Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory

Wisdom and Chivalry Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts Editor-in-Chief Francis G. Gentry Emeritus Professor ...

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Wisdom and Chivalry

Medieval and Renaissance Authors and Texts Editor-in-Chief

Francis G. Gentry Emeritus Professor of German, Penn State University

Editorial Board

Teodolinda Barolini, Columbia University Cynthia Brown, University of California, Santa Barbara Marina Brownlee, Princeton University Keith Busby, University of Wisconsin-Madison Craig Kallendorf, Texas A&M University Alastair Minnis, Yale University Brian Murdoch, Stirling University Jan Ziolkowski, Harvard University and Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection

VOLUME 4

Wisdom and Chivalry Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Medieval Political Theory

By

Stephen H. Rigby

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2009

This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Rigby, S. H. (Stephen Henry), 1955– Wisdom and chivalry : Chaucer’s Knight’s tale and medieval political theory / by Stephen H. Rigby. p. cm. — (Medieval and Renaissance authors and texts, ISSN 0925-7683 ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-17624-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400. Knight’s tale. 2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400.—Political and social views. 3. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400—Ethics. 4. Knights and knighthood in literature. 5. Politics in literature. 6. Ethics in literature. 7. Conduct of life in literature. 8. Ideology in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR1868.K63R54 2009 821’.1—dc22

2009010062

ISSN 0925-7683 ISBN 978 90 04 17624 9 Copyright 2009 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

For Rosalind

CONTENTS Preface .................................................................................................

xi

Abbreviations in the Text and Notes .............................................

xv

Introduction The ‘Knight’s Tale’ in Context ............................. i. The ‘Knight’s Tale’: the Critical Debate ............................ ii. Chaucer, Giles of Rome and Medieval Political Theory .....................................................................................

1 1 10

PART I ETHICS: THE GOOD RULE OF THE SELF Chapter One The ‘Knight’s Tale’ as Ethics: the Aristotelian Virtues ...................................................................... i. Chaucer’s Theseus: an Exemplar of Virtue? .................... ii. The Aristotelian Virtues in Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum ....................................................... iii. Prudence ................................................................................ iv. Justice ...................................................................................... v. Fortitude ................................................................................. vi. Temperance ........................................................................... vii. Liberality and Magnificence ............................................... viii. Proper Ambition and Magnanimity ................................. ix. ‘Mansuetude’ ......................................................................... x. Affability ................................................................................. xi. Truthfulness ........................................................................... xii. Proper Amusement .............................................................. xiii. Conclusion: Theseus, Cicero and Aristotle ......................

27 27 30 34 39 41 44 47 58 64 66 67 73 80

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Chapter Two The ‘Knight’s Tale’ as Ethics: the Passions and the Ages of Man ............................................. i. The Passions and the Parts of the Soul in Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum ......................................... ii. The Passions and the Parts of the Soul in the Teseida and the ‘Knight’s Tale’ .......................................... iii. The ‘Knight’s Tale’ and the Ages of Man ......................... iv. Conclusion: Theseus’s Pagan Virtue .................................

89 90 97 116 126

PART II ECONOMICS AND POLITICS: THE GOOD RULE OF OTHERS Chapter Three The ‘Knight’s Tale’ as Economics: The Good Rule of the Household ..................... i. Duke Theseus as ‘Animal Domesticum’ ........................... ii. Husbands and Wives: Conquering the ‘Regne of Femenye’ ........................................................................... iii. Parents and Children: Theseus and Emily ....................... iv. Masters, Servants and Possessions .................................... v. Conclusion: Theseus and the Virtues of the Active Life .............................................................................. Chapter Four The ‘Knight’s Tale’ as Politics: The Good Rule of the Community .................... i. Theseus: True Prince or Tyrant? ........................................ ii. Kingship and Tyranny in Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum ....................................................... iii. Making a Virtue of Necessity: A Tyrant’s Plea? ............. iv. Counsel and Obedience ....................................................... v. Theseus the Vainglorious? .................................................. vi. Justice and Mercy ................................................................. vii. Theseus: Bloody General or Prince of Chivalry? ............ viii. Conclusion: Theseus’s Pagan Lordship .............................

131 131 133 145 163 168

171 171 173 184 193 198 204 210 219

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PART III THE FIRST MOVER AND THE GOOD RULE OF THE COSMOS Chapter Five The ‘Knight’s Tale’ as Cosmography: The Good Rule of the Universe ........................... i. Theseus’s Cosmography: Wisdom, Delusion or Opportunism? .......................................................................... ii. Medieval Cosmography: Order, Diversity and Hierarchy .................................................................................. iii. The ‘First Mover’ and the ‘Fair Chain of Love’ ................. iv. The ‘First Mover’ and the Inevitability of Death .............. v. The ‘Knight’s Tale’: from Cosmography to Theodicy ...... vi. Conclusion: Theseus’s Pagan Wisdom ................................

231 231 236 245 253 258 270

Conclusion Chaucer: Literature, History and Ideology ........... i. The ‘Knight’s Tale’: Historical Context and Procrustean Criticism ................................................................................... ii. The ‘Knight’s Tale’ and the Pilgrims’ Story-Telling Contest ...................................................................................... iii. ‘The ‘Knight’s Tale’ as Ideology ...........................................

273

277 281

Bibliography ........................................................................................

291

Index ....................................................................................................

321

273

PREFACE Though words be the signs we have of one another’s opinions and intentions: yet because the equivocation of them is so frequent according to the diversity of contexture (which the presence of him that speaketh, our sight of his actions, and conjecture of his intentions, must help to discharge us of): it must be extreme hard to find out the opinions and meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification therof but their books; which cannot possibly be understood without history enough to discover those aforementioned circumstances, and also without great prudence to observe them. Thomas Hobbes, The Elements of Law Natural, I: 13, 8

The aim of this book is to throw new light on Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ by examining it in relation to medieval ideals of kingship and, in particular, by reading the tale in the context of Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum which was one of the most popular of the ‘mirrors for princes’ which sought to provide ethical and practical guidance to medieval rulers. When read in this context, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ can be seen as providing an extremely positive portrayal of Duke Theseus of Athens whose actions are central to its narrative. In this perspective, the tale’s seeming contradictions, which scholars have often seen as opening up a far more critical reading of the duke’s virtue and wisdom, are more the product of our own modern moral, political and philosophical values than of any inconsistency when judged either in terms of medieval ethics or political theory or in terms of the tale’s own internal narrative logic. Given this focus on Giles’s thought and on the virtue of Duke Theseus within the ‘Knight’s Tale’, it may be worth emphasising here that my own philosophical, religious, social and political views are invariably the opposite of those expressed by Giles. However, rather than denouncing Giles for having failed to anticipate, by seven centuries, my own boundless wisdom, my goal here has simply been to comprehend his thought as a means of arriving at a fuller understanding of Chaucer’s work. Similarly, whilst I myself feel little sympathy with Theseus’s desire to conquer the Amazons, to flaunt his princely majesty before his subjects or to arrange the marriage of his sister-inlaw against her own wishes, my assumption has been that readers are likely to be more interested in how such actions could be interpreted within medieval allegorical literature and political thought than they

xii

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are in learning about my own moral values or political views. Whilst historians and literary scholars can use their professional expertise to help us arrive at a better understanding of the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, they are no more qualified to make moral judgements about the tale’s meaning—or about anything else—than any one else is. In seeking to understand Chaucer’s poetry in the context of medieval political theory, we face two opposing difficulties. On the one hand, if we relate the ‘Knight’s Tale’ to the thought of a specific political writer, such as John of Salisbury or Giles of Rome, we run the risk that the choice of that particular thinker will seem arbitrary or subjective. On the other hand, if we adopt a more synthetic approach and bring together the work of a range of different thinkers, there is a danger that, as David Wallace has warned, we end up reading Chaucer’s text in terms of a ‘pre-fashioned theoretical gridwork’ of our own devising (Chaucerian Polity, 3). Here, I have sought to marry the strengths of these two approaches by using Giles’s De Regimine Principum to provide a general framework for reading the ‘Knight’s Tale’ whilst, hopefully, avoiding their weaknesses by showing, with the help of extensive quotation and citation, how much the moral and political guidance which Giles offered to contemporary rulers had in common with the work of other medieval political theorists, such as John of Wales, Thomas Aquinas, Brunetto Latini, Nicholas Oresme, Walter of Milemete and Honoré Bonet. As we shall see, the basic assumptions and morality of this theory was familiar not only to Chaucer but was also put to work by many other late medieval writers and poets, including Boccaccio, John Gower, Christine de Pizan and Thomas Hoccleve. I am happy to have the opportunity here to thank a number of institutions and individuals whose support has been vital for the completion of this study. I am extremely grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council and to the University of Manchester for funding the research leave which allowed me the time to research and write this book. I am also indebted to a number of colleagues at Manchester, who provided me with references and guidance in my research. They include Mary Beagon, Roy Gibson, and Peter Liddel, who offered advice on ancient thought and literature, and Conrad Leyser, who shared his expertise on Augustine with me. David Matthews’s detailed corrections and general comments on an earlier version of the book were extremely useful as were Jeff Denton’s responses to Chapters Four and Five. Richard Davies read the entire book in draft and suggested innumerable ways in which its content and style could be improved: it would be hard to imagine

preface

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a more demanding—or more helpful—critic. The book has also benefitted from the discussions of the Ducie Arms postgraduate reading group whose members have included Jason Crowley, Catherine Feely and Ian Harrison. I am especially grateful to Kathryn Green, whose advice helped determine the structure of the book as a whole. Alastair Minnis’s help and encouragement also played a vital role in bringing the book to publication. Naturally, however, none of those named here are in any way responsible for the views which are expressed in this study. Above all, I would like to thank my wife, Rosalind BrownGrant, whose constant support has been crucial for the completion of this project. The fortitude demonstrated by her willingness to read repeated draft versions of this book, the prudence and justice of her critical comments, and the temperance with which she expressed them would surely have won the admiration even of Giles of Rome himself. It is to her that this book is dedicated.

ABBREVIATIONS IN THE TEXT AND NOTES All references to Chaucer’s works are from The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson (third edition; 1987). All biblical quotations are taken from Bishop Challoner’s Douay-Rheims translation (Rockford, 1971). References to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, to the Middle English translation of Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, to Giles’s De Ecclesiastica Potestate, and to works by Aristotle frequently used by Giles are given in brackets within the text. All other primary and secondary works are cited in the notes by their author and an abbreviated form of their title. Full references are provided in the bibliography. Thorns and yoghs in Middle English texts have been modernised in quotations from these works. AM AO

Aristotle’s Metaphysics, ed. J. Warrington (London, 1956). Aristotle’s Oeconomica in Aristotle, Metaphysics, Books X–XIV, Oeconomica and Magna Moralia trans. H. Tredennick and C. C. Armstrong (Cambridge, Mass., 1935). AP Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution at Athens, ed. S. Everson (Cambridge, 1996). C.C.R. Calendar of Close Rolls C.P.R. Calendar of Patent Rolls DA Aristotle, De Anima (On the Soul), ed. H. Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth, 1986). E.E.T.S. Early English Text Society e.s. extra series G The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus, eds D. C. Fowler, C. F. Briggs and P. G. Remley, eds (New York, 1997). NE Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics, ed. H. Rackham (Ware, 1996). n.s. new series OEG Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Government: A Medieval Theory of World Government, ed. R. W. Dyson (New York, 2004).

xvi OH OR OY

abbreviations in the text and notes Aristotle, On the Heavens, in J. Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume I (Princeton, 1984). Aristotle, On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, ed. G. A. Kennedy (New York, 1991). Aristotle, On Youth, Old Age, Life, Death and Respiration, in J. Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle, Volume I (Princeton, 1984).

INTRODUCTION

THE ‘KNIGHT’S TALE’ IN CONTEXT Do you really want to believe that all men speak with equal validity? Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, xi: 3

i. The ‘Knight’s Tale’: the Critical Debate Arriving at an agreed reading of any work of literature is always a difficult matter but doing so is particularly problematic when, as in the case of Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, that work was produced over six centuries ago in a society whose culture and values were radically different from our own. It is hardly surprising, then, that the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, which has been described as ‘the most often and the most variously interpreted of The Canterbury Tales’, has been the subject of a running battle between modern literary critics. It is a battle in which Chaucer’s words are cited as evidence for mutually exclusive and diametrically opposite conclusions and to which no resolution is in sight.1 It would seem that, as Gerald of Wales said, ‘Nature upholds as many views as men: and each to his own view holds’.2 Most scholars would probably accept that the ‘Knight’s Tale’ does not seek to explore Theseus, the duke of Athens whose actions are central to the tale’s narrative, as a psychologically-rounded character. Rather, as Spearing notes, the tale presents the duke to us ‘as part of a literary structure embodying . . . a certain view of life’, a literary structure which conveys its content to us through ‘emblematic symbolism rather than naturalistic characterization’.3 Where the critics have been unable to

1

Hieatt, Chaucer, 3; Schweitzer, ‘Fate’, 13; McAlindon, ‘Cosmology’, 41. Gerald of Wales, Journey Through Wales, 63. See also Honoré Bonet’s quotation of the decretal which said ‘There are as many opinions and wills as there are men’ (Tree of Battles, 119), a phrase also used by Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, xi: 2. 3 Muscatine, Chaucer, 176–7; Spearing, ‘Introduction’, 27–8; Brooks, ‘Meaning’, 124; Kean, Chaucer, II, 3; Cameron, ‘Heroine’, 119–22, 127; Halverson, ‘Aspects’, 620–1; Hieatt, Chaucer, 3; Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 97–101. 2

2

introduction

arrive at a consensus is on which specific view of life the tale’s literary structure embodies. In particular, the critical debate about the ‘Knight’s Tale’ raises the question of how Chaucer’s work should be positioned in relation to the political culture of the late fourteenth century. The last three decades of the century were a time of political conflict and crisis.4 As a result, some critics have been tempted to see the narrative of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as a roman à clef in which Chaucer refers to particular historical characters and events of the period, so that Theseus is equated with John of Gaunt (or, alternatively, with Richard II) whilst Palamon and Arcite are figures for Richard II and Thomas, duke of Gloucester.5 One problem with this approach is the difficulty of establishing the date of the composition of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, suggestions for which range from 1372–6, through the early, mid and late 1380s, to the early 1390s and even to as late as the final years of Richard II’s reign.6 Both versions of the ‘Prologue’ to the Legend of Good Women list the story of ‘the love of Palamon and Arcite/Of Thebes’ amongst Chaucer’s works, which may mean that the ‘Knight’s Tale’ was already in existence by 1386 because, although the dates of the two versions of the Prologue are themselves a matter for debate, the earlier F-version of the ‘Prologue’ is often ascribed to the period from 1386 to 1388.7 Thus, if Chaucer began work on the Canterbury Tales from the late 1380s, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ seems to have been an earlier, independent composition which the poet then adopted as the first of his pilgrims’ tales, although we have no way of knowing how similar the original version was to the

4 On the political history of the period, see Ormrod, Reign of Edward III; Harriss, Shaping; Saul, Richard II; Bennett, Richard II; Waugh, ‘England’; Horrox,‘England’. 5 For Chaucer’s work as a commentary on particular events, see Astell, Political Allegory, chapter 4. For this approach applied to the ‘Knight’s Tale’, see Brown and Butcher, Age of Saturn, 206–11; Bennett, Commentary. 58. For a critique of this approach, see Middleton, ‘Idea’, 95; Rigby, Chaucer, 4–5. 6 McAlpine, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Pearsall, Life, 153; Patterson, ‘Court Politics’, 9; Simpson, Reform, 161; Rudd, Geoffrey Chaucer, 110; Aers, Powers, 219; Brown and Butcher, Age of Saturn, 210; Bennett, Commentary, 58. 7 Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, F: 420–1; G: 408–9; Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 5, 61–2; Minnis, Shorter Poems, 327–8; Gellrich, Discourse, 228. Some of the material from Statius’s Thebaid and Boccaccio’s Teseida adopted in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ was earlier used by Chaucer in his Anelida and Arcite although the precise date of this work is also uncertain, with suggestions ranging from 1373 to 1390 (Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 991).

the ‘knight’s tale’ in context

3

tale as we now have it.8 Given these uncertainties about dating, any attempt to relate the ‘Knight’s Tale’ to actual historical events must remain extremely speculative. Besides, even if the ‘Knight’s Tale’ were originally written as a commentary on contemporary political events, the continued popularity of the Canterbury Tales throughout the later middle ages suggests that the text continued to possess a relevance long after those immediate circumstances had passed. Certainly, the narrative of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ echoes many of the recurrent concerns of English political life in the later middle ages including kingship and tyranny, foreign warfare, internal order, marriage as a tool of diplomacy, counsel to the ruler and the problem of how to achieve a balance between justice and mercy. Accordingly, rather than reading the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as an allegory of the historical characters and events of Richard II’s reign, we are interested here in the ‘no less historical’ project of establishing the ‘larger interpretative structures’ within which people at the time made sense both of political events and of literary texts.9 Chaucer took as the epic, ‘historical’ background for the narrative of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ the events recounted in Statius’s Thebaid (c. 90 A.D.), Book XII of which tells how Theseus defeated Creon in response to the pleas of the Argive widows. It is ‘very likely’ that Chaucer would also have had access to Lactantius Placidus’s late fourth-century commentary on the Thebaid.10 It seems probable too, that in writing the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Chaucer made use of the mid-twelfth-century Roman de Thèbes, which seems to be the source for some of his description of Theseus’s war with Thebes.11 Certainly, we know that the Roman circulated in late fourteenth-century England as one of its six surviving manuscripts bears the arms of Henry Despenser, bishop of Norwich (1370–1406).12 However, the main source for the ‘Knight’s Tale’ was Boccaccio’s Teseida (c. 1340–2), a work which provided Chaucer with

8

Nolan, Chaucer, 247. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 117; Fowler, ‘Chaucer’s Hard Cases’, 126–7. 10 Statius, Thebaid, XII; Coleman, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 92; Clogan, ‘Chaucer’; Clogan, ‘Chaucer’s Use’, 26; Lactantius Placidus, Commentary. Statius is amongst the famous poets listed in Chaucer’s House of Fame (1456–63). 11 Coleman, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 96. For the text, see Roman de Thèbes. 12 For an edition of this manuscript, see Roman de Thèbes; for Despenser’s arms, see ibid., 33. For other manuscripts of the text, see Paschal, Structure, 21–2. 9

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the story of the conflict between Palamon and Arcite over their love of Emily which makes up the bulk of the tale’s narrative.13 Chaucer’s tale opens with Duke Theseus of Athens having conquered the Amazons and married Hippolyta, their defeated queen. However, his triumphal return to Athens is interrupted when he is called upon to come to the aid of the Argive widows who have suffered at the hands of Creon, the ruler of Thebes, who has refused to allow the bodies of their dead husbands to be buried or cremated. Having overthrown Creon, Theseus is then confronted with the deadly strife between Palamon and Arcite, two Theban lords whom he has captured and imprisoned after the fall of Thebes, who have both fallen in love with Emily, the sister of Hippolyta. Theseus eventually attempts to resolve their conflict by arranging a tournament in which the two men fight for the hand of Emily. Arcite emerges victorious but, at the moment of his triumph, is thrown from his horse and subsequently dies. At the end of the tale, Theseus assembles a ‘parlement’ (I: 2970) where he delivers a speech in which he calls for an end to the mourning for Arcite. He argues that, despite all the apparent suffering of this world, suffering to which the events of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself certainly bear witness, a beneficent order does underlie its seeming chaos (I: 2987–3074). He then uses this philosophical outlook to justify his arrangement of the marriage of Emily to Palamon. Emily’s own original preference was to remain chaste and unwed (I: 2304–21), but Theseus nonetheless requires her to marry Palamon as part of a foreign policy which sought to ‘have fully of Thebans obeisaunce’ (I: 2974). Theseus’s arrangement of Emily’s marriage and the philosophical justification he offers for it have been central issues in the long-standing critical debate about the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Within this debate, scholars have adopted three main positions. First, in its transmutation of the ‘wo’ and ‘sorwe’ caused by the death of Arcite into the ‘blisse’ of Palamon and Emily’s marriage (I: 3067–74, 3097), Theseus’s arrangement of the marriage alliance between Thebes and Athens, along with the philosophical rationale which he provides for it, have been seen by many scholars as evidence that Chaucer’s duke is the embodiment of the prudence and virtue expected of a medieval ruler. Here, Theseus is judged—by medieval standards if not ours—to be a noble, wise, chivalric and heroic figure. He is thus seen as a ruler

13

Boccaccio, Book of Theseus; Boccaccio, Teseida.


5

who seeks to establish harmony, order and unity, one whose exemplary excellence, in combining a masculine strength and manly virtue with a feminine pity, is emphasised by being juxtaposed against the destructive inhumanity of the tyrannical Creon.14 As a result, even when scholars have cast doubt on the plausibility of Theseus’s optimistic philosophising, they have often still been prepared to accept that, in political terms at least, Chaucer’s duke is a ruler who is well-intentioned, virtuous, just and merciful.15 Similarly, even those who see Theseus’s rule at the beginning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as being depicted in a questionable or even negative light—as hasty, fierce, arbitrary, tyrannical and excessively martial in the suddenness of his

14

See, for instance (in chronological order), Jefferson, Chaucer, 131; Frost, ‘Interpretation’, 121–42; Muscatine, ‘Form’, 921–2; Bennett, ‘Introduction’, 24–5; Halverson, ‘Aspects’, 614–5, 620; Muscatine, Chaucer, 182–3; Robertson, Preface, 127, 260–6, 270, 375, Bowden, Reader’s Guide, 23–30; Hoffman, Ovid, 40–56, 68–70; Bartholomew, Fortuna, 10–17, 76–7, 88, 98, 101–5; Huppé, Reading, 66–7, 73–4; Coghill, ‘Chaucer’s Narrative Art’, 124–5; Ruggiers, Art, 161–6; Jordan, Chaucer, 155–84; Cameron. ‘Heroine’, 122, 125–7; Whittock, Reading, 73–6; Muscatine, Poetry, 126; Brooks, ‘Meaning’, 125 (but see also 141); Hieatt, Chaucer, 29–44; Kean, Chaucer, II, 3–51; Robinson, Chaucer, 135–44; Norton-Smith, Geoffrey Chaucer, 124–34; Boitani, Chaucer, 143–6; Gardner, Poetry, 243; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 25–30, 44, 79, 116, 127; McCall, Chaucer, 63–84; Miller, ‘Allegory’, 340; Olson, ‘Chaucer’s Epic Statement’, 61–88; Hussey, Chaucer, 128, 131; Traversi, Canterbury Tales, 38, 58–61; Burrow, Essays, 36–43; Boitani, ‘Style’, 195; Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 123–35; Burrow, ‘Canterbury Tales’, 120–4; Mann, ‘Chance’, 90; Anderson, ‘Fourth Temple’, 114, 123–5; Olson, Canterbury Tales, 61–71; Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 203, 217; Luxton, ‘“Sentence”’, 94–113; Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinaunce” ’, 192–213; Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 79–80; Bishop, Narrative Art, 41–8; Wetherbee, Geoffrey Chaucer, 406; Woods, ‘Up and Down’, 44–5; Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 171–82; Woods, ‘ “My Sweete Foo”’, 277–82; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 143–5; Finlayson, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 126–49; Minnis, Shorter Poems, 24; Rigby, Chaucer, 33–9, 55–67; Ingham, ‘Homsocial and Creative Masculinity’, 30–4; Brewer, ‘Chivalry’, 68–70; Phillips, Introduction, 46–53; Rigby, ‘Society and Politics’, 47; Blamires, Chaucer, 27–30; Rudd, Geoffrey Chaucer, 177–8. 15 Spearing, ‘Introduction’, 75–8; Benson, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 123; Tristram, Figures, 88–91; Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 101–11; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 39–41, 44, 79–80; Payne, Chaucer, 216–21, 230–1; Minnis, Chaucer, 117–42; Cooper, Structure, 92–105; Bishop, ‘Chaucer’, 43–44; Bishop, Narrative Art, 41–8; Nolan, Chaucer, 249–81. For the philosophical deficiencies of Theseus’s views, see also Fifield, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 95–106; Blake, ‘Order’, 3–19; Lawler, One and the Many, 86–95; Allen and Moritz, Distinction, 25–31, 121–3, 177–8; Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, 142–81; Kolve, Chaucer, 144–9; Windeatt, ‘Literary Structures’, 203; Dahlberg, Literature, 135; Strohm, Social Chaucer, 132–3; Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 359–82; Wetherbee, ‘Romance’, 316–7, 327; Patterson, Chaucer, 202–230; Pearsall, Life, 155, 157; Astell, Chaucer, 103–5; Aers, Powers, 245; Tasioulas, ‘Science’, 181; Cooper, ‘Classical Background’, 263; Eyler, ‘Once More’, 437. For attempts to reconcile these different assessments of Theseus’s philosophising, see David, Strumpet Muse, 79, 84–9; Gaylord, ‘Role’, 171–90; Severs, ‘Tales’, 272–5; McAlindon, ‘Cosmology’, 41–57.

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decision to attack Thebes and in his refusal to allow Palamon and Arcite to be ransomed—are often still prepared to see him as a truly wise, merciful and consensual ruler, as a yardstick for the ideal prince of the later middle ages, by the end of the tale.16 Here, the voice of Theseus as a character within the diegesis of the tale is equated with that of the Knight as its narrator and, in turn, with that of Chaucer himself, so that, in effect, the Knight and the duke become mouthpieces for the poet’s own views.17 As a result, this reading of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ tends to be associated with a view of the Knight himself as a virtuous figure when judged by the standards of his day. The Knight is thus seen as an ideal representative of the estate of the bellatores, one who, as a crusader, has devoted his life to fighting the enemies of Christ rather than his own fellow Christians.18 In this perspective, when the wise and worthy Knight tells us that Duke Theseus’s conquests of other lands have been achieved by means of ‘his ‘wysdom and his chivalrie’ (I: 865), his words are to be taken literally by the reader. However, the ending of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ has been read in very different terms by a second group of critics. Here, far from being a model ruler, Duke Theseus is seen as being guilty of coercing Emily into marrying against her will, an act which exemplifies the questionable morality of his wider strategy of military conquest and political hegemony. For those who adopt this position, the duke’s actions would seem to exemplify both his cruel and ignoble character and the opportunistic, Machiavellian or even tyrannical nature of his rule. As a result, Theseus’s philosophical outlook is seen as far from constituting political or ethical wisdom. Rather, in its convenient acceptance of the way things are and its quietist teaching about the need to make a ‘vertu of necessitee’ (I: 3042), his philosophical rhetoric is actually another instrument of the duke’s self-interested or tyrannical power.19 Far from demonstrat-

16

Kolve, Chaucer, 101; Roney, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, 115–20; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 82; Chance, Mythographic Chaucer, 186; Elbow, Oppositions, 79–94; Burlin, Chaucerian Fictions, 109–11; McAlindon, ‘Cosmology’, 45–6; McCall, Chaucer, 72–3. 17 Birney, Essays, 15; Huppé, Reading, 56; Nolan, Chaucer, 251, 278. 18 See, for instance, Nolan, Chaucer, 251; Olson, Canterbury Tales, 28–33; Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 540. 19 Webb, ‘Reinterpretation’, 289–96; Underwood, ‘First’, 455–69; Neuse, ‘Knight’, 242–63; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 174–93; Reiss, ‘Chaucer’, 396; Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, 141–216; Ferster, Chaucer, 23–44; Rogers, Upon the Ways, 26–7; Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer, 83–90; Aers, Chaucer 24–32, 76–82; Kempton, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 242–4, 251–2; Brown and Butcher, Age of Saturn, 205, 229–36; Patterson, Chaucer, 168–9, 202, 230; La Farge, ‘Women’, 69–75; Sherman, ‘Politics’, 87–144; Fowler, ‘Chaucer’s


7

ing Theseus’s virtue and wisdom, the tale is interpreted as revealing, at best, that the duke’s philosophising, although well-intentioned, is inadequate in its understanding of the world and the place of humans within it or, at worst, that it is actually a self-interested justification of his own will to power. As a result, rather than the Knight and Theseus being the mouthpieces for Chaucer’s own views, the Knight’s description of the duke as conquering other lands by means of his ‘wysdom’ and his ‘chivalrie’ has necessarily to be read ironically so that a critical distance emerges between the views expressed by the duke and those of Chaucer himself.20 This approach to the ‘Knight’s Tale’ has also opened up a new reading of the Knight as a character, one which sees him not as a chivalric ideal but rather as being one of ‘the mercenaries who swarmed across Europe’ in this period and whose actions ‘brought the concept of chivalry into disrepute and eventual disuse’.21 A final alternative is to argue that rather than simply seeking to convince its readers to adopt one particular view of Theseus (whether as an ideal ruler or as a self-interested tyrant), the ‘Knight’s Tale’, like Chaucer’s work in general, is ‘dialogic’ in nature. Instead of didactically (or ‘monologically’) leading its audience to the acceptance of some particular ‘view of life’, Chaucer’s text invites its readers to engage actively in a dialogue with it so that they can arrive at their own moral conclu-

Hard Cases’, 132, 142 nn. 22–3; Hamaguchi, ‘Domesticating Amazons’, 344–5, 354; Sherman, ‘Chivalry’, 102–3; Utz, ‘Philosophy’, 161; Rock, ‘Forsworn’, 248–9; Guidry, ‘Parliaments’, 141, 147, 161–2. 20 Critics who see a gap between the outlook of Chaucer the poet and that of Theseus disagree about whether the voice of the Knight as the narrator of the tale should be equated with that of Theseus (Foster, ‘Humor’, 93–4; Patterson, Chaucer, 222–30; Aers and Staley, Powers, 24–5; Aers, Chaucer, 25–7. Wetherbee, ‘Chivalry’, 220–1; Wetherbee, ‘Romance’, 306, 317, 319, 321; Nolan, Chaucer, 250; Gellrich, Discourse, 257–70; Weisl, Conquering, 47, 51; Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 88, 90–2, 101–2, 145; Broughton, ‘He Conquered’, 43–4, 52–3, 59) or whether the Knight shares Chaucer’s ironic distance from the duke (Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 222–3; Payne, Chaucer, 12, 34, 208, 219–20, 229–33, 236–9, 253–7). For the gap between the ‘implications’ of the material dealt with in the narrative and the Knight’s own incomplete understanding of it, see also Olsson, ‘Securitas’, 149–52, Miller, ‘Subjectivity’, 558–9. Muscatine attempts to reconcile ‘serious’ and ‘ironic’ readings of the tale whilst inclining towards the former (Poetry, 125–6). 21 Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, 2; Lowe, Imagining Peace, 99. For persuasive critiques of this view of the Knight, see Keen, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’; Keen, ‘Chaucer’; Porter, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’; Pratt, ‘Was Chaucer’s Knight Really a Mercenary?’; Urban, ‘When was Chaucer’s Knight in “Ruce”?’; Lester, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’. Here we are more concerned with the critical debate about the morality of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself than with the controversy about the virtue of its teller.

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sions about the issues which it raises.22 For instance, many critics would argue that even if the ‘Knight’s Tale’, with its stress on hierarchy and order, provides us with a coherent and internally consistent expression of the ‘dominant’ ideology of its day, the truths which it attempts to pass off as obvious and self-evident are then called into question, challenged and revealed as deficient in the interpretive free-for-all which follows it in the form of the tales told by other pilgrims such as the Miller and the Clerk.23 Other critics would go even further, arguing that the ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself can be seen as an open-ended text which asks us to choose between the conflicting viewpoints which its narrative opens up to us. As Peggy Knapp puts it, read positively, Theseus, in arranging Emily’s marriage, is wisely providing for his young ward; read negatively, Emily is Theseus’s prisoner of war who is disposed of for his own political advantage: ‘The text offers both alternatives’.24 In practice, however, as in the second approach to the ‘Knight’s Tale’ set out above, this reading of Chaucer’s work as dialogic in nature tends to lead to the conclusion that the multiplicity of perspectives on offer within the Canterbury Tales as a whole, and within the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in particular, throws into question the authority of Duke Theseus’s own explicit claims about the cosmos and human life.25 Thus, in the case of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, exactly the same text has been be cited by those who are authorities in the field to support three mutually exclusive interpretations of Chaucer’s meaning. This book seeks to convince its audience that reading the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in the context of medieval mirrors for princes allows us to arrive at a persuasive interpretation of the tale. One alternative to this view would simply

22 On the Bakhtinian concepts of the monologic and dialogic text and for references to Bakhtin’s work, see Rigby, Chaucer, 19–24. For the Canterbury Tales as a site of multiple of competing discourses, see, amongst many others, Howard, Idea, 237–9; Borch, Failure, 38; Sklute, Virtue, 115; Rogers, Upon the Ways, 29–41; Kendrick, Chaucerian Play, 118–22, 168–9; Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante, 36; Dillon, Geoffrey Chaucer, 56; Aers, Powers, 245–6, 257–8; Phillips, Introduction, 10–11; Staley, Languages, xii, 11, 144, 326–31, 337, 355; Benson, ‘Literary Contests’, 139. It should be stressed that the view of the Canterbury Tales as dialogic is not an agnostic position but is itself, like all other interpretations of Chaucer, a monologic truth-claim. 23 Kempton, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 251–2; O’Brien, ‘Fire’, 162, 166; Grudin, Chaucer, 19–20, 88–9; 179–82; Staley, Languages, 15, 327; Rudd, Geoffrey Chaucer, 114–5. For further references to those critics who see the ‘Miller’s Tale’ as a reply to the Knight, see Rigby, Chaucer, 45–7 and below 278–9. 24 Knapp, Chaucer, 23; O’Brien, ‘Fire’, 157, 162; Spearing, ‘Introduction’, 48–9; Kempton, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 242; Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions, 154–5. 25 Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 210, 231–3.


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be to accept—or even to celebrate—the fact that literary critics do not have agreed standards of what counts as a plausible reading and so are unlikely, through debate and disagreement, to arrive at the kind of consensus which scholars in other academic disciplines normally regard as the precondition of long-term intellectual progress.26 Of course, it may well be the case that we do not have any logical grounds for preferring one literary opinion to another. However, those who adopt this position can then hardly object to the interpretation of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ offered in this book. Alternatively, it might be argued that, in practice, readers choose between competing interpretations of literary texts on political grounds, i.e. on the basis of which reading of the tale is most useful or convenient to them. The problem here is that deciding which reading of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ most helps our own political projects it itself a process of interpretation and so hardly provides a position from which to decide between competing readings of the tale. Besides, as we shall see, critics who are divided in terms of their own politics (as, say, conservative or radical) have often arrived at a common interpretation of Chaucer’s social and political outlook whilst those with shared political views (e.g. as Marxist or feminist) have found themselves on opposing sides in terms of their interpretation of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. In practice, a critics’s preference for one literary interpretation over another cannot simply be read off from his or her own political allegiances. If we want, we can see this disagreement about the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as a debate about Chaucer’s own intended authorial meaning. Certainly, in understanding other people and their linguistic utterances, we necessarily attribute intentions to them. For instance, if a critic tells us in writing that he does not believe in reading texts in terms of authorial intention, his audience is immediately obliged to decide if, as the author of this text, he intends us to take this claim seriously or whether he intends it to be taken ironically.27 Indeed, even understanding fictional characters requires recourse to some notion of intention as when critics claim that in falling to their knees to beg Theseus to have mercy on Palamon and Arcite (I: 1748–60), Hippolyta and Emily are (or are not) ‘mimicking’ femininity since mimicry is

26 Howard, ‘Medieval Poems’, 108, 113; Andrew, ‘Context’, 329–30; Fish, Is There A Text In This Class?, 148–9; Prado, Limits of Pragmatism, 158. 27 Searle, ‘Logical Status’, 325; Skinner, ‘Meaning’, 48–51, 63; Skinner, ‘Motives’, 68–78; Skinner, Social Meaning’, 94; Skinner, ‘Some Problems’, 102–6; Skinner, ‘Reply’, 268–75, 278–81; Skinner, Foundations, xiv–xv.

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itself an intentional act.28 The problem is, of course, that we do not have any direct access to Chaucer’s intentions in writing the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (for instance, whether or not to portray Duke Theseus as an ideal ruler) and that, even if we did, there would be no guarantee that his text succeeded in expressing such intentions. Whilst, in terms of the production of the text, authorial intention is something which existed prior to the composition of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, in terms of our reception and understanding of the tale, intention is something which we ourselves ascribe to Chaucer on the basis of our reading of his text and of our reconstruction of the linguistic, intellectual and historical context in which it was written.29 In this sense, the debate about the morality of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is not simply one about Chaucer’s authorial intention but, in practice, focuses on textual consistency and meaning. In particular, any reader of the tale has to decide whether the dark tone, subtleties, silences, tensions and ambivalences within the text and the tragic forces which it invokes necessarily cast doubt on Duke Theseus’s virtue and wisdom or whether the tale takes such dark and tragic elements as its starting point and seeks to present the duke’s response to it as morally admirable and philosophically plausible. ii. Chaucer, Giles of Rome and Medieval Political Theory In arguing for their own favoured interpretation of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, all critics, whatever their general theoretical outlook, are obliged to offer a close reading of the text in order to show, for instance, how Theseus’s words and actions conform to those of an ideal ruler or how they reveal him to be a ruthless tyrant. Yet, this immediately raises the contextual issue of the standards by which the duke is to be judged: how was a model prince or a tyrant defined at the time that the ‘Knight’s Tale’ was written? In order to answer this question, modern readers of Chaucer’s text have to acquire what, in the context of art history, Baxandall calls a ‘period eye’, i.e. the bundle of historically specific, culturally relative and socially determined interpretive and cognitive skills, viewing (or reading) norms and styles of thinking that are required to make sense of

28

See below, 144–5. Pocock, ‘Texts’, 24–5; Pocock, Virtue. 4–6; Pocock, ‘Concept’, 20–1; Skinner, ‘Meaning’ 64–5; Skinner, ‘Motives’, 75–8; Skinner, ‘Some Problems’, 103–6; Skinner, ‘Reply’, 248, 274–5; Skinner, Foundations, xi, xiv; Janssen, ‘Political Thought’, 133. 29


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some particular work of art. Even if modern readers can never grasp a work of medieval literature in exactly the ways in which it was received by its original audience, we can still attempt to acquire a knowledge of some of the ‘categories, the model patterns and the habits of inference and analogy’ which were assumed on the part of its readers, even if these interpretive skills may have been available only to a ‘community of understanding’ which made up ‘small proportion of the population’ of the time.30 In order to understand and to appreciate a work such as Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ we thus have to reconstruct its own internal ‘underlying schemes of thought’, the horizon of expectations which Chaucer could take for granted on the part of his audience but which are often alien or obscure to us today.31 For instance, modern readers are unlikely to share Duke Theseus’s assumption in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ that husbands are the ‘lords’ of their wives (I: 3081) even though the view that a wife owed obedience to her husband ‘that is hire lorde’ was quite unexceptional within medieval law and culture being one which was shared both by Chaucer’s misogynist Parson (X: 925–31) and by Christine de Pizan, the most systematic medieval defender of women.32 Similarly, many modern readers may be rather sceptical about Theseus’s teaching that a benevolent First Mover who has supposedly bound the entire universe with a ‘cheyne of love’ has also ordained that we must all die (I: 2987–3040) and yet, as we shall see, this opinion was the philosophical orthodoxy of Chaucer’s own day.33 This emphasis on the alterity of medieval culture has sometimes been seen as the product of a conservative disgust with modernity or as the expression of a reactionary nostalgia for some lost golden age of the past but there is no reason why this should necessarily be the case.34 After all, if we accept that the culture and society of the past were dramatically different from those of the present, this also provides the possibility that the society of the 30 Baxandall, Painting, 29–40; Randolph, ‘Gendering’, 538–46; Zumthor, Essai, 7, 19–20; L’Estrange, Holy Motherhood, 28, 32–7, 45, 57, 113; Ferster, ‘Interpretation’, 149; Nolan, Chaucer, 3; Muscatine, Poetry, 3; Green, Poets, 3; Thompson, Chaucer, 89, 137; Strohm, Social Chaucer, 48. 31 Brooks, ‘Meaning’, 125; Strohm, Social Chaucer, 47–51; Nolan, Chaucer, 2–3; Maclean, ‘Reading’, 131, 138–40; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 3; Hieatt, Chaucer, 3–4; North, Chaucer’s Universe, viii; Tinkle, ‘Saturn’, 290. 32 Bellamy, Law, 225–9; Christine de Pizan, Three Virtues, I: 20 (p. 80). See also below, 138–9. 33 See below, 253–60. 34 Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 33–4; Martin, Chaucer’s Women, xiii.

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future can be fundamentally different from that which now confronts us. An emphasis on the alterity of the past also allows us to realize that those beliefs which seem to us to be self-evident and timeless truths may themselves be the ‘merest contingencies’ of our own particular culture and society. Indeed, a stress on the elasticity and variability of human ideas and social structures has usually been associated with political radicalism rather than with conservatism.35 Scholars who have sought to bring a period eye to bear on the ‘Knight’s Tale’ have, understandably, often focused on Chaucer’s use of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy (524 A.D.), passages from which are quoted directly by Duke Theseus in his speech to the Athenian parliament (I: 2987–3074). This was a work which Chaucer himself had translated into Middle English and was one which would have been extremely familiar to the educated people who made up Chaucer’s original audience.36 Yet, the wisdom and prudence which Theseus displays in his Boethian monologue were not regarded in the middle ages as simply the preserve of the speculative philosopher. Rather, for contemporary political theorists, prudence on the part of the individual ruler was the foundation of good government. Hence, those authors who sought to offer advice to late medieval rulers, such as Brunetto Latini, Jacobus de Cessolis, Honoré Bonet (or Bouvet), John of Wales, Christine de Pizan and the author of the De Quadripartita Regis Specie, a treatise addressed to Richard II, were naturally in agreement that kings and princes, like those engaged in any skilled craft, needed the wisdom which came from learning ‘good sciences and doctrines’—particularly of the kind on offer in their own moralizing works. Political theorists therefore taught that kings should not only be willing to learn but should also demonstrate their prudence in practice through their ability to teach wisdom to other men.37

35

Skinner, ‘Meaning’, 66–7, 286–7; Geertz, Local Knowledge, 16. It should also be added that, since the past was not organized for our convenience, the extent to which medieval culture was different from our own cannot be decided on the basis of our own present political purposes. 36 For the Boethian passages used in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, see Jefferson, Chaucer, 142–3. For references to scholars who have read the tale in this context, see Rigby, Chaucer, 34–7. 37 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 1, 198–9, 260; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 2; IV: 8; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 211; Swanson, John of Wales, 76–7; De Quadripartita Regis Specie, 23, 31, 35; Christine de Pizan, Corps de Policie, 40, 43; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 41–2, 45; Alliterative Morte Arthure, 8–6–9; de la Peña, ‘Rex Strenus’, 35, 47–50.


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Given this intellectual climate, recent interpretations of the actions and philosophy of Duke Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ have paid increasing attention to the political theory of Chaucer’s own day, a theory which was set out in contemporary ‘mirrors for princes’ (Fürstenspiegel or Speculum Principum) which offered guidance on the qualities expected of a virtuous ruler and contrasted them with the vices of which tyrants were guilty.38 A text which is ideal for this purpose is Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, which was originally composed c. 1280 for the future King Philip IV of France (1285–1314).39 Giles’s work was one of the best-known and most widely-quoted political treatises of the later middle ages, one which Jean Gerson recommended for inclusion in a model princely library. The colossal influence of the De Regimine is attested to by the fact that it is outstripped amongst medieval mirrors for princes in the number of its surviving manuscripts (around 350 manuscripts of its Latin and vernacular versions) only by the pseudoAristotelian Secretum Secretorum, an Arabic text of the tenth century or earlier which was translated into Latin in the thirteenth century and was believed in the middle ages to be by Aristotle himself.40 Giles of Rome (Aegidius Romanus—or Egidio Colonna as he was also incorrectly known by the end of the fourteenth century) was born in Rome around 1243 into a family which was prominent in politics and the Church.41 He became a member of the order of Augustinian friars and studied at Paris under Thomas Aquinas. His career suffered as a result of the 1277 condemnation by the bishop of Paris of 219 propositions of Aristotelian philosophy but he was eventually rehabilitated and rose to be the regent master of theology of his order at the university in 1285. In 1292, Giles was promoted to the position of Prior General

38 On mirrors for princes, see Born, ‘Perfect Prince’, 470–504; Eberle, ‘Mirrors’; Grassnick, ‘ “O Prince” ’; Nederman, ‘Mirror Crack’d’, 18–20, Watts, Henry VI, 54–5. 39 Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 9–10. For the complete Latin text, see Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principum (Rome, 1482). 40 Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 20–1, 150–1; Jones, Royal Policy, 154; Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 134; Canning, History, 133; Eberle, ‘Mirrors’, 435; Dunbabin, ‘Government’, 484; McAleer, ‘Giles of Rome’, 22; Nederman and Bejczy, ‘Introduction’, 3, 7; Green, Poets, 141; Nederman, ‘Opposite of Love’, 181; Political Thought in Fourteenth-Century England, 18; Scanlon, Narrative, 106. For the text(s) of the Secretum, see Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Manzalaoui; Lydgate and Burgh, Secrees of Old Philosoffres. 41 On Giles’s life and writings, see Hewson, Giles of Rome, 3–37; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 9–10; Copleston, History, II, 460–5; Blythe, Mixed Government, 60. On the link to the Colonna family, see Dyson, ‘Introduction’, xi–xix.

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of the Augustinian order, a post he held for three years until he was appointed archbishop of Bourges thanks to the backing of Pope Boniface VIII. Giles was to repay Boniface for his support in 1302 when he wrote De Ecclesiastica Potestate (On Ecclesiastical Government), a tract which vigorously defended the papal position in Boniface’s conflict with Philip IV to whom, when the latter was a young prince, Giles had addressed his De Regimine.42 Following Boniface’s death in 1303, Giles’s career suffered but he was eventually partially reconciled with Philip IV. He died in 1316. Giles wrote extensively on philosophy, natural science, theology and political theory.43 His work was the product of the mid-thirteenthcentury flowering of Aristotelian studies at the universities of Oxford and Paris. The De Regimine itself drew heavily on the translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric and On the Soul, which became available in this period, and on the reading of Aristotle’s moral and political teaching offered by Thomas Aquinas and which was developed in Giles’s own commentaries on Aristotle.44 Giles’s De Regimine was thus part of a wider systematisation and popularisation of political theory which followed the rediscovery of Aristotle’s Politics, c. 1260, in works such as Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, On Princely Government 45 and his commentary on the Ethics and the Politics, Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor (extracts from which were included in the London Liber Custumarum), and Ptolemy of Lucca’s De Regimine Principum.46 This interest in Aristotelian political thought continued into the four-

42 For Giles’s role in this conflict, see Ullmann, ‘Boniface VIII’, 75–9; Black, Political Thought, 49–52. For a modern translation of the De Ecclesiastica Potestate, see Giles of Rome’s On Ecclesiastical Power, ed. Dyson. 43 For lists of Giles’s main works, see his Theoremata de Esse et Essentia, viii; Opera Omnia, Volume I, 1/1, 237–8; Volume I, 1/3, 311–12; for editions of some of his major religious and philosophical works, see the Bibliography. 44 Canning, ‘Introduction’, 356; Canning, History, 125–6; Nederman and Bejczy, ‘Introduction’, 3; Toste, ‘Virtue’, 85; Zuccolin, ‘Princely Virtues’, 240–1; Dod, ‘Aristotles Latinus’, 46–50; Thomson, ‘Walter Burley’s Commentary’, 559. This is not to say that Giles agreed (or could be seen to agree) with Aquinas on every issue, see Robert of Orford, Reprobationes; Ullmann, ‘Boniface VIII’, 65. 45 The traditional attribution of this work to Aquinas is defended by Catto (‘Ideas’, 11) and challenged by Black (Political Thought, 22) whilst Blythe sees it as an open question (‘Introduction’, 5). For ease of reference, this work is referred to as by Aquinas below. 46 For the many other mirrors for princes of this period, see Genet, ‘General Introduction’, xii–xiii; Eberle, ‘Mirrors’, 434–5.


15

teenth century in the commentaries by scholars such as Walter Burley, Jean Buridan and Nicholas Oresme.47 However, whilst drawing explicitly on the works of Aristotle, the mirrors for princes of writers such as Giles of Rome also incorporated a much older tradition of political theory. In the twelfth century, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus (1159) a text which continued to be read in late medieval England, had, under the influence of classical authorities such as Cicero, explored themes such as the morality of individual rulers and the difference between tyranny and good lordship which were later to be taken up by Aristotelians such as Giles of Rome.48 As we shall see, even before the translation of Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics into Latin in the thirteenth century, many of his key ideas were already familiar to writers such as the authors of ‘Bracton’ via the work of writers such as Seneca, Cicero, Lactantius, Macrobius and Boethius.49 Aristotelian ideas, such as the definition of virtue as the mean between two vices, were the commonplaces even of those mirrors for princes, such as that of Walter of Milemete, which were based on the Secretum Secretorum rather than the Politics and were also adopted in legal texts such as ‘Bracton’ and the Fleta.50 The medieval tradition of mirrors for princes can be traced even further back, to those addressed to the Carolingian royal family in the ninth century, such as Jonas of Orleans’s De Institutione Regia, and to the influence of the seventh-century Pseudo-Cyprian De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi. This latter text, which was also ascribed to Origen and Augustine, presented the righteous lord as possessing the virtues of fortitude and wisdom and characterised the rex iustus as the impartial judge, as the defender of widows and orphans, as the scourge of the criminal and the immoral, and as the brave defender of his realm. It was cited in many later mirrors and was widely known

47

Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, XIV: 392–406; Black, Political Thought, 10–11, 21; Thomson, ‘Walter Burley’s Commentary’. 48 On the Policraticus, see Luscombe, ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, 325–9. For the later use of this text, see Linder, ‘John of Salisbury’s Policraticus’; Genet, ‘General Introduction’, xii; Wilks, ‘John of Salisbury’, 263; Clark, Monastic Renaissance, 144–5, 223, 261–2; Ullmann, Jurisprudence, 523–4, 530. For a contrasting view, see Theilmann, ‘Caught’, 606. 49 Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, introduction: ix–xi, I: 60, 71–3, II: 180, 184, 193, III: 91–3, XI: 3, 14–15, 24–6, XIII: 69–72, 75–6. For ‘Bracton’, see Nederman, ‘General Introduction’, 3. 50 Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 53–4; Henry Bracton, Laws; Fleta, II.

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through its incorporation into Gratian’s Decretum in the twelfth century and, eventually, into vernacular poetry.51 Moreover, as is suggested by the fact that Giles’s De Regimine was dedicated to the future Philip IV of France (G: 3), this long tradition of political theory was not simply the concern of scholars and intellectuals. Late medieval rulers themselves were certainly aware of the need to project an image of themselves as prudent and learned. Charles V of France, for instance, seems consciously to have emulated the ideal prince as described by Aristotle and Giles. He built up a large library of books which included Henri de Gauchy’s French translation of the De Regimine Principum (c. 1282) as well as vernacular translations of (and commentaries on) Aristotelian or pseudo-Aristotelian works such as the Politics, Economics and Ethics by Nicholas Oresme, these latter being described by Philippe de Mézières as ‘singularly fitting for a king’s reading’. The French translations in Charles’s library also included that of Augustine’s City of God by Raoul de Presles, that of John of Salisbury’s Policraticus by Denis Foulechat, and a new translation of Giles’s De Regimine by Jean Golein.52 The need for rulers to be learned and prudent was also a refrain of the mirrors for princes produced in England such as that addressed by Walter of Milemete to the newly-crowned Edward III (1327–77).53 Richard II (1377–99), perhaps modelling himself on Charles V, also presented himself as a ‘sage’, as a philosopher-king and did not hesitate to describe himself on the tomb which he had made for himself as ‘prudens et mundus’ (‘prudent and refined’) and ‘animo prudens ut Omerus’ (‘prudent in mind like Homer’).54 Accordingly, the authors of both the De Quadripartita Regis Specie (1390s), an adaptation of the Secretum Secretorum, and the Liber Judiciorum (1391) praised Richard II for his prudence and for the ‘wonderful splendour’ of his intellect. Such wisdom in a ruler was not only admirable in itself but also had

51 Eberle, ‘Mirrors’, 434; Dubreucq, ‘Introduction’, 51, 56–60; De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi, 33, 43–4, 51–3; Gratian, Decretum, 1229–30; Bumke, Courtly Culture, 277–8; Scattergood, Politics, 299–301. 52 Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 229 (pp. 19, 222); Dunbabin, ‘Government’, 489; Brigg’s Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 20, 32, 156, 175; Guenée, States, 29–30; Menut, ‘Introduction’, to Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 8; Foulechat, Le Policratique; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques; Oresme; Livre de Yconomique. 53 Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 34, 46. 54 Saul, Richard II, 357; Royal Commission on Historical Monuments (England): Inventory of the Historical Monuments in London, Volume I, 31.


17

the practical benefit of making his subjects more obedient to him. As Solomon had said: ‘Counsel shall keep thee, and prudence shall preserve thee’ (Proverbs 2: 6, 9–12; 4: 7–9).55 Naturally, it was precisely the claim that, in practice, Richard II lacked such prudence, for instance in refusing to take counsel so that those who sought to advise him ‘dared not speak the truth’ about the welfare of the kingdom, which was used to help justify the king’s deposition in 1399.56 It was not just late medieval kings who sought to use contemporary learning and political theory to their advantage, as can be seen from a list of the books owned by Thomas, duke of Gloucester, Richard II’s uncle and political opponent, which was compiled after his murder in 1397. Amongst the duke’s library of over eighty volumes were law books, chronicles (including Higden’s Polychronicon), a copy of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum, Vegetius on the art of war and a manuscript of Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum.57 If court culture in England was still mainly French and Latin, this period also saw, as in Charles V’s France, an attempt to translate Latin learning into the vernacular, including the Middle English prose version of Boethius by Chaucer and John Trevisa’s translations of works such as the Polychronicon, the De Proprietatibus and, as we shall see, Giles’s De Regimine itself.58 In both France and England, this learning was also put to use in the imaginative literature of the period, as can be seen in Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du Vieil Pelerin, in John Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Book VII of which provides a mirror for princes which draws on Giles’s De Regimine as well as Brunetto Latini’s Aristotelian Li Livres dou Tresor (early 1260s) and the Secretum Secretorum, and in Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, which also uses Giles and the Secretum along with Jacobus de Cessolis’s De Ludo Scaccorum.59 It has been argued that the immediate audience for the serious-minded, philosophical poetry produced by men such 55 De Quadripartita, 23, 31, 35; Ferster, Fictions, 43; Saul, Richard II, 358; Eberle, ‘Richard II’, 252–3. For a biography of John de Thorp, whom Genet proposed as author of the De Quadripartita, see Rigby, Overseas Trade, 249–52. 56 Chronicles of the Revolution, 75, 179. 57 Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture’, 34–5. 58 Coleman, English Literature, 40. 59 Minnis, ‘ “Moral Gower” ’, 71–4; Runacres, ‘Art’, 115–6; Porter, ‘Gower’s Ethical Microcosm’, 135–47; Peck, ‘Politics’, 224, 232 n.46; Simpson, Sciences, 210–12, 217–8, 226–7; Simpson, Reform, 220–1; Copeland, Rhetoric, 210, 212; Staley, Languages, 28, 36; Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, 2038–9, 2052–3, 2109–14; Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment, 85–96.

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as Gower and Chaucer was primarily made up of career diplomats, knights in royal service, civil servants, and administrators, including other writers such as Thomas Usk and John Clanvowe, rather than the peerage, whose literary tastes were more conservative. Nevertheless, Gower and Chaucer were linked to nobles such as John of Gaunt and Henry Bolingbroke, even if their works seem to have been more popular amongst the peerage in the period after Chaucer’s death in 1400. Aristocratic patronage certainly did play a key role in encouraging the ‘clerkly’ (as oppose to clerical), vernacular, didactic, moralizing culture which emerged in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.60 As its use by Gower and Hoccleve suggests, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum itself was a familiar text in the England of Chaucer’s day where it circulated widely not only in its original Latin version but also in the somewhat abridged French translation by de Gauchy.61 Watts even goes so far as to describe the literature of political theory of late medieval England, like that of contemporary France, as ‘mostly Egidian in its assumptions’.62 There are sixty surviving manuscripts of the De Regimine of English origin or provenance from the pre-Reformation period and the text was at the height of its popularity in the half century or so from c. 1380.63 There was also a Middle English version of Giles’s text, which is our main source for Giles’s views in this present study. This translation, which was far more faithful to the original Latin text than de Gauchy’s French version, was begun perhaps as early as 1388 by John Trevisa for his patron, Thomas III, Lord Berkeley, although it may only have been completed after Trevisa’s death in 1402, its sole surviving manuscript dating from between 1408 and c. 1417.64 Giles’s treatise was studied at Oxford and Cambridge but its audience was 60 Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture’, 36–41; Goodman, John of Gaunt, 37–8; Strohm, Social Chaucer, chapters 2 and 3; Strohm, Politique, 94; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 8–9; Copeland, Rhetoric, 224; Simpson, Reform, 202, 204; Green, Poets, especially chapter five. 61 Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 75–6; Ormrod, Political Life, 64. For de Gauchy’s translation of Giles, see Li Livres Du Gouvernement Des Rois, ed. Molenaer. Other French translations followed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, see Guenée, States, 29; Minnis, ‘ “I Speke of Folk in Seculer Estaat”’, 28, 30; Merisalo, ‘De la Paraphrase’; Merisalo and Talvio, ‘Gilles de Rome’. 62 Watts, Henry VI, 20–1. 63 Briggs, ‘Manuscripts’; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 14–16, 21; Somerset, Clerical Discourse, 71–2. 64 Governance of Kings and Princes, eds Fowler, Briggs and Remley. On the dating of the translation, see Fowler, Life, 120, 190–1, 199; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 84–8. On Berkeley, see Hanna, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley’.


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certainly not confined to university scholars. On the contrary, copies were also owned by William, Lord Thorp of Northampton (d. 1391), by Richard II’s tutor Sir Simon Burley (d. 1388), by Thomas, duke of Gloucester (as we have seen), and by the latter’s widow, Eleanor de Bohun (d. 1399).65 Even if it is not possible to show that Chaucer himself knew the De Regimine Principum at first hand in the way that he seems to have been acquainted with John of Salisbury’s Policraticus, the ideas which Giles expresses there were very familiar among the court circles in which the poet mixed.66 They were the commonplaces of the political thought of his day, being adopted in many other texts of the late medieval period including Gower’s Confessio and Hoccleve’s Regiment in England and Honoré Bonet’s The Tree of Battles (1387) and Christine de Pizan’s Book of the Body Politic in France.67 Chaucer would certainly have been aware of Giles’s thought indirectly, for instance through its use in the work of his friend John Gower.68 Dante also refers to Giles’s De Regimine Principum by name in his discussion of the relationship of the ages of man to the true nobility of virtue in Book IV of the Convivio, a text with which Chaucer himself was familiar and which he made use of in the discussion of ‘gentillesse’ in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ (III: 1109–38).69 It has also been suggested that Boccaccio’s Teseida, which was Chaucer’s main source for the ‘Knight’s Tale’, was directly influenced by Giles’s De Regimine. Boccaccio could have had access to the copy of Giles’s work at the library of King Robert of Anjou at Naples and the poet’s ‘revered teacher’ in Naples, Dionigi da Borgo, was a student of Giles’s thought and the heir to his role as the ‘leading representative’ of Augustinian scholasticism. Boccaccio was certainly very familiar with Aristotle’s Ethics, the main source for Giles’s discussion of the virtues in Part I

65 Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 60–2. Briggs gives Thorp’s date of death as both 1390 and 1391 (pp. 60, 166) but the latter seems to be the correct date (White, Complete Peerage, Volume XII, Part I, 728–9; Calendar of Patent Rolls, 1388–92, 394, 413; Calendar of Close Rolls, 1389–92, 257). For links between Burley and Chaucer, see Chaucer Life-Records, 339, 348–51, 360. For fifteenth-century owners of the De Regimine, see Watts, Henry VI, 55. 66 Pratt, ‘Note’, 243–6; Linder, ‘Knowledge’, 345–6. 67 Coopland, ‘Introduction’, 61; Forhan, ‘Introduction’, xxi. 68 See the references in note 000, above. 69 Dante, Convivio, IV, xxiv: 7; Boitani, ‘What Dante Meant to Chaucer’, 116, 122, 130–3.

20

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of the De Regimine, a work whose definition of virtue Chaucer himself quotes in the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women.70 Yet, despite the popularity of the De Regimine in England during the time that the Canterbury Tales were being written, Giles’s treatise has only rarely been cited in connection with Chaucer’s work.71 Indeed, whilst Nolan saw Boccaccio’s Teseida as a systematic enactment of the Aristotelian theory set out in mirrors for princes such as the De Regimine, she rejected Giles of Rome’s work as a context for an understanding of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, preferring instead to see Chaucer’s version of the story as an embodiment of Ciceronian and Stoic views.72 Nonetheless, on occasion, Chaucerian scholars have invoked Giles’s Aristotelianism as a means of making sense of particular aspects of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Burrow, for instance, uses Giles’s work on the ages of man to portray Theseus as a representation of the ideal ruler who is in the prime of life and so combines the positive aspects of both youth and old age (G: 139–49).73 Similarly, McCall cites the De Regimine in his explication of the symbolism of the temples in the amphitheatre which Theseus constructs for the tournament between Palamon and Arcite whilst Minnis offers the duke’s building works as an illustration of the virtue of magnificence as defined by writers such as Giles.74 My aim here is to develop the work of these scholars and to show how a knowledge of Giles’s ethics, economics and political theory—and of the broader political culture within which the De Regimine was a central text—throws light on a far wider range of issues within the ‘Knight’s Tale’ than has previously been realized. The starting point for an historical understanding of any literary text is the nature and abilities of its audience at the time of its composition.75 If this is the case, it may make at least as much sense to read the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in the context of a standard work of political theory from this period such as Giles’s De Regimine as it does to interpret the tale in terms of the changes which it makes to Boccaccio’s Teseida, a work which was available as

70 Nolan, Chaucer, 155, 167–8, 332 n. 50; Edwards, Before the Knight’s Tale, 175–7; Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, F: 165–6. 71 Giles’s work is briefly mentioned in Schlauch, ‘Chaucer’s Doctrine’, 139–40. 72 Nolan, Chaucer, 166, 168–9, 261. See below, 81–7. 73 Burrow, Ages of Man, 9–11; Burrow, Ricardian Poetry, 54, 116–7, 126–8; Burrow, Essays, 38–42. 74 McCall, Chaucer, 172 (n. 22, 23), 174 (nn. 28, 29); Minnis, ‘“I Speke of Folk in Seculer Estaat” ’, 52–5. 75 Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 3.


21

a touchstone of the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ to hardly any of Chaucer’s original audience.76 However, to claim that the De Regimine Principume provides a useful context within which to read the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is not to imply that Giles’s text can be seen as a consciously-intended ‘key’ to Chaucer’s meaning in the way that Astell sees the conventional medieval ordering of the seven planets and the divisions of philosophy as constituting the ‘basic ordering principle’ for the Canterbury Tales as a whole.77 On the contrary, the De Regimine focuses on a number of themes, such as the rightful sources of a ruler’s revenues (G: 74–5), which do not arise in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, just as, in turn, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ raises a range of issues which the De Regimine does not discuss at length, such as the reference to the self-sacrificing friendship displayed by Theseus in following Pirithous to the underworld (I: 1196–1200). As Lindley says, ‘there is no single key’ to the sense of Chaucer’s text but rather ‘an extraordinary number of keys’.78 However, the fact that there are many keys to Chaucer’s work does not mean that every key which critics have offered to us necessarily opens up a door to Chaucer’s meaning. Whilst the ‘Knight’s Tale’, like any other text, is open to many persuasive readings, there are still some that are less plausible and less satisfactory than others.79 That the De Regimine Principum is far from constituting a single master-key to the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is evident from the fact that Giles’s work, like most mirrors for princes, it itself a space where a multiplicity of discourses intersect. Its contents thus range from ideas about the composition of the human soul to theories about the structure of the cosmos, from teachings about the nature of a good marriage to advice about the detail of the ruler’s conduct in time of war. As a result, although it is a work on the ‘government of princes’, the teachings which Giles offers to the ruler in the De Regimine are much wider in scope than modern conceptions of political theory, ranging as they do from individual morality, through social ideology to an overarching cosmology. It is this very breadth of Giles’s outlook which allows his

76 Burrow, Essays, 29. This is not to reject the utility of a comparison between the Teseida and the ‘Knight’s Tale’, an approach which, as we shall see below, also reveals much about the intellectual context in which Chaucer was writing. 77 Astell, Chaucer, 221–2, 228. 78 Lindley, ‘ “Vanysshed” ’, 100–2. 79 Skinner, ‘Meaning’, 63, 303 n. 198; Skinner, ‘Motives’, 68; Eco, ‘Reply’, 141.

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work to function as a comprehensive framework within which to assess the virtue of Chaucer’s Duke Theseus and the legitimacy of his polity. If Giles’s De Regimine does not provide the master-key to the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, it does provide us with a means of access to a much broader political culture. It exemplifies a way of characterising the virtues and vices of princes and tyrants which was found in many medieval political treatises, which informed a number of contemporary works of imaginative literature known to Chaucer, including Boccaccio’s Teseida and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and which, as we shall see, does much to illuminate the meaning of Chaucer’s own poetry. To read Chaucer’s work in the context of late medieval political theory does not require us to see the culture or society of fourteenthcentury England as harmonious, monolithic or uniform: a period which witnessed the Peasants’ Revolt, the birth of Lollardy and the deposition of two crowned kings could hardly be portrayed as such. Nevertheless, this period can be seen as being characterised by the existence of a ‘sprawling ideology of kingship’ which provided the shared conceptual framework, common understandings, familiar terms and shared principles which underlay the discussion contemporary of political life—even of those who found themselves in opposing political camps.80 We are now more likely to see this framework in terms of a ‘dominant’ or (more accurately) ‘official’ ideology than as an expression of what Robertson referred to as the ‘medieval mind’—although Robertson’s work itself did much to illuminate the nature of this ideology.81 The important point is that there was a familiar if—as we shall see—flexible ‘language’ (or cluster of overlapping and interacting languages) within which the political matters of the day were discussed. This language, idiom, doxa, ideology, set of norms, discourse or normative vocabulary, what Mehl calls ‘les lois d’une grammaire royale’, was characterised by a shared set of implicit assumptions and explicit arguments and by common modes of reasoning and expression along with the use of familiar Biblical, patristic and classical intertexts.82

80 Watts, Henry VI, 13–14, 51, 53, 57; Simpson, Reform, 202; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 107–9. 81 Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer, 265; Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 112. On the problems of the term ‘dominant’ ideology, see below, 282–8. 82 Pocock, ‘Texts’, 25–8; Pocock, Politics, 25–8; Pocock, ‘Reconstruction’, 959–60, 964–5, 969–72, 974–6; Pocock, Virtue, 2–3, 7–12; Coleman, ‘Science’, 183–4; Skinner, Foundations, xi; Black, ‘Political languages’, 315–7; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 150. See also Guidry, ‘Parliament of Gods’, 141.


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It is a political language, culture and, above all, morality to which Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum is an extremely useful point of entry. For Giles, the ‘gouernans of prynces’ was concerned with the ‘doyng and dedes of mankynde’ and so was a part of the science of morals. He adopted the standard medieval division of moral science into three main branches: ethics (‘ethica and monastica’), which deal with the prudence needed for a man to rule himself; economics (‘iconomyk’), which discusses the kind of prudence required for a man to rule his household; and politics (‘politica’), which treats of the prudence involved in to ruling a city or realm in time of peace and of war (G: 6–8, 394–7).83 This division formed the basis of the structure of the De Regimine which, accordingly, is divided into three books. The first of these is pitched at a rather high level of abstraction in which the ruler is advised to embrace virtue and to eschew vice (G: 122, 125), whilst the second and third pass on to a more detailed examination of how such virtue should be exercised in the prince’s rule of others through his rightful ordering of his household and his government of the realm. Medieval ‘political’ theory was thus not only concerned with government in a narrow or modern sense but rather regarded ethics as the foundation of politics and presented ‘economics’ as a form of dominion. It is this division of Giles’s subject-matter into ethics, economics and politics which structures the thematic commentary on Duke Theseus’s governance and teachings offered here. Part I of this book assesses the duke’s rule of the self in terms of Giles’s discussion of the Aristotelian virtues (Chapter One) and of his account of the passions and of the different ‘manners’ of the young and the old (Chapter Two). Part II then looks at Theseus in terms of his rule of others. Chapter Three examines the duke’s conduct in relation to the issues of gender, the family and the household raised in Giles’s ‘economics’, whilst Chapter Four asks whether the duke’s exercise of political power reveals him to be a ‘true’ king or a tyrant in the sense that these terms were understood within medieval political theory. For many medieval thinkers, including Giles 83 For this three-fold division, see Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, II: 185–88; Copleman, ‘Science’, 185; Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, II: 19; Albertus Magnus, Questions, 164–5; Aquinas, Ethics, 6; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 1649–1710; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 4; Aquinas, Commentary on the Ethics, 276; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 124; Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 8–7–8; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 338, 345; Olsson, ‘Securitas’, 144; Bejczy, ‘Concept’, 25–6; Nederman, ‘Opposite’, 192; Blythe, Ideal Government, 119; Brown-Grant, French Romance, 20.

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of Rome himself, the good rule of the self and of society should be modelled on the rightful order of the natural world as a whole. Part III of this book therefore turns its attention to the cosmography and philosophy set out in the duke’s Boethian ‘First Mover’ speech with which the ‘Knight’s Tale’ concludes and asks whether the speech demonstrates the prudence which writers such as Giles demanded of a prince or whether it shows him to be a self-interested opportunist (Chapter Five). Finally, the Conclusion of the book seeks to link critical debates about the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ with some of the more general methodological issues involved in interpreting Chaucer’s work as an engagement with the ethical, social and political issues of his own time. In particular, does Chaucer’s work reproduce the dominant ideology of late medieval England or does his work, as literature, manage in some way to subvert the official social and political values of his day?

PART I

ETHICS: THE GOOD RULE OF THE SELF

CHAPTER ONE

THE ‘KNIGHT’S TALE’ AS ETHICS: THE ARISTOTELIAN VIRTUES Vertu is the mene, as Etik seith Chaucer, The Legend of Good Women, F: 165–6

i. Chaucer’s Theseus: an Exemplar of Virtue? Despite the contradictory interpretations which critics have offered of Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, they have at least been in agreement that the duke’s personal morality must be central to any assessment of whether Chaucer presents him to us as an ideal ruler or as a tyrant.1 Certainly, in a political system such as that of late medieval England where the personal role of the king was fundamental, the individual virtue of the ruler was inevitably a key issue.2 This was most obviously true for those, including Richard II himself, who favoured a ‘descending’ concept of power in which the ruler was seen as, in a sense, separate from the rest of the political community, being appointed by and answerable to God. For those who adopted this viewpoint, the ideal form of government was, as Dunbabin puts it, one of ‘autocracy tempered by conscience’. As Gower said, in addressing the king: ‘While all things are permissible to you, do not seek to permit yourself all things’. However, an emphasis on the king’s personal morality was also common amongst those who favoured an ‘ascending’ concept of power in which the ruler is regarded as part of, and so as in some sense responsible to, the political community. After all, if a good king was one who listened to wise counsel, this still required a prudence on his part in selecting councillors and in deciding which of their many

1 It should be stressed that what is at issue is whether or not Chaucer presented Theseus as an ideal ruler, not whether modern critics themselves approve of the duke’s actions. 2 On late medieval kingship, see Ormrod, Political Life, 61–83; Harris, ‘Introduction’; Hicks, English Political Culture, 28–50.

