tales
1. Cited in G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, second edition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 14 n2.
2. Gregory's Latin has the more periodic, "Sed quia ad amorem Dei et proximi
plerumque corda audientium plus exempla quam verba excitant, charitati
vestrae indicare studeo quod is qui praesto est filius meus Epiphanius
diaconus, Isauria provincia exortus, in vicina factum terra Lycaoniae solet
narrare miraculum." See Homilia XXIX in Patrologia cursus wmpletus: series
latina, ed.J.-P. Migne, vol. 76 (Paris, 1841-64), col. 1293-1301.
3. See Gaylord," Sentence and Solaas in Fragment VII" and Barbara Nolan," 'A
Poet Ther Was': Chaucer's Voices in the General Prologue to the Canterbury
Tales," PMLA 101 (1986): 154-67.
4. Iser, The Act of Reading, 53-85.
5. The phrase quoted is Carolyn Dinshaw's, in Chaucer's Sexual Poetics
(Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 180.
6. Many scholars emphasize that, as Penelope Curtis puts it, the Pardoner
is "offering himself as a live 'ensample,' " in "The Pardoner's 'Jape,' " in
192 NOTES
The Pardoner's Tale: lviodern Critical Interpretations, ed. Harold Bloom (New York:
Chelsea House Publishers, 1988), pp. 23-42, at 28. Another strain of criti-
cism emphasizes the Pardoner's spiritual torment, beginning with Alfred L.
Kellog, "An Augustinian Interpretation of Chaucer's Pardoner," Speculum 26
(1951): 465-81 and continuing in the accounts of Donald Howard, The Idea
of the Canterbury Tales, 333-71; H. Marshall Leicester, The Disenchanted
Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1990), pp. 35-64; and Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of
History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), pp. 367-421.
C. David Benson, David Lawton, and Derek Pearsall have raised the fullest
objections to such dramatic readings of the Canterbury Tales as a whole and
the Pardoner in particular. See Benson, Chaucer's Drama cif Style (Chapel Hill
and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1986); Lawton, Chaucer's
Narrators (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1985), esp. pp. 36-75; and Pearsall,
The Canterbury Tales (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1985).
7. Paul Strohm argues that fifteenth-century readers appreciated "different
facets of[Chaucer's) work than those esteemed by his immediate circle" (28).
The fifteenth-century audience sought generic stability where the immediate
audience had appreciated the frustration of generic expectations. See
"Chaucer's Fifteenth-Century Audience and the Narrowing of the 'Chaucer
Tradition,' "SAC 4 (1982): 25-26.
8. See David Lawton, "Dullness and the Fifteenth Century," ELH 54 (1987):
761-99.
9. Kane and Donaldson's critique of stemmatics and their efforts to rethink
editorial methods are described in Piers Plowman: The B Version (London:
Athlone Press, 1988), pp. 1-70, 128-225, at 130. For salient critiques of lectio
difficilior, see Robert Adams, "Editing and the Limitations of the Durior
Lectio," Yearbook of Langland Studies 5 (1991): 7-15.
10. Donaldson writes, "sometimes the corrections [of scribes) are very
good ... .I cannot help feeling that there is something basically wrong about
a situation in which scholars, who are dedicated to upholding and fostering
intelligence, can operate securely only if those who serve them-in this case
scribes-are by definition stupid" (111). See "The Psychology of Editors of
Middle English Texts," in Speaking of Chaucer (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press,
1983). Derek Pearsall points out the pitfalls of such" eclectic" editing meth-
ods, saying that "[t)he critical edition thus becomes an extended exercise in
literary taste ..." (109); see "Theory and Practice in Middle English Editing,"
Text: Transactions of the Society for Textual Scholarship 7 (Ann Arbor: University
of Michigan Press, 1988), pp. 107-26.
11. See Barry Windeatt, "The Scribes as Chaucer's Early Critics," SAC 1 (1979):
119-41:"The scribal rewriting [of the exemplar) reflects a sense of what is out
of the ordinary and needs to be 'made normal' "(121). Derek Pearsall writes,
"Manuscripts dismissed as worthless by editors of critical texts are often the
very ones where scribal editors have participated most fully in the activity of
a poem" (128); see "Fifteenth Century Manuscript Production," in Fifteenth-
Century Studies, ed. Robert F. Yeager (Hamden, CT:Archon Books, 1984).
NOTES 193
12. R. G. Collingwood, "Question and Answer," An Autobiography

(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), pp. 24-33, at 29.
13. Seth Lerer essentially argues that fifteenth-century readers show evidence of
a "subjected," even "childlike" relation to "father Chaucer." I argue that, on
the contrary, some fifteenth-century readers exhibit attentive and even
contentious reading methods that, if anything, take an "adult," stabilizing and
acculturating role in relation to Chaucer's unstable texts. Such readers
understand Chaucer's disruptions only too well.
14. On lectio difficilior, see Allen, "The Pardoner in the 'dogges boure': Early
Reception of the Canterbury Tales," The Chaucer Review 36 (2001): 91-127, of
which the present chapter is an abbreviated and revised version.
15. Pearsall gives ca. 1410 as the date in Old English and Middle English Poetry,
The Routledge History of English Poetry, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 298.
16. On the possible connection between the Interlude and the Jubilee, see
Peter Brown, "Journey's End: The Prologue to the Tale if Beryn," in Chaucer
and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed.Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London: King's
College London Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991),
pp. 150-56.The manuscript date is 1450-70.
17. On Chaucer's "secondary audience" in the fifteenth century, see Strohm,
"Fifteenth-Century Audience," 29-32.
18. I quote from the edition of The Canterbury Interlude and the Merchant~ Tale if
Beryn by John Bowers, in The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations
and Additions, TEAMS Middle English Texts Series (Kalamazoo: Medieval
Institute Publications of Western Michigan University, 1992), pp. 55-196.
19. Many critics have noted the Interlude-writer's familiarity with the Canterbury
Tales, especially the Miller's Tale. See Stephen Kohl, "Chaucer's Pilgrims in
Fifteenth-Century Literature," Fifteenth-Century Studies 7 (1983): 221-36;
and Karen A. Winstead, "The Beryn-Writer as a Reader of Chaucer,"
Chaucer Review 22 (1988): 225-33. Those who attend especially to the dif-
ferences between the Canterbury Tales and the Interlude and Tale of Beryn
include John Bowers," The Tale of Beryn and The Seige if Thebes: Alternative
Ideas of The Canterbury Tales," SAC 7 (1985): 23-50, repr. in Writing After
Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel J.
Pinti (New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1998), pp. 201-25; and Andrew
Taylor, "The Curious Eye and the Alternative Endings of The Canterbury
Tales," in Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel, ed. Paul Budra and Betty A.
Schellenberg (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998), pp. 34-52.
20. In his analysis of the "riddle" of narrative personae, David Lawton remarks that
"many romances ... get away virtually without one" (Chaucer~ Narrators, 12).
21. It is possible, as Bowers remarks (Continuations and Additions, nn. 147-57),
that the image the two pilgrims try to interpret is the particular Canterbury
Cathedral panel showing Adam delving the earth, and that it thus reflects
their unregenerate status.
22. According to the MED, to "live at rest" is not simply to live in freedom from
labor or motion but to live in a state of peace (s.v. "rest," 4b). Several illustrative
194 NOTES
quotations suggest the political implications of the idiom, especially "set or

