Source or Hard Analogue? Decameron X, 10 and the Clerk's Tale

Abstract

In the absence of authoritative external definitions of the word source as it is used by literary scholars, Chaucerians have largely had to create their own. Surprisingly, the Oxford English Dictionary contains no specifically literary sense of the word. Even the definition that comes closest to being useful for philological study—’A work, etc., supplying information or evidence (esp. of an original or primary character) as to some fact, event, or series of these’—cites people as sources more often than texts, and so diminishes its value in any text-based study. 1 The situation is only somewhat better in other traditional reference works. A Handbook to Literature is perhaps the most helpful: its initial, OED-like ‘The person, manuscript, or book from which something is derived’ is elaborated by a later distinction between a Primary source and a Secondary source: the former ‘represents a direct and immediate acquaintance with the information’ contained in the source, and the latter an ‘indirect acquaintance.’ 2 Such sources could still be people, but the distinction between primary and secondary sources seems promising in its ability to distinguish various degrees and perhaps kinds of importance that a text might have to a composing author. But the imprecision of words like represents and acquaintance still leaves obvious shortcomings for those interested in source study: not every work with which an author is acquainted is meaningful as a source. 3 In more recent reference works, the concept of a source in that sense is likely to disappear entirely: the term source does not make the cut for inclusion in Critical Terms for Literary Study, implicitly being replaced by Louis A. Renza’s essentially Bloomian essay on “Influence.” 4 W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster’s original Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, published in 1941, did not entirely resolve these uncertainties. In the introduction to that volume, Bryan specified that only written texts available to Chaucer should be sought as sources: