Chaucer's Tale of Melibee and the Failure of Allegory
Abstract When Chaucer calls his Melibee “a litel thyng in prose,” he signals a key formulation for understanding his inclusion of a translation as his contribution to the Canterbury Tales. This article argues that Chaucer draws upon the legal model of ownership and use developed in Henry de Bracton's De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae as an analogue to literary ideas about textual ownership and borrowing. In doing so, he posits that the central problems the Melibee addresses revolve not around the specific political circumstances of Ricardian England, as has long been assumed by critics, but around the possibility of a vernacular author “owning” and “using” allegory.
Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics
AbstractI profess to Your Highness, in the integrity of my heart, that what I am going to say is literally true this minute I am writing: What Revolutions may happen before it shall be ready for your perusal, I can by no means warrant….–Jonathan Swift,A Tale of A Tub, Epistle Dedicatory.
"What Man Artow?": Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee
The Chaucerian phrase in my title derives from the moment in the Canterbury pilgrimage when Harry Bailly first notices the unobtrusive traveling companion whom we know to be the narrator (VII.695). While this is not the only time that Harry interrogates a pilgrim, what is striking about this occasion is the comprehensiveness of his opening question, its vocational lack of specificity: “What man artow?” By contrast, for example, Harry asks the Monk and the Parson not to identify themselves but simply to explain their respective ecclesiastical offices (see VII. 1929–36 and X.22–23); that the Monk is a monk and the Parson a priest are facts not in question. Similarly, the other two pilgrims whom Harry asks to account for themselves, the Canon and the Yeoman, are also easily recognizable: the Canon’s hooded black gown and white surplice proclaim his identity as a canon (IX. 73), while his companion is unproblematically classified as his servant or “yemen” (587), the English word typically used to translate the Latin valettus.1 Hence, Harry seeks immediately to absorb the Canon into the taletelling game, and only when alerted by the Yeoman’s ambiguous assurances does he more pointedly ask him to “telle what [the Canon] is” (616).