put at rest" meaning to set a kingdom at peace. The Host says that behaving
"after company," either imitating one's betters or, possibly, acting like a good
companion, creates peaceful community. It is worth remarking the density of
idiomatic speech in the Host's responses to the "lewd" pilgrims here and else-
where; this seems at once an imitation of Chaucer's Host with his mild oaths,
and a depiction of how a well-governed leader reaches the straying members
of his conununity. It may also be a mark of the Interlude-poet's concern with
a familiar, and familiarizing, language: idiomatic speech calls upon a prese-
lected audience and points out their inclusion in a locally recognizable code.
23. In the Northumberland manuscript, the Host recedes because of omitted
links, most notably the Prologue to the Pardoner's Tale and the jocular Prologue
to the Manciple's Tale.
24. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, 37 4.
25. This material value emerges clearly when the Summoner, who catches them
at it, demands half of what they have stolen (178-79).
26. The notion of judgment in both the worldly and spiritual senses precedes
the concrete enumerative meaning of the word "account" in English (MED,
s.v. "account(e) n" and "accounten v"). In Gower it is used of moral respon-
sibility and control, interestingly, in another context that explores rage:
Canacee's father, upon learning she has had a child by her brother, becomes
"like a leon in his rage, I Which of no drede set accompt" ( Confessio A mantis,
III.267-68). The phrase "to ben at accounte" meaning "to prepare a financial
statement" is first cited in the MED in 1431.
27. On the terms of establishing horizontal bonds among them, see David
Wallace, Chaucerian Polity:Absolutist Lineages andAssociational Forms in England
and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 65-82.
28. For a useful sustained account of the community constituting itself through
language, see Leonard Koff, Chaucer and the Art cif Storytelling (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1988).
29. John M.Bowers argues that the Pardoner remains a "eunuch or a homosexual"
whose "amatory assault" on Kit is therefore "doomed from the start"
("Alternative Ideas," 204). For a reading more akin to my own, see Taylor,
"Curious Eye:'
30. The source of the Pardoner's challenge to the pilgrims has often been found,
of course, in his sexual identity-a reading which turns on the narrator's
portrait of the Pardoner in the General Prologue: "I trowe he were a geldyng
or a mare" (!.691). Some have understood this as an indication of sexual
identity, others as a signal of anatomical anomaly; see C. David Benson in
"Chaucer's Pardoner: His Sexuality and Modern Critics," Mediaevalia 8
(1985, for 1982): 337-49 and, for the opposite perspective, Stephen Kruger,
"Claiming the Pardoner: Toward a Gay Reading of Chaucer's Pardoner's
Tale," Exemplaria 6 (1994): 115-39.
31. The Interlude and Tale cif Beryn appear in Northumberland MS. 455, Alnwyck
Castle, fols. 180r-235r. On the Northumberland manuscript, see J. M. Manly
NOTES 195
and Edith Rickert, The Text 4 the Ca11terbury Tales, Studied on the Basis 4 All
Known Manuscripts 8 vols. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1940), 1: 390ff.
The order ofNl (and of other tales) can be found not only in the descrip-
tion of the manuscript in Manly and Rickert, 1: 387-95 but also in vol. II,
on unnumbered pages following 494. For a useful chart of the Nl order, see
also Bowers, "Alternative Endings," 207. The order of fragments in Nl and in
Manly and Rickert's b order are as follows:
Nl Manly and Rickert's b order
A (I) GP,KnT,MiPT,RvPT A(I)

B 1 (II) MLT (no endlink) B 1 (II)
F' (V) SqT (adapted headlink: F' (V)
ends uniquely at 1. 349)
Eb (IV) MerPT Eb(IV)
D (III) WBPT, FrPT, SuPT D (III)
E'(IV)CIIPT E·' (IV)
Fb (V) MerE, FrankT Fb (V)
G' (VIII) SNPT G (VIII) SNPT, CYPT
B 2b (VII) PrT (no Prologue)
C' (VI) PhyT C (VI) PhyT, PdT
B 2" (VII) ShT, Th, Me!P B 2 (VII) ShT, PrT, Th, MeiP, -7
Cb (VI) PdPT
Gb (VIII) CYPT
Interlude/ Beryr1
D (lll) SuT, II. 2159-2294
B 2d" (VII) Mel, MkPT, NPPT -7 Mel, MkPT, NPPT
H (IX) MaT (no Prologue) H(IX)
l (X) PsPT !(X)
32. A fragment of the Summoner's Tale is also copied here. The Tale is cut short in
the manuscripts of Manly-Rickert's d* affiliation, which Northumberland
follows in the first part of the Summoner's Tale, which stops at line 2158
(fol. 119r). A new exemplar seems to have supplied the end of the Tale,
lines 2159-294, from Manly-Rickert's b* group. This ending is inserted
after the Tale of Beryn, with the heading, "Here endith the tale of the
Sumpnoure w[ith]in the boke Wryten" (fol. 242v). See Manly-Rickert,
"Classification," vol. II, 228-29, and the description of the manuscript in vol. I,
387-95.
The insertion of the Summoner ending is a reminder that any unity in the
MS was interrupted by the contingencies of copying, including the availabil-
ity of exemplars. There are a number of missing links and other shifts in order
for which there may be less interpretive than logistical explanations. The
ordering of the tales in this MS was probably not the work of the Beryn-
author. Manly and Rickert dismiss out of hand any possibility that writer and
scribe were the same man, based on "the differences between them in intel-
ligence and ... the errors committed by the scribe in the text" (vol. I, 392).
33. Strohm, "Fifteenth-Century Audience," 24-27.
196 NOTES
34. Bowers argues, similarly, for "the poet-continuator himself" having had "a
hand, probably a strong one, in arranging the fragments in an order which
suited his concept of a round trip" ("Alternative Endings," 207).
35. On the haphazard availability of exemplars and the workings of bookshops
see Doyle and Parkes's influential article, "The Production of Copies of the
Canterbury Tales and the Confessio Amantis in the Early Fifteenth Century,"
in Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts, and Libraries: Essays Presented to N R. Ker,
ed. M. B. Parkes and Andrew G. Watson (London: Scolar Press, 1978),
pp. 163-212. See also Ralph Hanna III, Pursuing History: Middle English
Manuscripts and Their Texts (Stanford, 1996).
36. Owen, The Manuscripts cif"The Canterbury Tales," 76-77.
37. Bowers, "Alternative Ideas," 206-210.
38. Manly and Rickert do not record any instances of this variant.
39. Manly and Rickert cite this variant in Northumberland and a similar one,
"chose" for "cosyn," in two other manuscripts, Cambridge University
Gg.4.27 and Cambridge Ii.3.26.
40. In this regard, see also E.Talbot Donaldson, "Chaucer's Three 'P's': Pandarus,
Pardoner, and Poet," Michigan Quarterly Review 14 (1975): 282-301, at 283
and Derek Pearsall, "Chaucer's Pardoner: The Death of a Salesman," Chaucer
Review 17 (1983): 358-65.
Chapter 6 Memory and Recognition in

