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.
Chaucer's Prudent Poetics: Allegory, the Tale of Melibee, and the Frame Narrative to the Canterbury Tales
The character Prudence in Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee prudently explains to her husband Melibee that he ought to be merciful, interpreting the text’s events for him as they unfold. However, her interpretive methodology poses many problems to the reader. Prudence confuses her twin roles as human wife and allegorical virtue; both the content and manner of her speech can sometimes contradict her own advice, and it is far from clear at the end of the story that her husband has actually learned anything. The implication of this incoherence is that interpretive methodologies themselves are the problem. It is Melibee’s strict, moralizing adherence to the precise words used by Prudence and his counselors that leads him towards violence and revenge, while Prudence’s looser and somewhat contradictory interpretations of proverbial wisdom nonetheless culminate in a clear, consistent notion of charitable mercy.
Curial Prose in England
That style which modern scholars have called "curial" or "clergial" is an elaborate fifteenth-century prose style practiced most notoriously by William Caxton in works published during the last decades of the century. It is often assumed that he learned the style from French courtly models.1 This view has recently suffered modification through the work of Diane Bornstein, whose study of the Tale of Melibee revealed that Chaucer had an independent grasp of many features of the style almost a hundred years before Caxton used it.2 Although she was successful in demonstrating the use at an early date of these stylistic features, Bornstein did not question or discuss the sources of Chaucer's evident competence. It could be reasonably assumed, as had been assumed for Caxton, that they lay in French literary texts, since features of the style are present in the source of Melibee, the Livre de Mellibee et de Prudence, and they could be presumed to have occurred also in other literary texts of French origin with which Chaucer was doubtless familiar. But this is not a necessary assumption. Consider the following passage: