Has Anyone Here Read Melibee?
Edward E. Foster
The Chaucer Review, Volume 34, Number 4, 2000, pp. 398-409 (Article)
Published by Penn State University Press
DOI: 10.1353/cr.2000.0005
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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/cr/summary/v034/34.4foster.html
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HAS ANYONE HERE READ MELIBEE?
by Edward E. Foster
Is it possible that none, or few, read the Tale of Melibee, even in the fourteenth century? Certainly, most critics have found the tale to be a lump
in their oatmeal. Not students, though, because it is virtually certain that
few of them read it even if it is assigned. When I teach Chaucer to undergraduates, I have them read Thopas, but I just comment on Melibee. In survey courses, I am never tempted to substitute Melibee for the Wife of Bath’s
Tale or the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. I suspect that many of my colleagues in the
Chaucer business do the same. Is it possible that we are merely preserving a Medieval tradition and that Chaucer would have approved? The
most circumspect, and generous, statement of reservations about Melibee
remains E. Talbot Donaldson’s: “ . . . the story (or sermon) was nevertheless a very popular one in the Middle Ages when readers did not
entirely distinguish between pleasure in literature and pleasure in being
edified. Chaucer himself probably did distinguish between these pleasures—but he also probably felt more pleasure in being edified then we
are apt to.”1
Some critics are much less indulgent. C. David Benson admits quite
frankly that “Melibee is a clear, dull, lengthy, and somewhat suffocating
work without the irony or stylistic virtuosity that so baffled the Host in
Chaucer’s first tale.”2 Lee Patterson suggests that maybe it is not just a
problem of being alien to a twentieth-century audience: “If we find Melibee
oppressive, then, perhaps it is not just our modern indifference that is to
blame.”3 And, perhaps most candidly, Trevor Whittock: “The Tale of Melibee
is an enormous bore, and the bane of commentators. Some critics mutter a soothing nothing before it and hastily pass on to the next tale; others more openly confess their bafflement and exasperation. The critics
who deal with it are split between those who regard the Tale of Melibee as
another burlesque or painful leg-pull and those who regard it as a seriously intended piece of moralizing quite in keeping with the dull homiletics of the time.”4
Nevertheless, Melibee is not without its apologists, even champions.5
Many critics have sought out the latent excellence that might make it
more agreeable to a Medieval audience and more tolerable to a modern
THE CHAUCER REVIEW, Vol. 34, No. 4, 2000.
Copyright © 2000 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
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one. I suspect that such an enterprise is the last infirmity of the noble
critical mind—the impulse to find hidden genius where none is apparent. Defenses of the tale generally fall into two categories: those who
argue that medieval readers and hearers found such narratives more congenial than we do in this degenerate age and those who take the tale to
be some kind of clever or elaborate Chaucerian joke. By and large, neither sort of explanation is completely satisfying. Certainly, people in the
Middle Ages were different from us, but could they have been that different and still belong to the same species? On the other hand, if the tale
is a joke, it is a very long one that may make sense within the fiction of
the Canterbury Tales (the pilgrims, in the person of the Host, their crudest exemplar, fail to see the art of Thopas so are condemned to endure
Melibee), but it becomes less and less amusing to us as we slog through
the proverbs of Prudence. And, after all, the audience outside the tale is
Chaucer’s real object. Is it possible, then, that medieval readers and auditors skipped Melibee just as my classes do, that perhaps it was read only by
such intrepid souls as “moral Gower” and “philosophical Strode”? My
hypothesis does not admit of conclusive proof, but I find it such a fascinating and plausible conjecture that I would like to explore it.
Now, the defenses of Melibee are ingenious and often learned. Even the
“joke theory” has had serious advocates. For example, Whittock, after
making the admission cited above, proceeds to discover a saving grace:
“a mischievous idea took hold in Chaucer’s mind. Why not incorporate
it in the Canterbury Tales as the tale he himself tells? What could more fittingly illustrate the fumblings of the uninspired litterateur he was portraying himself to be? What could more markingly settle the score with
those in his audience wanting in all literary judgment, particularly as they
would not even recognize any mockery at all?”6 Well, I don’t mind
Chaucer taunting the insensitive fools Whittock supposes, but what about
us? We still have this lump in our oatmeal. John Gardner has asked us to
believe something comparable to Whittock: “Chaucer borrows an old
and especially awkward quotation narrative and vastly expands it, making the absurdity more marked. . . . Here, obviously, Chaucer is creating
intentionally bad art, originally no doubt a prank on the courtly audience that had assembled to hear him,” and “a prank on the pilgrims”
also.7 Gardner bolsters this supposition by suggesting a serious
Chaucerian intention to engage in a nominalist questioning of the adequacy of art to communicate, and cites other intentionally bad art: the
Monk’s Tale, the Physician’s_Tale, the Prioress’s Tale, the Manciple’s Tale, and
Thopas.8 But I would reply that these have attractive surfaces, as I will
argue later, and at least they are tactfully short. Finally, Gardner imagines
Chaucer “chuckling over its awfulness.”9 But even “pranks” can eventually become tiresome to the larger audience in Chaucer’s age and ours.
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However, “Chaucer the teacher” or “Chaucer the innovator” is more
common than “Chaucer the prankster” in the criticism of Melibee. Many
have seen Melibee as political advice to the court about contemporary
events, but Donald Howard is more precise: “If the address to the ruling
class is one side of a ‘metastructure,’ it is not complete without the
Melibee, just as the religious side of the metastructure is not complete without the Parson’s Tale.”10 Further, he notes the popularity of such didactic
works from the mid-thirteenth to the fifteenth century. According to
Howard, Chaucer was concerned about how to make peace, and was
counseling the court about the proper uses of wealth and urging a new
public spiritedness rather than interests of self or family.11
In a similar vein, other critics have seen Melibee_as important instruction for one group or another on one topic or another. Richard Green
emphasizes the kind of advice to princes that he sees in the works of
Hoccleve, Lydgate and Gower,12 though he sees the “court poet” as necessarily constrained to offer only such “general and unexceptionable statements as Melibee.”13 Many critics think Chaucer is in the cautious or
cautionary advice business. Carolyn P. Collette sees it as advice to women,14
Lee Patterson as advice to young nobles,15 and Paul Strohm as advice not
so much to the aristocracy as to members of Chaucer’s own class.16
Then, there are those who see it as a satire of the middle class, the
pretentious bourgeoisie,17 or political satire,18 or, as in the view of
Thomas J. Farrell, simply as a sententious balance to the “solas” of
Thopas,19 although it should be noted that Farrell’s article is a lot more
interesting than Melibee is. Finally, the allegorical interpretations of
Owen and Strohm go some way towards freeing the tale from its problematic literal level. The trouble with this approach is that only by keeping the allegorical interpretation on the most general level can one
avoid the improbable conclusion that “the world, the flesh and the
devil” are converted.20
Finally, there are those who seek literary redemption in style or form.