Henryson 's Testament of Cresseid
1. This is not to say that Chaucer always associates exemplarity with an imposi-
tion of ideals upon women. The Knight's memory of Blanche, for instance, or
the Squire's Canacee, exemplify courtly ideals in action without implying a
cost for either character. Saint Cecilia, too, demonstrates Christian martyrdom
in a tale that does not imply that such exemplarity robs her of her integrity.
2. Wetherbee, "Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower."
3. The phrase is Hampton's, Writing From History, 92.
4. On the mercantile ethos of the Man if Law's Tale, see David Wallace,
Chaucerian Polity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), ch. 7.
5. Karla Taylor writes of Troilus and Criseyde, "I believe Chaucer was already
wrestling with the problem of exemplary fiction in the Troilus, and that he
calls attention to the inadequacy of the form as traditionally conceived"
(261-62). See Chaucer Reads "The Divine Comedy" (Stanford: Stanford
6. On the Theban back-story, see Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of
History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), ch. 2, and Catherine
Sanok, "Criseyde, Cassandre, and the Thebaiad: Women and the Theban
Subtext of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde" SAC 20 (1998): 41-71.
7. Oenone writes:
me fide conspicuus Troiae munitor amavit,

admisitque meas ad sua dona manus.
NOTES 197
quaecumque herba patens ad opem radixque medenti