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competing counsels he should follow.3 Accordingly, when those who deposed Richard II in 1399 attempted to justify their actions, they did so not only in terms of their condemnation of the king’s specific policies, such as his illegal reappointment of sheriffs beyond their one-year term of office, but also in terms of his character and morality. Whereas for Gower’s Confessio Amantis truth and constancy were the chief virtues of a king, the Articles of Deposition claimed that Richard had been ‘variable and dissimulating in both word and letter, and so inconstant in his behaviour . . . that virtually no living person who came to know him could or wished to trust him’.4 In a sense, the question confronting the members of England’s political community in 1399 was not whether or not they agreed or disagreed with the particular policies which Richard had pursued but rather whether they were willing to continue putting their faith in the king himself. It was this view of politics as based on the personal ethics of the ruler which provided the foundation of Giles of Rome’s political theory and with which he began Part I of Book I of De Regimine Principum. For Giles, whilst more wisdom is needed to rule the members of a household than to rule only one’s self and yet more wisdom still is needed to rule a city or realm, good ‘economic’ and ‘political’ rule are nonetheless grounded in the ‘ethical’ self-rule of the individual, since to rule others, one must first rule one’s self, so that temperate reason overcomes the intemperate appetites and lusts of the flesh (G: 7–8, 50).5 Indeed, the ethical advice contained in Giles’s treatise was not simply intended for political rulers but was also presented as useful for any man who would ‘make himself worthi’ to be a king or a prince (G: 7–11, 168, 224).6 It is for this reason that Giles’ De Regimine is of particular importance for

3 Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 8 (p. 234); Watts, Henry VI, 25–8, 77. On the ‘descending’ and ‘ascending’ concepts of power, see Ullmann, History, 12–13, 31, 54, 57, 148, 154, 159–60, 203, 208–9, 212, 214; Ullmann, Principles, 20–1; Dunbabin, ‘Aristotle’, 73; Dunbabin, ‘Government’, 484, 487; Black, Political Thought, 154; Valente, Theory, 13–14; Rigby, ‘Urban “Oligarchy”’, 65; Skinner, Foundations, I, 47–8, 60; Rigby, ‘Society and Politics’, 40–5; Black, Political Thought, 154; Theilmann, ‘Caught’, 608–11, 617. In practice, the real issue in medieval political life was how to reconcile or balance these two seemingly conflicting principles. See Blythe, Ideal Government, passim; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 157. 4 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 1723–77; Record and Process, article 25 (p. 180). 5 See also Aquinas, Ethics, 1207; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, I: 3; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 8 (p. 234); Bonet, Tree of Battles, 211; Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 32–3, 51; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 154. 6 See Gower, Vox Clamantis, VII: 17 (p. 275).

the ‘knight’s tale’ as ethics

29

an assessment of the behaviour of Chaucer’s Duke Theseus. After all, given its focus on the conflict between Palamon and Arcite and the way in which Theseus seeks to control the two youths, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is not really concerned with the detail of the ‘practical way’ in which the duke governs Athens.7 It does not, for instance, tell us whether the duke has forbidden usury or has employed spies to check up on his subjects’ sources of income as the De Regimine recommends a ruler to do (G: 268–71, 350–1). Nonetheless, in exploring Theseus’s conduct, the tale does address many of the ethical issues which Giles saw as central to good government, making the De Regimine a useful yardstick by which the morality of the duke’s actions can be judged. If ethics was central to medieval discussions of politics then, in turn, it was a commonplace of medieval literary theory that literature itself pertains to ethics: ethice subponitur. Accordingly, writers such as Chaucer (I: 798) and Gower sought not only to offer the literary delights of ‘solaas’ and ‘lust’ but also the wisdom of ‘sentence’ and ‘lore’. 8 Boccaccio’s Teseida, upon which Chaucer based the ‘Knight’s Tale’, is itself a classic example of this conception of the purpose of literature, bringing together the three themes of ‘security, love and virtue’, which are achieved via ‘valiance in arms, the inspiration of love and right direction of the will’, which Dante had seen as the most worthy of being celebrated in the new vernacular poetry which he called for in his De Vulgari Eloquentia.9 If the authors and literary theorists of the middle ages saw ethics as central to the purpose of literature and if medieval political theorists regarded individual virtue as the basis of good government, then it is precisely in terms of his personal virtue and ethics that Theseus has been seen as defective by those who interpret the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as a critique of the duke. For instance, whereas Giles urged rulers to be prudent and wise, scholars have seen Theseus as well-intentioned but deluded or even as cynically opportunistic in his optimistic claims about the beneficent order which underlies the cosmos; whereas Giles argues that rulers should possess the virtue of justice, the fairness of Theseus’s decisions

7

Benson, ‘Literary Contests’, 131. Gower, Confessio Amantis, Prologue: 12–19; Richard of Bury, Philobiblon, 104–9; Minnis, Medieval Literary Theory, 13; Aers, Piers Plowman, 52–9; Allen, Ethical Poetic, 6–11, 18, 217, 288, 293. 9 Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia II.ii (pp. 39–40). See also Boccaccio, Teseida, 365; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 328–9; Edwards, Before the Knight’s Tale, 14–16. 8

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has been challenged and his philosophy seen as promoting a quietist acceptance of injustice; whereas Giles’s ideal prince should demonstrate the virtue of magnificence in his works, Theseus’s lavish spending has been seen as a questionable and decadent exercise of power and wealth; whereas Giles’s model ruler should display his virtue in relation to the receipt of honours, Theseus has been judged as lacking in magnanimity and as indulging in vainglory; whereas Giles recommends a ruler to be moderate in his enjoyment of recreation, Theseus’s devotion to hunting is reminiscent of the extreme of appetite and bloodlust which for medieval moralists was represented by the tyrannical Nimrod.10 Even when Theseus has been seen as exemplary in his virtue, critics have not necessarily accepted the relevance of the Aristotelian ethics set out in works such as Giles of Rome’s De Regimine for an understanding of him. In particular, Nolan sees the duke as embodying the ideals of Ciceronian and Senecan Stoicism rather than the Aristotelian virtues.11 We need to ask, then, whether Chaucer’s Theseus exercises the wisdom, virtue and self-restraint which the authors of mirrors for princes recommended to their princely audiences or whether he is guilty of the surrender to vice which medieval political theorists saw as characteristic of the tyrant. If Theseus is to be seen as a virtuous ruler, does he exemplify a Stoic, rather than an Aristotelian, political morality? ii. The Aristotelian Virtues in Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum In examining the individual self-rule which is the basis of all other forms of rulership, Giles’s constant refrain was that rulers should be superior to other men in their morals since their virtue is the key to the moral health of the entire realm (G: 17, 31, 97, 119, 132, 136–8, 211–12, 220, 332–3, 336–7, 382, 385). Because the effects of the ruler’s actions are more widely felt than those of other men and because kings should be superior to other men in their morals, what may be perfectly legitimate for those of lower rank (such as making a living

10 Blake, ‘Order’, 14; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 188, 191; Burrow, Ricardian Poetry, 129; Phillips, Introduction, 52; Neuse, ‘Knight’, 252; Ferster, Chaucer, 33; La Farge, ‘Women’, 70–1; Aers, Chaucer, 28, 32; Sherman, ‘Politics’, 96–8; Marvin, Hunting Law, 65–6. 11 Nolan, Chaucer, 250, 261.


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from waged-work, trade, a craft or a profession) may be prohibited to them. Rather, kings should aspire (with the help of God) to be demigods (‘half-gods’), in the sense that they should surpass other men not only in their might and dignity but also in their exemplary virtue and wisdom (G: 106–10, 141, 225, 265–73; 343, 351, 380, 385; OEG: 69, 339). True human felicity is to be found not in fleeting external goods, which are characteristically over-valued by the rich, such as health, beauty, riches, worship, fame or might, but rather in the true nobility of inner virtue, in prudence, charity and reason (DA: III.10; G: 27–30, 35–7, 41, 104–5, 138, 190, 369–71). For Giles, virtue can be seen as a form of hierarchy in which our bodies, the aspect of our nature which we share as humans with the beasts, are ruled by the reason which we share with the angels (G: 35–6, 138, 190, 369–71). Like a long line of Christian thinkers and poets, from Augustine and Boethius through John of Salisbury and the author of the Fasciculus Morum to Gower and Hoccleve, Giles therefore presented sin as a form of disorder, as an inversion of the rightful relationship which should exist between reason and the body, between the spiritual and the material, and between the human and the animal (G: 12–13, 73–4, 130–2; OEG: 9).12 If morality was seen as central to politics then, conversely, virtue itself was presented in political terms. For Giles, as for Augustine, man is rightfully subject to God and the flesh is rightfully subject to the soul so that, in sinning, the body, i.e. the ‘inferior’ or ‘servant’, ‘rebels against the soul’, disobediently rises up against the ‘lord’ whom it is ‘appointed to serve’ as its superior and perfection and chooses a new lord for itself so that it becomes a servant of sin (OEG: 41, 93, 105–7, 323, 357).13 As a result, whilst Giles’s De Regimine gives much practical advice to the ruler, for instance about how to win the love of his subjects by being liberal in the giving of gifts or how to abate internal strife by invoking the fear of external threats (G: 332, 349–50), 12 For this view, see also Augustine, City of God, I: 16 (p. 26); I: 24 (pp. 35–6); XII: 24 (p. 502); XIII: 13 (pp. 522–3); XIII: 24 (p. 542); XIV: 15 (pp. 575–6); XIV: 24 (p. 586); XIX: 4 (pp. 854–5); XXII: 21 (p. 1064); Boethius, Consolation, IV, pr. III; IV, m. III; John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 1, VIII: 12: VIII: (pp. 11–12, 365, 400–1); Fasciculus Morum, 515; Gower, Vox Clamantis, V, 10: 651–2; VII, 21: 1170–9; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 363; Chaucer, ‘Parson’s Tale’ (X: 260–8); Hoccleve, Regiment, 5090–5103. 13 Giles of Rome, Tractatus de Peccato Originali, ff. 3–4, 14; Giles of Rome, In Quosdam Aristotelis Metaphysicorum Locos Questiones, Book 1, Question 1; Augustine, City of God, XII: 1 (p. 472); XIII: 3 (p. 513); XIII: 13 (pp. 522–3); XIII: 20 (p. 534); XIV: 11–12 (pp. 569–71); XIV: 15 (pp. 575–6); XV: 22 (p. 637); XIX: 27 (p. 893); Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 143, 363–4.

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its main point is that the ruler’s own personal interests go hand-inhand with the need to govern virtuously and wisely. Rather than seeing self-interest as qualifying the ruler’s virtue or advising the opportunist pursuit of expediency at the expense of principle, Giles, like Gower, presented the prince’s pragmatic goal of ensuring his own safety as being best served when he himself actively pursues a moral course and seeks the common profit of his subjects: ‘if the regne is saaf, the kyng is saaf’ (G: 118–9, 149, 340–1, 345, 348, 351).14 In setting out the moral qualities required of a ruler in Part II of Book I of the De Regimine, Giles employs the Aristotelian definition of virtue as the mean between two opposing vices (NE: II, vi: 9–17; II, ix: 1–2; G: 42, 62–3, 65, 98, 131, 136, 284–5), a definition which was adopted by many medieval authors, including Chaucer and Gower.15 Temperance, for instance, is said to be the virtuous mean between, on the one hand, an excessive enjoyment of food and drink and, on the other, the insufficiency of nourishment which would lead to death (G: 154–6). For Giles, virtue, reason, prudence and justice are, in a sense, all one, so that those who lack one virtue will tend to lack all of them (G: 41, 103–4).16 Nevertheless, despite this interdependence of the virtues, Giles did analytically differentiate a number of separate forms of virtue. Traditionally, theologians and preachers had often classified seven major virtues: the four ‘active’ or cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, temperance and justice (Wisdom 8: 7), and the three theological or ‘contemplative’ virtues of faith, hope and charity (1 Corinthains 14 Ferster, Chaucer, 33; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 14 (p. 243); Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3073–4. See also Jonas of Orleans, De Instituto Regia, 212–4. 15 For the mean as the central principle of Aristotle’s ethics and politics, see Eurigenis, ‘Doctrine’. For Chaucer, see Legend of Good Women, F: 165–6, Troilus and Criseyde, I: 687–9 and the ‘Parson’s Tale’ (X: 833); for Gower, see Confessio Amantis, V: 7641–3. For Boethius’s recommendation to ‘occupye the mene’, see the Consolation, and Boece, IV, pr. 7: 50. See also John of Salisbury (who ascribed the doctrine of the mean to Horace), Frivolities, III: 3; VIII: 2, 6, 8, 12, 13 (pp. 157–8, 300, 321, 337–8, 371–2, 374); Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 38, 289; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 242; Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 21, 43, 93–103; Aquinas, Ethics, 261–2, 309–25; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 151–4, 194; Romance of the Rose, 173; Roman de la Rose, 11245; Dante, Convivio, IV, xvii: 14; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 161–2; Sullivan, ‘Justice’, 128. 16 For the idea of the virtues as being bound up with each other or as reducible to justice, see NE: II, vi: 6; V, i: 15; Cicero, On Duties, II: 35 (pp. 75–6); Latini, Book of the Treasure, 148, 198–9; Sheridan, ‘Introduction’, 21; Burrow, Reading, 49–50; Zuccolin, ‘Princely Virtues’, 247; Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 108 n. 61. Aquinas (Disputed Questions, 80–93, 250–9) and Oresme (Livre de Ethiques, 360–1) also discussed whether the virtues can be distinguished from each other and whether the possession of one virtue implies the possession of all of them.


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13: 13).17 Giles, by contrast, followed Aristotle in distinguishing twelve main virtues: the four cardinal ones along with liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, proper ambition (‘honoris amatiua’), gentleness (‘mansuetudo’), friendliness (‘affabilitas’), truthfulness (‘apericio’, and proper amusement (‘eutrapelia’) (G: 40).18 Consequently, whilst Chaucer’s Parson includes magnanimity and magnificence as two branches of fortitude in his seven-fold division of the virtues (X: 731, 735), these constitute two separate virtues amongst Giles’s twelve.19 Of course, sapientia and fortitudo, the ‘wysdom’ and ‘chivalrie’ for which the Knight praises Duke Theseus (I: 865), had been seen as the general virtues required of a hero or of a prince long before Giles of Rome had urged rulers to achieve the virtues of prudence and fortitude.20 Isidore of Seville, for instance, had defined a heroic or epic poem as one which ‘narrates stories and deeds of brave men’, heroes being defined as those who are not only brave but also wise.21 This combination of fortitudo et sapientia was a standard topos of late antique and medieval literature as in Fulgentius’s commentary on the Aeneid which claims that ‘all perfection depends in manliness of body and wisdom of mind’ or the description of Arthur in Wace’s Roman de Brut as both ‘pruz’ and ‘sages’.22 The Knight himself in the ‘General Prologue’ to the Canterbury Tales is described as being both ‘worthy’ as a crusading warrior and also as ‘wys’ (I: 68). Nevertheless, whilst it was the heir to much older ways of conceiving of virtue, Giles’s Aristotelian summa of

17

Mâle, Religious Art, 112; Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, 52–62; John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV, 12 (pp. 58–9); Book of Vices and Virtues, 121–5; Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 84, 220, 259, 271; Aquinas, Ethics, 336–7; Palmer, Seneca’s De Remediis Fortuitorum, 8–9; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 145, 198, 272–5; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 277; Lull, Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, 90–108; Nolan, Chaucer, 167. 18 Giles thus excludes from his list of virtues those dispositions of the soul which, although they incline us to virtue, do not actually constitute virtues in themselves. These include ‘eubulia’ and ‘synosis’, by which we know a virtue and then choose to adopt it (NE: II, iv: 3), which are ‘annexed’ to the virtue of prudence; continency and perseverance, which are dispositions to virtue; and ‘eroyca’, which is a god-like virtue and thus above human virtue (G: 108, 111–12). 19 Dante read Aristotle as listing eleven moral virtues, seeing prudence as an intellectual, rather than a moral, virtue (NE, VI, iii–viii, xiii, G: 37), even though, without prudence, the moral virtues ‘could not exist’ (Convivio, IV, xvii: 2–15). See also Aquinas, Ethics, 1161–1287. 20 de La Peña, ‘Rex Strenus Valde’, 35, 47–9; Curtius, European Literature, 171–8; Kaske, ‘Sapientia’, 423–6. 21 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, I.39.9. 22 Fulgentius, Exposition, 122; Wace, Roman de Brut, 11064; Alliterative Morte Arthure, 530–7.

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the virtues and their subdivisions does provide us with a detailed and wide-ranging catalogue of human behaviour by which the actions of a ruler such as Chaucer’s Duke Theseus can be judged. iii. Prudence Given the centrality of hierarchy to Giles’s ethical and social outlook, it is hardly surprising that he ranked the virtues themselves in a hierarchical order. Whilst adopting Aristotle’s twelve-fold classification of the virtues, Giles still retained the traditional definition, one often associated with Cicero’s On Duties (De Officiis), of four as cardinal in the sense that they are the foundations of all the virtues.23 These four are prudence, which allows us to make rational and rightful inner moral choices; justice, which makes us perform rightful deeds; temperance, which moderates the passions; and fortitude, which prevents us from withdrawing from goodness (G: 41, 45–6). For Giles, the virtues which contribute to the common good are superior to those which only profit the individual (NE: I, ii: 8) and, of these, he followed Aquinas in seeing prudence, which rules all the other virtues, as the prime virtue (G: 46–7, 68).24 As Walter of Milemete later put it, the wisdom of the king ‘is the perfection of the kingdom’.25 Characteristically, Giles scholastically sub-divided the primary virtue of prudence into eight different aspects. Firstly, in order to rule prudently, i.e., to govern himself and others so as to achieve good ends, a king needs ‘memory’, remembrance of the past, since although the past itself cannot be changed, it teaches us moral lessons, provides experience about what preserves and undermines a kingdom, and offers some 23 Cicero, On Duties, I: 15 (p. 7). Isidore of Seville assigns the definition of the four cardinal virtues to Socrates (Etymologies, II.24.5), see Plato, Republic, IV: 427 (p. 138) and Book of Vices and Virtues, 123. The four cardinal virtues are also listed by Solomon in Wisdom 8: 7 (Book of Vices and Virtues, 122; Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 84). See also Bejczy, ‘Concept of Political Virtue’, 9; Hohlstein, ‘Clemens Princeps’, 206; Mâle, Religious Art, 112; Owst, Literature, 183–4. 24 Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 105; Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 324; Zuccolin, ‘Princely Virtues’. 249–50. Brunetto Latini also saw wisdom and prudence as the foundation of all the virtues although the need for moderation also means that we should not be ‘too clever’ (Book of the Treasure, 198, 215). See also Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 15 (p. 244); Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 51–4; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 120–4; Watts, Henry VI, 23–4, 34, 58–9. 25 Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 34, 52. See also Prose Life of Alexander, 8.


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guidance as to the future. Those who enjoy power should be therefore be ‘studious’ in learning how to rule well, not only by studying what philosophers (including Giles himself) had said about the art of ruling but also by acquiring a knowledge of the praiseworthy deeds of their predecessors and about ‘how cytees were ireweled in olde tyme’ (G: 51–3, 155, 227, 245, 286, 297, 351). Memory was therefore presented by many writers as central to the cultivation of moral virtue. Gower’s Confessio, for instance, sees ‘proper remembrance’ is a faculty which it is crucial for a ruler to possess if he is to maintain his kingdom and to escape the tyranny of unrestrained will.26 The reading of many late medieval kings and nobles certainly suggests that they were keen to be seen as having a knowledge of the ‘storehouse of practical exempla’ and moral lessons which works of history provided. As Philippe de Commynes was to put it in the fifteenth century: ‘all books are valueless unless they bring a recollection of things past’.27 The second of Giles’s eight aspects of prudence is foresight, which a ruler needs in order to see the good end to which he should bring his subjects and so that he can ‘ordeyne remedye agenste thinges that may myshappe’.28 Third, a ruler needs understanding so that he is aware of the good laws, customs and usages that are the ‘principles and premises’ for good works and deeds. Fourth, he then needs reason so that he can work out the actions and ends that follow from these principles and premises. Fifth, to rule well, a prince needs to ‘haue mynde and knowe and be war’ (i.e. vigilant). Sixth, as no man can possibly think by himself of all the things that are profitable for the realm, the ruler, whilst teaching virtue to his subjects by his own example, should also be willing to learn from other people. Rather than just hoping for the best, as children tend to do, the ruler should take advice from many others.29 He should particularly listen to those older and wise ‘barons’ who love the realm, as Henry IV promised to do on taking the throne in 1399, because those who are noble and mighty are often well disposed

26 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 156; Peck, Kingship, 1–6, 31, 55, 58, 82. See also Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 14593–14604; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 12–13, 200. 27 Green, Poets, 135–9; Strack, ‘Piety’, pp. 271–4; Keen, Chivalry, 111; Watts, Henry VI, 56. 28 See also Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 34. 29 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 200. For the king’s laws as leading his subjects to virtue, see Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 347.

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to learn and to acquire wisdom.30 Seventh, a ruler needs ‘experiencia, redy assay’ with which he adapts to the diversity of people with whom he has to deal. Different people require different kinds of treatment, as when a teacher adopts different forms of teaching and punishment depending upon the character of the particular children in his charge. The final aspect of prudence is the ‘caucio, redy warnesse’ by which a ruler distinguishes those things which are truly good from those which only seem so at first sight (G: 51–54, 124, 150–4, 203, 227, 350–3). Given the emphasis on the ruler’s need for prudence both in mirrors for princes and in the wider political culture of the day (see above, 16–17), an assessment of whether or not Theseus possessed this primary virtue is vital for any assessment of his rulership. Chaucer’s Theseus can certainly be seen as embodying many of the attributes of prudence specified in Giles’s De Regimine. For instance, he possesses an ability to remember and to learn moral lessons from the past (G: 51–2, 297), as is shown by the historical exempla with which he decorates the temples in the amphitheatre where Palamon and Arcite are to fight.31 The temple of Venus, for instance, contains on its walls depictions of King Solomon, whose love of many foreign women led him to follow ‘strange gods’, his idolatry being punished by God with the eventual division of his kingdom (3 Kings 11: 1–12), and of Turnus, whose love of Lavinia led, as the Aeneid showed, to a war in which Turnus himself, along with many others, was killed.32 In turn, just as Chaucer’s Duke Theseus personifies Giles’s advice that rulers should prudently learn from the example of the past so the ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself provides us with a lesson about how cities were ruled ‘in olde tyme’ (G: 297), one which is welcomed by its audience, particularly the ‘gentils’ amongst them, as ‘a noble storie/ And worthy for to drawen to memorie’ (I: 3111–13). As a prudent ruler, Theseus seeks not only to have remembrance of the past but also foresight of what is to come, so as to guard against future dangers and to lead his people to virtue. It is in this spirit, for instance, that Theseus arranges the combat between Palamon and Arcite for the hand of Emily: ‘Lo, heere youre ende of that I shall devyse’ . . . ‘This is your ende and youre conclusioun’ (I: 1844, 1869). Fifty weeks later, 30

Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 415. Olson, ‘Chaucer’s Epic Statement’, 72–3. 32 Chaucer, House of Fame, 451–8; Virgil, Aeneid, Books VII and XII. See also Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies, I: 48. 31


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when the tournament, in the form of a mêlée, is held, Theseus mercifully ordains that it should be fought in a way which seeks to avoid the shedding of ‘gentil blood’ (I: 2537–64).33 Of course, Theseus is only human, so that eventually his plans are undone by something which, from a human perspective, appears to be an accident, when Arcite is killed by being thrown from his horse (I: 2684–90, 2703). Nevertheless, Theseus’s arrangment of the combat does still presents a contrast with the tournament in Boccaccio’s Teseida, one which results in nine deaths.34 Thus, although he is not omnipotent, neither is Chaucer’s Theseus helpless in the face of events. Rather, in seeking to pacify the murderous quarrel between Palamon and Arcite, he shows himself to be a virtuous ruler who seeks to contain division and disorder, a task which demands ‘unremitting dedication, even though men’s best efforts to procure justice and order in society are doomed to frustration’.35 As Giles said, nearly all the doings of mankind involve some degree of peril; all we can do is to seek to avoid those that are most likely to put us in danger (G: 332). The emphasis on suffering and chaos in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ has been seen as undermining the Knight’s own explicit ideal of order. In fact, it was precisely because the sublunary world was seen as a realm which was so liable to disorder that the effort of those, such as Theseus, to limit such confusion was regarded as admirable and virtuous.36 Many of the other aspects of prudence as defined by Giles are exemplified by Theseus’s deeds and teachings. For instance, when Theseus encounters Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove, he first condemns them to death but then pardons them on the grounds that they have contritely confessed their fault (I: 1706–1825). Scholars have been critical of Theseus’s change of heart, seeing it as motivated by selfishness and egotism rather than reason.37 Yet, in fact, Theseus here can be seen to possess the ‘experiencia’ which Giles calls on rulers to demonstrate in adjusting their behaviour to particular circumstances and people

33 On the mêlée, see Kaeuper, War, 200; Barber, Tournaments, p. 2; Keen, Chivalry, 206–7; Lester, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 461, 465; Bumke, Courtly Culture, 251–60; Boulton, Knights, 12–13. 34 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 261–2; Boccaccio, Teseida, 341–4; Hieatt, Chaucer, 29–30. 35 Markus, ‘Latin Fathers’, 110. Rayner, Image, 126–7. 36 Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 533–40; Kempton, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 251; Ganim, ‘Chaucerian Ritual’, 65, 76–7. 37 Ferster, Chaucer, 31–3; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 181–2.

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(G: 53). As the duke says, an accused man who is ‘in repentaunce and drede’, as Palamon and Arcite show themselves to be, should be treated differently from one who remains ‘proud’ and ‘despitous’: ‘That lord hath litel of discrecioun,/ That in swich cas kan no divisioun/ But weyeth pride and humblesse after oon’ (I: 1773–1781). As we shall see in Chapters Four and Five, Duke Theseus’s prudence is perhaps most apparent in the moral and cosmological teachings set out in the ‘First Mover’ speech which he delivers at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Here, however, rather than focusing on the content of the duke’s speech, it is what his speech reveals about the more general qualities of mind which Giles recommends in a ruler which is of interest to us. For instance, in his speech the duke not only shows his understanding of the principles of good government but also, as Giles advises, demonstrates an ability to draw practical conclusions from them, as when he seals the peace between Athens and Thebes with the marriage of Emily and Palamon. His willingness to learn from others is also evident when he takes counsel on these matters from his ‘parlement’, ‘conseil’ and ‘baronage’ (I: 2970, 3076, 3096) (see also below, 193–5). In this way, his speech reveals his ability both to learn and to teach, as is also seen when he first assimilates and then passes on to his subjects the consolatory wisdom of his father, Egeus, about the inevitability of death (I: 2843–52, 3027–46). That Theseus, a man of action and mighty conqueror, should be able to turn his hand to cosmological philosophising may seem rather surprising but, as we have seen, the need for such prudence and wisdom on the part of rulers was a medieval commonplace. If, as Giles argued, self-rule is the foundation of virtuous kingship and prudence is the key to virtue then it is crucial that ‘kynges and princes be prudentes’ (G: 49). Certainly, Theseus was to be hailed by Lydgate for his ‘prudence’, ‘wisdam’ and ‘discrecion’ whilst, in his defeat of the Minotaur, Boccaccio saw him as an allegory of the ‘prudent man’ who, with the help of virility (represented by Ariadne), overcomes vice.38

38 Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 65, 118, 122; Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, IV: X. See also Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, II: 124.


