The Canterbury Tales, written by Geoffrey Chaucer is a collection of varied tales told and experiences shared by an eclectic group of young and older pilgrims en route to Canterbury from London. Chaucer’s description of age reveals thematic implications regarding the problem and trickery that accompanies old age, the hostility or attack on people who are old by the young, and the exploitation of old age for the purpose of gain. This essay is concerned with the way old age is described in the CT, specifically the Miller’s Tale, Pardoner’s Tale, as well as a close analysis of the portrait descriptions of these pilgrims found in the General Prologue. Combined, these tales and prologue suggest what Chaucer, an aged author himself, may have felt concerning the treatment of age as it exists in both the young and in the old.
Arguably, age is susceptible to betrayal and the older the person seems to be the greater the chance for trickery. Chaucer’s fabliau of an old carpenter and his young wife as told in the MilT begins with a severely contrasted marriage. Chaucer begins with “This carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf, / Which that he lovede moore than his lyf; / Of eighteen yeer she was of age” (MilT 3221-23). The wife is a young woman of eighteen years married to an older man who the Miller describes as simply “he was old” (MilT 3225). By profession the old husband holds the position of a carpenter, a member of the bourgeois class who makes the choice of marrying a considerably younger “maid.” We are not told either by the narrator or by Chaucer if the wife is still a virgin by this marriage, however, for this essay it is sufficient to note that she is simply younger than her husband, and at eighteen may still be in the flower of her youth. Moreover, the wife is once again contrasted to her husband’s age, existing as “Fair was this young wyf, and therewithal / As any wezele hir body gent and small” (MilT 3234). Again, the wife is pictured as both young and fair; both vibrant and wild; both petite and possibly lithe in frame. Perhaps, she can be considered the epitome of beauty. This would of course suggest the husband’s fear and desire to keep a closer eye on his wife. It is not difficult to perceive that the level of trust is missing, resulting in a carpenter who is “Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage” (MilT 3224). What fears could an aged man have? Could he have the fear of death, loneliness, betrayal? Possibly, but the Miller mentions, “For she was wylde and yong, and he was old / And demed hymself been lik a cokewold” (MilT 3225-26). This self-fulfilling prophecy by the carpenter does come true, but at the expense of both adultery and ridicule. Chaucer, in contrasting youth against old age, positions Alisoun and “hende Nicholas,” to conspire against the carpenter, “Whil that hir housbonde was at Oseneye” (MilT 3274). This treachery is a betrayal that then leads to sex and ridicule. At the end of the play it is the old carpenter that cuts the rope sending down the tubs in hope of salvation from the flood. The carpenter is the butt of a joke when Nicholas, himself tricked and burnt on the ass by Absalom, shouts “Help! Water! Water! Help, for Goddes herte” (MilT 3815). Upon hearing these screams it is the carpenter who interprets a destroying Noadic flood on the move. His interpretation is given without much thought. Instead, he is reactive, jumping to the conclusion that the end of the world is at hand. Furthermore, the carpenter, in thinking the jest was up and that he could rely on both his tenant clerk and wife to explain to the gathering crowd, experiences additional ridicule and betrayal. The narrator states that “They tolden every man that he was wood; / He was agast so of Nowelis flood/ Thurgh fantasie that of his vanytee” (MilT 3833-35). This betrayal by two trusted individuals and their conspiracy against a “sely” carpenter points toward the reiteration of ridicule in the public sphere. The carpenter, with a “brosten…arm” was in the midst of a crowd where “The folk gan laughen at his fantasye; / Into the roofthey kiken and they cape, / And turned al his harm unto a jape” (MilT 3840-42). What can be said about a society that does not respect its elders? Most likely, it is a society that supports the word and story of two young lovers instead of aiding an old man. Age in this tale is susceptible to ridicule and it is the older person who is seen as false and finally the foolish outcast. The latter presents a point of reference to the old man in the PardT. Again, old age is seemingly fit for ridicule.
Where greed is the root of all evils, or as the Pardoner states, “Radix malorum es Cupiditas,” the greater the disparity between youth and old age. Moreover, old age in exchange for youth does not seem to be an attractive choice for the three young men in this tale. Once more, youth is pitted against old age. In the PardT three young men encounter an old man and behave in a hostile manner toward him. These youth express a disgust toward old age that is somewhat fueled by their drinking. The Pardoner mentions that “Thise riotoures thre of which I telle, / Long erst er prime rong of any belle, / Were hem in a tavern to drynke,” (PardT 661-63). Drunk and obviously influenced by the alcohol they foolishly take up the plan to “sleen this false traytour Deeth” (PardT 699). What strikes a chord of irony is the false bravado of slaying death, which in itself is an oxymoron; to slay death would mean that death would kill itself. Again, Chaucer knew the implications. He may possibly been alluding toward the Biblical concept that Death has no sting. This sting suggests power of some kind and Chaucer in the PardT links it together with old age existing as a precursor (or messenger) for death itself.
The value of youth pitted against the value of old age is an unequal exchange in the PardT. The old man suggests “For I ne kan nat fynde / A man, though that I walked into Ynde, / Neither in cite ne in no village, / That wolde change his youth for myn age;” (PardT 721-24). The implication is then that old age perhaps has nothing of value to exchange. Old age is, according to the three youth, an accomplice of sorts. They collectively agree that the old man is “By God and by the hooly sacrament! / For soothly thou art oon of his ascent / To sleen us young folk, thou false theef!” (PardT 758-9) They agree to scorn this old man because he stands at the door of death and must know where to find him. Chaucer utilizes the PardT to establish a valid separation of age between those that are young and those that are old. He points toward the old man being scorned and the youth having the power to scorn; He points to old age as a useless exchange regarding youthfulness; He ultimately points to what drives the youthful versus what causes the old to wander. Together, these dual attributes representing age display Chaucer’s possible reflections on age and utility; age and limitation; age and respect. Again, what kind of society does not respect their aged; their seers; their wise men? It is a society where youthful exuberance and caprice are driven by their greed for improper gain. In the MilT it was a combination two young agents, Nicholas and Alisoun, who scorned and ridiculed an old carpenter for the lust and gain of sex. Comparatively, the PardT also contains elements of scorn and ridicule toward the aged. Chaucer uses the MilT and PardT, one fabliau and the other folktale, to present a case that age is susceptible to these thematic considerations of scorn, ridicule, hostility, lust and greed. The final result of the three, youthful rioters is that they did meet death, and death killed them. Why? Because, the three youth participated in “speken to an old man vileynye” and he, as the messenger of and for Death, points them in the right direction.
The MilT differs slightly in the treatment of an old man versus the PardT. The main difference being that the old man in the PardT arguably sends the three youth to die, thereby retaining some semblance of dignity, honor, and power. In contrast, the MilT presents an old man who breaks his arm, is cuckolded, and ridiculed in the public sphere as he is taken for a madman. These two tales collectively put forward Chaucer’s range of ideas concerning the representation and treatment of age existing in both the young and in the old. Chaucer utilized both youth and old age, existing in the dialectic tone of the MilT and the panegyric rhetoric of the PardT, to once more suggest possible thematic elements regarding the problem and foolishness that accompanies old age, the hostility or attack on people who are old, and the exploitation of old age for the purpose of gain.