Diane Bornstein contends that the tale is ornamental, transformed from
the Renaud’s pedestrian Livre by Chaucer’s use of the “style clergical,”
originally a clerical rhetorical technique but popular in English in the
fifteenth century.21 Even more ambitious is the effort of Waterhouse and
Griffith, who contend that, like Thopas, Melibee deconstructs itself: “The
ultimate game is that the tale itself allows so many interpretations, and
causes so many frustrations.”22 They go on to consider Melibee from the
point of view of “reader response,” a spectacular irony in view of the fact
that, while their critical speculations are absolutely fascinating, they
acknowledge the ultimate effect on the reader: “It is not necessary to read
very far in the tale to tell that its truly tedious surface level can have a
soporific effect on an audience.”23
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I could go on; I have probably overlooked some important perspectives on the tale. My point, however, is not to do a survey of the criticism,
but to present enough of the ways in which Melibee has been defended in
order to be fair. And yet the problem remains: no matter what highminded purpose is assigned to the tale, no matter what literary technique
is identified, virtually all of the critics of Melibee admit that it is boring, at
least on the surface, or maintain a discreet silence on the topic. This
seems to me to be significant because elsewhere Chaucer did not deal in
boring surfaces; he did not make bad jokes or descend to superficial
drudgery to make serious ulterior points. The Squire’s fanciful tale is
mercifully interrupted, whether the Franklin knows it or not, after only
708 lines (about 39 minutes if read aloud). And the Physician’s Tale is only
328 lines (or 18 minutes); Chaucer makes his point and gets out. Closer
to home for Melibee in Fragment VII, the standard for “sentence” and
“solas” is high. Although the Prioress’s Tale is a slender contribution in
itself, it is enlivened by the stark contrast between the self-conscious simplicity of the Prioress and the unconscious brutality of her anti-Semitism
all in the name of devotion to Mary. In any case, it is over in 238 lines (or
13 minutes). Likewise, Thopas makes a very funny point about popular
romances and a very serious point about the affectations of the aristocracy in 226 lines (or 12 minutes) and then is effectively, if doltishly, cut
off by the Host before the joke can go on too long. On the other side of
Melibee is the Monk’s Tale, which does extend to 880 lines (or 50 minutes),
but it is ameliorated by the Monk’s comical indignation and pompous
commitment to seriousness in reaction to the Host’s characterization of
him. In addition, it is broken into non-chronological, non-categorical
segments of widely varying lengths, which lead us through a crescendo
of curiosity about how well the Monk understands “contemptus mundi”
as opposed to moral culpability; then, before our patience runs out, the
“tale” is mercifully interrupted by the Knight, who is, I think amusingly
to us, overwhelmed by the sadness of the stories. And concluding
Fragment VII is the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Need I say more about the importance of surfaces in the presentation of serious matter? Especially in context, Melibee seems to be more than even a docile fourteenth-century
audience could handle.
Nevertheless, if we consider the Canterbury Tales as a whole, it is difficult to ignore the centrality of the doctrine of Melibee, boring as it may
be, to the significance of the metaphorical pilgrimage as a whole.
Howard’s extended contention that Melibee is “a major structural unit in
the Canterbury Tales” is, viewed from this perspective, persuasive.24 The
importance of “prudence” in the fourteenth century is impressively
expounded by J. D. Burnley.25 He notes of Piers Plowman that “prudence
is the virtue that ensures that a man’s actions are rationally considered
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and are consonant with the will of God.”26 The significance for the
Canterbury Tales becomes especially striking in Burnley’s explanation that
“prudence is far more than a desirable quality in a secular ruler; it is the
essential ability possessed by all men to select the path which will lead to
spiritual salvation”27 and that it is “of supreme importance in the medieval
theology of salvation,” and “not so much a virtue as a knot of knowledge
upon which actions are based.”28
Burnley’s assessment of prudence accords with the tendency of the
whole of the Canterbury Tales to focus on the interconnection between
“commune profit” as a political ideal, and individual salvation as the ultimate goal of each Christian. Prudence’s sentence in Melibee, for all that
it is drearily presented and off-putting, forces a convergence between
these fundamental issues, political order and personal salvation, which
is especially apropos in Fragment VII, which abounds in flawed teachers
and culminates in the orthodox and optimistic theology of redemption
presented by the Nun’s Priest. This conjunction of “commune profit”
and personal salvation may be the fulcrum on which the moral edification of the whole of the Canterbury Tales depends. The importance of
“commune profit” as instrumental in salvation, as the way the public and
private are conjoined, had been a preoccupation of Chaucer’s at least as
early as his presentation of the Dream of Scipio in the Parliament of Fowls.
Melibee is the place in the Canterbury Tales where Chaucer brings together
these crucial dimensions of human experience and fuses the final individual quest, which is appropriately the burden of the concluding Parson’s
Tale, with the world of affairs in which our salvation must be worked out.
If this is so, then Melibee is very important indeed; it is conceptually central to the journey of life that the Tales represent. So, I do take Melibee
seriously. Yet, how can I if even the preponderance of defenders admit
that the literal level or surface makes the teeth ache with boredom?
Inevitably, that is a dilemma for us moderns. Is it possible that the crucial doctrine of the pilgrimage is implied but not said or, rather, said without being read or heard by any but those of us who have made Chaucer
not just a poetic, but our academic subject? That is the supposition that
I would like to explore in the remainder of this essay, but in order not to
reduce the matter to a question of modern taste, I will examine the circumstances of Chaucer’s audiences and the probabilities of their
responses.
First we need to ask why Chaucer would write, in fact translate, such a
pedestrian work as Melibee if indeed it would have seemed so in the fourteenth century. Trevor Whittock’s “fiction” about the composition of
Melibee is intriguing—that Chaucer was importuned by an influential and
affluent but not necessarily perceptive acquaintance to produce on commission morally edifying work.29 Whether such an encounter, or some-
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thing like it, ever occurred, the broad outline is not impossible and
accords with Chaucer’s circumstances. He was well placed to be offered
such a commission and his temperament was that of a man of his age: he
was interested in the problem and the process of translation, as his many
other endeavors suggest, and Renaud de Louens’ Le Livre de Melibee et de
Dame Prudence, itself a translation of Albertanus of Brescia’s thirteenthcentury Liber consolationis et consilii, was popular enough (written before
1336 and incorporated into the Menagier de Paris in the early 1390’s) to
be readily accessible. It might even have seemed trendy, perhaps reflecting the taste for “how to” books favored by so many critics of Melibee. Or
Chaucer may just have done the translation as an amusing exercise at a
time when the dominance of English was asserting itself at the court of
Richard II. Who knows? The perplexing issue is not why Chaucer would
engage in such an exercise, but why he would incorporate it into the
Canterbury Tales and give it prominence as the lynchpin of political moral
theology, when all but the most patient and sober must be tried beyond
perseverance by its tedious style and structure.
My conjecture is that Chaucer never really expected most of his audience to bear with much of Melibee, that its presence, given the notoriety
of Renaud’s Livre and works like it, is an instance of “incorporation by
reference.” I will return to this speculation, but that the Melibee story
should be present at all recalls the common Chaucerian device of taking
something familiar, say the tale of the loathly hag, and giving it new significance by its placement in the mouth of the Wife of Bath. Examples
abound. The obscene fabliaux of the Miller become entertaining as they
are combined into one story and moral when presented as “quiting” the
Knight’s Tale; the Franklin’s fatuous “demands” at the end of his tale have
force because of the tension between the superficiality of his character
and the profundity of the issues of Providence and appearance/reality
that are implied in his tale; the Monk’s tragedies are engaging because
of who he is, what his monastic ideal is, and how the Knight reacts. Just
so Renaud’s ponderous tale of Prudence and Melibee gains new significance of a kind more interesting to Chaucer, when it is placed as the narrative pivot of the conjoining of “commune” profit and personal salvation
in the context of the Tales. Within Fragment VII Melibee is surrounded by
tales that critique, perhaps in a nominalist way, our capacity to know and
communicate. The Prioress with her dangerous innocence and the Monk
with his meaningless tragedies frame the statement of what is needed for
political order and salvation, something altogether more substantial than
the parody in Thopas.