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iv. Justice The second of the cardinal virtues is justice which, for Giles, is the foundation of any enduring polity (G: 57–61, 68; see Proverbs 14: 34). Just as the law itself is like a ruler so, in turn, a judge or a ruler is himself justice personified or ‘souled lawe’ (NE: V, iv: 7). He should therefore prove himself worthy of his status by governing justly and by observing justice in his own person. As goodness is most apparent when it is exercised in relation to other people, it follows that justice, which itself exists in relation to others, is the ‘most cleer’ or evident virtue so that it is particularly seemly that it should be kept by kings and princes: ‘office will show a man’ (NE: V, i: 15–16).39 Similarly, just as a ruler’s virtues have a greater impact than those of other men, so his unjust deeds are worse than those of others since they too affect more people (G: 55, 60–2). Giles distinguishes three aspects of justice. The first is ‘justicia legalis’, by which subjects are obedient to the law so that virtue is encouraged (as when a law against adultery requires temperance on the part of a spouse (NE: V, i: 15–20)) and the common good is maintained. Without ‘iusticia legalis’ there would be ‘no ordre’ and the realm would not endure but would be destroyed by unrestrained vice (G: 54–8).40 It is this aspect of justice which is threatened by the behaviour of Palamon and Arcite, whose excesses Duke Theseus seeks to restrain. For instance, when Palamon escapes from prison, he plans to return home to Thebes to beg his friends ‘On Theseus to helpe him to werreye’ so that he can win the hand of Emily (I: 1483–6). When the duke finds Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove, Palamon confesses to Theseus that he is guilty of having ‘broken wikkedly’ from the duke’s prison (I: 1735–6). Similarly, when the duke released Arcite from prison, he did so on the agreed condition that if Arcite was ever again to be found in Athens, ‘with a swerd he sholde lese his heed’ (I: 1209–15, 1725–6). For these crimes, Palamon admits that ‘both han we deserved to be slayn’ (I: 1741), although his honesty in doing so actually helps him to win pity from the duke. In forgiving the two Thebans their crimes, Theseus

39 Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia, 192, 213; Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: IX (p. 51); Latini, Book of the Treasure, 168; Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 51–2; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 34; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 23–2. 40 Aquinas, Ethics, 895–912; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 278.

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has them bow down to his ‘lordshipe’ and requires them to swear that they will never again harm his country, ‘Ne make werre upon me nyght ne day,/ But been my freendes in all that ye may’ (I: 1821–28). Here, as in the orthodoxy of medieval political theory, the peace and good order of the community require some to rule and others to be subject and obedient.41 The second aspect of justice, justice ‘commutatiua’, is that of fair and equal exchange between people, so that right and equity are served and the social order is maintained (NE: V, ii: 12–13; G: 54–60).42 Theseus also displays this form of justice, as when he gives ‘mete and wages’ to the builders and artisans in return for building his amphitheatre (I: 1900). Predictably, however, rather than the equality of the marketplace which characterises ‘justicia commutatiua’, it is ‘justicia distributiua’, the aspect of justice in which men are hierarchically rewarded with wealth and honour in accordance with their social status, which receives particular emphasis in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (NE: V, ii: 12–13; G: 54–60).43 That each person should be treated according to their birth, wealth and status was the basis of the ceremonial of late medieval public life, from the seating arrangements in parliaments, through the placing of guests at banquets, down to the making of offerings in church where, as is shown by the anger of the Wife of Bath if anyone ‘bifore hire sholde goon’ (I: 449–52), parishioners expected to go up in order of their social standing.44 Likewise, within literature, whilst King Arthur’s knights were seated at the Round Table so that none was higher than another, at Arthur’s Christmas feast at Camelot it was taken for granted that, as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight puts it, the noblest person was ‘more highly placed, as seemed most fitting’.45 The ‘Knight’s Tale’ repeatedly shows Duke Theseus displaying his understanding of the need for such hierarchial ‘justice’. For instance, when the followers of Palamon and Arcite arrive in Athens for the 41 See also Gratian, Treatise, 25–6; Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 324. For Theseus’s severity and mercy, see also below, p. 000. 42 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 168, 173; Aquinas, Ethics, 929–76; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 288, 526. 43 See also Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 387; Aquinas, Ethics, 938–76; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 283–4; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 257. 44 John Russell, Book of Nurture, 194; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ll. 71–3; Rigby, English Society, 198, 322; Rigby, ‘English Society’, 28; Rigby, ‘Wife of Bath’, 139–40; Duffy, Stripping, 125–7; Burnley, Courtliness, 57. 45 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 39, 74. See also Wace, Roman de Brut, 9731–60, 10460–2.


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tournament, Theseus receives them and houses them according to their rank—‘everich at his degree’—and seats them appropriately at the table (I: 2192, 2200). Later, as the court and those who are to fight in the tournament ride to the amphitheatre they do so ‘after hir degree’ (I: 2573). Similarly, at the end of the combat, Theseus seeks to reconcile the two opposing sides and so, like Richard II after the Smithfield tournament of 1390, presents gifts to his guests ‘after hir degree’ before seeing them ‘worthily’ on their way (I: 2731–2739).46 Finally, in building a tomb for Arcite, Theseus chooses a site for it which will be ‘most honurable in his degree’ (I: 2853–6). In treating others as their status requires, Theseus does not simply display the chivalric courtesy expected of a ruler but also shows his understanding of a deeper principle of justice. If, as Aristotle (NE: V, v: 17–18) and Cicero had taught, justice is the virtue ‘which assigns to everyone his due’ then justice required the ‘proportionate equality’—i.e. inequality—in which men receive their deserts according to their unequal dignitas (G: 55–6, 59–60).47 v. Fortitude The third of the cardinal virtues is fortitude, which in benefiting the community as a whole, can be seen as superior to the fourth cardinal virtue, temperance, which mainly benefits the particular individual whose passions it tempers (G: 68).48 Fortitude is the virtuous mean which both moderates the excess of hardiness that is ‘audacia’ and abates the insufficiency of hardiness that is fearfulness.49 Excessive dread of future dangers is unseemly in a king, making him unable to take counsel on how to deal with a threat and so endangering all the realm through his inability to act. Yet a total lack of fear is also unsuitable in a ruler as it will make him rash and foolhardy, which also puts the realm in danger. A ‘moderate drede’ is more useful for a king as it encourages him

46 The Brut, II, 343; Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinanuce”’, 202. According to the Westminster Chronicle (88–9), the earl of Nottingham gave gifts to the guests at his wedding in 1385 according to their rank (‘statum’). 47 Augustine, City of God, XIX: 21 (p. 882); Cicero, On Duties, I: 15 (p. 7); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 74, 76, 149; Schofield, Stoic Idea, 71–2; Robert of Basevorn, Form of Preaching, XXXIX; Hoccleve, Regiment, 2445–7, 2468–71. 48 See also Aquinas, Ethics, 585. Brunetto Latini, by contrast, argues that the rule of the self involved in temperance comes before justice and fortitude (Book of the Treasure, 215–6, 260). 49 Aquinas, Ethics, 341, 528–55; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 165, 203.

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to take counsel and then to act on it so as to deal with a threat to his kingdom (G: 125–7, 400). However, if virtue is always a mean between two vices, one of these two extremes is usually a more serious failing than the other (NE: IV, ix: 3–4). In this case, whilst fortitude should restrain an excess of the passions of both fearfulness and hardiness, it is more likely to be needed to overcome timidity and cowardice than it is to moderate foolhardiness. As a result, the virtuous ‘mean’ between ‘audacia’ and fearfulness is actually nearer to the former than to the latter (NE: III, ix: 1; G: 62–5).50 Following Aristotle (NE: V, viii) and Aquinas, Giles distinguishes seven types of fortitude.51 The first, Aristotle’s true courage, is ‘fortitudo ciuilis’ which is inspired by the honour which is given to the brave and the dishonour suffered by cowards. The second, ‘fortitudo seruylis’ is the hardiness which comes from the soldier’s fear of the penalties for desertion. The third type of fortitude is ‘fortitudo militaris, of knyghthood’, i.e., that which arises from the warrior’s previous experience of battle. The fourth, ‘furiosa’, is the courage that comes from fury in battle.52 The fifth type of fortitude, ‘fortitudo consuetudinalis’, is the confidence which comes from previous experience of success in battle. The sixth, ‘fortitudo bestialis’ arises from an ignorance of the true strength of the enemy. The final type of fortitude, ‘fortitudo virtuosa’ is when men use their own free will and reason to choose to fight for goodness. Although kings should have an understanding of all seven types of fortitude so as to know how to lead their men in war, they themselves should possess ‘virtuous fortitude’ so that they do not put their subjects into danger unnecessarily but only in ‘rightful werre and bataille’ from which ‘greet profite’ may come to the realm (G: 66–7). Similarly, for Honoré Bonet, the man with the virtue of fortitude can be recognized because ‘he finds all his pleasure and all his delight in being in arms, and in just wars, and in defending all just causes’.53 As a tale of chivalric virtue and prudence, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ does not deal with the hardiness which Giles saw as the product of the warrior’s fear of the penalties for desertion or which arises from an ignorance

50 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 155, 159, 227; Aquinas, Ethics, 365–6. For Theseus’s boldness as proverbial, see Ormrod, Political Life, 62. 51 Aquinas, Ethics, 561–80; See also Bonet, Tree of Battles, 121. 52 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 171. 53 Bonet, Tree of Battles, 120, 133–4. See also Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 53.


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of the strength of the enemy. Nor, with his restraint and self-control, does Theseus himself display the courage which comes from fury in battle and which Giles did not regard as a truly virtuous form of fortitude (G: 67). Instead, it is the intemperate Palamon and Arcite who, in their confrontation in the grove, are spurred on by their frenzied rage, attacking each other like wild animals until they are up to their ankles in each other’s blood (I: 1656–1660). It is this murderous fury of a combat conducted ‘Withouten judge or oother officere’ which Theseus disciplines and pacifies by converting it into the ceremony and ritual of the tournament at which he ordains that no man should be slain, a desire thwarted only by the seeming accident of Arcite’s fall (I: 1712, 2537–2562, 2703, 2708).54 However, Theseus certainly can be seen as possessing an understanding of how the honour and worship which are accorded to the brave provide a motive for fortitude, as when Arcite’s triumph over Palamon at the tournament is honoured by ‘The trompours, with the loude mynstralcie,/ The heraudes, that ful loude yelle and crie’ (I: 2671–2). Conversely, Theseus demonstrates his understanding of men’s desire to avoid shame as a motive for their bravery when, at the end of the tournament, he reassures those who have not been victorious that to have been captured by ‘twenty knyghtes’ or by many ‘footmen’ does not disgrace anyone: ‘Ther may no men clepen it cowardye’ (I: 2715–34). Naturally, Theseus himself also has the fortitude which comes from previous experience of battle and, in particular, of success in battle, the duke having won so many lands that he is the greatest conqueror of his age (I: 862–6, 877–81). Above all, however, Theseus displays the ‘virtuous fortitude’ which Giles sees as crucial for the ruler. As the De Regimine advises, he fights ‘not for woodnesse but for goodnesse’, having won many lands ‘with his wysdom and his chivalrie’ (G: 67; I: 865, 878). Even his anger at the actions of the evil tyrannical Creon is the product of his compassion, pity and, as Lactantius Placidus said, his ‘indignation’ for the suffering of the widows of those to whom Creon had refused burial, the duke swearing as a ‘trewe knyght’ to wreak revenge on Creon as the tyrant deserves (I: 953–64).

54

Lester, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 463–4; Middleton, ‘War’, 128; Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinaunce”’, 208–9; Fradenburg, City, 211, 223. For the use of blunted and rebated weapons in tournaments, as at the Smithfield tournament of 1390, see Vale, ‘Violence’, 145, 153–4; Froissart, Chronicles, 477–8.

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It is not surprising then that Lydgate was to praise Theseus as being like a ‘second Hercules’ in his ‘manly force’ and high prowess.55 vi. Temperance The last of the cardinal virtues is temperance. Nature has ordained that humans should have sensual pleasure such as the enjoyment of food and drink and the ‘delectation’ involved in ‘workes and dedes of matrimonye’. Of course, partaking gluttonously in food and drink or indulging lecherously in the ‘seruice of Venus’ are vices of excess. Yet, if people took too little food or abstained totally from sex, this would also be against reason, since it would threaten the survival of mankind, even if, in practice, excessive abstinence is generally less of a danger than over-indulgence. As Chaucer’s Parson taught, temperance is the virtuous mean between these two vices (X: 833).56 Temperance involves sobriety in the taking of drink, abstinence in the consumption of food, chasteness in sexual pleasure, and ‘pudicitia’ in refraining from those passions that move us to lechery, although the active life of the mighty does help to make them less prone to such excesses than that of the idle rich (OR: 2, 17; G: 69–71, 154–6).57 Temperance is thus an essential virtue on the pat of the ruler, as can be seen in the Prose Life of Alexander where the first of the seven steps leading to the throne of Cyrus, king of the Persians, to which Alexander ascends, is said to represent the sobriety necessary for a ruler.58 A lack of temperance is more blameworthy than a lack of fortitude, both because it is easier to be temperate than to be brave and because temperance is a virtue which we need much more frequently than we do courage in battle. Kings are particularly to be blamed for intemperance, as a servile surrender to the vileness of passions is all the more unseemly in one who should make himself worthy of honour and worship with intemperance being a classic hallmark of the tyrant who puts his own private pleasure before the common

55 Lactantius Placidus, Commentary, 638–9; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 75. See also Christine de Pizan, Mutacion de Fortune, 13412–456. 56 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 171; Aquinas, Ethics, 342, 595–649; Fasciculus Morum, 640–3; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 165, 219, 376, 406. 57 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 215–7, 221–5. See also Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 52–3. 58 Prose Life of Alexander, 56–7.


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good.59 Such intemperate rulers will make themselves despised by their subjects and, particularly when they are lustful towards their subjects’ wives and daughters, are likely to provoke their people to ‘ryse agenst hem’ (G: 68–74).60 This was, of course, the fate of Apius, in Chaucer’s ‘Physician’s Tale’, who sought to abuse his position as governor of his land in order to satisfy his lustful desire for the virtuous Virginia (VII: 260–9). For Giles, as for Chaucer’s Parson (X: 859–60), even husbands and wives should love each other temperately and rationally. For this reason, he argues against incestuous marriages in which the power of conjugal love is added to affection which already exists between close kin, a combination which is likely to produce an excessive lust which blinds the couple’s reason and understanding (G: 186).61 If rulers are to be particularly blamed for a lack of temperance, to what extent does Duke Theseus manage to avoid this failing? As we shall see in the next chapter, the duke’s exercise of this virtue in the general sense of the restraint of the passions is emphasised in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ by the contrast which the tale draws between the impulsiveness of the youthful Palamon and Arcite and the self-control of the middle-aged Theseus. Here, we are concerned with temperance in the more specific sense of overcoming gluttony and lechery. One problem is that whilst Theseus’s possession of the first three cardinal virtues is evident in his positive actions as described in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, temperance is a virtue which, in narrative terms, is most clearly displayed by what a character does not do. For instance, with its descriptions of the lavish feasts which Theseus lays on before and after the tournament between Palamon and Arcite (I: 2193–2206, 2736), it would have been easy for the ‘Knight’s Tale’ to depict the duke as displaying the lack of self-restraint which, as in the case of the gluttonous emperor Nero in John of Salisbury and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, was seen as being characteristic of a ruler who was a tyrant.62 Yet the tale does not show us Theseus becoming

59 Bonet, Tree of Battles, 211–12; Secretrum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 51–2; Aquinas, Ethics, 2071–2; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 11–12; De Quadripartita, 33; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 50–1, 249; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 52–3; Fowler, ‘Chaucer’s Hard Cases’, 127–8. 60 See also Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 52–2; Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 22753–64; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 239. 61 Aquinas (Ethics, 643) followed Isidore of Seville (Etymologies, V.26.24; X.148) in seeing an etymological link between unchastity and incest. 62 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, VIII: 14 (p. 386); Gower, Confessio Amantis, VI: 1156–61.

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drunk at his feasts or have him indulge excessively in luxurious foods. Although the ‘noble duc’ does make ‘revel al the long nyght’ with his many foreign guests after the tournament, he does so, ‘as was right’, in order to put an end to any lingering hostility between the knights who have just fought on opposing sides. As a result, rather than being an occasion for sensual indulgence, Theseus’s feast becomes a means of achieving peace and reconciliation (I: 2715–34).63 As tyrants were seen as being personally vicious and immoral, they were often depicted as being unable to control their own sexual appetites. This lack of self-restraint could be made especially clear by having the ruler’s lechery take the form of an unnatural, incestuous desire for his own relatives, particularly for his own daughter, as in the case of King Antiochus who takes his daughter’s maidenhead in Gower’s Confessio Amantis.64 However, the ruler’s lack of self-restraint and incestuous lust could also take the form of a desire for sex with his sister, as in the case of Nero in Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ who ‘lay’ with his own sister (VII: 2482), and of Caligula in Gower’s Confessio, who takes the virginity of his three sisters.65 Theseus does not have any children of his own in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, but he is, in effect, guardian to Emily, the sister of his wife, Hippolyta. However, even this degree of kinship would have meant that any sexual relationship between Theseus and his ‘suster’ (I: 1833, 2818, 3075) would have been regarded as incestuous by medieval standards.66 Yet there is no hint of any illicit desire for Emily on the part of the duke. On the contrary, rather than Theseus desiring Emily for himself, he has sometimes been censured by modern critics for his insistence that she should marry someone else.67 In avoiding gluttony and lechery Theseus achieves the virtue of temperance and so can be seen to display all four of the cardinal virtues as defined by medieval moralists and political theorists.

63

Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 535. See also Nicholls, Matter, 18–19, 127. Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 335; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VIII: 247–2008; Peck, Kingship, 165–6; Archibald, Incest, 146, 186; Bullón Fernández, Fathers, 47–61; Brown-Grant, French Romance, 66–8, 182, 189–94. The Man of Law praises Chaucer for not having written of such unnatural ‘abhomynaciouns’ as that of Antiochus (II: 77–89). See also Emaré, 223–67. 65 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VIII: 203–4. Giles also criticises Nero for being so lecherous that he seemed like a woman (G: 26). 66 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, X.148; Jacob’s Well, 62; Brundage, ‘Sex’, 38, 43; Archibald, Incest, 21, 221–2. 67 See Chapter 2, section iii, below. 64


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vii. Liberality and Magnificence After his discussion of the four cardinal virtues, Giles lists the remaining virtues under three main headings. Firstly, there are the virtues which relate to the external goods of wealth (liberality and magnificence) and honour (proper ambition and magnanimity).68 Second is the virtue of ‘mansuetude’ which relates to ‘outward euel’.69 Third are the virtues displayed in our relations with others: affability, truthfulness and rightful amusement (‘eutrapelia’).70 The virtues which relate to external goods are divided between those that are of ‘profitable good’, i.e., liberality and magnificence whose goodness is in relation to wealth and money, and those of ‘honest good’, i.e., magnanimity and proper ambition whose goodness is in relation to honour and worship. Liberality is defined in relation to moderate spending whereas magnificence is defined in relation to great spending and cost (G: 74; NE: IV, i–ii).71 Nevertheless, since, as Giles said, magnificence is itself the height of liberality (G: 84), these two virtues can be considered together in our assessment of Theseus’s goodness. Liberality was one of the virtues traditionally expected of a medieval ruler, one for which heroes such as King Arthur had long been praised.72 As Gower said, ‘a king’s character ought to be liberal in everything’.73 The Chandos Herald thus lauded the Black Prince not only for his prowess and wisdom but also for his ‘tresnoble largesse’.74 Liberality was usually defined, as it was by Giles, as the reasonable mean between the two vices of excessive and insufficient expenditure, that is between prodigality and avarice (NE: IV, i: 2, G: 74).75 For Giles, the liberal man is one who both acquires and spends money virtuously, using it to benefit others rather than loving it as an end in itself and so turning

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Aquinas, Ethics, 342–6. Aquinas, Ethics, 349. 70 Aquinas, Ethics, 352–4. 71 Aquinas, Ethics, 649–700. 72 Wace, Roman de Brut, 9761–8, 11059–66. 73 Gower, Vox Clamantis, IV: 11 (pp. 238–9). 74 Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 1625, 4103–5. 75 Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, VII: 2; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 165, 230; De Quadripartita, 32–3; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 11 (p. 239); Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 1984–2164; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 161; Liber Custumarum, p. 18; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 38, 289; Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 53–4; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 26; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, pp. 23–3; Ainsworth, ‘Froissardian Perspectives’, 62. 69

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himself into the slave of his own possessions.76 As all men are inclined by nature to love themselves, those who spend their money rightfully, for instance by giving great gifts to those who are themselves good, are even more virtuous than those who simply acquire money rightfully. It follows that the more wealth a ruler has, the more he is to be condemned when he is guilty of avarice, which, as Hoccleve later agreed, is a greater sin than prodigality.77 As Solomon had said, ‘A just king setteth up the land; a covetous man shall destroy it’ (Proverbs 29: 4). As with most of Giles’s virtues, liberality is not only good in itself but also has the pragmatic benefit of making a ruler loved by his subjects and so helps to bring peace and stability to his realm. It is for this reason that Giles lists the giving of gifts so as to win the love of his people amongst the three main tasks of the ruler (G: 74–80, 332–3).78 Theseus can certainly be seen to display such liberality amd courtly largesse in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ when he lays on a lavish feast before the tournament between Palamon and Arcite and, in particular, gives ‘grete yiftes to the meeste and the leeste’ (I: 2197–2205). Giles distinguishes the virtue of magnificence, which is involved in the doing of great deeds and works, from that of liberality in terms of the scale of expenditure which it involves. Whereas liberality is defined in relation to the wealth which a man has (so that a wealthy man could spend much and yet still be regarded as avaricious in relation to his abundant resources), magnificence is defined in relation to the scale of the actual works which his wealth produces. As Aristotle put it, ‘a poor man cannot be magnificent’ (NE: IV, ii: 13; G: 103–5). Indeed, since nobility is ‘oolde bloode igrounded in richesse’, a lineage tends to be considered more noble over the generations and so should use its wealth to create ever greater works (G: 150–2). Magnificence therefore constitutes the virtuous mean between, on the one hand, the insufficiency of ‘paruificencia’, the paltriness when not enough is spent to produce the great works that are called for, and, on the other, the vulgar excess of ‘consumpcion’, when a man wastefully spends more than is necessary (G: 79–83; NE: IV, ii, 20–2).79 Given Jesus’s warnings about the fate of those who love to exalt themselves (Matthew 23:12; Luke 14:11, 18:14) and the criticisms of 76 77 78 79

See also Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 22753–64. See also Hoccleve, Regiment, 4614–6, 4632–5. Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 37–40. Aquinas, Ethics, 707–11; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 165, 243.


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medieval preachers, moralists, poets and theologians against those who sinfully take pride in their wealth, rank and power, it may seem surprising that magnificence should be seen as a virtue on the part of a ruler by medieval political theorists.80 Certainly, the authors of medieval mirrors for princes were very conscious of the difficulties of reconciling worldly honour with humility and of the need for rulers to resist the temptation of self-glorification to which they were particularly subject. As John of Salisbury said, the prince should be humble so that his authority ‘may not be diminished’.81 Giles himself advised rulers to avoid the arrogance which is a characteristic failing of the rich who mistakenly believe that wealth is a measure of their own worth and so tend to act contemptuously towards other men (OR: 2: 16; G: 150–4).82 Inevitably, Richard II was to be accused of the sins of ‘ostentation, pomp and vainglory’ by his opponents as when Adam of Usk portrayed the king presiding at the Shrewsbury session of parliament in January 1398 ‘with a display of earthly ostentation such as ears have not heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man’, the world standing amazed ‘at what might come from such futility’.83 Excessive pride, prodigality and ostentatious display were certainly characteristics of the tyrants described in Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’. These included Nero who, in his jewel-encrusted clothes, was ‘more pompous of array’ than any other emperor (VII: 2468–2474), Belshazzar (Daniel 5: 20–3), who was so proud ‘of herte and of array’ (VII: 2186), and Nebuchadnezzar (Daniel 3: 1–8), whose mighty throne, precious treasure, glorious sceptre and royal majesty ‘with tonge unethe may discryved be’ and who, on pain of death, had all men bow down before a huge gold statue of himself (VII: 2143–63).84 In this context, Duke Theseus’s lavish expenditure on his building projects and on entertaining guests may seem to be an indication that he is morally suspect. La Farge, for instance, argues that ‘a question mark hangs over much’ of what it pleases Theseus to indulge himself in doing. In particular, ‘there is something playfully

80 Jonas of Orelans, De Institutione Regia, 190; Fasciculus Morum, 55; Clanvowe, Two Ways, 489–91; Hoccleve, Regiment, 1128–48; Owst, Literature, 150, 308–14. 81 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV: 7 (pp. 32, 34–5); Aquinas, Ethics, 789; Verweij, ‘Princely Virtues’, 58, 61. 82 Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 70. 83 Adam Usk, Chronicle, 36–8. 84 Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 235; For Nebuchadnezzar’s vainglory, see also Jonas of Orleans, De Institutio Regia, 212–4; Gower, Confessio Amantis, I: 2785–3042. For Richard II as prodigal, see Saul, Richard II, 447.

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useless about Theseus’s projects and inspirations: they can be read as the decadent exercise of power and expenditure of wealth simply because they are there and at his disposal’, as in the case of his construction of the amphitheatre for the tournament between Palamon and Arcite.85 Nevertheless, despite contemporary warnings about the dangers of pride and ostentation, medieval rulers—and those who sought to advise them—were also extremely conscious of the theatricality of power through which their might would be displayed to other princes and to their own nobles and people. As Vale puts it, ‘it was incumbent upon later medieval rulers to indulge in the maximum degree of display which their resources and income would allow’.86 For this reason, when the chancellor came to justify his request for a grant of taxation from parliament in May 1384, he did so partly on the grounds that if Richard II and the French king were to meet to discuss peace, Richard should be as ‘splendidly and honourably arrayed’ as his counterpart.87 Similarly, whilst mirrors for princes, such as Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, might advise ‘meekness’ to the ruler, the exercise of this virtue did not, as Christine de Pizan’s Book of the Body Politic made clear, mean that the ruler should abase himself so much that he lost the reverence and honour due to him from his subjects. Rather, the requirement of ‘meekness’ meant that the ruler should deal courteously with the petitions and requests which were presented to him.88 If excessive ostentation was a sign of tyranny, a ruler’s display of appropriate ‘magnificence’ was not seen as sinful or even as ‘playfully useless’ but was explicitly recognized as a positive virtue by political theorists. As the Prose Life of Alexander taught, whilst men of high degree should not scorn their inferiors, kings should still be ‘preferred before other men’.89 Indeed, for Giles, whilst the virtuous mean of magnificence is the ideal for a ruler, an insufficiency of great works is more to be blamed than ostentation as it is particularly harmful to a king’s majesty. As John of Salisbury had argued, whilst true human felicity lies in the goods of the soul, external goods are not evil in themselves but rather need to be put to

85

La Farge, ‘Women’, 70–1. Saul, ‘Richard II and the Vocabulary of Kingship’, 861; Kipling, ‘Richard II’s “Sumptuous Pageants”’, 83; Harriss, ‘Introduction’, 10; Rigby, ‘Ideology’, 327–32; Vale, Princely Court, 169. 87 Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 166. 88 Swanson, John of Wales, 75; Hoccleve, Regiment, 3571–91; Christine de Pizan, Corps de Policie, 28, 36–7; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 30, 38–9. 89 Prose Life of Alexander, 12, 57. 86


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good use as a means to bring about the felicity of the community (OR: 2: 16; G: 27–30, 35–7, 41, 81–2, 104–5, 152–4, 156).90 The legitimacy of magnificence on the part of a ruler was explicitly defended by Roger Dymmok in his Liber Contra XII Errores et Hereses Lollardorum (c. 1395). Like Giles, Dymmok based his argument on Aristotle’s discussion of magnificence, arguing that the sumptuousness of the ruler’s housing, food and clothing symbolised and enhanced his power so that his subjects would be less likely to rise in insurrection against him. Dymmock also appealed to the magnificence with which Solomon so impressed the Queen of Sheba (3 Kings 10: 4–8) in order to support his claim that ‘it is fitting for a king to have sumptuous and beautiful buildings, excellent meals and ornate clothing, since it was because of these things that the wisdom of Solomon received great praise’.91 Gloria here was not an alternative to sapientia, the Solomonic aspect of kingship so emphasised in the literary texts with which Richard II himself can be directly associated.92 Rather, Solomon’s golden shields, drinking vessels and furniture and his ivory throne, which had no rival in any kingdom, were themselves a demonstration that ‘king Solomon exceeded all the kings of the earth in riches, and in wisdom’ (3 Kings 10: 14–23).93 The public choreography of royal status and splendour, through courtly and civic ceremonial, both manifested and, in turn, reinforced the real power of the ruler, a fact of which Richard II himself, with his keen interest in—or even preoccupation with—the imagery and iconography of kingship, was evidently well aware. 94 The same concern with display was evident amongst the nobility of the late fourteenth century. Indeed, on the basis of records since lost, the

90 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, V: 17 (pp. 164–5); John of Salisbury, Frivolities, VIII: 16 (pp. 397–8). 91 Dymmok, Liber Contra XII Errores, 292–7; NE: 4.ii (pp. 90–3); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 242, 425; Eberle, ‘Politics’, 174–5; Saul, Richard II, 356–7. 92 Kipling, Enter, 161; Eberle, ‘Richard II’, 252–3; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 230. 93 Dymmok, Liber Contra XII Errores, 295–7; Somerset, ‘Answering’, 62–3. The Black Book of Edward IV (pp. 3, 15, 81) was also to cite the story of Solomon and Sheba in linking the king’s wisdom with the regulation of the ‘Domus Regis Magnificencie’ through which the king impresses others. See also Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 230. 94 Bumke, Courtly Culture, 278–9; McLaren, London Chronicles, 52–64; Woolgar, Great Household, 2–4, 8, 198; Scott, Domination, 12, 45, 55–6, 66–7, 105, 204–5; Vale, Princely Court, 169; Scheifele, ‘Richard II’, 256; Saul, ‘The Kingship of Richard II’, 39, 43, 54–5; Barron, ‘Richard II’, 139–40; Bennett, Richard II, 195; Saul, Three Richards, 115–8; Stratford, ‘Richard II’s Treasure’, 212–4.

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seventeenth-century biographer of Sir Thomas Berkeley, the patron of Trevisa’s Middle English translation of Giles’s De Regimine, styled him ‘Thomas the Magnificent’.95 Of course, if moralists such as Dymmok and Bonet taught that rulers should clothe themselves ‘sumptuously and with artifice’ they also argued that such displays of magnificence should be ‘measured’ and ‘moderate’. The ruler’s dress should befit his status and be in accordance with the customs of the day since to dress above one’s station was to be guilty of the sin of pride.96 Nevertheless, the extent of the wealth which, in practice, was considered to be compatible with the ‘measure’ of the virtuous lord can be seen in the Chandos Herald’s Life of the Black Prince. Here, the prince is praised, with no apparent irony, for his ‘temperance et droiture/ Rayson et justice et mesure’ immediately after a passage describing his rule in Gascony where he is said to have enjoyed a degree of state and honour that was unparalleled since the birth of Christ. The magnificence of the prince’s household is explicitly linked here with the perception of him by his nobles as a ‘bon seignour, loial et sage’.97 Likewise, The Libelle of Englyshe Polycye was able to praise Henry V not only for his wisdom and prudence but also for his ‘high magnificence’.98 The Latin, Anglo-Norman and Middle English versions of the Secretum Secretorum were all agreed that in order for a ruler to demonstrate the magnificence corresponding to his royal station, it was appropriate that a king should exceed all others in his attire and that he should always be dressed ‘in faire garmentis and robes passyng others in fairenesse. And he shold were dere, riche and straunge ornamentes’, having thereby ‘a prerogatif in his arraie above all others, wherby his dignité is worshipped and made faire’ and the reverence rendered to him enhanced and increased.99 Similarly, although John Gower attacked the pride and vainglory of those who took pleasure in worldly honours, praise, wealth, power, rich garb, high towers and fair adornment and argued that a king should display the humility of David, he also claimed that a king should ‘strive to elevate himself through the prerogative of

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Woolgar, Great Household, 197–8; Hanna, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley’, 882–3. Dymmok, Liber Contra XII Errores, 295–7; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 213; Black Book of Edward IV, 13–14. 97 Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 1600–28. 98 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, 1034–41. 99 Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 48–50, 185, 293–4; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Manzalaoui, 36–7, 132, 215–6; Lydgate and Burgh, Secrees of Old Philisoffres, 1093–1106. See also Dante, Convivio, IV, xxv: 4; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, I: 3. 96


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his privileged status, and hence rule magnificently’ in the eyes of his people. Whilst he should ‘present himself as humble and just in the eyes of God’, it is still right for him to be ‘revered above all others’ so long as he ‘governs in his kingdom honourably’.100 A text such as the Liber Regalis, a description of ceremonial of the royal coronation which dates from Richard II’s reign, might advise that, on the eve of his coronation, the king should humbly meditate upon the biblical text ‘Have they made thee ruler? Be not lifted up: be among them as one of them’ (Ecclesiasticus 32: 1). Nevertheless, it also ordained that, on the day of the ceremony itself, the king should be raised onto a ‘lofty seat’ adorned with silken cloth of gold in Westminster Palace and then, once in Westminster Abbey, should sit on a ‘lofty throne’ so that he might ‘clearly be seen by all the people’.101 It was precisely this flexibility, its ability to have it both ways and so to recommend that the king should both meditate on the text ‘Be not lifted up’ and then be elevated on high, which gave medieval ideology its utility.102 Given this flexibility of moral standards, how can we know whether a prince’s expenditure demonstrates the magnificence of the virtuous ruler or is a sign that he is guilty of the ostentation and excess which are characteristic of the tyrant? Following Aristotle (NE: IV, ii: 11–17) and Aquinas, Giles’s De Regimine sets out four main forms of work which a good ruler will undertake in order to be magnificent.103 The first and most important of these is the building of great temples for the worship of God; the second is in works which are for the common good; the third is in works which benefit particular individuals who are worthy of honour; the fourth is in works ‘touchinge his own persone’ as when a prince expends money on his house or on special occasions such as ‘grete and solempne feasts’ associated with marriage or with knighthood (G: 81). In order to be truly magnificent in these four main forms of work, a king must also possess six qualities. The first is wisdom so that he knows how to ‘make semelich spending’ in great works. The second is that he must do his works for the common good, not for personal vainglory. The third is that he should be willing

100 Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 1249–60, 22981–23028; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 18 (pp. 247–8). 101 English Coronation Records, 82–3, 113–14. On the magnificence and luxury associated with the coronation, see ibid., 113–5, 119–21, 127. 102 Blythe, Ideal Government, 61, 69–72, 76, 187, 303. 103 Aquinas, Ethics, 719–20 725–8. See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 162.

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to spend readily rather than concentrating on reckoning how much he can afford. The fourth is that he thinks more about how to do the work well, for instance about how to make a temple wonderful and fair, than about how much money is needed for it. The fifth is that he is ‘excellentliche liberal’, as magnificence is the perfection of liberality. The sixth is that his works should be greater, fairer and ‘more solempnere’ than those of the ‘paruificius’ man, who spoils the work by seeking to save money (G: 83–5). Duke Theseus’s works and public display are emphasised at three main points in the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Firstly, Chaucer details the effort and expenditure which Theseus puts into ‘bisily’ and ‘roially’ constructing his amphitheatre, which is a mile in circumference, possesses stone walls and ditches, is of great height, enjoys unobstructed sight-lines, and is of mathematical construction. The three temples which it contains are even more splendid. The temple of Diana is built of alabaster and coral whilst those of Venus and Mars are equally expensive, each being lavishly decorated with noble carvings and paintings (I: 1881–1917, 2090). Secondly, the tale also details the ‘greet labour’ with which Theseus prepares the feast at which he entertains the lords and knights who are to fight on the side of Palamon and of Arcite on the evening before their combat (I: 2190–2206, 2483). Finally, Chaucer tells us of the ‘bisy cure’ which Theseus puts into building the tomb of Arcite and his lavish expenditure on Arcite’s funeral itself. Here the dead Theban’s body and funeral bier are covered in cloth of gold and three mighty steeds bear Arcite’s arms so that the funeral ‘sholde be/ The moore noble and riche in his degree’. Arcite’s body is then cremated on an immense pyre along with many precious stones and much other wealth (I: 2852–2966). For Burrow, Theseus’s expenditure on public display is a demonstration that the duke possesses the virtue of magnanimity. Nevertheless, although magnanimity and magnificence could be hard to distinguish (so that the giving of gifts could be regarded as an instance of both virtues (G: 85, 87)), the duke’s works can, as Minnis has argued, perhaps better be seen as instances of the kinds of expenditure which Giles’s De Regimine recommends to princes under the heading of magnificence.104 Firstly, Giles advises that a ruler should be magnificent in the worship

104 Burrow, Essays, 38–9; Starkey, ‘Age of the Household’, 255; Minnis, ‘“I Speke of Folk in Seculer Estaat” ’, 52–5. See also Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, X.167.


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of God, making great temples with ‘worschepful sacrefice and worthi array’ (G: 81). Giles’s advice did not only apply to Christian rulers. On the contrary, as an authority for this advice, Giles explicitly cites Aristotle’s Ethics which lists buildings, offerings and sacrifices to the gods amongst those forms of expenditure which are ‘definitely entitled honourable’ (NE: IV, ii, 11). In accordance with this advice, Theseus’s temples are built ‘in worship’ of the gods, with altars where Palamon, Arcite and Emily pray and make their offerings and sacrifices for ‘ryte and sacrifise’ (I: 1902–13, 2262–7, 2275–8, 2369–71). In this sense he is like the pagan Emperor Tiberius who is praised in Gower’s tale of Mundus and Paulina for purging the temple of Isis, which has been corrupted by the treacherous crimes of two deceitful priests, this being the temple which the ‘noble wommen’ of the city, including Paulina, the worthiest of them all, attend with ‘gret Devocioun’.105 Robert Rypon’s early fifteenth-century sermon also urges knights to honour the Church by following the example of the pagan Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, ‘who prohibited the spoliation of temples and spared the church’.106 Similarly, Giles’s De Regimine cites Dionysius of Sicily as a tyrant whose crimes included robbing ‘holy places’ (G: 120), even though, by Giles’s own Christian standards, the temples of antiquity were far from being ‘holy’.107 As Aquinas said, ‘if someone now spent any money on the worship of a demon, he would not be munificent but sacrilegious’.108 Secondly, Giles follows Aristotle in seeing expenditure on great works as a sign of the virtue of magnificence when it is done for the common good (G: 81; NE: IV, ii, 11). For instance, in describing the temples of Diana, Mars and Venus which Theseus builds at the amphitheatre, Chaucer could easily have depicted Theseus as being guilty of worshipping what were, from a Christian perspective, malignant devils who promoted indecency.109 Yet, in practice, rather than promoting 105 Gower, Confessio Amantis, I: 761–8, 800–4, 1039–44. See also John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, V: 4 (p. 77). 106 Owst, Literature, 552–3. 107 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 301–4 has a lengthy discussion of this issue. For Dionysius, see also Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, 218. 108 Aquinas, Ethics, 719 (emphasis added). 109 Augustine, City of God, II: 10 (p. 58); II: 25–7 (pp. 81–5). For Augustine, Venus was an unjust and sinful adulteress; Mars, was the god of the undesirable human activity of war; and even Diana, the goddess of chastity in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (I: 1912) was actually, like the gods of love and war, an unclean demon (ibid., III: 3 (p. 91); III: 11 (p. 99); VII: 14 (p. 272), VII: 33 (p. 294); IX: 7 (pp. 351–2)).

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lechery and sin, Theseus has the temples of these deities painted with lessons of the suffering which they bring about, the temple of Venus being decorated with the pain and foolishness which love creates, and that of Mars with the ‘infortune’ which comes with war and violence (I: 1942–3, 2021). Even if, in terms of Christian beliefs, Theseus is literally mistaken in terms of the gods to which he is devoted, his actions do still provide an allegorical illustration of an admirable understanding of ethics. Giles’s third form of magnificence is the ruler’s expenditure on ‘persones that ben worthi worschep’, including the giving of ‘grete yiftes’, with the Ethics listing both ‘welcoming foreign guests’ and celebrating their departure as instances of this form of spending (G: 81, 85; NE, IV, ii, 15). Accordingly, when Lycurgus, King of Thrace, Emetreus, King of India, and the other noble knights arrive in Athens to fight for Palamon and Arcite, with one hundred on either side, Theseus lodges and feeds them, seeking to please and to honour them and lavishing them with ‘grete yiftes’ (I: 1851, 2190–6). Similarly, after the tournament, the duke again gives gifts to his guests, entertains them and then ‘conveyed the kynges worthily/ Out of his toun a journee largely’ (I: 2735–9), such a ceremonial sending-off also being part of the expected etiquette of courtly life.110 Finally, Giles specifies that a ruler should be magnificent in relation to his own person, for instance in building a wonderful house for himself, one which he should ‘araye semlich’, and in feasts for marriages and other special occasions, thus ‘drawynge to hym wonderfullich cheualrie’ (G: 81, 83; NE: IV, ii, 15–16). Seen in this context, the descriptions in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ of Theseus feasting his guests in his ‘paleys riche’ (I: 2525) with its ‘riche array’ before the tournament and the three days of feasts which follow it (I: 2193–99, 2736) are not simply stock accounts of courtly generosity and spectacle. Rather, they correspond closely in their nature to the kinds of magnificent works which medieval political theorists advised the virtuous ruler to undertake. As Giles puts it, a ruler’s subjects should be so impressed when they see his great works and his magnificent palace that they are ‘astonyed for gret wonder’ (G: 256).111

110 111

Burnley, Courtliness, 58. Watts, ‘Looking for the State’, 248–53.


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Moreover, Theseus’s projects are in line not only with Giles’s (and Aquinas’s) definition of the kinds of works which the virtue of magnificence should produce but also with his account of the spirit in which such projects should be undertaken (G: 83–5).112 Just as Giles advises that a ruler should not stint in his spending in order to produce wonderful works, so Chaucer’s Theseus is described as arraying his amphitheatre and temples at ‘grete cost’, there being no architect or artist in the land who was not involved in their making.113 The building of the temple of Mars also cost ‘largely of gold a fother’ and the temple of Venus is similarly expensive, whilst even the pigments which produced the life-like paintings which decorated the temple of Diana cost ‘many a floryn’ (I: 1897–1917, 2087–91). Whereas the ‘paruificus’ man will mar or spoil his works by seeking to reduce their costs, Theseus’s amphitheatre is said to be the most ‘noble’ that there has ever been in the world (I: 1885–6) and when he feasts and honours his guests, he does so in such a fashion that ‘no mannes wit/ Of noon estate ne koude amenden it’ (I: 2195–6). It is difficult, in this context, to overlook the parallels between Theseus’s magnificence in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ and that displayed at the great tournament which Richard II held at Smithfield in 1390, one of a series of such events which the king sponsored during his reign, tournaments being one of the main forums in which the authority of medieval English kings was symbolically displayed.114 Richard’s 1390 tournament was attended by a number of foreign lords and knights, including the count of Oustervant whom Richard was courting as an ally, and Chaucer, as clerk of the king’s works, was himself involved in organizing it. Before the tournament, there was a procession in which twenty English knights were led on golden chains by ladies of the sorority of the Garter. Afterwards there was a great banquet at which Richard II wore his crown and full regalia ‘ad demonstrandum suam regiam excellenciam’ to his distinguished foreign visitors.115 Whether

112

Aquinas, Ethics, 712–33. Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 231; Nolan, Chaucer, 273–4. 114 Watts, ‘Looking for the State’, 253. 115 Historia Vitae at Regni Ricardi Secundi, 131–2; Westminster Chronicle, 450–1; The Brut, II, 343, Froissart, Chronicles, II: 477–81. For Chaucer’s involvement, Chaucer Life-Records, 456, 472–3. See also Lindenbaum, ‘Smithfield Tournament’, 4, 9, 19–20; Saul, Richard II, 340, 342, 351–2; Saul, Three Richards, 95–6; Barron, ‘Richard II’, 151; Barber, Tournaments, 36–7; Gillespie, ‘Richard II’, 129; Bennett, Richard II, 40–2. For the softening of the Church’s stance on tournaments in the fourteenth century and the increasingly positive attitude of English kings from the mid-fourteenth century, 113

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in literature or in historical reality, behaviour which may now seem to us to be a ‘decadent’ and self-indulgent display of power could, for a medieval commentator such as Giles, be regarded as an expression of the ‘wisdam and connyng’ which all rulers should possess (G: 83–4). viii. Proper Ambition and Magnanimity In addition to the virtues of liberality and magnificence, which relate to the ‘profitable’ good of wealth, Giles distinguishes two virtues relating to the ‘honest’ good of honour: proper ambition and magnanimity. If liberality is defined in relation to moderate spending whilst magnificence is defined in relation to great spending, so ‘honoris amatiua’ or ‘propre worschip’ is the virtue which, as Aristotle said, causes us to be ‘rightly disposed towards moderate and small honours’ (NE: IV, iv: 1–2) whereas magnanimity is related to great worship and to the great deeds which bring such honour. Just as a ruler should be both liberal and magnificent, so he should have both proper ambition and magnanimity. Hence, the two virtues will be considered together here.116 Although magnanimity motivates us to do great deeds, as a virtue it is still a mean, one which stands midway between the excess of presumption, in which a man foolishly seeks to achieve too much, and the insufficiency which is pusillanimity in which a man is unwilling to perform the great deeds which lead to honour and worship. The magnanimous man does not set too much store by outer goods and so is not over-proud when he enjoys good fortune or receives great honour. Neither does he complain impatiently when he suffers misfortune or is despised but rather always bears himself as he should.117 Magnanimity is related to the passions of hope and despair: the ruler needs both humility, so that he does not over-reach himself through an excess of hope, and magnanimity, so that he does not despair when confronted with the difficulty involved in performing great deeds. It is this hope for future good that leads a ruler to take counsel and to make laws for his realm so as to achieve not just goodness but ‘passing and excellent

see Kaeuper, War, 206–8; Keen, Nobles, 94–5; Vale, ‘Violence’, 152–3, 158. For ladies leading knights into a tournament, see Histoire des Seigneurs de Gavre, 84: 7–11. 116 See also Aquinas, Ethics, 735–94. 117 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 163; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 166, 249. See also Starkey, ‘Age of the Household’, 253–4.


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good’. Whilst poor men who lack riches, power and ‘worthiness of blood’ may be forgiven for not achieving such excellence, rulers have no excuse for pusillanimity. However, in overcoming pusillanimity rulers need to beware the opposite failing in which they foolhardily take on more than they can realistically achieve and so endanger not only themselves but also their realm and their subjects. Such immoderate hope and disregard for difficulty are more characteristic of children and of drunkards than of a prudent ruler (G: 90–5, 122–4, 150–2). A magnanimous ruler can be recognized by six main properties. The first is that though he is brave in battle, he does not endanger himself for trivial reasons but only for the defence of the realm, the common profit and the worship of God. In themselves, deeds of bravery are instances of the virtue of fortitude. Whether or not such deeds also demonstrate magnanimity depends on the motive for which they are done: the brave man has ‘likyng in such dedis’ in themselves whereas the magnanimous man performs them for the more excellent reason that they are worthy of great worship. Indeed, in the sense that all virtues bring men honour, magnanimity can be seen as being involved in the achievement of all of the virtues. The second property of the magnanimous ruler is that, in enjoying more riches than other men, he should be more generous in giving gifts. The third is that because a king should perform acts that bring great worship, his deeds should be few, because as such acts ‘fallen not ofte’. The fourth is that the magnanimous ruler should show himself outwardly as he thinks and feels inwardly, openly displaying his love of worthy men or honestly showing his hate for others rather than dissembling affection towards them whilst actually scheming to attack them.118 The fifth is that because he does not set too great a store in outer things, the magnanimous prince will not be over-concerned with praise or blame from others and, in particular, will not trust in flatterers who seek to pervert his passion and will. The final quality of the magnanimous prince is that, in being sufficient in riches and in not holding outer goods in too high an estimation, he will not seek gifts from other men (G: 87–90; NE: IV, iii: 23–30). The problem for rulers—and for the moralists who advised them— was that whilst the receipt of honour and worship could motivate a ruler to perform the great deeds needed to maintain the common good, a desire for such honour could also pass into pride and vainglory

118

Aquinas, Ethics, 772–5.