Showing posts with label Chaucer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chaucer. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 19, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
Chaucer's Clerk's Tale: a Seminar Starter
“Chaucer and Everyday Death: The Clerk’s Tale, Burial, and the Subject of Poverty” by Kathy Lavezzo
Critical Summary:
Kathy Lavezzo suggests that “the notion of universal death was a late-medieval commonplace,” which found representation in such things as: “sculpture, the visual arts and literature of the Dance of Death” (295-96). Both the ClP and the ClT discuss this universal claim. According to Lavezzo, Chaucer is following Petrarch, as one of his sources for his re-telling of the Griselda story. Still, the discussion of death—as—leveler performed, according to Lavezzo, “other social functions” (296). Citing E. P. Thomson and David Wallace, Lavezzo seems to move beyond religious fear and persuasion for control to suggest that Chaucer cared for the peasant class. In fact, Chaucer privileges the notion of a universal death to suggest that it really does not exist; i.e. death, though it happens to all, cannot be appropriated to function the same way to all. To Lavezzo’s credit then, “Chaucer raises the idea of a universal death only to undermine it,” and upon a close examination of the Griselda story seeks to uncover this in her five sections below. Before we get to that, however, Lavezzo engages us with what feminist readings regard as “gender resistance” only to add to it her own branding of another “more material type of resistance” (298). She claims that “povre” Griselda registers her peasant estate via “fatal maternal losses” and as a “subject of poverty” (299) and when death re-visits her throughout the tale with the taking away of her children, it is not a leveler per se. It is her material oppression, or her lack of material possession that Lavezzo begins to claim has a visible “vantage point” (299) when focused on Griselda’s poor recollection. As Christian ideology is invoked in the ClT, Lavezzo further notes that the lack of protection afforded to Griselda’s children via burial rites (a claim that she will later make is “standard” to Christians, but unfulfilled in Church practice), reminds Griselda of her indigent peasantry; and, moreover, the treatment of the peasant in death is related with the treatment of the peasant in life. This Lavezzo offers as the “politics of burial” (299). Before launching into the “how,” Lavezzo initiates her motive to “shed new light” on the “social Chaucer” (taken, as she notes, from Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer) by focusing on the quotidian, the everyday affairs of Griselda and possibly her example as “peasant agency” (300).
I: The Rhetoric of the Leveler. Lavezzo opens with the disclaimer, “The rhetoric of universal death has a long history,” which extends from Horace into the Medium Aevum and the Enlightenment period. She offers that death visits everyone, especially in moments of pestilence. Moving beyond revisionist criticism, which support death’s universal claim, Lavezzo here is interested in separating ideation (perhaps, called theory) from actual, from “death as medieval reality” (301). This is her attempt to smell the fecal matter of death; to taste and touch and hold, if not grasp at it. In times of pestilence then, all are affected. Lavezzo, comparing both the dans macabre and the 1381 Rebellion, offers this. Moreover, Lavezzo suggests: “If the discourse of the leveler satirized the proud and wealthy, it also fostered complaisance among the poor” (302). In citing Villon and Myrc, she recognizes in the first, the use of the leveler as a move from the indigent self to a blessing; in the second, the leveler is used as a way to view the corpse toward a humble life, ensuring “their soul’s redemption” (302). The role of a universal death here offered two things: an attack on “the hierarchical world” as well as the “stifling of peasant discontent” (302). Lavezzo then reiterates her point that “the ideology of the great leveler” is not commensurate with the actual, the real-life death of the medieval people. She then gives example of death associated with the disadvantaged, taken from Carmichael’s work on the Black Death and the lazaretti, or plague hospitals. In short, the very plague hospitals came into existence when the need arose; the need arose because wealthy Florentines departed, leaving the urban poor; no work, no money, no food. Still, she asserts that this example contrasts death as leveler, and in fact, suggests death’s affinity for the indigent despite “universal images of death […] and modern scholarship” (303). Two final thoughts are offered by Lavezzo in this section: first, “death in the Middle Ages was not universal”; second, the “rhetoric of death—as—leveler is profoundly challenged by the social renunciations it entails” (304).
