Abstract
From opening description of Franklin's hospitality in General Prologue to question posed at end of Franklin's narrative, Which was mooste fre? (V 1622), Chaucer appears to be exploring issue of generosity in Franklin's portrait and tale. This is not surprising. Generosity is also central to analogue stories in Boccaccio's Decameron and Filocolo , both possible sources for Franklin's narrative, and public performance of liberality aligns perfectly with Franklin's lai . The virtue of magnificence was seen as a sign of status in medieval society, and romantic genre that Franklin employs similarly aspires to courtly associations. 1 More specifically, romances often focused on households comprising these courts. Surveying a number of late medieval English romances, D. Vance Smith states, the discursive frame of fourteenth-century English romance takes an economic cast . . . . (I)t is concerned in inextricable ways with matters that are relegated to household. 2 The following essay explores financial household concerns expressed by and through Franklin, concerns that allow generosity to occur in first place. This is a tale attentive to bureaucratic management of household possessions. My focus on bureaucracy within Franklin's Tale fills a gap in scholarship. In a recent essay assessing work on Chaucer's responsibilities as Controller and Clerk of Works, Jenna Mead notes that there is little historically accurate, sustained attention paid to influence of Chaucer's bureaucratic day job on his poetic labors, despite his approximately fourteen-year commitment to administrative duties. 3 Noting a problematic absence of a theorized model of bureaucrat in medieval governance, Mead asks, What might it mean to propose a 'bureaucratic Chaucer'? 4 Accepting Mead's challenge to envision a bureaucratic Chaucer as author of Franklin's Tale reveals a resistance to bureaucracy in late Middle Ages. An analysis of tale's treatment of bureaucracy suggests that Franklin is not intent
Published Version
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