utilis in toto nascitur orbe, mea est.
me miseram, quod amor non est medicabilis herbis!
deficior prudens artis ab arte mea.
("Me, the builder of Troy, the illustrious god of the lyre, loved, and let my
hands into the secret of his gifts. Whatever herb potent for aid, whatever root
that is useful to the healer grows in all the world, is mine.Aias, wretched me,
that love may not be healed by herbs! Skilled in an art, I am left helpless by
the very art I know.")
Text and translation are quoted from Ovid, Heroides and Amores, ed. and
trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), pp.
5.145-50.
8. Sally Mapstone discusses the Heroidean context, in "The Origins of
Criseyde," in Medieval Women: Texts and Contexts in Late Medieval Britain.
Essays for Felicity Riddy, ed. Jocelyn Wogan-Browne et a!. (Turnhout,
Belgium: Brepols, 2000), pp. 131-47.
9. Louise 0. Fradenburg shows how suppressed feminine suffering shapes the
poem, in "'Oure Owen Wo to Drynke': Loss, Gender, and Chivalry in
Troilus and Criseyde," in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde: "Subgit to Aile Poesye":
Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf and Catherine S. Cox (Binghamton,
NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1992), pp. 88-106.
10. Along with Fradenburg, see also Gayle Margherita, "Historicity, Femininity,
and Chaucer's Troilus," Exemplaria 6 (1994): 243-69 and Sanok, "Criseyde,
Cassandre, and the Thebaid".
11. Karla Taylor, "Inferno 5 and Troilus and Criseyde Revisited;' in Chaucer's
Troilus and Criseyde: "Subgit to aile poesye": Essays in Criticism, ed. R. A. Shoaf
with Catherine S. Cox (Binghamton, NY: Center for Medieval and Early
Renaissance Studies, State University of New York, 1992), pp. 239-56,
at 252.
12. On the parallel between Criseyde and readers, see especially Carolyn
Dinshaw, Chaucer:, Sexual Poetics (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press,
1989).
13. On the two plots see the "Introduction" to Denton Fox's edition of the
Testament of Cresseid (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1968), pp. 20-22, and
Douglas Gray, Robert Henryson (Leiden: E.]. Brill, 1979), p. 170. All citations
from the Testament are from Fox's edition; I have normalized thorn and yogh.
14. On Henryson's recognition of Chaucer's refusal to judge, see Derek Pearsall,
" 'Quha wait gif all that Chauceir wrait was trew?': Henryson's Testament of
Cresseid," in New Perspectives on Middle English Texts, ed. Susan Powell and
Jeremy J. Smith (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), pp. 169-82. For a more dra-
matic account ofHenryson's "complex act ... ofliterary theft" see Nicholas
Watson, "Outdoing Chaucer: Lydgate's Troy Book and Henryson's Testament
of Cresseid as Competitive Imitations of Troilus and Criseyde," in Shifts and
Traspositions in Medieval Narrative: A Festschrift for Dr. Elspeth Kennedy, ed.
Karen Pratt (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 89-108, at 90-91. See also
198 NOTES
A. C. Spearing, Criticism a11d 1\!fedieva/ Poetry (New York: Barnes & Noble,
1972), pp. 135-92.
15. It is worth comparing the function of the weather in Troilus a11d Criseyde, on
the night of the consummation, when rain is a felicitous plot development
(it aids Pandarus's machinations) but an implicitly threatening condition of
the love affair; see Jill Mann, "The Planetary Gods in Chaucer and
Henryson," in Chaucer Traditio11s: Studies i11 Ho11or of Derek Brewer, ed. Ruth
Morse and Barry Windeatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
pp. 91-106.
16. "Resonance" is Gray's term (esp. 170-76).
17. Strauss, "To Speak Once More of Cresseid: Henryson's Testame11t
Re-considered," Scottish Literary ]oumal 4 (1977): 5-13. Many scholars chart
Cresseid's acceptance of responsibility but most find no explicitly Christian
salvation for her; see especially Lee Patterson, "Christian and Pagan in the
Testament of Cresseid," Philological Quarterly 52 (1973): 696-714. See also
Steven R. McKenna, Robert Hmrys(m 's Tragic Visio11 (New York: Peter Lang,
1994); and David J. Parkinson, "Henryson's Scottish Tragedy," Chaucer Review
25 (1991): 355-62. A few others have asserted that she is punished for, and
learns to recognize, her offense against courtly love; see for example
C. W Jentoft, "Henryson as Authentic 'Chaucerian': Narrator, Character,
and Courtly Love in The Testame11t of Cresseid," Studies i11 Scottish Literature 10
(1972): 94-102.
18. On the successive, partial images of Cresseid, see Jane Adamson, "The
Curious Incident of the Recognition in Henryson's 'The Testament of
Cresseid,' "Parergo11 27 (1980): 17-25.
19. "Getting of wisdom" is quoted in making a similar point by Felicity Riddy,
" 'Abject odious': Feminine and Masculine in Henryson's Testammt of Cresseid,"
in The Lo11g Fffiemth Ce11tury: Essays for Douglas Gray, ed. Helen Cooper and
Sally Mapstone (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 236 [229-48].
20. An emblem is not quite the same as an exemplum, of course. Henryson
brings the two very close, though, by portraying Cresseid in near-pictorial
terms. On the pictorial see esp.John Ganim, Style a11d Co11scious11ess i11 Middle
E11glish Narrative (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), pp. 123-41.
21. With Pearsall, "Henryson's Testame11t," I find that this narrator need not be
understood as a coherent character, but plays a certain role in presenting the
poem near its beginning.
22. On the relations among "this narracioun," the Troilus, and the Testame11t, see
Tim William Machan, "Textual Authority and the Works of Hoccleve,
Lydgate, and Henryson," Viator 23 (1992): 281-99; rpt. in Writi11g After
Chaucer: Esse11tial Readi11gs i11 Chaucer a11d the Fi[tee11th Ce11tury, ed. Daniel J.
Pinti (New York: Garland, 1998), pp. 177-200.
23. The proximity of love for and hatred of women in courtly discourse is a
commonplace of medieval misogyny, articulated for instance by C. S. Lewis,
Allegory of Love, 145.
24. Against charges that Henryson expresses a much harsher attitude toward
Cresseid than Chaucer, Mann asserts that "his poem gives back to Cresseid a
role, the role of self-recognition that Chaucer had denied to her" (100).
NOTES 199
25. Mann's account of this seems to me convincing: the gods, despite their
depiction as having freedom of choice and action, are themselves (as planets)
subject to the laws of the cosmos; "It is these laws [time and change] which
'punish' Cresseid's infidelities with leprosy; the parallel conception that she is
punished for her 'blasphemy' against Venus and Cupid represents the 'inten-
tionalist' view of the universe to which Cresseid, at this point in the poem,
stubbornly clings" (95).
26. For this insight see Douglas Duncan, "Henryson's Testament of Cresseid,"
Essays in Criticism 11 (1961): 128-35.
27. On the ways in which memorial activity was understood as the basis of
ethical judgment, see Carruthers, The Book of Memory, esp. ch. 5. Reading
provides mental images, which in turn give the reader a local, and sensory,
experience of"what right action feels like" (169).
28. Fox finds that this mirror is only symbolic of vanity and luxury, whereas later
instances of mirroring in the poem reveal Cresseid's progress, as she begins
to see herself as a warning to others (45-46).
29. This is Duncan's important insight about the poem, 131-33.
30. On the complaint's conclusiveness see the astute reading of Patterson,
704-710. I do not agree with Patterson that the complaint's exemplary
gesture allows Cresseid to "avoid personal responsibility" (707).
31. The memory of singing also recalls Criseyde's association with birds
(nightingales and perhaps the eagle of her dream).
32. On the importance of the physical and concrete in medieval ideas about
memory see Carruthers, esp. ch. 2.
33. In making this claim I disagree with several critics who have described
Cresseid's exemplary status as detracting from her subjectivity or the pathos
of her situation. See Alice Nitecki," 'Fenyeit of the New':Authority in The
Testament of Cresseid;' Journal of Narrative Technique 15 (1985): 120-32;
Patterson, "Christian and Pagan"; Sklute, "Phoebus Descending."
34. For another reading of the "contrast between what Criseyde may say and
what may be said of her" (143) in the tradition from Benoit to Shakespeare,
see Sally Maps tone, "The Origins of Criseyde."
35. Marshall W Stearns, Robert Henryson (1949; repr. New York: AMS Press,
1966), pp. 98-105, points out that Aristotle ascribes both memory and
dreams to the intellect, the same faculty as imagination; both memory and
dreams are the effects of sensory perceptions whose "imprints" remain in the
mind. Aristotle writes that when strong emotions accompany sense percep-
tions, such imprints can deceive us, so that "the more deeply one is under the
influence of the emotion, the less similarity is required to give rise to
these impressions" (De Somniis, 460b1). For Stearns, Troilus's memory has
the status of an emotionally charged dream state. But Carruthers argues that
just such emotional charge is an integral part of any memorial knowledge;
see, for example, 134, where she points out that "what is unusual is more
memorable than what is routine" as a way of explaining why, for one prac-
titioner of memory arts, an emphasis on violence and sexuality is particularly
prominent. For Carruthers's reading of Aristotle's arts of memory and the
distinction between dreams and memory, see esp. 58-60.
200 NOTES
36. Patterson, 710, emphasizes the subjective nature of the (mis) recognition
scene. Though he points out that the testament is an "act of publication"
(712), to my mind he underestimates the importance ofCresseid's exemplary
status, hence her public availability.
37. Mann argues that in her self-recognition at the end Cresseid experiences
"re-integration" between her present and former selves, and is thereby
granted a self-realization that Chaucer denied her (100).
38. Riddy," 'Abject odious.' "See also Tatyana Moran," The Testament if Cresseid
and the Book of Troylus," Litera 6 (1959): 18-24; Sklute, "Phoebus
Descending," 189-204; and Fradenburg's analysis of the poem's attitude to
Cresseid, in "Henryson Scholarship," 79.
39. On Cresseid's understanding of the full weight of her betrayal, see esp. Duncan,
"Henryson's Testament"; Strauss, "Henryson's Testament Reconsidered"; and
Pearsall, "Henryson's Testament.''
40. Hampton, Writing From History associates the pictorial with the effort to
subsume specificity into timeless, general truths; see especially the chapter
on Tasso, 81-133. But pictorial images can work more dynamically, accord-
ing to Carruthers: memory-images are condensed in order to be filed away
in the mind, but are reactivated when relevant, so that even "picturing" is not
calling up something static, but reading a process in time. Pictures are thus
understood "rhetorically, as directly referential not to an object but to a text
("historia") and thus to the human memorative processes called reading and
composition" (222).
41. The creation of memory-images depends on reducing rich conceptual
terrain into memorable units: "The picture reduces words to their res, the
outline of topics and principal words, which, in speaking, one would elaborate"
(Carruthers, 242).
42. In a response to Riddy which largely accepts her claim about female abjec-
tion in the poem but redirects its significance, Pearsall writes, "The poem .. .is
not an acquiescence in the uncompromising violence and power of the
patriarchal order, nor a self-consciously subversive questioning of it, but a
poetic representation of it which reveals, through the powers invested in such
poetic representation, what is customarily concealed. There are fractures and
fissures within this ostensibly monolithic patriarchal order which betrary its
meanness, its contradictions, its weakness, its denial of the humanity of the
humans over whom it presumes to preside" ("Henryson's Testament," 181).
43. For this insight (204) and for a more sustained exploration of temporality
in Troilus and Criseyde, see Karla Taylor, Chaucer Reads "The Divine Comedy,"
175-209.
44. For a somewhat different notion of how temporality works in the poem,
see Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer, 118-23. The classic analysis of the poem's
ending, in which Troilus distances himself from his worlclly suffering and
achieves cosmic laughter, is Morton W Bloomfield, "Distance and
Predestination in Troilus and Criseyde," PMLA 72 (1957): 14-26.
45. Mukafovsicy, Aesthetic Function, expresses this modern predilection in his notion
that didactic and aesthetic exist always together but in tension with each other.
NOTES 201
46. The locus classicus for competitive relations between successive generations is
Harold Bloom, Anxiety of Influence. John Ganim calls Henryson's poem
"a corrective reading experience, an antidote to a century of [emotional]
excess or defect" (Style and Consciousness, 123). For a more open-ended
Henryson, see Melvin Storm, "The Intertextual Cresseida: Chaucer's
Henryson or Henryson's Chaucer?" Studies in Scottish Literature 28 (1993):
105-22.
47. C. David Benson, "Critic and Poet: What Lydgate and Henryson Did to
Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde," Modern Language Quarterly 53 (1992): 23-40
argues that Henryson "fills in" what Chaucer leaves out in his poem, recti-
fYing an absence (24-25), but that he simultaneously shares readerly con-
cerns with his predecessor: "Henryson seems less interested in delivering a
didactic message than in involving his readers in a series of complex moral
issues" (37-38).
48. Here I extend Derek Pearsall's analysis of Chaucerian reticence in The Life
of Gel!ffrey Chaucer. On Chaucer's inclusive and genial presence, see also
Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
49. See Francis Thynne, Animaduersions vppon the annotaciones and corrections of
some imperfections of impressiones of Chaucers workes, ed. F. J. Furnivall and
G. H. Kingsley, EETS o.s. 9 (1875; repr. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1965). On Thynne's edition, see Fox's "Introduction," 18-20.
50. For Gadamer, understanding is always an act of relating the text to one's
particular situation, seeing it through one's own horizons. Truth and Method,
307-312.
51. David Wallace's Cambridge History of Middle English Literature (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001) is perhaps the most important demon-
stration of the current insistence on more local and various modes of
thought in late medieval English literary culture. In his "Preface" Wallace
writes that the volume "resists [the] impulse to stabilize and homogenize
medieval textuality" by evoking "cultural, linguistic and orthographic
conditions of dizzying complexity" (xiv).
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INDEX
Aers, David, 169n87 Benson, C. David, 192n6, 194n30