II: “Povre” Griselda. In this section, Lavezzo is convinced that Griselda’s new clothes and new location, “an emperoures halle,” (which proves to be more like an emperoures helle) might offer, on the surface, a change, but instead suggests a Griselda, who “never relinquishes her identity as a ‘povre womman’” (305). She then claims that though both Walter and Griselda exist as chasm opposites, in terms of estate class distinctions, “there has yet to appear in Chaucer studies” a comprehensive examination regarding the “figure of poverty in The Clerk’s Tale” (305). Lavezzo admits that the ClT records accurately Chaucer’s depiction of peasant and rural life. On page 306 then, she takes up the argument in some detail suggesting a “social Chaucer” who departs from his sources, only to offer: “how medieval rural life was filled with labor and devoid of proper sustenance and suitable housing” (306). By focusing on the death of children (infanticide), Lavezzo recalls such disasters as: the Hundred Years’ War, the famine of 1315-17 as well as the plague of 1349-50. She then proceeds to have a “what if moment” beginning at “But due to close quarters, an inadequate diet” (307) and so on, until the end of the paragraph. In support of her earlier claim that death was in fact no leveler (when applied to medieval real life), she attempts to make a link between dispossessed, peasant mother and Griselda’s loss of child in support of “other hardships faced”; hardships, beyond death as leveler (308). Lavezzo then moves into describing Griselda’s “complex gesture” of cross-signing at the moment her baby girl is to be taken away. She suggests that the signing is not in association with “an oppressive ideology of death” (think back to E. P. Thomson), but rather in support of “spiritual significance” (309). This significance takes, amidst many shapes, the shape of Griselda’s transcended, indigent self into what Lavezzo calls “a daughter of Christ or a type of the Virgin” (309). Taking a cue from John Boswell, Lavezzo continues her discussion of “povre” Griselda in terms of tokens as material offerings. In short, she had none to give her children, but the sign of the cross. This only reaffirmed her peasant estate even as a Marquess, and further reaffirmed “her doomed daughter’s peasant heritage” (310). This section ends with Lavezzo suggesting, “Griselda remakes the Christian economy of suffering” (311) even though she cannot save her daughter by quietly signing on her child[ren]. And, by doing so, “Griselda,” Lavezzo argues: “registers the intimate connection between the problems of impoverishment, child abandonment, and infanticide” (312).
III: Burial and Indigent Vulnerability. Lavezzo claims that Griselda is indeed anxious, regardless of her rather stoic appearance, when her children are taken away and led to death. Chaucer, in going beyond his sources, pays close attention to Griselda’s concern for their burial, a protective space away from beasts and birds (of prey). Due to such a concern, Lavezzo suggests “Griselda’s woe,” “Griselda’s anxiety” help to undermine “the idea of a leveling death” (313). In terms of the Second Coming, Lavezzo relies on Augustine, Ariès and Bynum to tease out medieval concerns “between the dead’s interment and their bodies’ resurrection” (314). Those (properly) buried were ready to meet their Maker, while the “ill-prepared,” or non-buried and openly rotting folk, were not. What is at stake then is how non-burial may “seriously jeopardize their final adoption by Christ” (315). She further comments on the disparity between Church practice and Church doctrine in terms of burial rites for Christians; where Griselda is a Christian then, burial is her rite and “supports the notion of death as a moment of social leveling,” but she cannot even guarantee this for her children much less herself (315). Lavezzo continues with the obvious disparities between the place of burial as well as the way one is to be buried. Anxieties felt by the indigent peasantry were well supported. As Lavezzo put it: “the most likely category of person to die in the Middle Ages” was “a member of the group least likely to receive a proper burial” (316). Moreover, those who could afford it, and were afforded coffins, Lavezzo insists, “the Clerk attributes the privilege of protection to the upper classes” (317). She ends this section suggesting that the “coffin” and the “cofre” extend the upper class stratification of privilege, and further seeks to widen the gap between the peasantry and the aristocracy. At one point, Lavezzo reminds us of the Clerk’s portrait and his possession of “but a litel gold in cofre” (GP 298). In support of Jill Mann, even this seems to point, or rather reflect an authenticity by Chaucer to portray the poor.
