Chaucer's Merchant Research Articles

The “Laurer” and the “Columbyn”: The Images of Frustrated Love in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

«Rys up, my wyf, my love, my lady free» (1.2138) -however it has been the literary scholars who have followed old January with much greater alacrity than his «fresshe May» into the literary and rhetorical world of the wedding chamber and the garden that Chaucer lets the Merchant create for the married couple. The scholars, in turn, especially those interested in sources, metaphor, analogy, and allusion have been richly rewarded by the study of The Merchant's Tale, this «dense mosaic of references, allusions, quotations», as G. G. Sedgewick has described it. Unifying the richly structured composition of this «mosaic» is the theme of frustrated love, a concern to which many of these «ref- erences, allusions, quotations» point. One of the earlier critical concerns was to track down the analogues. It proved to be a fertile field; by now it has become a critical commonplace that one of the central motifs of Chaucer's tale—the blind man and the adulterous youth the pear-tree-cluster—is of Mid Eastern origin and can be found among the tales of the Disciplina Clericalis. This anthology of Eastern folklore—com- prising East Indian, Byzantine, Persian, Arabian, and Hebrew materials—was compiled in Latin back in the twelfth century by Petrus Alfunsus. Alfunsus, originally a Jewish scholar born in Spain, converted to Christianity, and eventu- ally emigrated to England where he became royal physician to King Henry I. He wrote the Disciplina while he resided in England. Alfonsi's collection of thirty- four tales is important as a bridge by which what is commonly called the literaty «matter of Araby» in both form and content became a tradition that supplied vernacular medieaval Europen writers.

Chaucer on the Hearth

Abstract Close parallels of plot and language show that in the construction of his third Christmas book, The Cricket on the Hearth, Dickens drew directly and heavily on Chaucer's Merchant's Tale. The Merchant's Tale comically displays the ill-fated marriage between old Januarie and young May. Cricket's plot revolves around whether it is possible for young Mary Peerybingle to be happy in her marriage to the older John, even as her friend May prepares to wed the still older Tackleton. Perhaps one of the qualities that attracted Dickens to Chaucer was a shared aesthetic that mixes pathos, comedy, and social observation. Be that as it may, Dickens was sufficiently pleased by his artistic success in Cricket that he adapted the scenario of a young wife who loves her aging husband in the Dr. and Mrs. Strong subplot in David Copperfield.

Placebo Effects: Flattery and Antifeminism in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale and the Tale of Melibee

Chaucer's Tale of Melibee and Merchant's Tale both draw on the work of the jurist Albertanus of Brescia, and both are concerned with the overlapping discourses of marriage, gender, and political counsel. This essay argues that while Melibee uses gender difference to theorize the practice of good counsel and to regulate the lordly self, the Merchant's Tale offers a more cynical revision of the same themes as it explores how counsel is corrupted by flattery and selfishness. The debate over January's marriage illustrates the close connections between antifeminism and bad counsel, and the rhetorical pleasure provided by the flattering counselor Placebo turns out to be as important as the sexual pleasure January supposedly seeks in a wife. By the end of the tale, however, the vices of flattery and bad counsel are displaced onto feminine figures such as May and Fortune, allowing January to preserve his distorted self-regard and the illusion of masculine community.

Gender, Vulgarity, and the Phantom Debates of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale has long been criticized for its apparently disjunctive themes and style, yet by reading it as a series of five debates concerning gender and marriage, its organic unity comes into sharper focus. The primary sections of the tale—the marriage encomium, Justinus and Placebo's argument, May's wedding night, the mythological interlude of Pluto and Proserpina, and the tale's fabliau resolution—each highlight various aspects of the classical and medieval debate tradition, as they also foreground considerations of male and female desires within the marital realm. A sixth debate emerges in Chaucer's metatextual construction of the pilgrims' varying views of gender and marriage. As the masculinist arena of debate is regendered through the tale's unfolding, its fabliau humor envisions a world in which women can debate as persuasively as men—even through their silence.

Rhetoric and Performing Anger: Proserpina's Gift and Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

Although scholars have historically minimized the relationship between medieval grammatical and rhetorical traditions and Chaucer's poetics, Proserpina's angry speech in the Merchant's Tale represents the intersection of medieval classroom grammar exercises, Geoffrey of Vinsauf's theory of delivery, and poetics. Proserpina's angry speech reveals that her rhetoric is calculated to subvert the masculine power structures that surround her. Such a focus on Chaucer's depiction of women's persuasive tactics helps to highlight Chaucer's deep engagement with rhetoric beginning in the 1380's. Moreover, this investigation asks for increased attention to the overlap between classroom grammatical traditions, rhetorical theory, and medieval poetics.