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(G: 84). As Philippe de Mézières said in his Letter to King Richard II (1395), quoting St John Chrystostom, ‘it is, in practice, impossible that a great lord, placed in the seat of honour, and with many temporal victories to his credit, should not be assailed by vainglory’.119 Similarly, Chaucer’s Parson attacks the vainglorious man who seeks to have ‘pompe and delit in his temporeel hynesse’ and to ‘glorifie hym in this wordly estaat’ (X: 405). Certainly, Chaucer’s Duke Theseus himself has sometimes been judged by modern critics as being guilty of such vainglory.120 Yet, whilst vaingloriously desiring excessive honour and despising those who will not perform great deeds is a characteristic vice of those who are noble, it is also possible for the ruler to set such little store in praise that he does not perform deeds worthy of worship or even lapses into the exaggerated humility, ‘wrecched lownesse’, which is itself a form of ostentation or boastfulness (NE: IV, iv: 15; G: 117–22). Like John of Salisbury, who warned the ruler to be neither haughty nor abject, Giles argued that since it is reasonable that each man should receive the worship due to his estate, it is seemly for a ruler to ‘loue and desire honoure and worschep’ so long as he desires them as a recognition that he has eschewed foul deeds and has performed works for the common profit which are worthy of honour and worship (G: 117–22).121 Whilst a desire for worship could be seen as a vice when it was taken to excess or when honour was simply prized as an end in itself, Giles’s De Regimine is nonetheless quite explicit in its claim that the ruler should be magnanimous: the common profit can only be maintained with great difficulty, hence to do so ‘ben worthi greet honour and worschep’ which the magnanimous man ‘loueth’. Indeed, the pursuit of the worship which arises from securing the common good rather than the seeking of short-term personal pleasure is one of the attributes which distinguishes a true king from a tyrant (G: 119, 333–4). If such honour motivates the ruler to do virtuous deeds which are worthy of praise then it is useful and right. Just as medieval political theorists urged rulers to adopt the virtue of magnificence whilst simultaneously warning them against the sin of excessive ostentation, so they defended the right of rulers to be honoured and worshipped

119 Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II, 51, 125; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 11 (p. 238); Fouyas, Social Message, 117. 120 Neuse, ‘Knight’, 252; Aers, Chaucer, 28, 32. See also below, 198–204. 121 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV: 7, 9 (pp. 35, 43); Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 258, 379.


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by their subjects whilst, at the same time, cautioning them against the desire for excessive honour by which so many rulers were tempted. If, as Giles said, kings and princes should not praise themselves excessively, it was nonetheless right that they should be ‘worschepped’ by their subjects and so should seek to make themselves ‘gracious and worthi to be loued’ (G: 101).122 For Giles, magnanimity was the characteristic virtue of those who are noble and gentle because they aspire to live up to the great deeds of their ancestors and to maintain their own honour and worship. Such nobles also have a public visibility which makes them keen to act so as to avoid blame and to be more virtuous than other men (OR: 2, 17; G: 150–2, 154–6).123 Accordingly, whilst loving worship too much can make a man vainglorious, caring too little for praise can also be a vice because it may mean that men are not motivated to perform deeds which are worthy of praise. Whilst we should not over-value worship and, depending upon circumstances, may praise the unambitious man as modest, we should nonetheless seek to do deeds which are worthy of praise and honour (G: 85–94; NE: IV, iv). As the Secretum Secretorum said, a wish for good fame engenders all good things and helps to strengthen the kingdom.124 For Jacobus de Cessolis too, honour is ‘no thyng ellys but to do reverence to another person for the good and vertuos dispocioin that is in hym’.125 In this vein, the Alliterative Morte Arthure applauds the generosity and magnificence which King Arthur displays to his foreign guests and for caring more about acquiring ‘worship’ than for possessing ‘welth’.126 Hoccleve too praised those knights who sought to win honour and noble fame rather than fighting for material gain.127 Whilst Gower cautioned rulers against the vainglory of seeking earthly praise and honour, he also advised Richard II to be just so that the chronicle of his ‘everlasting glory may redound around the world’ and he would then enjoy the reputation of his father, the Black Prince, whose ‘undying fame is celebrated everywhere’.128

122

Olsson, ‘Securitas’, 140–3. Latini, Book of the Treasure, 163, 267–8. 124 Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 46, 182–3, 292. 125 Jacobus de Cessolis, The Game of Chess, II: 4. 126 Alliterative Morte Arthure, 538–41. 127 Hoccleve, Regiment, 1156–76. 128 Gower, Vox Clamantis, V: 10, VI: 10, 13 (pp. 201–2, 238, 241). See also Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 47. 123

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That the rendering of honour to the ruler could be regarded as performing a useful social function could be illustrated with reference to the ‘triumphs’ which were granted to victorious conquerors in the ancient world. Gower’s Confessio Amantis thus describes the triumph accorded to the ‘worthi princes’ of ancient Rome, the triumphant Emperor being honoured in a chariot pulled by four white steeds and surrounded by the prisoners he had taken. In itself, Gower does not object to the triumph which is held for the emperor ‘In thonk of his chivalerie/ And for non other flaterie’. But he also emphasises how even as the victorious emperor was at the height of his ‘noblesse’, ‘pompe’ and ‘pride’, he was reminded of the transience of such glory by a ‘Ribald’ (i.e., a jester) whose words were meant as a reminder that he should ‘his vanite repressse’ and ‘Let no justice gon aside’.129 Christine de Pizan too praised the ‘very noble custom’ of the triumph, in which the victors were given jewels to reward their service, as a way of honouring virtue and public service: ‘Would to God that France, which is the most noble land in the world, had such a custom!’ As Christine said, whilst striving ‘too ardently for glory in this world’ is a sin, for those who ‘live morally in the active life, to desire glory in a just cause is not a vice’: the ‘good and the noble’ ought and can desire glory.130 The ruler was perfectly entitled to have his victories hailed by his subjects whilst also being expected to remain ever-vigilant against the temptations of pride and vanity. Consequently, whilst some readers have interpreted Duke Theseus’s decision to aid the Argive widows against Creon as resulting from a desire to reaffirm his own honour rather than it being a selfless act of compassion, medieval moralists and poets by no means saw the two as necessarily being in opposition.131 We can see this combination of worship and virtue at Theseus’s homecoming from victory over the Amazons where his triumph is celebrated ‘With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee’ (I: 869–70, 895, 972). It is precisely because he expects his success to be hailed by his subjects that the duke asks the widows, who have awaited his return at the Temple of Clemency, why

129

Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 2355–2411. Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 22, 50–2, 55–7, 63, 69, 77–83; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 19–20, 48–50, 54–5, 62, 68, 76–83; see also Boethius, Consolation, III, pr. 6; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 311. On the triumph, see also Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVIII.II.3–6. 131 Webb, ‘Reinterpretation’, 295; Sherman, ‘Politics’, 96–8. 130


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they have disturbed his triumph with their sorrow. In reply, the noble ladies make it clear that, although in seeking pity from the victorious duke, they did not at all begrudge him his triumph nor have any desire to detract from the acclaim which was due to him: ‘Nat greveth us your glorie and youre honour’ (I: 894–930). Immediately, even at the moment of his ‘mooste pride’ (I: 895), Theseus follows the advice given to the triumphant ruler in Gower’s Confessio Amantis to ‘Let no justice gon aside’.132 He asks the widows how he can provide them with justice against anyone who has injured them, refusing any rest and foregoing the celebration of his victory in order to punish the tyrannical Creon (I: 909–10, 965–74). To us, such actions may be seem to be ill-advised or ‘hasty’, but Chaucer does not present them as such by, for instance, having the duke go to war against the advice of wise counsellors or by subsequently failing in battle.133 Rather, Theseus’s success in defeating Creon, as he promises to do, would seem to demonstrate that, by Giles’s standards, he possesses the magnanimity which is the virtuous mean between a pusillanimous failure to act and a reckless foolhardiness which endangers the realm (G: 122–4). In addition to doing great deeds which are worthy of honour and worship, Theseus displays many of the other character traits of the magnanimous man as described by Giles. For instance, whilst Theseus’s doctrine of making a ‘virtue of necessity’ has been interpreted by some modern critics as a licence for tyranny (see below, 184–5), Giles presents the ability to suffer bad fortune patiently and without complaining as a key trait of the magnanimous man: it is those who are ‘pusillanimous’ and so lack magnanimity who ‘can not suffry fortune’ and who are ‘ouercome in vnfortune and myshap’ (G: 86–7). Similarly, just as Giles teaches that the magnanimous man should be honest and open about his emotions, showing himself ‘outward as it is inward’ (G: 88), so Chaucer tells us that Theseus, on hearing of the suffering of the widows who have waited for his return, ‘doun from his courser sterte/ With herte pitous, whan he herede hem speke./ Hym thoughte that his herte wolde breke, When he saugh hem so pitous and so maat’ (I: 952–5). If the inner compassion which Theseus feels for the widows’ plight relates to his possession of the virtue of justice, his open display of sympathy for them can be seen as an expression of his magnanimity.

132 133

Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII; 2388. Roney, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, 115.

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chapter one ix. ‘Mansuetude’

Having dealt with the four virtues that stand ‘in outward good’, Giles next turns his attention to ‘mansuetudo’, the virtue that relates to evil deeds which are done to us (G: 74). ‘Mansuetudo’ (or what Chaucer’s Parson calls ‘debonairetee’ (X: 654)), lacks a precise modern equivalent but is often translated as ‘patience’, ‘gentleness’ or ‘meekness’ since it is the virtuous mean between, on the one hand, the wrath which seeks excessive and irrational revenge for harms done to us and to others and, on the other, ‘inirascibilitas’, the insufficient anger and ‘wommanliche’ excess of mercy which makes us too mild in punishing evil. However, since by nature we generally desire revenge on those that harm us, excessive anger tends to be more of a danger that needs correction than insufficient vengefulness (NE: IV, v: 12). Whilst it is right and reasonable that kings should be moved to punish wrongdoers so that the polity should endure, such punishment should not be done out of hate but rather out of love of righteousness and of the common profit (G: 95–7, 129, 136–7).134 As well as listing ‘mansuetudo’ as one of the virtues, Giles also uses the same term, because of a ‘scarsete of names’, as a ‘name equiuocum’ for one of the twelve passions (G: 114). In his discussion of ‘mansuetudo’ as a virtue, Giles presents it as a counter to wrath but, in his account of ‘mansuetudo’ as a passion, he makes a distinction between wrath and hate in terms of eight criteria. The first is that whilst we may hate someone who is evil whether they have hurt us personally or not, wrath is what moves us to seek revenge for a harm done to us personally or to our family and friends (OR: 2: 2, 1).135 Second, we can hate wrongdoers in general but are wrathful against some particular person who has wronged us. Third, hate tends to be limitless whereas wrath can be satisfied by an adequate revenge. Fourth, he who is wrathful will ‘do smerte and sorwe’, whereas he who hates will desire to do ‘damage’ and ‘noye’. Fifth, unlike hate, wrath desires not just that harm be done to someone but also that such revenge be publicly known for what it is. Sixth, wrath is also linked with feelings of personal sorrow, whereas we may hate wrongdoers in general without feeling such personal woe. Seventh, wrath is more merciful than hate because

134 135

Aquinas, Ethics, 349, 800–14; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 260. Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 52v.


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our desire for revenge can be satiated whereas hate is limitless. Finally, it follows that wrath can be satisfied merely by harming those who have done us wrong, whereas limitless hate will seek to destroy them totally. Hate is therefore worse than wrath, and rulers, whose capacity for harm is greater than other men’s, should take particular care that their wrath does not turn into irrational and excessively vengeful hate. Nevertheless, as Chaucer’s Parson also argued (X: 536–40), there is a wrath that is reasonable and ordinate and which leads us to perform virtuous deeds, bringing justice to those who have suffered wrongly and punishing those who have harmed them. Whilst we need the virtue and the passion of ‘mansuetude’ so that a rightful wrath at wrongdoing does not turn into the sin of limitless hatred, we also need that form of the passion of wrath which is an ‘instrument of vertue and of resoun’, so that an excess of ‘mansuetudo’ does not lead us into pusillanimity in doing works of virtue (G: 114, 127–9).136 As we have seen, for Giles, wrath can be distinguished from hate in that it involves a desire not just to harm someone else but that it be ‘oponliche iknowe that the other hath the harm by hym’ (G: 128). It is this righteous wrath, which otherwise could be seen as boastful and self-aggrandizing, which Theseus expresses when he swears ‘Upon the tiraunt Creon hem to wreke’ (I: 961) and promises ‘That al the peple of Grece sholde speke/ How Creon was of Theseus yserved’ (I: 962–3).137 Indeed, in pleading for his help against Creon, the Argive widows specifically appeal to his ‘gentillesse’ (I: 920) just as later, in shifting from vengeful wrath to mercy towards Palamon and Arcite, we are told that ‘pitee renneth soone in gentil herte’ (I: 1761).138 Giles argues that, ideally, a king should hate the sin rather than the sinner, but sometimes a vice can only be destroyed and the common profit maintained by destroying those who do the evil (G: 120), as when Theseus swears that he will inflict upon Creon the death which he has ‘ful wel deserved’ (I: 964). Similarly, whereas hate is limitless, wrath can be satiated, so that although Theseus originally imprisons Palamon and Arcite as supporters of Creon and members of the Theban royal family (I: 1018, 1023–4), he eventually forgives them (I: 1825) and seeks a reconciliation between Athens and Thebes by the marriage between 136

On the difference between wrath and hated, see also Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 54; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 52–3. 137 Hansen, Chaucer, 219. 138 For Chaucer’s other uses of this phrase, see Hoffman, Ovid, 68.

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Palamon and Emily. As Giles says, a king needs to know not only when to punish but also when to forgive, being wrathful when he should be but also the ‘contrarie’ when appropriate, so that reason abates wrath and makes it merciful (G: 95–7, 127–129, 136–7). x. Affability Finally, Giles turns his attention to those virtues which ‘stondeth in outward good in ordre to othere’, i.e., in relation to others in our words and deeds (G: 74). These can be divided into the virtue that relates to friendship (‘amicabilitas’ or affability); that which relates to honesty (‘apericio’ or truthfulness); and that which relates to amusement (‘debita iocunditas’ or ‘eutrapelia’). Since man is a social or ‘companable’ animal, he needs rightful fellowship and communication with others. However, this is particularly true of those who are noble because, unlike the more solitary life of the ‘cherles’, the life of those at court requires them to be affable and good to speak with (G: 150–2). Affability is the virtuous mean which creates this sociability, moderating the excess of indiscriminate flattery and obsequiousness whilst, at the same time, abating the insufficient sociability of contrariness and shrewishness (G: 97–98; NE: IV, vi: 1–5).139 Nonetheless, although some ‘homlichnesse’ is a virtue in a king, Giles, like John of Salisbury, taught that a king should not be too familiar with those beneath him: a ruler should have more worship and reverence than other men so that a manner which might be considered insufficiently affable in one of his subjects may be virtuously and sufficiently ‘homlich’ in a king (G: 98–99, 284).140 For this reason, Honoré Bonet followed the Secretum Secretorum in advising the ruler not to appear too frequently in public ‘for we do not esteem a person whom we see often so much as one we see rarely’.141 That Theseus exhibits the virtue of ‘affabilitas’ or ‘amicabilitas’ in the general sense of being sociable is perhaps most evident at the feast which follows the tournament between the followers of Palamon and Arcite. The combat has been hard fought and although, thanks to Theseus’s ordinance that it should not be a ‘mortal bataille’ (I: 2537–64), no-one

139

Aquinas, Ethics, 816–29; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 165; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 100–1. 140 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV: 7 (p. 35). 141 Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 49; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 213.


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has been killed in the combat itself (although Arcite does tragically die from having been thrown from his horse), some of the participants have nevertheless been ‘soore yhurt’, having suffered broken bones and other wounds and with one knight having even been pierced to the breast bone.142 In order to put an end to any lingering ‘rancour and envye’ between the two sides, the ‘noble duc, as he wel kan,/ Conforteth and honoureth every man’, reassuring all that they have fought valiantly and have been evenly matched, praising each side as equal in its ‘gree’ (i.e., victory’) and ‘eyther syde ylik as ootheres brother’, feasting his noble guests for three days before honourably escorting them on their way (I: 2708–40). The courtesy and sociability which Theseus demonstrates here are not simply personal character traits or a demonstration of his professional skill as a man of chivalry.143 Rather, an ‘affability’ in words and in deeds is one of the twelve virtues which Giles requires of a ruler, one which here helps turn potential conflict into social harmony. As Giles said, ‘gentelnesse and noblenesse of maneres’ are the foundation of all the virtues: if the law prohibits vice, it is ‘curtesye’ which teaches virtue (G: 97, 280–2). In Dante’s words, ‘courtesy and virtue are one’ and it is this virtuous courtesy which Duke Theseus reveals in his treatment of others.144 xi. Truthfulness The second of the three virtues which Giles relates to sociability is that of ‘truthfulness’. The concept of ‘truth’ had a variety of legal, moral, religious and philosophical meanings in the later middle ages.145 Like Brunetto Latini and Aquinas, Giles employs the term in the sense of self-knowledge and of having an accurate appreciation of one’s own worth.146 As Aristotle had said, the virtue of truthfulness is the mean which both abates the excess of boasting in which we claim to possess more goodness or to have achieved more than we actually have done

142

Vale, ‘Violence’, 146. Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 535; Burnley, Courtliness, 57; Bumke, Courtly Culture, 183–5, 219–20, 228–9. 144 Nicholls, Matter, 8–9, 18–19, 127; Young Children’s Book, 9–10; Dante, Convivio, II, xi: 3. See also below, 000. 145 Burrow, Reading, 42–7; Green, Crisis, passim. 146 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 165; Aquinas, Ethics, 831–42. See also Dante, Convivio, IV, xvii: 11; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 266. 143

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whilst also moderating the opposite fault of scorning our own achievements and holding ourselves below our true worth (NE: IV, vii). Rulers should not despise their own worth because this will lead others to despise them. However, since humans are more prone to over-valuing themselves than to underestimating their own worth, boastfulness is generally more likely to need correction than excessive self-scorn, particularly as the vice of boasting tends to be more socially harmful than self-derision. Nevertheless, whilst kings and princes should not praise themselves excessively, it is still right that they should be ‘worschepped’ by their subjects and so should seek to be ‘gracious and worthi to be loued’ (G: 99–101). As Gower said, the gold of the king’s crown symbolised his excellence ‘That men schull don him reverence/ As to here liege soverein’, the bright stones in the crown betokening ‘The Cronique of this worldes fame/ Which stant upon his goode name’.147 That Theseus may possess ‘truthfulness’ in Giles’s sense of self-knowledge can perhaps best be seen when he marches on Thebes displaying ‘his penoun/ Of golde ful riche, in which ther was ybete/ The Mynotaur, which that he wan in Crete’ (I: 975–80). The Minotaur, the half-man/ half-bull, depicted on Theseus’ pennon was not a strict armorial bearing but rather a rebus or a symbolic emblem of the kind which is often found in medieval fiction.148 If we so wish, we can follow Holcot and Boccaccio in seeing Theseus’s triumph over the Minotaur as an allegory of the triumph of virtue and reason over the appetites and the bestiality of sin.149 Even at the literal level, Theseus’s defeat over the Minotaur was seen by medieval writers as being worthy of everlasting praise in freeing the Athenians from the cruel tribute of the lives of the noble youths which had been demanded by King Minos as vengeance for the

147

Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 1749–74. Lippe, ‘Armorial Bearings’, 96. The Minotaur pennon is mentioned in neither Statius’s Thebaid (although Statius does describe Theseus’s shield as depicting him wrestling with the Minotaur in the Cretan Labyrinth) nor Boccaccio’s Teseida, these texts referring only to unspecified ‘vexilla’ and ‘Le ‘nsegne’ Statius, Thebaid, XII: 614, 665–76; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 62; Boccaccio, Teseida, 63; Wise, Influence, 50–1. 149 Boccaccio, Genealogie Gentilium Deorum, IV: 10; Robertson, Preface, 156; McCall, Chaucer, 67, 170–1 n. 18; Schweitzer, ‘Fate’, 35; Hoffman, Ovid, 40–1, 50; Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 87–8. As shown by the depiction of Theseus, Ariadne and the Minotaur on a plaque which was once positioned at the centre of the labyrinth in the nave of Chartres Cathedral, Theseus was certainly open to moral and theological allegorization (Ball, Universe of Stone, 138). For Christian allegorizations of Theseus see also below, 38, 99, 201, 234. 148


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death of his son.150 However, the more immediate purpose of Theseus’s pennon in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself seems to be the same as that of the shield described by Statius, i.e. to inspire Theseus, by reminding him of his own bravery in entering the Labyrinth, and to strike fear and terror into his opponents when they see the ‘grim picture’ of the achievement which marked the ‘beginnings of his glory’.151 But, of course, the pennon can only achieve these effects because of the ‘veritas’ of the events to which it makes reference, that is to the killing of the hateful monster for which Laurent de Premierfait described him as ‘le vaillant chevalier Theseus’ and which John Lydgate’s paraphrase of Premierfait hailed as an ‘impossible’ deed.152 It thus provides a contrast with the pentangle device displayed on Sir Gawain’s shield in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight whose ‘endeless knot’ Burrow has interpreted as boastfully proclaiming a faultless perfection which, as Gawain’s own failure shows, no human, ‘not even a knight of Arthur’s court, can justly claim’.153 If Theseus possesses ‘veritas’ in Giles’s sense of displaying an accurate estimate of his own worth and showing himself as he really is, the duke can also be seen as being ‘truthful’ in the more traditional sense of being faithful to his word and loyal to his friends.154 For Gower, such fidelity was the ‘chief’ virtue and so was particularly needed by kings.155 Following Aristotle (NE: IX: xxii), Aquinas had defined friendship as the love we feel ‘for those we will good things to’ and in which we love our friends as ourselves, a definition which was in turn adopted by Giles: ‘he semeth a frende that loueth his frend as hemself’ (G: 8).156 For Aristotle, friendship could be evil when it is between morally inferior people, as it can lead them to engage in unworthy pursuits such as drinking and dicing, whereas the friendship of those who are virtuous is itself good

150 John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, 305–6; Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, vii: 8; II, x: 5; Laurent de Premierfait, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 128–9; Christine de Pizan, Mutacion de Fortune, 13389–448. 151 Hoffman, Ovid, 50; Sherman, ‘Politics’, 109; Statius, Thebaid, XII: 665–76. 152 Premierfait, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 127–8, 148; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 24, 119. See also Higden, Polychronicon, I, 380–3. 153 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 619–65; Burrow, Reading, 50, 159, 171; Spearing, Gawain-Poet, 228. 154 Burrow, Reading, 42–3; Green, Crisis, 13–19. 155 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 1723–1984; Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 22789– 812. 156 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 180, 349, 358. See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 177–8.