Melibee has the advantage of being so well known in the fourteenth century that a tedious rehearsal of its details would not be necessary in order
to make the point. It is there for those who want to follow through the
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intricacies, who have the patience for the ploddingly didactic, but for a
larger audience the “kernel” is available without having to swallow the
husk. If it is too long, too boring, too earnest to plow through, its “sentence” is clear and familiar without a dutiful journey through its daunting prose. If this is so, Chaucer can have it both ways. Internally it can be
a joke on Harry and the other pilgrims who failed to appreciate Thopas,
while externally it can be accessible both to scholars who would read it
and to the much larger audience that could get the idea without the diligence of actually reading it. It may even be a good example of a bad tale
as Gardner would have us believe,30 but in any case we can take it or leave
it alone, as our tolerance or impatience dictates, and still see the moral
lesson.
It remains to see how such a narrative strategy would play itself out
with the audiences that Chaucer was addressing in his own time and how
the tale would have actually reached audiences. Since there is a good deal
of controversy about who Chaucer’s audience was—the court, the
London intelligensia, the new middle class, or some combination of
these—let us assume the widest possible group.31 There seems little doubt
that Chaucer’s works were read, that manuscripts of parts of the
Canterbury Tales were passed around among his contemporaries. The
unsettled state of the copies extant at the time of his death, as indicated
by the history of early fifteenth-century editors trying to get the Tales complete and in the right order, suggests that segments of the Tales circulated
widely in his lifetime.
As I said, there is much speculation about who Chaucer’s readership
might have been, but members of the court of Richard II are probable
in view of his career, his marriage, and his lifelong associations. Although
we don’t have records that establish the composition of that court audience precisely, a list of three levels of participants is extant from 1364
during the reign of Edward III: the true royals, the bachelors and demoiselles, and the esquires.32 All would have been literate, probably both in
French and English, though not necessarily sophisticated in their literary tastes nor particularly adroit in their ability to read.
It is hard to imagine the appeal that Melibee would have had for this
group, worldly and privileged as they were. Richard Firth Green argues
that it would have had a taste for this sort of thing based on what was in
people’s libraries,33 but what was in an aristocrat’s library is no proof of
what he had read, much less enjoyed. Furthermore, Paul Strohm is persuasive that this was a fluid world of true aristrocracy and a surrounding
blend of upwardly mobile groups.34 It may be that such an audience
would think that it ought to be mindful of advice and self-help books,
but it strains credulity, if there is any continuity in human nature at all,
to imagine that such a group would actually struggle through the moral
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earnestness of Melibee, or get the joke if indeed it was a joke, or appreciate an example of how not to tell a story, or appreciate the “style clergial”, or be edified by moral allegory without the bait of a more appealing
narrative surface. I am not suggesting that they were obtuse, but they do
not seem to be the kind of audience much given to the patient and sympathetic reading Melibee would have required. Of course, it is possible
that the royals or the higher aristocracy had Melibee read to them as they
rested or went about their business, but even if such a fanciful scenario
occurred, it would still not be “reading” in any meaningful, attentive sense.
Chaucer, however, had an additional audience, this one well attested,
among the arriving middle class of the late fourteenth century and,
although some of these might have been aspirants like the Franklin, some
also were the merchants and commercial functionaries who were thriving as London rebounded from the Black Death. In some respects, even
if only because of the uncertainty of the parvenus, this audience might
have been more likely to swallow Melibee whole than would court sophisticates. However, each group, the court and the middle class, commercial and professional, would have had a stake in appearing to be familiar
with Melibee and to be aware of the admonition it preferred concerning
the relationship of Prudence to “commune profit” and personal salvation. But this could readily be accomplished without the drudgery of
actually reading the text.
That the story of Melibee was popular has been taken as a sign that it
was attractive to a large reading audience. Indeed, Manly and Rickert
note that Melibee has survived in 77 of 82 manuscripts and surmise that
“obviously the tale was popular.”35 However, this argument can be turned
upside down. Circulation does not prove reading. Who of us does not
have books on our library shelves that we would like to be readers of, or
like to be thought to be readers of, but never have read and never will.