affective response, see pity; rage Bersuire, Pierre, 64, 180n21
Alain ofLille, 12 Black, Antony, 65, 181n23
Allen, Elizabeth, 189n28 Boccaccio, Giovanni, De casibus
antifeminism, 37,39-40,42,45, 143-4, illustrium vivorum, 7-8, 99-100,
150-2 105-6
see also under women Boke of Nurture, 28-9,33
application, 16-18, 35, 112-13, 123, Book of the Knight of the Tower, 17, 29-31
136, 148, 156-7, 166n55 Perrot Lenard, story of: actual
Aquinas, Thomas, 79, 80 audience, 32-3; ~mticipated
Aristotle audience, 31-7, 42-4; courtly
Nicomachean Ethics, 16-17, 199n35 discourse, 31-3, 44--8; example as
On Rhetoric, 162n 14 spectacle, 38-44; inscribed
Ashley, Kathleen, 160n24 audience, 44--8; literacy of
audience women, 33--7; narrator, 33--7,42-7
anticipated, 5-11 passim, 15-18, Pygrere, story of, 41-3
21-5,28-31,154-8, 171n8 Bowers,John, 128, 194-5n31
diversity of, 2, 8,10-13,41-2, Bremond, Claude, 4
48-52,96-9,157-8
emotional response of, 15-18, 72-82 Carruthers,Mary, 17-18,69,147-8,
passim, 104, 111-14 183n39, 199nn27,32,35,200n41
freedom of, 22-6,34-7, 135, 139, Cato, Distichs, 27
156-8 Caxton, William, 28, 30-1
unreliability of, 12-15,23,79,100,157 Book of the Knight of the Tower, 48-52
see also application Chaucer, Geoffrey
Augustine, 73 Canterbury Tales: interpretive
authority standards, 95-9, 126-7;
clerical, 8-11, 34-5, 40-4, 46, 4 7 narrative structure, 83-4,
disavowal of, 92, 96, 98, 101, 143 126-9; pity in, 98-9;
female, 45-8 reconfiguration in
paternal, 30--7,60--1,75-8, 102-4, 108 Northumberland MS, 126-31
potential corruption of, 39, 40, 45, Clerk:~ Tale: aesthetic form as basis for
62-6,76,87-89,108-9 judgment, 22-5; affective
and social norms, 27-37, 117-18, response, 14--16; audience
120-1,124-5 initiative, 21-2; inscribed
violence of, 31, 39, 42,60-2,72-9, audience, 18-21
93, 102-4, 143 General Prologue, 124-5
220 INDEX
Chaucer, Geoffrey-continued David, Alfred, 25, 169n86

