Chaucer's Little Treatises

Abstract

Chaucer’s prologue to the “Tale of Melibee” tends to attract more critical interest than the tale itself, often revolving around Chaucer’s references to a “litel tretys” and a “tretys lite,” as article titles such as “‘This Litel Tretys’ Again” (by John W. Clark) and “Chaucer’s Little Treatise, The Melibee” (by Thomas J. Farrell) suggest. The focus of such commentaries on the prologue tends to be identification of the treatise, with the inevitable conclusion being that there is only one treatise to identify. However, careful reading of the passage in question reveals that the most logical conclusion is that the two references, to a “litel tretys” (VII.957) and a “tretys lyte” (VII.963), refer to separate, albeit linked, treatises. Recognition of this likelihood depends on focussing not simply on the question of what Chaucer refers to in the two lines cited above but on the larger context of the linking material preceding the “Tale of Sir Thopas” as well as the interruption of that tale. In focussing on the question of the treatise, previous commentators have not sufficiently considered the ways that the references to the treatises develop from the dialogue between Harry and the narrator begun prior to the “Thopas.” The dialogue between Harry and Geoffrey before and after the “Thopas” stresses in various ways the difficulty of finding a fixed and single meaning even for a single word, let alone for a person, or a tale. Chaucer’s use of the word “tretys” in the Thopas-Melibee link is emblematic of the way he undercuts the idea that meaning is fixed and invariable, not only within the link itself, but throughout his writing. To understand the implications of granting a double referent to the word “tretys,” we must first consider what Harry’s way of reading implies.