Yet we can talk about them knowledgeably at departmental cocktail parties. Some books are like that. The timeless wisdom and practical advice
in Melibee would have to be respected, but the potential audience would
have known the gist of Melibee and would have been much more likely to
have “taken it as read,” rather than to actually read it. Some might have
skimmed a bit, though even that would have been a chore granted the
state of late fourteenth-century handwriting. Others might have read
enough to recognize the story they were in. Still others might have been
willing to stop with the title. Thus, Chaucer would have communicated
a crucial lesson of the Tales and his audience could have gotten the message without the burden of a tiresome read. Fourteenth-century readers
might have been more patient than we are but they did not have the lustre of modern critical theory that Waterhouse and Griffith use to make
the tale more palatable. As part of the larger project of the Canterbury
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Tales, Chaucer would have achieved his purpose adroitly and painlessly.
Still, among the possible audiences there were the learned and the
earnest—clerics, intellectuals, even lawyers—men like Gower and Strode
and Usk and Lydgate, whose turn of mind was morally sturdy enough to
withstand Melibee, find moral profit in it, and maybe even a kind of pleasure. I do, after all, believe that some fourteenth-century readers had the
capacity to endure and enjoy tedious moral discourse, but I suspect the
number was small and select. I believe Aristotle that “all men by nature
desire to know,” but I also believe that few are willing to go to the trouble unless enticed by the surface allures of fiction. Critics who take Melibee
as a serious joke, a satire on the court, courtiers, or the middle class
whose self-esteem would force them foolishly to take the reading of
Melibee as a serious duty, miss the point. All would know the “game” and,
whether Melibee is straightforward or satiric, know how to play that game.
If straightforward, they knew what was in it; if satiric, they were likely
clever enough to get the joke without paying the price. Maybe some did
not, but they deserved to pay the price. For sturdier readers, few though
they might be, the serious moral burden could be enjoyed, as well as the
joke on the unsophisticated pilgrims, who underestimated Thopas.
The possibility of a listening audience poses a different problem. It
must be acknowledged that there is no direct evidence that Chaucer, or
anyone else, ever read the Tales or segments of them aloud at court or at
any other venue. The evidence for oral presentation is not conclusive.
References to Froissart reading Meliador to the court of Count Gaston de
la Foix36 do not guarantee that comparable readings occurred at the
court of Richard II, though it is not improbable that French customs, like
French literature, were mirrored in England. The evidence that the socalled “Troilus frontispiece” in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, MS
61 represents an actual event is slender, despite its traditional title,
“Chaucer Reading to the Court of Richard II.” Derek Pearsall had shown
that it is the kind of stylized “advertisement” that might be included in a
book to make it more saleable in the highly competitive book world of
the fifteenth century.37 His argument that even if it is a stylization it represents a kind of event that might have occurred is suggestive but not
compelling.
The great bulk of the evidence for oral presentation is based on locutions in Chaucer’s text, but that is exactly how the pilgrims would speak
anyway because, within the fiction of the Canterbury Tales, the narratives
are in fact spoken. Nor do references to the custom of oral reading in
Troilus and Criseyde prove the case. Finally, there is evidence that the court
of Richard II enjoyed public presentations and that there were also public civic performances for the rest of the complex population of London.
However, those directly attested were apparently of a light nature—more
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vaudeville than theater, more “solas” than “sentence”. So the argument
is not ironclad. Nevertheless, the assumption that Chaucer, in propria persona or through surrogates, gave public readings at court and elsewhere
is so widely accepted by Chaucerians that the question of how Melibee
would fare in such an environment must be addressed.38
So, even if the French and Italian practice of public oral reading
occurred in England, a work of the style and subject of Melibee does not
seem a likely candidate for presentation. To read a romance in five installments over five days, as Froissart apparently did, is one thing; to read a
work of moral instruction, heavy with proverbs and lasting over two and
a half hours, would put even a monk, accustomed to large doses of
Scripture, to sleep no matter how many installments the performance
was divided into—and Melibee does not admit of division into easily readable chunks. Moreover, if any of the Canterbury Tales lack the oral techniques that characterize the rest, Melibee does. True, Melibee speaks and
Prudence speaks at great length, but the rhythms of the language and
the stylistic mannerisms, perhaps especially the “clergial,” are not those
of the oral literary tradition and they lack even the rhetorical flourishes
and fascinating exempla of the pulpit tradition. No. The tale is less suited
for oral reading than any other except the Parson’s Tale.