Knight's Tale, 109 didacticism, strategies of
Legend of Good Women, 133, recognition of sin, 1-3, 5-6, 38-42,
184n49 135, 141, 144-51, 158
Man of Law's Tale, 133 redundancy, 5-6,38-40, 68, 106,
Miller's Tale, 119-22 passim 162n21
Pardoner's Tale: challenge to ventriloquism, 45-8
interpretive norms, 98-9, visible signs, 1-3, 6, 11, 38-40,76-8,
111-15,117,119,123, 126; 120, 140-1, 144-7, 149-52,
Host as inscribed audience, 157-8
113-14, 116-17;moral desire, see also discernment; example;
111,113-14 injunction
Physician's Tale: audience initiative, Dinshaw, Carolyn, 113, 169n84, 191n5
95-9; costs of exemplarity, 84, discernment
93-5; disavowal of authority, based on fiction, 7-8,19,34-7,
86-8, 90, 96-8; history vs 46-8,50,71-2,76-9,80,84,
fiction, 85-90, 92-3; Host as 131, 155-6
inscribed audience, 83-4, 97-9; deflection of, 47, 107, 120
in relation to other tales of as self-governance, 35, 48, 50, 62-9,
Virginia, 53-6; pity, 90-9; 103-4
reliability of narrator, 84-99 see also audience; phronesis; see under
passim example, judgment
Troilus and Criseyde, anticipated prompted by
audience, 137, 139; Donaldson,E.Talbot, 114, 192nn9, 10
authoritative texts, 135-8; costs
of exemplarity, 133-4, 138-40; Elliott, Dyan, 8, 41-2,44, 174n38,
will of Criseyde, suggested, 41,42
134, 138-40 endorsement, 84-5,99, 101-4, 108-9,
Chretien de Troyes, Yvain, 6-7 130-1
Cicero exemplum, 1-14, 160-1n8
De inventione, 162n15 example
De oratore, 184n43 aesthetic character of, 7, 16-17,
Clarke, Robert L.A., 160n4 22-6,76-80,135,140,145-58
Collingwood,R.G., 114-15,120 passim, 167n69, 168n76
common profit, 65-7, 78-82 passim, affective character of, 14-18,97,99,
105, 107, 181n24 111-14,141-3,152
failure of, 94-9 as combination of general and
see also kingship particular, 1-7,46-7,50,66-8,
conduct books, 27-31 100, 147, 150-2, 156-7
Copeland, Rita, 18,21 communicative function of, 6-7,23,
copiousness, see rhetoric 74,76,83-4,146, 163n23
courtly love contingency of, 1-3,9-11, 17-18,
in Book of the Knight of the Tower, 25-6,51,56,73,136-40,155-18
31-3,35,36,44-8 desire for, of audience, 11, 13-14,
in Troilus and Criseyde, 134-9 51-2,90,99, 113-26 passim,
Crane, Frederick, 7 131,144, 175n45, 183n34
INDEX 221
as inquiry rather than assertion, 2-3, Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 18, 166n55,

7-11,14,22-5,96-8,133-40 167n68,201n50
passim, 144, 152-3, 157-8 Ganim, John, 160n3, 198n20, 201n46
judgment prompted by, 2-3,7-8, Grady, Frank, 169n87, 185n54, 55
14-18,19-20,22-3,35-8, Georgianna, Linda, 165n48, 169n80
139-40, 147-8, 155-8 gentility, 27, 51, 118-21, 124-6
as metanarrative, 2, 6, 28-30, 155 Geoffrey de Ia Tour Landry, 30,32-3,
as mode, 3, 161nn10-11 172nn18-20
as picture or icon, 78, 123, 135, 139, see also Book of the Knight of the
147-8, 151-2 Tower
and poetic order, 99-109 passim, Gower, John, Confessio A mantis, 22, 25,
127-9,140-1,144-54,157-8 65-8,72,81,82
potential corruption of, 12-13, Appolonius ofTyre, 82
38-45,59-61,123 Book 7 of Confessio Amantis:
reductiveness of, 95, 139-40, 143-5, mutability of human will, 62-8,
151-3 70-1; mirror for princes, 64-8,
as social action, 4-11, 16-18, 70-2; pity as policy, 70-2;
57-62 plainness vs plenitude, 67-72;
as spectacle, 38-44,59,61-2 Rome as ideal, 67-8; tyranny,
stability of, 85-99 passim, 112-13, 62-3,65-6
116,147,151-3,157 Caesar and accomplices of Cataline,
see also audience; injunction; 71-2
narrative Prologue, 66-7
Carmidotirus, 71
fable, see fabula depiction of Rome, 67-72
fabula, 9, 12-13, 58-62, 88-90, 96, 113, Lucrece, 14, 63,72-4
164n37, 179n11, 187-8n15 Lycurgus, 14
see also fiction as moralist, 63
Ferster,Judith, 8-9, 182n31 Sarah and Tobias, 81
fiction Virginia: abuse of authority, 62,
as artifice, 89-90, 92-3, 144-5, 158 75-80; costs of exemplarity, 74,
associated with transformation, 55, 76-8; defense of fiction, 78-82;
86-7, 88-93 passim Genius as narrator, 75, 81; pity
as falsehood, 34-7, 89-90, 101, as policy, 77-82; political
108-9, 142 failure, 79-82; relation to other
and figurative language, 63,73-8 tales ofVirginia, 53-7, 62-4,
passim, 145, 152 83-5,94-8
and imaginative activity of reader, Gray, Douglas, 141
63-4, 148-50 Green, Richard Firth, 172n22, 175n46
as marvel or wonder, 74,77-8, Gregory the Great, 15-17, 131
106,111
as morally effective, 63-4, 144-58 Hampton, Timothy, 9, 73,134,156-7,
passim, 149-50 178n3,200n40
see also fabula; poetry Handlyng Synne, 1-3, 5-6, 10-11,30,
Fradenburg, Louise 0., 138 38,40,56, 135,156,157
Frye, Northrop, 3 Havelok, Eric Alfred, 12
222 INDEX
Henryson, Robert, Testament of Cresseid Jacques de Vitry, 9, 30