IV: Everyday Death and Guild Culture. Lavezzo opens with a reminder of the power of “chesting,” or what to her Chaucer seems to be doing for those who have “the power to ‘chest’” (321). Admittedly, she declares, “Chaucer points […] to a contradiction in a religious ideology intended to manage the peasantry” (321). The contradiction? That “imbalances” exist and off-set any creature comforts afforded by burial of the peasantry in death, or in the after-life. In short, it was a constant reminder to the un-interred, and proved problematic to what Lavezzo calls, “the loyal subject in medieval Christian society” (322). Lavezzo runs with this into the folds of a child-less Griselda, then shifts into a discourse on Guilds and their relevance to The Canterbury Tales (Tales), which stem from “an anxiety over the care of the dead” (322). Citing Chaucerians, Lindhall and Wallace, Lavezzo gives credit to the link between guilds and Chaucer; specifically, when citing Wallace on “his provisional effort to connect guild emphasis on death,” (323) the Pardoner, the Summoner and even The Friar’s Tale are used, but to Lavezzo—it is The Clerk’s Tale, which “offers us our most powerful link” between the Tales and “medieval guild culture” (323). Again, Chaucer’s “representation through Griselda” may have been the “very impetus” for the creation “of many guilds in the fourteenth century” (323). Lavezzo seeks to prove this via historical account (Richard II solicitation in 1389) and Hanawalt’s assertions on “guild functions” (323). She then goes into the care-taking duties such guilds performed: body retrieval, funeral attendance, financial assistance and so on. The point she makes here is that burial was a business and being a member of a guild could assuage medieval peasantry anxieties associated with such burial practices. Moreover, Lavezzo points out: “guild membership provided much-needed financial aid that inadvertently acknowledged social inequities”; both for the living as well as the dead (324). Again, Lavezzo seems to use this information to point out: that “death reasserted rather than leveled the material distinctions between the privileged and the disadvantaged” (325).
V: Unearthing Chaucer’s Object Lessons. Holding onto her conjectures “about the significance of a historical parallel between the guilds and the subject of burial in The Clerk’s Tale,” Lavezzo uses this section to launch into “Chaucerian sympathy” and borrows Strohm’s nomenclature of “the social Chaucer” (325). She acknowledges that in times past, there was a tradition to hold Chaucer as detached from the hardships of late medieval life. In this section, Lavezzo seeks to move beyond that thinking and bring in a Chaucer who is very much in tune, in step with such a society. Moreover, she relies on “A growing body of criticism” (325) beyond Kittredge, which challenges Chaucerian detachment; further still, it is this “important scholarship,” which “identify Chaucer’s literary work as encompassing multiple discourses, some of them liberatory” (326). In short, she is in agreement that Chaucer cares, and cares “about the commons,” but “to claim that he supports peasant agency is another” thing altogether (326). Lavezzo seeks to do this. By examining Chaucer’s use of the quotidian, the everyday aspects and associations in medieval life, peasant agency can be represented. The purpose, to provide insight or thought “about power and disenfranchisement” (327). Lavezzo claims that Chaucer, “Primarily through his depiction of material goods,…reveals his own investment in peasant agency” (327). Through “material goods,” Lavezzo claims that resistance, subtle ones are privileged. They may in fact be secret, hidden. She ends with Chaucer’s “interest in how the disadvantaged can point to contradictions within a powerful and oppressive Christian culture of death” (328) as well as how, such disenfranchised people groups are themselves members, “living and dying,” (329) as sites of quotidian contestation.
Larger Issues:
--Estate Discourse Satire (commentary on social mobility); Death and Knowledge (i.e. being in the know) as power dynamics; Christian ideology (practice v. doctrine); Social Chaucer v. Detached Chaucer (artist); Guild Formation (14th century clubs and rites of the disadvantaged); Marriage Commentary (a little uncertain about this one because neither Walter nor Griselda reflect an ideal, but seem to suggest the excess, the incorrect).
Illuminations:
Tha article provides a historical backdrop, which serve as a midrashic filler to the tale. For instance, background information on guild formation, burial practice as a business as well as a return to the Tales GP describing the Clerk’s portrait and his “cofre” (l. 298). These help to illuminate both ClP and ClT; moreover, Lavezzo’s insistence on the “social Chaucer” presents a reading of ClT which presents new light on the quotidian spaces, places of interaction—the middle of everyday representation.