Granted the oral presentation of other parts of the Canterbury Tales,
how would Melibee be managed? One possibility, even more enticing than
that Melibee was rarely read, is that Melibee was never read aloud, never
offered as part of a public program. Yet the answer may not be as simple
as that. Certainly Thopas would have made excellent oral reading and the
interruption by the Host would have been irresistible both in “amending al the jape” of the parody and in capitalizing on the self-characterization of Chaucer as narrator by Chaucer as reader. Indeed, this is a place
where public presentation would have had unique possibilities for irony
and humor. But the interchange between Chaucer and Harry would
inevitably lead to Melibee—and then what?
If I could persuade myself of Bruce Rosenberg’s supposition of audience participation, it would be tempting to imagine Chaucer shouted
down at this point,39 thus interactively avoiding his need to recite Melibee
and the audience’s need to hear a tale so ill-suited for oral presentation.
That probably goes too far, but the fantasy is delicious. The link, however, between Thopas and Melibee does not force continuation. Thopas
makes a nice short piece, about 12 minutes, and the link would compound the joke for everyone who knew what the pilgrims had in store in
Chaucer’s “litel thing” in prose. But it would not be in store for them.
The link would become not a transition or introduction, but a climax.
Then, I doubt that Melibee would have been read. The audience could
enjoy the joke and simultaneously be aware of the “sentence” about to
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come. This would have been a rich moment because Chaucer would have
highlighted the humor and ironies and, because of the familiarity of
Prudence’s doctrine, have revealed his lesson powerfully, painlessly, and
instantaneously.
So maybe we are not being unfaithful to Chaucer if we do not assign
Melibee to our students but only comment on it. Perhaps this is as close
as we can come to a recreation of a profound Chaucerian moment. No
matter what the timing of the original translation of Melibee and its insertion into the Canterbury Tales, at some point Chaucer had to make some
decisions about whether and how to include it as he had adapted and
incorporated other things that he had written earlier. Melibee was perfect
for the “sentence” he wanted at this point in the Tales: it unifies the double theme of “commune profit” and personal salvation that had fascinated him since the “Dream of Scipio” and which was emerging in the
Tales as a whole. But the story of Melibee was intransigent to the kind of
shaping that he worked on other incorporated (and new) materials in
order to provide them with the lustrous surface that enhanced and vivified their “sentence.” As an answer to this, or some such impasse,
Chaucer devised a structure so that the tale could achieve its power, have
its impact, and serve the whole project by the very fact that it did not have
to be read to make its point—and probably would not be except by the
most earnest moralists. I can imagine that such people were different
enough from us to find real joy in Melibee. For the rest of us, and that
includes all but teachers of Chaucer and graduate students in our trivial
age as much as it includes a serious but not solemn majority in Chaucer’s
own time, Chaucer’s accommodation of Melibee to the Canterbury Tales
could become a triumph for a tale never meant to be read—only known.
In this way, a joke on the pilgrims can be tolerable to us, and the moral
lesson can be efficacious to the pilgrims, who must suffer through it, and
to us, who have its whole, with all of its moral dignity, implied in an
instant of recognition.
Whitman College
1. E. Talbot Donaldson, ed., Chaucer’s Poetry (New York, 1975), 937.
2. C. David Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style (Chapel Hill, 1986), 39.
3. Lee Patterson, “ ‘What Man Artow?’: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir
Thopas and The Tale of Melibee,” SAC 11 (1989): 156.
4. Trevor Whittock, A Reading of the “Canterbury Tales” (Cambridge, Engl., 1968),
211–12.
5. For a representative survey, see The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston,
1987), 923–24.
6. Whittock, 213.
7. John Gardner, The Life and Times of Chaucer (New York, 1977), 291.
8. Gardner, 293–95.
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9. Gardner, 295.
10. Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the “Canterbury Tales” (Berkeley, 1976), 309.
11. Howard, Idea, 313–15.
12. Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the
Late Middle Ages (Toronto, 1980), 140–43.
13. Green, 164.
14. Carolyn P. Collette, “Heeding the Advice of Prudence: A Context for the Melibee,”
ChauR 29 (1995): 419–29.
15. Patterson, 151.
16. Paul Strohm, “Chaucer’s Audience,” Literature and History 5 (1977): 30–39.
17. Dolores Palomo, “What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Melibee,” PQ 53 (1974):
304–20.
18. Lynn Staley Johnson, “Inverse Counsel: Contexts for the Melibee,” SP 87 (1990):
137–55.
19. Thomas J. Farrell, “Chaucer’s Little Treatise, the Melibee,” ChauR 20 (1985): 61–67.
20. Charles A. Owen, Jr., “The Tale of Melibee,” ChauR 7 (1973): 267–80; Paul Strohm,
“The Allegory of the Tale of Melibee,” ChauR 2 (1967): 32–42.
21. Diane Bornstein, “Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee as an Example of the ‘Style Clergial’,”
ChauR 12 (1978): 236–54.
22. Ruth Waterhouse and Gwen Griffiths, “ ‘Sweete Wordes’ of Non-Sense: The
Deconstruction of the Moral Melibee,” ChauR 23 (1988): 333–61 and 24 (1989): 53–63. The
quotation is from 24 (1989): 62 of this two-part essay.
23. Waterhouse and Griffiths, ChauR 23 (1988): 338.
24. Howard, Idea, 309–15 and Chaucer: His Life, His Works, His World (New York, 1987),
383, 437, 446.
25. J. D. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition (Suffolk, 1979),
51–57.
26. Burnley, 51.
27. Burnley, 52.
28. Burnley, 53. See also Traugott Lawler, The One and the Many (Hamden, 1980),
102–08.
29. Whittock, 213–14.
30. Gardner, 295.
31. See Ann Middleton, “Chaucer’s ‘New Men’ and the Good of Literature in the
Canterbury Tales,” in Literature and Society: Selected Papers from the English Institute, 1978, ed.
Edward W. Said (Baltimore, 1980), 15–49; Gervase Mathew, The Court of Richard II (New
York, 1968); Mary E. Griffin, Studies in Chaucer and his Audience (Quebec, 1956).
32. Strohm, “Audience,” 26–27.
33. Green, 140–43.
34. Strohm, “Audience,” 27–28.
35. John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, The Text of the “Canterbury Tales” (Chicago,
c.1940), II, 371–72.
36. Derek Brewer, Chaucer in his Time (London, 1963), 197.
37. Derek Pearsall, “The Troilus Frontispiece and Chaucer’s Audience,” Yearbook of
English Studies 7 (1977): 68–74.
38. See George P. Wilson, “Chaucer and Oral Reading,” South Atlantic Quarterly 25
(1926): 283–99; Ruth Crosby, “Oral Delivery in the Middle Ages,” Speculum 11 (1936):
88–110; Ruth Crosby, “Chaucer and the Custom of Oral Delivery,” Speculum 13 (1938):
413–38; John Lawlor, Chaucer (London, 1968), 9; Ward Parks, “Oral Tradition in the
Canterbury Tales,” in Oral Poetics in Middle English Poetry, ed. Mark C. Amodio (New York,
1994), 149–73; and, especially, Edmund Reiss, “Chaucer and his Audience,” ChauR 14
(1980): 390–402.
39. Bruce Rosenberg, “The Oral Performance of Chaucer’s Poetry: Situation and
Medium,” Folklore Forum 13 (1980): 224–37.