The Physician’s Tale and Remembered Texts

Abstract

The Physician’s Tale and Remembered Texts Kenneth Bleeth Connecticut College In a 1915 article entitled ‘‘Chaucer’s Bed’s Head,’’ Frederick Tupper, contemplating the so-called maidenly virtues of Virginia in The Physician’s Tale, tells us that he ‘‘cannot resist the thought that Chaucer . . . had ‘read them in a book’’’—but not in the Roman de la Rose, Chaucer’s immediate source for the tale; nor in Livy, the story’s ultimate source; nor in Gower’s retelling of the Appius and Virginia anecdote. ‘‘Keen in his quest,’’ Tupper writes, ‘‘the seeker’’ (as Tupper styles himself ) turns to the Fathers of the Church. Jerome and Augustine fail to supply sufficiently compelling parallels. But what about Ambrose, whose De Virginibus is quoted with approval by both Jerome and Augustine ? ‘‘And there the search,’’ Tupper informs us, ‘‘came happily to an end.’’1 We can recognize in Tupper’s comments two characteristics of the First Age of Chaucerian source study. First is the assumption that Chaucer ’s sources were necessarily to be found ‘‘in a book.’’ Second, Tupper embraces the belief that the questing scholar’s task is to hack his way through the textual underbrush, undeterred by false trails, to uncover the fons et origo of a Chaucerian passage or work. (The flip side of these assumptions is the scholar’s frustration when definitive sources prove elusive—you can hear this tone, I think, in Root’s observation in 1906 that Chaucer may have assembled The Squire’s Tale from ‘‘such scraps of knowledge about Tartary and the Far East as he had picked up in reading or conversation.’’)2 Evidently persuaded by Tupper’s parallels, Edgar Shannon included the Ambrose material in The Physician’s Tale chapter 1 Frederick Tupper, ‘‘Chaucer’s Bed’s Head,’’ MLN 30 (1915): 5–7. 2 Robert Kilburn Root, The Poetry of Chaucer (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 270. PAGE 221 221 ................. 16094$ $CH9 11-01-10 14:04:25 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER of the first Sources and Analogues.3 But other, more plausible possibilities were subsequently proposed. In the second volume of the new Sources and Analogues, Ambrose does not make the cut. In his place are excerpts from the chapters on the education of children and the proper behavior for young women in John of Wales’s Communiloquium, the late thirteenth-century preacher’s manual that includes citations from the very passages in De Virginibus that had initially attracted Tupper’s attention .4 But even the Communiloquium, which, as Robert Pratt has demonstrated , the poet certainly knew in some form, does not provide any eureka moments for the student of The Physician’s Tale.5 The tale’s set pieces on virginity and female conduct demonstrate with particular clarity the truth of C. S. Lewis’s observation that medieval authors ‘‘hardly ever attempt to write anything unless someone has written it before.’’6 When texts are layered with citations and paraphrases of earlier authorities , it frequently proves impossible to isolate a specific source for an often-cited anecdote or piece of doctrine. Moreover, the desire to pin down the precise point of origin for topoi with widespread currency misrepresents both the rich intertextuality of medieval discourse and the manner in which Chaucer’s extensive but unsystematic reading made its way into his poems. Nature’s monologue (VI.11–29), for example, has been quarried for allusions to Ovid, Cicero, Juvenal, the Ovidius moralizatus, and, in particular , Jean de Meun, whose Nature, like Chaucer’s, identifies herself as God’s ‘‘vicaire’’ (Roman de la Rose, lines 16752, 19477), and who describes the goddess in hyperbolic language reminiscent of Nature’s account of Virginia’s beauty in Chaucer.7 But Jean inherited the trope of 3 Edgar F. Shannon, ‘‘The Physician’s Tale,’’ in Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ed. W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1941), pp. 407–8. 4 Kenneth Bleeth, ‘‘The Physician’s Tale,’’ in Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, ed. Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, vol. 2 (Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester , N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2005), pp. 558–63. 5...