Critical Summary:
Kathy Lavezzo suggests that “the notion of universal death was a late-medieval commonplace,” which found representation in such things as: “sculpture, the visual arts and literature of the Dance of Death” (295-96). Both the ClP and the ClT discuss this universal claim. According to Lavezzo, Chaucer is following Petrarch, as one of his sources for his re-telling of the Griselda story. Still, the discussion of death—as—leveler performed, according to Lavezzo, “other social functions” (296). Citing E. P. Thomson and David Wallace, Lavezzo seems to move beyond religious fear and persuasion for control to suggest that Chaucer cared for the peasant class. In fact, Chaucer privileges the notion of a universal death to suggest that it really does not exist; i.e. death, though it happens to all, cannot be appropriated to function the same way to all. To Lavezzo’s credit then, “Chaucer raises the idea of a universal death only to undermine it,” and upon a close examination of the Griselda story seeks to uncover this in her five sections below. Before we get to that, however, Lavezzo engages us with what feminist readings regard as “gender resistance” only to add to it her own branding of another “more material type of resistance” (298). She claims that “povre” Griselda registers her peasant estate via “fatal maternal losses” and as a “subject of poverty” (299) and when death re-visits her throughout the tale with the taking away of her children, it is not a leveler per se. It is her material oppression, or her lack of material possession that Lavezzo begins to claim has a visible “vantage point” (299) when focused on Griselda’s poor recollection. As Christian ideology is invoked in the ClT, Lavezzo further notes that the lack of protection afforded to Griselda’s children via burial rites (a claim that she will later make is “standard” to Christians, but unfulfilled in Church practice), reminds Griselda of her indigent peasantry; and, moreover, the treatment of the peasant in death is related with the treatment of the peasant in life. This Lavezzo offers as the “politics of burial” (299). Before launching into the “how,” Lavezzo initiates her motive to “shed new light” on the “social Chaucer” (taken, as she notes, from Paul Strohm’s Social Chaucer) by focusing on the quotidian, the everyday affairs of Griselda and possibly her example as “peasant agency” (300).
I: The Rhetoric of the Leveler. Lavezzo opens with the disclaimer, “The rhetoric of universal death has a long history,” which extends from Horace into the Medium Aevum and the Enlightenment period. She offers that death visits everyone, especially in moments of pestilence. Moving beyond revisionist criticism, which support death’s universal claim, Lavezzo here is interested in separating ideation (perhaps, called theory) from actual, from “death as medieval reality” (301). This is her attempt to smell the fecal matter of death; to taste and touch and hold, if not grasp at it. In times of pestilence then, all are affected. Lavezzo, comparing both the dans macabre and the 1381 Rebellion, offers this. Moreover, Lavezzo suggests: “If the discourse of the leveler satirized the proud and wealthy, it also fostered complaisance among the poor” (302). In citing Villon and Myrc, she recognizes in the first, the use of the leveler as a move from the indigent self to a blessing; in the second, the leveler is used as a way to view the corpse toward a humble life, ensuring “their soul’s redemption” (302). The role of a universal death here offered two things: an attack on “the hierarchical world” as well as the “stifling of peasant discontent” (302). Lavezzo then reiterates her point that “the ideology of the great leveler” is not commensurate with the actual, the real-life death of the medieval people. She then gives example of death associated with the disadvantaged, taken from Carmichael’s work on the Black Death and the lazaretti, or plague hospitals. In short, the very plague hospitals came into existence when the need arose; the need arose because wealthy Florentines departed, leaving the urban poor; no work, no money, no food. Still, she asserts that this example contrasts death as leveler, and in fact, suggests death’s affinity for the indigent despite “universal images of death […] and modern scholarship” (303). Two final thoughts are offered by Lavezzo in this section: first, “death in the Middle Ages was not universal”; second, the “rhetoric of death—as—leveler is profoundly challenged by the social renunciations it entails” (304).