anticipated audience, 148, 154-5 Jakobson, Roman, 168n74
Cresseid's self-recognition, 141, Jauss, H.R., 161n8
144-7 Jean de Meun, Roman de Ia Rose, 64,
example distinct from inner 73,86-7,89,92-3, 187n12,
experience, 141,145-9,152-4 188n20
poetic and moral order linked, 140, judgment, see discernment; phronesis;
145-7,151-8 passim see under example
Troilus as inscribed audience,
149-53 Kane, George, 114, 192n9
history Kemp, Teresa D., 176n54, 177n64
associated with moral stability, 85-7, kingship
89-90 analogous to paternity, 54-6,77,80
as coherent teleology, 49-50, 55, and community, 65-8, 70-2
57-60, 89-90, 92-5 passim as exemplary selfhood, 67,99-100
as contingent event, 9-10, 49-50, and individual will, 62-7,70-2,
100,113 79-82
as facticity, 59, 86-7, 88-9,92 public display of, 106
as repetition, 107 as self-governance, 62,65-7,
Howard, Donald, 130 70-2
How the Goodwife Taught her and tyranny, 62, 65-6, 79-82
Daughter, 28 Koff, Leonard, 194n28
Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 100 Krug,Rebecca, 166n59, 177n60
Krueger, Roberta, 38, 171n13-14,
imitation, of texts, 56-7, 126-7, 135-8, 174nn36,44
142, 158, 167n67
linked to imitation of conduct, 2-3, Latini, Brunetto, 64, 71
7, 15,21,56-7,138-40,154-6 Lawton, David, 192nn6, 8, 193n20
see also intertextuality; translation lectio difficilior (and lectio facilior), 114-15,
incest, 39, 76, 91-2, 173n35 125-6, 129
injunction (moral message), 2-6, 97-9, Le Goff, Jacques, 4
126-7, 133, 148, 155 Livre du Chevalier de Ia Tour Landry, see
intention, authorial, 21-2,99-100, Book of the Knight of the Tower
106-9 Livy, Ab urbe condita
Interlude and Tale of Beryn circulation of, in medieval England,
characterization of Pardoner, 119-21 64, 180nn19-21, 186-7n8,
easier reading of Pardoner:, Tale, 187n15, 191n46;
124-6 historical teleology in, 54-5,
Host as exemplar of gentility, 116-19 57,61
Host as inscribed audience, 113-14, Lucretia, 53,72-3
125-6 Virginia: costs of exemplarity, 53-5,
narrator, 117-18 61-2; direct and indirect
intertextuality, 56,86-7, 100, 135, 138 discourse, 57-60; history vs
see also imitation; reception fiction, 59-61; inscribed
Iser,Wolfgang, 112-13, 166-7n64, audience, 60-2; pathos, 61-2;
185n2 rhetoric, 57-62
INDEX 223
Lydgate,John political function of, 79-82, 104

Fall of Princes, 99-100,104,107 as social regulation, 27-37, 116-19,
Virginia, accounts of, in general, 121, 125
53-6; correspondence between violence of, 28,31, 39, 42, 53,61-2,
author and audience, 99-101, 72, 74
106-109; curtailment of narrator
interpretation, 107-9; disruptions of, 18-22,90, 119-23,
endorsement ofVirginius, 126-7, 130-1
101-3; obedience to sources, relation to reader, 5-6, 14, 20-2, 28,
99-100, 105-8; suppression of 30, 139-40
violence, 102-4, 107 reliability of, 54, 81, 84-99 passim,
Lyons, J.D., 4, 9, 55, 68-9, 156 101,142,144
Nature, 85-6
Mann,Jill, 144, 150 Northumberland Manuscript
Mannyng, Robert, see Handlyng Synne anticipated readers, 126-7
Manly, J.M., 128 Chaucer as narrator of Pardoner's
Margherita, Gayle, 138 Tale, 130
memory generic arrangement, 127-9
as basis of exemplarity, 17-18, 34-5, scribal error, 114-15, 129-31
147-50, 154-5 twentieth-century vs earlier readers,
as fantasy of permanence, 48-52 126,130-1
Menagier de Paris, 27 Nussbaum, Martha, 16
mercy, see pity
Middleton, Anne, 14,25 58, 65,83-4, Oenone, 137-40
91, 178n8 Olive de Belleville, 33-4
Mirroir des bonnes femmes, 38 Ovid, Heroides and Metamorphoses, 78,
mirrors for princes, 8-9, 99-100 137-8
moral, see injunction Owen, Charles, 127-8
Mosher, Joseph, 4
Mukarovsky,Jan, 23, 163n23, Patterson, Lee, 141, 144, 168n35,
168n73, 169n82, 179n12, 169n84,200n36
200-1n45 Pearsall, Derek, 95,101,144,154
Perkins, Nicholas, 189n32
names, significance of, 88, 91, 101-2 Petrarch, Letters of Old Age, on Griselda,
narrative 14-15, 18-22
and compilation, 29-30,64-5,68-9, phronesis, 12-18
126-31 see also discernment; see under
contingency of, 1-2, 4-11, 22-5, 60, example
63,89,113-14,138,157 Piers Plowman, 114
direct vs indirect discourse in, 54, pity
57-60,75,78-9,83,91,93 as artifice, 93-9 passim, 112-14, 142
instability of, 12-15,25-6,129-31, as disruption, 62, 84, 85, 104
136-8,153,156 mixed with violence, 72-3,76,79,
involvement in, 11, 13,15-18,42-4, 92-4, 109, 142-4
111-14,119,123-6,153-4, as mystification, 14-15,70-2, 79, 98,
156-8 149-50
224 INDEX
Plato, 12 Schmitt, Jean-Claude, 4

poetry, 12, 23, 25, 34, 52, 65, 82, 109, sermons, example used in, 1, 4, 7-13
133-4, 140, 145, 154, 168n74 pas~m,30, 111,156,158,
see also fiction; narrative 164nn35, 39
Premierfait, Laurent de, Des cas des Shakespeare, William, 73, 185n49
nobles hommes et femmes, 100, Simpson,James, 189nn33-4
104---8 passim, 189n30, Silver,Victoria, 163n26
190nn36-8, 41 ;, 191nn43-4 Solterer, Helen, 173n30, 175n49
spectacle, 38-44,61, 178nn6-7
Quillet, Jeanne, 65 Sponsler, Claire, 27
Staley, Lynn, 185n55
rage, 114,116-17,120-1,125-6 Stierle, Karl-Heinz, 7-8
readers, see audience Strauss,Jennifer, 141
reception Strohm, Paul, 25,95-6, 167n70,
as corrective reading, 109, 114-1 7, 192n7
125, 126-7, 154---5 Suleiman, Susan, 5, 162-3n21
of Roman history, medieval, 64, Summit,Jennifer, 181n22
73, 78
as signal to audience,21-2, 114-15, Tale of Beryn, Interlude and, see under
129-31, 136-8, 154-5 Interlude and Tale of Beryn
reticence, Chaucerian, 84, 95-7 Taylor, Karla, 139, 185n50, 196n5
rhetoric Thynne, William, 154
copiousness of, 69-72 translation, 18,21-2, 25, 48-50, 100,
diverse uses of, 69-70, 108-9 105-6, 167nn6-7
as interpretation, 67 see also imitation; intertextuality
in Livy vs. Gower, 184n40 Trevet, Nicholas, 64
as plainness, 67-8,69-71,74 Tubach, Frederic C., 4, 7-8
as political action, 55, 57-62,67-72, tyranny, 57-62,65-6, 73-82 passim,
108-9 103, 106
see also didacticism, strategies of; see also kingship
narrator
Richard II, 82 Ullmann, Walter, 65, 181n23-4,
Rickert, Edith, 128 182n29, 183n37
Riddy, Felicity, 150-1, 170n4, 171n9,
172n26 voyeurism, 39--44
Robertson, D.W, 25
rumor, 35-6,47, 105-6, 139-40, 143, Wallace, David, 165n46, 175n48,
145-6 201n51
Russell, John, see Boke of Nuture Watts, John, 181nn24, 28, 183n37
Wetherbee, Winthrop, 86
Salter, Elizabeth, 91 Windeatt, Barry, 192n 11
Sanok, Catherine, 139, 175n51 Wolfson, Susan]., 168n76
Scanlon,Larry,4,8, 10-11,17, Woodville, Elizabeth (Queen of
171n12 Edward IV), 30-1, 48-52, 176n53,
Schlauch, Margaret, 181n23 177n66

(The New Middle Ages) Elizabeth Allen (Auth.) - False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature-Palgrave Macmillan US (2005)

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(The New Middle Ages) Elizabeth Allen (Auth.) - False Fables and Exemplary Truth in Later Middle English Literature-Palgrave Macmillan US (2005)

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THE NEW MIDDLE AGES

BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor

PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on

ISBN 978-1-349-73416-0 ISBN 978-1-137-04479-2 (eBook)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the

Transferred to Digital Printing 2011

1. Introduction:Toward a Poetics of Exemplarity 1

M any people have contributed time, energy, and encouragement to this

Michael Szalay, Elisa Tamarkin, and Andrew Zissos. I received crucial

Rychere and Exemplary Narrative

exemplary-from the epic narrative of Aeneas's pious obligations to

Colbek," the priest-whose daughter is among the revelers mysteriously

Instrumentality and Phronesis

of secular life." 40 This new accessibility, and vernacularity in particular,

The preaching of "fablis and lesyngis" is associated here with error or

apparently abstract moral lesson that is designed to gather any disparate or

to stop reading. Petrarch clearly endorses this reader's response:

I am uncertain how others would interpret this incident, but I interpreted it

In contrast, Petrarch dismisses the skeptical reader who thinks Griselda's

acts of interpretation over obedience to rules. Instead of promoting the

It is not far from this notion of readerly involvement as a process of

The Clerk's Tale and Readerly Initiative

(chapter 3) the relation between authority and audience is staged through

I decided to retell this story in another language not so much to encourage

This quasi-allegorical reading of the tale's spiritual value makes Griselda's

happened could it be useful. Petrarch's reply universalizes and mystifies the

"Whereas a man may have noon audience,

his endorsements-or, as in the case of the Host, choose different principles

While framing devices exert particular pressure upon the relationship

Aristotelian sense occur to some degree separately from the problem of

completely to that of her husband that any reluctance is indetectable; her

Toward a Poetics of Exemplarity

texts anticipate responsiveness to contingent circumstance as a basis for

ANTICIPATING AUDIENCE IN THE BOOK

T he later Middle Ages saw a proliferation oflay conduct books,including

Within this context of preoccupation with conduct, the Book of the

apparently obsolescent world of courtly poetry, he briefly writes in

particularly, the Knight imagines examples as a fund of experiences that can

I haue thought on my wel bylouyd doughters whome I see so lytel to make

As in his Prologue, the Knight disapproves of fiction-"fables and lesynges"-

childhood education as an acculturation to virtue hardly places the Knight

daughters, emphasizing the function of exemplarity:

This moment expresses one form of anxiety in the affirmative discourse of

The Knight's Wife and the Restrictions of

... yf so came that somme gentyl knyght I worshipful I myghty I and

wherupon ye told me ones an ensample whiche I haue not forgeten which

The Knight employs the debate scenario to relegate the spectacular

Caxton's Preface: Putting Anxiety to Work

In asserting that all virtuous doctrines transmitted by past authors have

preceptual-"many good rewles," not primarily a book of narratives. Still,

THE COSTS OF EXEMPLARY HISTORY

so drastically that Virginia herself virtually disappears (Fall of Princes,

suggests the stubborn timelessness of exemplary stories whose messages can

assertion of readers' imaginative activity and consequent freedom to call

Absolute Endorsement: Livy's Virginia

Gower's Critique: Virginia as Political Metaphor

nevertheless embraces it here. Indeed, I suggest that Gower's tale of Virginia

"Pleine Trouthe" and Copious Example in Book 7

such norm is the plastic term-and late fourteenth-century buzzword-

Worthy princes offer examples to the world, as shown or revealed in books.

and Genius, Venus's priest, the Confessio's examples are embedded in a

The word under the coupe ofhevene

The ideal of rhetorical plainness has quickly given way to a formulation in