Social Aesthetics and the Emergence of Civic Discourse from the Shipman's Tale to Melibee

Abstract

Surprisingly, Chaucer's Tale of Melibee enters the Canterbury Tales as the solution to an aesthetic problem. The Host interrupts Chaucer's first tale, Sir Thopas, with an expression of sensory displeasure and (since at root the aesthetic concerns the senses) a qualitative evaluation: Myne eres aken of thy drasty speche, he tells Chaucer, adding, Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord! (VII 923, 930).1 The Host's earthy disgust points to the send-up in Sir Thopas s stultifying tail-rhymes?every one in the book, and every one hagridden with clich?. All form and no content, Sir Thopas betrays the obsolescence of the tail-rhyme romance, which had trans planted an Anglo-Norman tradition into English.2 Since Anglo-Norman was no longer anyone's native language by the late fourteenth century, such romances were residual cultural and literary forms. Chaucer's rym dogerel, introduced as a rym I lerned longe agoon (VII 925, 709), is mired in nostalgic iteration. Cast in a form no longer capable of renova tion (or so this introduction suggests), Sir Thopas presents the upheavals of a multilingual culture as an aesthetic problem. The terms with which the Melibee is introduced are also aesthetic. Chaucer forewarns his audience that his version of Prudence and Melibee