II: “Povre” Griselda. In this section, Lavezzo is convinced that Griselda’s new clothes and new location, “an emperoures halle,” (which proves to be more like an emperoures helle) might offer, on the surface, a change, but instead suggests a Griselda, who “never relinquishes her identity as a ‘povre womman’” (305). She then claims that though both Walter and Griselda exist as chasm opposites, in terms of estate class distinctions, “there has yet to appear in Chaucer studies” a comprehensive examination regarding the “figure of poverty in The Clerk’s Tale” (305). Lavezzo admits that the ClT records accurately Chaucer’s depiction of peasant and rural life. On page 306 then, she takes up the argument in some detail suggesting a “social Chaucer” who departs from his sources, only to offer: “how medieval rural life was filled with labor and devoid of proper sustenance and suitable housing” (306). By focusing on the death of children (infanticide), Lavezzo recalls such disasters as: the Hundred Years’ War, the famine of 1315-17 as well as the plague of 1349-50. She then proceeds to have a “what if moment” beginning at “But due to close quarters, an inadequate diet” (307) and so on, until the end of the paragraph. In support of her earlier claim that death was in fact no leveler (when applied to medieval real life), she attempts to make a link between dispossessed, peasant mother and Griselda’s loss of child in support of “other hardships faced”; hardships, beyond death as leveler (308). Lavezzo then moves into describing Griselda’s “complex gesture” of cross-signing at the moment her baby girl is to be taken away. She suggests that the signing is not in association with “an oppressive ideology of death” (think back to E. P. Thomson), but rather in support of “spiritual significance” (309). This significance takes, amidst many shapes, the shape of Griselda’s transcended, indigent self into what Lavezzo calls “a daughter of Christ or a type of the Virgin” (309). Taking a cue from John Boswell, Lavezzo continues her discussion of “povre” Griselda in terms of tokens as material offerings. In short, she had none to give her children, but the sign of the cross. This only reaffirmed her peasant estate even as a Marquess, and further reaffirmed “her doomed daughter’s peasant heritage” (310). This section ends with Lavezzo suggesting, “Griselda remakes the Christian economy of suffering” (311) even though she cannot save her daughter by quietly signing on her child[ren]. And, by doing so, “Griselda,” Lavezzo argues: “registers the intimate connection between the problems of impoverishment, child abandonment, and infanticide” (312).
III: Burial and Indigent Vulnerability. Lavezzo claims that Griselda is indeed anxious, regardless of her rather stoic appearance, when her children are taken away and led to death. Chaucer, in going beyond his sources, pays close attention to Griselda’s concern for their burial, a protective space away from beasts and birds (of prey). Due to such a concern, Lavezzo suggests “Griselda’s woe,” “Griselda’s anxiety” help to undermine “the idea of a leveling death” (313). In terms of the Second Coming, Lavezzo relies on Augustine, Ariès and Bynum to tease out medieval concerns “between the dead’s interment and their bodies’ resurrection” (314). Those (properly) buried were ready to meet their Maker, while the “ill-prepared,” or non-buried and openly rotting folk, were not. What is at stake then is how non-burial may “seriously jeopardize their final adoption by Christ” (315). She further comments on the disparity between Church practice and Church doctrine in terms of burial rites for Christians; where Griselda is a Christian then, burial is her rite and “supports the notion of death as a moment of social leveling,” but she cannot even guarantee this for her children much less herself (315). Lavezzo continues with the obvious disparities between the place of burial as well as the way one is to be buried. Anxieties felt by the indigent peasantry were well supported. As Lavezzo put it: “the most likely category of person to die in the Middle Ages” was “a member of the group least likely to receive a proper burial” (316). Moreover, those who could afford it, and were afforded coffins, Lavezzo insists, “the Clerk attributes the privilege of protection to the upper classes” (317). She ends this section suggesting that the “coffin” and the “cofre” extend the upper class stratification of privilege, and further seeks to widen the gap between the peasantry and the aristocracy. At one point, Lavezzo reminds us of the Clerk’s portrait and his possession of “but a litel gold in cofre” (GP 298). In support of Jill Mann, even this seems to point, or rather reflect an authenticity by Chaucer to portray the poor.
IV: Everyday Death and Guild Culture. Lavezzo opens with a reminder of the power of “chesting,” or what to her Chaucer seems to be doing for those who have “the power to ‘chest’” (321). Admittedly, she declares, “Chaucer points […] to a contradiction in a religious ideology intended to manage the peasantry” (321). The contradiction? That “imbalances” exist and off-set any creature comforts afforded by burial of the peasantry in death, or in the after-life. In short, it was a constant reminder to the un-interred, and proved problematic to what Lavezzo calls, “the loyal subject in medieval Christian society” (322). Lavezzo runs with this into the folds of a child-less Griselda, then shifts into a discourse on Guilds and their relevance to The Canterbury Tales (Tales), which stem from “an anxiety over the care of the dead” (322). Citing Chaucerians, Lindhall and Wallace, Lavezzo gives credit to the link between guilds and Chaucer; specifically, when citing Wallace on “his provisional effort to connect guild emphasis on death,” (323) the Pardoner, the Summoner and even The Friar’s Tale are used, but to Lavezzo—it is The Clerk’s Tale, which “offers us our most powerful link” between the Tales and “medieval guild culture” (323). Again, Chaucer’s “representation through Griselda” may have been the “very impetus” for the creation “of many guilds in the fourteenth century” (323). Lavezzo seeks to prove this via historical account (Richard II solicitation in 1389) and Hanawalt’s assertions on “guild functions” (323). She then goes into the care-taking duties such guilds performed: body retrieval, funeral attendance, financial assistance and so on. The point she makes here is that burial was a business and being a member of a guild could assuage medieval peasantry anxieties associated with such burial practices. Moreover, Lavezzo points out: “guild membership provided much-needed financial aid that inadvertently acknowledged social inequities”; both for the living as well as the dead (324). Again, Lavezzo seems to use this information to point out: that “death reasserted rather than leveled the material distinctions between the privileged and the disadvantaged” (325).
V: Unearthing Chaucer’s Object Lessons. Holding onto her conjectures “about the significance of a historical parallel between the guilds and the subject of burial in The Clerk’s Tale,” Lavezzo uses this section to launch into “Chaucerian sympathy” and borrows Strohm’s nomenclature of “the social Chaucer” (325). She acknowledges that in times past, there was a tradition to hold Chaucer as detached from the hardships of late medieval life. In this section, Lavezzo seeks to move beyond that thinking and bring in a Chaucer who is very much in tune, in step with such a society. Moreover, she relies on “A growing body of criticism” (325) beyond Kittredge, which challenges Chaucerian detachment; further still, it is this “important scholarship,” which “identify Chaucer’s literary work as encompassing multiple discourses, some of them liberatory” (326). In short, she is in agreement that Chaucer cares, and cares “about the commons,” but “to claim that he supports peasant agency is another” thing altogether (326). Lavezzo seeks to do this. By examining Chaucer’s use of the quotidian, the everyday aspects and associations in medieval life, peasant agency can be represented. The purpose, to provide insight or thought “about power and disenfranchisement” (327). Lavezzo claims that Chaucer, “Primarily through his depiction of material goods,…reveals his own investment in peasant agency” (327). Through “material goods,” Lavezzo claims that resistance, subtle ones are privileged. They may in fact be secret, hidden. She ends with Chaucer’s “interest in how the disadvantaged can point to contradictions within a powerful and oppressive Christian culture of death” (328) as well as how, such disenfranchised people groups are themselves members, “living and dying,” (329) as sites of quotidian contestation.
Larger Issues:
--Estate Discourse Satire (commentary on social mobility); Death and Knowledge (i.e. being in the know) as power dynamics; Christian ideology (practice v. doctrine); Social Chaucer v. Detached Chaucer (artist); Guild Formation (14th century clubs and rites of the disadvantaged); Marriage Commentary (a little uncertain about this one because neither Walter nor Griselda reflect an ideal, but seem to suggest the excess, the incorrect).
Illuminations:
Tha article provides a historical backdrop, which serve as a midrashic filler to the tale. For instance, background information on guild formation, burial practice as a business as well as a return to the Tales GP describing the Clerk’s portrait and his “cofre” (l. 298). These help to illuminate both ClP and ClT; moreover, Lavezzo’s insistence on the “social Chaucer” presents a reading of ClT which presents new light on the quotidian spaces, places of interaction—the middle of everyday representation.
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