The Tale of Beryn:

Abstract After a brief comment on the versification of the Tale of Beryn, the essay considers the anonymous poet's faithful and lively representations of Chaucer's pilgrims as they spend their day in Canterbury, contrasting Beryn's prologue in this respect with Lydgate's prologue to his Siege of Thebes. The second part of this essay argues that the story of Beryn well suits the Merchant who tells it. Beryn, like Chaucer's Merchant, trades overseas and suffers those vicissitudes of Fortune to which merchant-venturers were subject—storms at seas and, in this case particularly, legal problems. But Beryn ends up rich, an appropriate happy ending for a narrator whose talk, as Chaucer wrote, was all about “th’ encrees of his wynnyng.”

Pregnant Desire:

Abstract This article examines the scene in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale in which May declares both that she is pregnant and that she suffers from a pregnancy-induced hunger for pears that must be satiated to preserve her life. Contextualizing Chaucer's text within medieval scientific discourses on pica (the medical term for often deviant pregnancy cravings), conception, and the physiological stimulation of desire, the article argues that the scene allows Chaucer to complicate more traditional narratives of human culpability and sinfulness in regards to the body's lusts.

“To take a wyf it is a glorious thing”: Januarie's Thesis on Marriage in the Merchant's Tale (IV.1263–1392)

Januarie's speech in favour of marriage in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale has been classified under many different genres. This article presents a new reading of the passage as a classical thesis as it was understood in the late medieval period. Januarie uses biblical exempla and language reflecting the marriage vows to present an argument in favour of marriage. Theophrastus, directly quoted, offers a counter-thesis. Januarie's rebuttal underscores the chief virtues of marriage, and concentrates especially on the faith of a wife—the very thing that will be challenged as the Merchant's Tale continues. Through subtle cues, Chaucer invites his audience to compare Januarie's views on marriage to the marriages of the Wife of Bath and the recent marriage of the Merchant. The audience, familiar with the controlling nature of the Wife of Bath and the sad experience of the Merchant-narrator, sees an erudite and sincere thesis issuing from a naive old man who will soon have cause to reconsider his ideas. When read as a polished piece of scholarly rhetoric, Januarie's speech directly engages with other portions of the Canterbury Tales' “marriage group” and evokes new readings of those texts.

Three Unnoticed Links between Matthew of Vendome's Comedia Lidie and Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

1Rutgers University

Three Unnoticed Links between Matthew of Vendôme's Comedia Lidie and Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

Three Unnoticed Links between Matthew of Vendôme's Comedia Lidie and Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

Performative Passivity and Fantasies of Masculinity in the Merchant's Tale

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale has a mixed critical record. While a few schol ars over the years have made arguments for the tale's comic potential, many critics agree that the tale's narrator, a sour and disillusioned char acter, has an unsettling effect on the tale.1 The narrator, often identified with the Merchant from the tale's headlink, has been variously described as bitter and self-lacerating, traits that lend the tale its reputation as brutal, bitter, and hence un-Chaucerian.2 In a welcome feminist inter vention, Elaine Tuttle Hansen argues that the impulse to identify the tale's cynical antifeminism with a character distinct from Chaucer is the attempt to salvage an authorial position that remains insulated from the disinte gration of gender difference enacted by this story.3 Foreclosing the poten tial comedy of the tale, the bitterness tradition attempts to deny the joke that May's performative passivity makes of gender. As I shall argue, May's conduct demonstrates that the feminine passivity upon which masculine performances of agency depend is of course 2M act, and by playing out this act, exposes the ridiculous nature of all claims to masculine author ity, whether they are based on knowing rawness, ironic detachment, or blind naivete. Scholars aligned with the bitterness tradition seek to do what the tale itself cannot: they set up a binary of gender, creating two masculinities distinguished by separate claims to agency. While Chaucer is empowered by the ability to resist defensive cynicism, the tale's speaker is debilitated by his retreat into frustrated attack. This scheme of masculinity is ranked by the ability to contain feminine agency, suggesting as it does that aloof detachment implies more self-control than disillusioned disappointment. The fantasy of masculine agency that the bitterness tradition natural izes is a tempting gender-fiction, one to which even Hansen concedes in her acknowledgment of the tale's bitterness. Hansen pulls back from her most radical insight, that May is different and has something that can

In Memoriam: Emerson Brown, Jr.

On March 19, 2002, Emerson Brown died of prostate cancer at the age of 67. Educated at Hamilton College and Cornell University, Emerson taught medieval literature at Stanford and Vanderbilt and served on the Editorial Board of the Chaucer Review. His wide-ranging scholarship centered on Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, but included work on Shakespeare, William Carlos Williams, and epicurean thought in the Middle Ages. In 1992, Emerson won Vanderbilt's Jeffrey Nordhaus Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. Outside the classroom, he was an avid cyclist and jazz clarinetist. Emerson is survived by his wife Cindy and son Lee.

Medieval Women in their Communities ed. by Diane Watt (review)

REVIEWS103 an invention of the nineteenth centuty' (135), for example, needs considerably more nuance in light ofJames Paxson's recent work on personification. Neither is her claim quite as large as her main title implies: she applies her findings to classical auctores exclusively, with no mention ofvernacular reading and little treatment of Scriptural interpretation. That Reynolds's findings are less revolutionary than she implies, however, does not mean that they arc without value. What is genuinely new and interesting in her book is the discovery, in this group ofpreviously under-examined glosses, ofa twelfthcentury pedagogical basis for literal reading and for the reader's paradoxical prominence in establishing authorial intention. Linguists will find much of value in her close examination ofthese grammatical practices, while literary historians will at least find new support for some established ideas in this book's final chapters. ROBERT S. STURGES University of New Orleans diane watt, ed., Medieval Women in their Communities. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997. Pp. 250. isbn: 0-8020-8122-3. $19.95 (paper), isbn: 0-80204289 -9. $50 (cloth). This essay collection, edited by Diane Watt, grew out of the 1995 meeting of the Gender and Medieval Studies Group at Gregynog, the conference center for the University ofWales. The volume is a useful addition to the proliferating studies on women in the Middle Ages and also offers a considerable expansion of the topic initially undertaken in a 1989 issue of Signs, entitled Working Together in the Middle Ages: Perspectives on Women's Communities. Watt's introduction provides an overview ofthe essays and raises a variety ofissues. She examines modern and medieval definitions ofcommunity and acknowledges the importance that modern feminists have tended to place on the issues ofcommunity and the collective identity, but she also challenges Jacob Burckhardt's assertion that medieval people were conscious ofthemselves not as individuals, but 'only as a member ofa race, people, party, family' (7). All in all, she positions the volume well to lead us into the varied discussions and definitions of community contained therein. The first five essays form a more-or-less cohesive group, all examining women's roles within the context ofa variety ofreligious communities—convents, béguinages, and anchorholds. The first three ofthese (Jane Cartwright's 'The Desire to Corrupt: Convent and Community in Medieval Wales'; Marie-Luise Ehrenschwendtner's 'Puellae litteratae: The Use ofthe Vernacular in the Dominican Convents ofSouthern Germany'; and Rosalynn Voaden's All Girls Together: Community, Gender and Vision at Helfta') underscore a contrast between the small number and lack ofsupport for Welsh convents, as compared to the more affluent and intellectually richer convents in Germany. Cartwright's essay is a provocative look at the rarity ofWelsh nuns, who 'belonged more to the erotica of the imagination, than to any social reality' (39). German nuns, by contrast, as the other two articles demonstrate, were not only more K>4ARTHURIANA prolific but sought to take firmer control oftheir own learning and spirituality through the use ofvernacular texts and mystical discourse among women. The fourth essay, Penelope Galloway's '"Discreet and Devout Maidens": Women's Involvement in Beguine Communities in Northern France, 1200—1500,' is a penetrating study not only ofthe beguine movement itself, but ofthe female patrons who provided support to beguine houses, particularly the countess sisters, Jeanne and Marguerite of Flanders. The final essay in this first group, Susannah Mary Chewning's 'Mysticism and the Anchoritic Community: "ATime. . .ofVeiled Infinity,"' is less focused on anchoresses themselves than on Pe Wohunge ofUre Lauerd, one of the earliest of English mystical texts, which speaks in a feminine voice 'disruptive of established codes of masculine power.' (122) Nevertheless, the article sheds light on the distinctiveness of the anchoritic life and on the issue of female mysticism. The second five articles are far more diverse in their approaches to the issue of community. In fact, the essay by Cynthia Kraman, 'Communities of Otherness in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale,' interesting though it is in its efforts to posit Jewish readings ofthe Song ofSongs as a subtext for the Merchant's Tale, seems somewhat out ofplace in this volume. Despite the obvious effort in the title to connect it to the...

Chaucer’s Merchants and the Foreign Exchange: An Introduction to Medieval Finance

