Between precedent and possibility: Liminality, historicity, and narrative in Chaucer's the Franklin's tale

Studies in Philology

Volumn 103, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 47-67

  Nowlin, Steele ^a  

^a PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 36448983102     PISSN: 00393738     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/sip.2006.0005     Document Type: Article

References (66)

1. Any discussion of the Franklin's Tale must take up these issues to some extent. For recent discussions on the relationship between words and deeds in the tale, see Michaela Paasche Grudin, Chaucer and the Politics of Discourse (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1996)
2. and Paul Beekman Taylor, Chaucer's Chain of Love (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Press, 1996)
3. For a discussion of gentilesse and its transformation in the tale, see Lindsay A. Mann, " 'Gentilesse' and the Franklin's Tale," Studies in Philology 63 (1966): 10-29
4. For a discussion of the promises in the tale, see Alan T. Gaylord, "The Promises in The Franklin's Tale," ELH 31 (1964): 331-65
5. For a discussion on reality and illusion, see Carolyn Collette, "Seeing and Believing in the Franklin's Tale," Chancer Review 26 (1992): 395-410
6. For "reality" in its Boethian context, see W. Bryant Bachman Jr., "To Maken Illusioun': The Philosophy of Magic and the Magic of Philosophy in the Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 12 (1977): 55-67
7. For discussions of the "morality" of the tale, see Gerald Morgan's series of articles, including "A Defence of Dorigen's Complaint," Medium Aevum 46 (1977): 77-97
8. "Boccaccio's Filocolo and the Moral Argument of the Franklin's Tale," Chancer Review 20 (1986): 285-306
9. and "Experience and the Judgment of Poetry: A Reconsideration of the Franklin's Tale," Medium Aevum 70 (2002): 204-25
10. Critics also see many of these issues ultimately leading to Dorigen's silence. For a discussion of the critical tradition of Dorigen in the tale, see Francine McGreggor, "What of Dorigen? Agency and Ambivalence in the Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 31 (1997): 365-67
11. In Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society, Victor Turner argues that in the realm of liminality, "the possibility exists of standing aside not only from one's own social position but from all social positions and of formulating a potentially unlimited series of alternative social arrangements" ([Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 19741, 14)
12. For a brief critical summary, see Kathleen Biddick, The Shock of Medievalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 138-39
13. R. D. Eaton, "Narrative Closure in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale," Neophilologus 84 (2000): 310
14. Loomis, "Chaucer and the Breton Lays of the Auchinleck MS," Studies in Philology 38 (1941): 18
15. No. 2, the Britouns were gentil
16. No. 3, they lived in old days
17. No. 4, they composed in their own language
18. No. 5, the lays were in rime
19. No. 6, the lays were sung
20. No. 7, they were accompanied by musical instruments
21. No. 8, they were written down
22. No. 9, they were on diverse subjects" (ibid.)
23. Hume, "Why Chaucer Calls the Franklin's Tale a Breton Lai," Philological Quarterly 51 (1972): 374
24. See Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury's introduction to The Middle English Breton Lay, ed. Anne Laskaya and Eve Salisbury (Kalamazoo: TEAMS, 1995), 4
25. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., gen. ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), V.709-15. All quotations from Chaucer's works are from this edition and will be cited parenthetically within the text
26. Mortimer J. Donovan, The Breton Lay: A Guide to Varieties (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 7
27. Sir Orfeo, ed. A. J. Bliss (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), lines 1-20. This is the text of the Auehinleek manuscript
28. Robert R. Edwards, "The Franklin's Tale," in Sources and Analogues of the "Canterbury Tales,"ed. Robert M. Correale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 212
29. The similarity between "Bretaine" and "Bretayne," referring to Brittany and Britain, illustrates a further level of liminality with which Chaucer may be working. A. C. Spearing notes that the English translator of Le Fresne translates "En Bretaine" as "in Bretayne," meaning Britain (not Brittany), specifically "In be west cuntre," which Spearing argues is most likely Cornwall or some other Celtic area ("Marie de France and Her Middle English Adapters," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 [1990]: 127)
30. Emily Yoder argues that the "Bretons" of the Franklin's Tale could likewise refer to Celtic peoples ("Chaucer and the 'Breton' Lay," Chaucer Review 12 [1977]: 7)
31. For an analysis of this aspect of Marie's project, see Donovan, Breton Lay, 13-25
32. Minnis, "From Medieval to Renaissance? Chaucer's Position on Past Gentility," Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 227
33. Baker, "A Crux in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale: Dorigen's Complaint," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 60 (1961): 62
34. Morgan, "A Defence of Dorigen's Complaint," 85
35. For a less sympathetic reading, see Derek Pearsall, "The Franklin's Tale, Line 1469: Forms of Address in Chaucer," Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 69-78
36. Forms of the verb appear in lines 825, 893, 1318, 1365, 1383, 1394, 1397, 1405, 1410, 1414, 1420, 1423, 1425, 1430, 1433, and 1446
37. In Menedon's story, the lady hopes to escape her promise: "E pensando in qual maniera tornare potesse adietro ciò che promesso avea, e non trovando licita scusa, in più dolore cresceva" (403)
38. Menedon's story appears in Giovanni Boccaccio, Filocolo, ed. Antonio Enzo Quaglio, vol. 1, Tutte le opere de Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Verona, 1967), bk. 4, chaps. 31-34
39. All quotations from Boccacccio's Decameron will be from Decameron, ed. Arnoldo Mondadori, vol. 4, of Tutte le opere de Giovanni Boccaccio, ed. Vittore Branca (Verona, 1976)
40. In Menedon's story, Tarolfo changes his mind only after recognizing in the lady's arrival the generosity of her husband who sent her: "La qual cosa udendo, Tarolfo più che prima s'incominciò a maravigliare e a pensare forte, e a conoscere cominciò la gran liberalitè del marito di lei che mandata a lui l'avea" (404). [When he heard this, Tarolfo began to marvel more than before and to ponder, and he began to realize the great generosity shown to him by the husband who had commanded her to go to him] (Edwards, "The Franklin's Tale," 230)
41. Several critics have seen the clerk as nothing more than a second-rate conjurer who performs no real work. Chauneey Wood argues that the clerk only predicts high tide rather than conjure one and believes the clerk to be "markedly lacking in 'gentilesse'" ("Of Time and Tide in the 'Franklin's Tale,'" Philological Quarterly 45 [1966]: 691)
42. Anthony E. Luengo sees the clerk's conjuring as mere "stage magic" ("Magic and Illusion in the Franklin's Tale," Journal of English and Germanic Philology 77 [1978]: 1)
43. See Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 24-25
44. and Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), xiv-xv
45. Middleton, "War by Other Means: Marriage and Chivalry in Chaucer," Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings 1 (1984): 130-31
46. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2002), 4
47. Edwards argues that "separated from Christian revelation, the classical world is contained in a secular history it cannot escape and a salvation history it can never significantly enter. It thus holds open an alternative realm of philosophical speculation and exploration about selfhood, experience, behavior, community, and institutions." The realm is also useful for "interrogating the nature of secular virtue, for examining desire, choice, and predicaments under the constraints of history" (4)
48. Minnis, "From Medieval to Renaissance," 219
49. See also Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 30
50. For discussions of the pagan characteristics of the world of the tale, see J. S. P. Tatlock, The Scene of the Franklin's Tale Visited (London: Chaucer Society, 1914), 17-37
51. Kathryn Hume, "The Pagan Setting of the Franklin's Tale and the Sources of Dorigen's Cosmology," Studio Neophilologica 44 (1972): 289-94
52. Minnis, "From Medieval to Renaissance"
53. and A. C. Spearing, "Classical Antiquity in Chaucer's Chivalric Romances," in Chivalry, Knighthood, and War in the Middle Ages (Sewanee, Tennessee: University of the South Press. 1999), 53-73
54. Lindsay Mann sees gentilesse as moving from "a purely secular, courtly inspiration... [to] a purely moral, religious one" (" 'Gentilesse' and the Franklin's Tale," 20)
55. and Gerhard Joseph argues that the Christian symbolism demonstrates the transformation of the secular grace of gentility into Christian grace ("The Franklin's Tale: Chaucer's Theodicy," Chaucer Review 1 [1966]: 20-32)
56. Bachman, '"To Maken Illusioun/" 56-57
57. Peck, "Sovereignty and the Two Worlds of the Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 1 (1967): 270
58. Several critics have seen the tale as a commentary on narrative. See Dominique Battles, "Chaucer's Franklin's Tale and Boccaccio's Filocolo Reconsidered," Chaucer Review 34 (1999): 38-59
59. Sandra J. McEntire, "Illusions and Interpretation in the Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 31 (1996): 145-63
60. R. A. Shoaf, "The Franklin's Tale: Chaucer and Medusa," Chaucer Review 21 (1986): 274-90
61. Eaton, "Narrative Closure"
62. V. A. Kolve, "Rocky Shores and Pleasure Gardens: Poetry VS. Magic in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale," in Poetics: Theory and Practice in Medieval English Literature, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 165-95
63. and Linda Charnes, '"This Werk Unresonable': Narrative Frustration and Generic Redistribution in Chaucer's Franklin's Tale," Chaucer Review 23 (1989): 301-15
64. See Edwards, "Source, Context, and Cultural Translation in the Franklin's Tale," Modern Philology 94 (1996): 141-62
65. Patterson, Chancer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 219