Chaucer's Merchants and the Foreign Exchange: An Introduction to Medieval Finance Kenneth S. Cahn EM the financial tmnsattions desniool in Th, Cant,,,.bury Tale,, it is impossible to conclude-as many Chaucer scholars have-that the merchant was a usurer or any type of money lender. 1 Contrary to most opinion, he did not deal profitably in monetary exchange2 by speculat­ ing, or in any other manner, legal3 or illegal.4 That he was in debt is stated in the poem more than once. 5 His activities have been incorrectly 1 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N.Robinson,2nd ed.(Boston: Houghton, 1957),p.658n; Thomas A.Knott,"Chaucer's Anonymous Merchant," PQ, 1(1922), 12,14; John M.Manly,Some New Light on Chaucer(1926; rpt.Gloucester,Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), p. 192; Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales(NewYork: Macmillan, 1948), p. 148. 2 Chaucer's Poetry, ed.E.T.Donaldson(NewYork: Ronald,1975),p.14; OscarE. Johnson, "Was Chaucer's Merchant in Debt) A Study in Chaucerian Syntax and Rhetoric," JEGP, 52 (1953), 50. 3 B.A.Park,"The Character ofChaucer's Merchant," ELN, l(1964),169-70; The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed.W.W.Skeac (Oxford: Clarendon Press,189497 ),V,30; Frederick Tupper,Types ofSociety in Medieval Literature(NewYork: H.Holt, 1926), p. 44. 4 See,in addition to the works cited in footnotes 1 and 2 above,Jill Mann,Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press,1973),pp.100-01; The Canterbury Tales ofGeoffrey Chaucer, ed.D.Cook(NewYork: Doubleday Anchor,1961), p.21 and Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed.D.R.Howard(NewYork: Signet, 1969),p.72; perhaps a position was taken by John K.Crane,"An Honest Debtor): A Note on Chaucer's Merchant,Line A276," ELN, 4(1966),81-85,who writes chat in "a deeperhistoricalcontext...themerchanthas probably committed every money crime in the book." > Only one line has been interpreted co mean chat the merchant was in debt: "Ther wisce no wight chat he was in dette "(I,280),and Johnson,pp.50,57 argues that the correct meaning for that line is "he was emphatically out of debt." See also,Gardiner Stillwell, "Chaucer's Merchant: No Debts?" JEGP, 57(1958), 192, 194; Park, pp. 172-73. 81 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER associated with smuggling gold out ofthe country6 and smuggling false, light, or clipped money into the country. 7 Such operations, for Chaucer's merchant, were not only economically improbable, but in some in­ stances physically impossible. Until recently, many commentators have failed to distinguish be­ tween two different types of medieval monetary exchange8 and have shown themselves confused about such matters as the nature of the "sheeld," which has been described as a French coin9 or a gold coin10 but was, in fact, neither French, nor gold, nor a coin. In the Middle Ages to sell shields meant to borrow sterling. 1. Foreign Exchange: Historical Background The medieval banking systems are not simple, and the foreign exchange is particularly complex. Centuries ago, the foreign exchange was called "the greatest and weightiest mystery to be found on the whole map of trade," and since then major economic historians who discussed exchange have cited this line and echoed the sentiment about the difficulties of the subject matter. Indeed, even those who actively participate in it do not fully understand the modern exchange market, and its structures are certainly not identical to those ofthe market in the Middle Ages. 11 Confusion of aspects of the banking, lending, and exchange systems extant in Europe in Chaucer's time has generated considerable misunderstanding of the actions of Chaucer's merchants. 6 Bowden, p. 150. 7 Knott, pp. 10-11. 8 Bowden, pp. 148-50 and 154n; Knott, pp. 10-12; Ewald Fliigel, "Gower's Mirour de l'omme und Chaucer's Prolog," Anglia, 24 (1901), 474-76; Robinson, p. 658. Park, pp. 169-70, seems to be the first to distinguish manual exchange from foreign exchange. 9 Bowden, p. 150n; Cook, p. 21; Donaldson, p. 14; Park, p. 169: Robinson, p. 658; Skeat, V. 30. 10 Howard, p...

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, E 1263, 1854, and 2360–65

(1977). Chaucer's Merchant's Tale, E 1263, 1854, and 2360–65. The Explicator: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 25-26.

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale and the Decameron

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale and the Decameron

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale: Another Swing of the Pendulum

Despite a recent tendency to consider the Merchant's Tale outside the dramatic context of its prologue, and to read it primarily as a broadly humorous, if discordant, piece of anti-feminism, the tale is actually unified by a consistent narrative point of view that successfully accommodates the apparently incongruous themes, tones, and styles of the poem. The final effect, moreover, is not comic at all, but rather sardonic, a dark and unsettling view of an aspect of man's experience. The Merchant's Prologue, though probably written after the tale, is carefully adjusted to the climate of the tale, and must be considered in any critical account, especially since it is through the strong, viable presence of the narrator that the tale is held together. Two features characterize this narrator, one tonal, the other attitudinal. The first is the cool, acidulous voice we hear narrating the story, the expression of an ironic intelligence deeply at odds with the world. The second is the narrator's heightened awareness of sex, particularly in its more grotesque and violent forms, which gives the tale its unsavory atmosphere. These marks of a single unified narrator, together with the ironic finale of the plot, result in a literary mode that is not finally comic, but which suggests comparison with the so-called “problem comedies” of Shakespeare.

The Scorpion of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

The Scorpion of Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

Chaucer's Merchant and January's "Hevene in Erthe Heere"

Chaucer's Merchant and January's "Hevene in Erthe Heere"

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale and Courtly Love

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale and Courtly Love