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and encourages them to grow further in goodness (NE: IX, xii, 3).157 Such virtuous friendship, in which men act towards each other out of love and affection rather than out of a calculation of mutual utility, was seen as a ‘badge of distinction’ by the medieval nobility. It was not just a matter of personal affection but, in its associations with virtue and self-control, a social ideal. As Cicero said in his Laelius, which was to become a ‘handbook of friendship for the European aristocracy’, such a loving friendship was ‘the noblest and most delightful of all the gifts the gods have given to mankind’.158 In the ‘Knight’s Tale’, this virtuous and ennobling form of friendship seems to be exemplified in Theseus’s love for the ‘worthy duc’ Pirithous. It is this friendship which enables Pirithous to secure the release of Arcite from prison (I: 1202–7) since, as the Ovide Moralisé says, the two men loved each other so well that neither could refuse anything that the other asked of him.159 As Aristotle had argued, the rich and powerful especially require friends ‘since what would be the good of their prosperity without an outlet for beneficence, which is displayed in its fullest and most praiseworthy form towards friends?’ (NE: VIII, i: 1).160 The two men had been close friends since they were boys: Pirithous loved Theseus more than any man in the world whilst, in return, Theseus ‘loved hym als tendrely agayn’: ‘so wel they lovede, as olde bookes sayn,/ That whan that oon was deed, soothly to telle,/ His felawe wente and soughte hym doun in helle’ (I: 1191–1200). In classical mythology, Theseus actually went to the underworld to help Pirithous carry off Persephone, who had previously been abducted and taken to Hades by Pluto. As Statius’s Thebaid said, Theseus was a loyal friend who shared the worst with his ‘reckless’ comrade. The two men were captured by Pluto, but Theseus (or, in some versions of the story, both men) was eventually rescued by Hercules.161 Ovid’s Metamorphoses had described Theses and Pirithous as ‘inseparable friends’, with Pirithous being dearer to Theseus than his own life.162

157

Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 419. Cicero, Laelius, 201–4; Jaeger, Ennobling Love, ix, 2, 4–6, 13, 27–37, 61. 159 Ovide Moralisé, VII: 1736–9. For the variant ancient versions of this story, see Clark, Catabasis, chapter 5. 160 Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 413. 161 Statius, Thebaid, I: 475–6, VIII: 53–4; Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, I: 48, 57; II: 133; Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I: X (p. 54); Hoffman, Ovid, 52–6. 162 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII: 303, 405–7; XII: 227–9. 158


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Within medieval literature, the loyalty expressed in the friendship between Theseus and Pirithous was proverbial, as in Le Roman de Thèbes and Alan of Lille’s Anticlaudianus (c. 1184), both texts known to Chaucer. In the latter, Theseus actually returns to the underworld to rescue his friend, this devotion being seen as a classical parallel for the virtuous, manly love between David and Jonathan.163 As Brunetto Latini said, the truly noble man will love his friend as much or even more than he cares for his own profit (NE: IX, iv: 5).164 Ironically, then, whilst ancient Greek tradition had seen Theseus’s and Pirithous’s attempt to carry off Persephone as ‘an outrageous act of impiety’, the Ovide Moralisé was able to equate Theseus with Jesus in its allegorization of their descent into the underworld whilst John of Garland equated Theseus with the ‘celica vita’ or contemplative life as opposed to Pirithous who was seen as representing the ‘active life’.165 Boccaccio’s commentary on Dante’s Inferno contrasts the faithful loyalty which the two friends represent with the Furies, who are ‘conventional figures for discord’.166 Similarly, in Boccaccio’s Teseida, when Theseus tarries in Scythia to enjoy married life with his new bride, Hippolyta, it is a vision of Pirithous which summons him back to Athens in order to win further glory, a message which the duke interprets as actually coming from ‘some divinity who looked after his honour with loving zeal’.167 However, within medieval culture, as Giles of Rome himself pointed out, a symbol or exemplum had no single meaning but instead carried a range of different connotations which could vary depending upon its use in a particular context (OEG: 265). Consequently, Pirithous was not only read in bono, he could also be interpreted in malo, as he was by Bernardus Silvestris who used him to represent a false eloquence.168 Similarly, modern critics have seen the reference to the story of Theseus and Pirithous’s catabasis in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as an allusion to ‘lechery’, with the duke having being guilty of having helped his friend in a quest

163 Jaeger, Ennobling Love, 103; Roman de Thèbes: 958; Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, II (p. 73); Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 120–1; Hoffman, ‘Ovid’, 252–7; Boccaccio, Esposizioni, 479. For Chaucer’s knowledge of the Anticlaudianus, see House of Fame, 986. See also Cicero, Laelius: On Friendship, 200. 164 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 184–5; Aquinas, Ethics, 1797–8. 165 Ovide Moralisé, VII: 2039–67; John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, 307–8, 363–6. 166 Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 96, n. 73. 167 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 53–4; Boccaccio, Teseida, 50–1. 168 Chance, Mythographic Chaucer, 197–8.

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to ‘rape’ Persephone. This disreputable motivation would then explain why the Knight ‘abruptly stops’ in his recounting of these events: ‘But of that storie list me nat to write’ (I: 1201).169 If the story of Theseus and Pirithous has no inherent meaning, which of its potentially contradictory connotations is invoked in the context of the ‘Knight’s Tale’? Firstly, it is not clear whether Chaucer knew the details of the story of Theseus and Pirithous’s journey to the underworld to abduct/rape Persephone. The story is not mentioned in Boccaccio’s Teseida and is only vaguely alluded to in the Thebaid where Statius simply refers to the self-sacrificing loyalty of Theseus to the ‘audacious’ Pirithous to whom he was a ‘sworn friend’.170 Chaucer’s Knight follows the positive interpretation of the myth as given in The Romance of the Rose where Friend makes a reference to Pirithous in the context of a discussion about how those who die live on in the hearts and memories of those who loved them. Here, although Pirithous himself is said to have died, he nonetheless ‘lived on in Theseus’s heart, and Theseus had loved him so well while he lived on earth that after his death he sought him and pursued him so much that he even went alive into the underworld to look for him’.171 Secondly, even if Chaucer was familiar with the myth of Theseus and Pirithous’s journey to the underworld, it does not follow that he would have seen this as a story about lechery and rape. After all, in the version of the story given both by the Ovide Moralisé, Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius Moralizatus and Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea, Theseus and Pirithous are said to have gone to Hell to ‘rescue’ (‘delivrer’/‘recourre’) Persephone, who had actually been ravished (‘par rapine la prist’/‘ot ravie’) by Pluto. Christine therefore interpreted the story as one of loyal friendship, with Hercules’s rescue of the two men also allegorically representing Christ’s release of the holy patriarchs and prophets from Limbo and symbolising how the good spirit should draw all the virtues to itself.172 Finally, if, as seems to be the case, the relationship between Pirithous and Theseus provides, in the context of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, an ‘ironic 169

Chance, Mythographic Chaucer, 197. Statius, Thebaid, I: 475–6; VIII: 53–4. Chance claims that Pirithous is ‘not mentioned in the Teseida’ (Mythographic Chaucer, 197), but, in fact, Pirithous obtains the release of Arcite in Boccaccio’s Teseida as he does in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 86–7; Boccaccio, Teseida, 90–2). 171 Roman de la Rose, 8110–8124; Romance of the Rose, 125. 172 Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, 204–5, 240–1; Hoffman, ‘Ovid’, 254. 170


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gloss’ on the enmity between Palamon and Arcite, it would seem to be the positive associations of their friendship which are invoked by the Knight’s allusion to it.173 The truth and fidelity of Theseus and Pirithous as ‘felawes’ (I: 1192) (i.e., sworn brothers) contrasts here with the ease with which Palamon and Arcite renounce their oaths to be true to each other until death as ‘brother ysworn’ (i.e. as formally bound brothers in arms), once their love for Emily comes between them (I: 1129–1140, 1161, 1583 1604–5).174 Their loyalty thus exhibits the love which Boethius described as giving harmony to the entire universe, from the ordering of the elements down to the love which rules human hearts, being seen in the bonds both of wedlock and of the friendship of ‘All faithful comrades’.175 Far from being an act of self-censorship about a disreputable episode, the way in which the Knight draws short his allusion to Theseus and Pirithous’s journey to the underworld seems simply to be one of a number of occasions when the Knight employs the rhetorical device of the ‘occupatio’, one which medieval literary theorists would have regarded as appropriate for the Knight’s elevated style, subject matter and own personal status.176 xii. Proper Amusement The final sociable virtue which Giles discusses is ‘iocunditas’ or ‘eutrapelia’, that is the reasonable enjoyment of mirth and games which constitutes the mean between, on the one hand, an excessive buffoonery and over-indulgence in play and amusement and, on the other, the insufficient sociability that is boorishness (NE: IV, ix). Human nature being as it is, eutrapelia is most likely to be needed to curb the temptation to indulge in excessive amusement and vain pursuits. Nonetheless, just as

173

Chance, Mythographic Chaucer, 197. Pirithous’s negative association with ‘false eloquence’ (see above, 71) is, after all, hardly at issue in the context of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. See also Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 96. 174 Bennett, Commentary, 19–20; Blamires, Chaucer, 25–7; Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 236–7; Stretter, ‘Rewriting Perfect Friendship’ 236–9. For sworn brotherhood in arms as a legally recognized relationship in medieval military law, see Keen, Nobles, 43–62; for an example of such a tie between two knights known to Chaucer, see Düll, Luttrell and Keen, ‘Faithful Unto Death’, and Bray, The Friend, especially chapter one. See also Brown, ‘Ritual Brotherhood’; Brown-Grant, French Romance, 22–3, 71–2. 175 Boethius, Consolation, II. m. VIII: 1–27; Hoffman, Ovid, 55–6; Bray, The Friend, 257–8. 176 Fisher, ‘Three Styles’, 121–2; Rigby, Chaucer, 38; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 79.

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sleep is necessary for the body, so some recreation is necessary for the mind and for our continued ability to perform good works. As Aristotle said, whilst excessive bodily pleasure should be avoided, ‘even the temperate man has pleasures’ (AP: VIII, 3; NE: IV, viii, 1; VII, xii: 7).177 For Giles, as for John of Salisbury, even kings are entitled to the reasonable enjoyment of ‘pleyes and games’, although, as always, what is seemly for lesser men may be inappropriate for the dignity of a ruler.178 Whilst kings should be ‘iocunde and mery’, it is particularly important that their amusements should be ‘liberal, honeste and moderat’ so that they are not distracted from working for the common good and so that they present themselves as steadfast and serious to their subjects rather than as childish in their excessive enjoyment of play (G: 53, 98, 101–3, 131, 233–4). Whether Theseus possesses the virtue of eutrapelia by which a good ruler refreshes himself or whether he is guilty of overindulgence in amusement so that he neglects good works is a question which is certainly raised by the duke’s fondness for hunting, this being, as the ‘Knight’s Tale’ makes clear, his favourite form of recreation. In his eagerness to hunt, the duke rises before dawn, going out to ride with horn and hounds: ‘For in his huntyng hath he swich delit/ That is it al his joye and appetit/ To been hymself the grete hertes bane/ For after Mars he serveth now Diane’. In particular, on the day in May that he is to encounter Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove, Theseus rides out ‘roially’ and ‘with alle joye and blis’ (I: 1674–95). It would certainly be possible to cite medieval authorities for whom the duke’s devotion to hunting would have cast doubt on his wisdom and virtue. Most famously, perhaps, John of Salisbury’s Policraticus included a lengthy attack on those possessed by the ‘crazy mania’ for hunting. Rarely are hunters ‘found to be modest or dignified, rarely self-controlled, and in my opinion never temperate’. It was the proud Nimrod, who was ‘a stout hunter before the lord’ (Genesis 10: 9), who had been the first tyrant and who had ‘reduced to servitude those of his own status and race’ whom nature had ‘created free and equal’.179

177 Cicero, On Duties, I: 103 (p. 40); Albertus Magnus, Questions, 81; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 440; Aquinas, Ethics, 850–4, 2077; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 201, 219; Albert Magnus, Questions, 81; Oresme, Livre de Politique, 341; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 270, 404; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 55; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 53–4; Olson, Literature, chapter 4. 178 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 5, 8 (pp. 28, 38). 179 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 3–4 (pp. 11–26); Rooney, Hunting, 39; Thiébaux, ‘Medieval Chase’, 263–5; Orme, From Childhood, 197. For this tradition in theology


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Medieval preachers regularly denounced those who disregarded their secular and spiritual duties to go hunting and attacked the rich men, whether of the nobility or of the Church, who lived in luxury whilst neglecting the needy, thinking less of the poor ‘than they do of their hunting dogs’.180 Indeed, it has recently been argued that, in his devotion to hunting, Chaucer’s Theseus himself evokes the ‘triangle of desire, appetite and bloodlust’ which John of Salisbury ascribed to the proud and tyrannical Nimrod.181 Yet, despite his criticism of hunters, even John of Salisbury conceded that ‘it is quite possible, depending upon the circumstances, time, manner, individual, and purpose’ for hunting to be a justified pursuit and a ‘useful and honourable activity’.182 Unquestionably, for members of the medieval nobility, both male and female, a skill in hunting was an expected accomplishment, the techniques, ritualized ceremonies and arcane and socially exclusive vocabulary of the sport constituting, as the Policraticus sarcastically put it, ‘the liberal studies of the higher class’.183 Both in fiction and in real life (as in the statute of 1390 which excluded commoners from the right to hunt with dogs and to take venison), hunting was an activity which functioned as a marker of gentle status (as in the case of Chaucer’s Troilus, who hunted the noble quarry of the boar, bear and lion but ‘The smale beests leet he gon beside’ (III: 1779–81)), whilst the ‘hunte’ (or huntsman), like the one who accompanied Theseus (I: 1678), was a standard officer of the aristocratic household. Lords such as Sir Thomas Berkeley, the patron of Trevisa’s translation of the De Regimine Principum, and kings such as Edward III and Richard II were dedicated hunters, whilst Henry IV was one of many European rulers who ‘maintained immense establishments of hounds, falcons or both, partly for the entertainment of visiting dignitaries, but

and canon law, see Willard, ‘Chaucer’s “Text”’; Dubreucq, ‘Introduction’, 29; Glossa Ordinaria, 113; Gratian, Treatise, 22. 180 Owst, Literature, 260, 264, 270, 278–9; Golding, ‘Hermit’, 113; Rooney, Hunting, 41–2, 122–7, 131, 195–7; Wimbledon, Redde Ratione Villicationis Tue, 259–61; Langland, Piers Plowman, V: 416–20; Owst, Destructorium Viciorum, 30–1; Vices and Virtues, Part I, 69; Ovide Moralisé, III: 591–603. 181 Marvin, Hunting Law, 8, 65–6. 182 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 4 (pp. 23–5). See also John Mirk, Festial, I, 93. 183 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 4, 23 (p. 16); Orme, From Childhood, 191–8. For Chaucer’s knowledge of the languages and practices of hunting, see Emerson, ‘Chaucer’.

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essentially for their own amusement’.184 Similarly, when the ‘Knight’s Tale’ describes King Lycurgus of Thrace arriving on a golden chariot to support Palamon at the tournament, his magnificent display includes twenty white wolfhounds which were used ‘To hunten at the leoun or the deer’, each tightly muzzled and wearing a collar of gold with their ‘tourettes (i.e., leash-rings) fyled rounde’, (I: 2129–54).185 A knowledge of hunting was made available through manuals such as Gaston Phoebus’s Livre de Chasse (1387–9), which was translated into English as The Master of the Game by Edward, duke of York, between 1406 and 1413. At his death in 1388, Sir Simon Burley, former tutor to Richard II, owned not only a Bible, two books on the Ten Commandments, a collection of saints’ lives and a copy of Giles’s De Regimine but also various romances and one work in English ‘del forster & del sengler’ which was probably a book of hunting.186 Perhaps in response to the criticisms of those such as John of Salisbury, these manuals defended hunting as an activity which was personally, socially and morally beneficial. It was therefore said to encourage health, happiness, good manners and sociability and was justified as form of recreation which prepared men for war and which provided an alternative to idleness and to disreputable activities such as dicing. As The Master of the Game says, hunting encouraged a man ‘to eschew the seven deadly sins’, and so to achieve heavenly salvation, whilst also providing earthly joy and bodily health.187 As Olson concludes, hunting was not merely a form of play but had a much broader social and cultural significance.188 184 Keen, Chivalry, 11, 145, 172–3, 249; Vale, Princely Court, 179–84; Lyon, ‘What Were Edward III’s Priorities?’; Sherborne, ‘Aspects’, 6, 17, 21; Saul, Richard II, 15, 196, 337, 452; Orme, ‘Education’, 64, 83–4; Alexander, ‘Painting’, 158; Fletcher, ‘Manhood’, 29; Wilkins, ‘Music’, 195; Marvin, ‘Slaughter’, 226–8, 247; Woolgar, Great Household, 53, 115–6, 193–5; Burnley, Courtliness, 25, 54, 106, 132–4, 194, 205; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 1139–41, 1379–82; Boke of Curtasye, 629–38; Cummins, Hound, 1, 172–86; Hanna, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley’, 883; Rooney, Hunting, 1–4, 78, 99, 101; Owst, Literature, 353. 185 Brooks and Fowler see the king’s appearance and display as also having a moral significance (‘Meaning’, 131–33). 186 Marvin, Hunting Law, 97–8, 114–30; Rooney, Hunting, 11–19; Cummins, Hound, p. 41; Olson, Literature, 124–7; Orme, From Childhood, 194–5; Scattergood, ‘Literary Culture’, 35–6. Clarke identified Burley’s book as a romance but admitted that she was ‘unable to trace’ its identity (Fourteenth Century Studies, 120). For a facsimile of an early fifteenth-century manuscript of the Livre de Chasse, see Gaston Phoebus, Hunting Book. 187 Edward of Norwich, The Master of the Game, 1–13; Keen, Chivalry, 9–11; Olson, Literature, 119–27, 188–91; Thiébaux, ‘Medieval Chase’, 260–3; Cummins, Hound, 2–8; Wynnere and Wastoure, 402–6; Rooney, ‘Hunts’, 157. 188 Olson, Literature, 126–7.


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Accordingly, the fact that hunting could sometimes be used to signify worldly vanity and that the sport was forbidden to clerics, a point which Chaucer uses to satirise the Monk in the ‘General Prologue’, did not mean that hunting was wrong per se.189 Rather, hunting could also be a sign of the courtliness and physical prowess required in a knight, provided that, as Giles’s De Regimine, Jacob’s Well, Philippe de Mézières’s Songe du Vieil Pelerin and The Master of the Game all agreed, it was not done ‘oute of tyme and oute of mesure’ and did not distract men from their more important secular or spiritual duties (G: 103).190 As Machaut’s Jugement dou Roy de Navarre put it, hunting was an activity chosen by nobles, one that is gracious, pleasant and advantageous, bringing honour in its completion.191 Even a didactic and religiously-orientated work such as Ramon Lull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry was happy to recommend that knights should not only joust and attend tournaments but also, as Caxton’s translation put it, should ‘hunte at hertes, at bores & other wyld bestes. For in doynge these thynges, the knyghtes exercyse them to armes for to mayntene thordre of knighthode’.192 Giles of Rome himself agreed that hunters of boars and of harts were ideal for use as fighting men since such hunters are accustomed to ‘greet trauaille’ and, more generally, argued that, since ‘bestes scholde be soget to man’, humanity could ‘fighteth and werreth agent hem’ (AP: I: 5, 7; G: 259–60, 274, 398).193 Similarly, in Handlynge Synne, although Robert Mannyng notes the prohibition of hunting to the clergy, he explicitly allows that such ‘pleynges’ are ‘graunted’ to emperors, kings, earls, barons and knights so as to keep them from being tempted by the sins that result from idleness.194 Walter of Milemete was a cleric but he too agreed that hunting with dogs was one of the ‘honourable comforts’ which a ruler could enjoy, one which would not only invigorate his body, and improve his senses but also enhance his ‘intellectual penetration’.195 It is as a signifier of the joys of the aristocratic life that the hart-hunt

189

On the clergy, see John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 4 (p. 25); Dives and Pauper, Volume I, Part I, 186–7; Rooney, Hunting, 41; Willard, ‘Chaucer’s “Text”’, 231, 242–50. 190 Rooney, Hunting, 6, 54, 85–6, 95, 102–3, 118–20, 127–9, 137, 194, 197; Jacob’s Well, 105; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 226 (pp. 213–4); Edward of Norwich, Master of the Game, 4–5; Maddern, ‘Gentility’, 30; Orme, ‘Education’, 77–80; Strack, ‘Piety’, 266. 191 Minnis, Shorter Poems, 118. 192 Lull, Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, 31. 193 Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 810. 194 Mannyng, Handlynge Synne, 3085–96. 195 Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 46.

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functions in The Book of the Duchess (344–86), the lengthiest and most technical of Chaucer’s descriptions of hunting, in which the sociability and pleasure of hunting contrast with the Black Knight’s mourning and detachment from society.196 If hunting could provoke a wide range of reactions in medieval culture, from a condemnation of it as a sign of worldly vanity, through a more neutral acceptance of it as a marker of courtliness, to a positive defence of its virtues, which of these responses is invoked by Theseus’s love of the hunt in the context of the ‘Knight’s Tale’? That Theseus prefers above all to hunt the hart with hounds (I: 1675, 1678), the chasse royale which was regarded as the noblest form of hunting, certainly indicates his gentility. Even the manner of his hunting, which takes place in May and in which the hart is first tracked down by a huntsman (I: 1675, 1689), is in line with the procedures set out in the hunting manuals.197 In narrative terms, it would easily have been possible for Theseus’s love of hunting to have been shown to be so excessive that it resulted in his neglect of his duties as a head of household and as a ruler, as in the case of Walter in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ (see below, 154). Alternatively, as in a number of medieval romances, the chase could take the form of the ‘Unfortunate Hunt’, in which the hero suffers in some way, falling into moral or physical danger or endangering his wife and family by ignoring his responsibilities as head of household.198 Finally, the duke’s hunting could have been equated with the sinful, carnal love symbolised by the ‘hunt of Venus’.199 Yet, in practice, none of these potentially negative connotations of the hunt are employed in the account of Theseus’s hunting in the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Rather, his pursuit of the hart takes the form of the familiar literary motif of the ‘Interrupted Hunt’ so that although the duke is led to the grove where Palamon and Arcite are fighting through his enjoyment of the hart-hunt, on encountering the two Thebans he instantly breaks off from the chase and resumes his duties as a ruler. He separates the two men, demanding to know why they were fighting

196

Minnis, Shorter Poems, 177; Rooney, Hunting, 153–8. Marvin, Hunting Law, 99; Rooney, Hunting, 4; Cummins, Hound, 34; Thiébaux, ‘Medieval Chase’, 265–7; Edward of Norwich, Master of the Game, 29, 35, 130–2. 198 Rooney, Hunting, 50–4, 68–75, 78, 93. 199 Rooney, Hunting, 31–2, 45–9, 193; Robertson, Preface, 263; Minnis, Shorter Poems, 120; Rudd, Greenery, 57–8; Lydgate, Pilgrimage of the Life of Man, 8125–93. On hunting as a metaphor for love, see Thiébaux, Stag of Love, chapters 3, 4. For Venus as a huntress in Chaucer, see House of Fame, 227–9. 197


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‘Withouten judge or oother officere/ As it were in a lystys roially’, and then gives judgement on them (I: 1696–1713, 1742–7). Just as Theseus was previously willing to turn aside from the triumphal celebration of his defeat of the Amazons in order to do justice to the widows who begged him for mercy, so here he quickly abandons his enjoyment of the hunt when the more pressing issue of restoring public order has to be addressed. Nor have his pleasures been at the expense of his other duties as a ruler or head of household. Rather than leaving his wife and her young sister at home, the duke was actually accompanied on his hunt by Hippolyta, his ‘faire queene’ and by Emily who, as contemporary manuals recommended for hunting in summer, was ‘clothed al in grene’ (I: 1673–95).200 Rather than associating Theseus with the carnal hunt of Venus, Chaucer tells us that the duke went hunting out of devotion to ‘Dyane the chaste’, the virgin huntress (I: 1682, 2051, 2055).201 As Giles says, the enjoyment of game and play is rightful and needful in the life of mankind provided that it is ‘liberal, honeste and moderat’ (G: 101). Finally, Chaucer could have presented Theseus’s decision to hunt simply as a plot-device with which to motivate his meeting with Palamon and Arcite, the hart accidentally leading the duke to the two Thebans like the ‘whelp’ in The Book of the Duchess which leads the Dreamer away from the hart hunt and through the forest to the Black Knight (387–445). Their chance encounter would perhaps have emphasised how the hunter was at the mercy of Fortune, as was often the case in medieval literature.202 In fact, rather than simply being the result of chance, Theseus’s desire to go hunting is explicitly presented in Boethian terms as an aspect of the ‘destinee’ by which God’s ‘purveiaunce’ is executed on Earth (I: 1663–73), making itself felt in human affairs through fortune, whose effects seem to be chaotic and capricious but which is actually an ‘instrument of God’, forming part of a chain of causes which ‘stretch back in unbroken order through Destiny to the divine plan in God’s mind’ in which all things are disposed to the

200 For women hunters, see Cummins, Hound, pp. 7, 35–6, 179 and Alliterative Morte Arthure, 656–9. Gaston Phoebus’s manual recommends that hunters wear green clothing in summer and grey in winter (ibid., 179); see also Emerson, ‘Chaucer’, 141. The statue of Diana, the goddess of hunting, is dressed in green in her temple in Theseus’s amphitheatre (I: 2079; see also Stock, ‘Two Mayings’, 210–11, 215). 201 Robertson, Preface, 263–4. 202 Rooney, Hunting, 60, 69, 138.

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good.203 If even John of Salisbury was prepared to allow that, depending upon the circumstances, it is quite possible, ‘for hunting to be a useful and honourable activity’, then Theseus’s hunting in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ can certainly be seen as an instance of the reasonable relaxation which writers such as John permitted to rulers and which moralists such as Giles of Rome presented as instances of the virtue of ‘eutrapelia’. xiii. Conclusion: Theseus, Cicero and Aristotle In order to understand a text such as Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ our first (but by no means only) task is to identify the particular ‘language’, or combination of languages which was the immediate context for its creation—language here meaning not ‘Latin’ or ‘English’, of course, but rather a particular ‘rhetoric’, ‘normative vocabulary’, ‘discourse’ or ‘specialized idiom’ which is used to make sense of the world.204 Duke Theseus’s behaviour in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ has often been seen by modern critics as, at best, questionable and, at worst, sinful and vicious. Yet, when judged in the light of the Aristotelian language of ethics set out in medieval political treatises the duke can actually be seen to embody all of the virtues which contemporary writers urged their princely readers to adopt. A familiarity with medieval ethical and political theory can therefore help us to develop a ‘period eye’ (see above, 10–12) which allows us to appreciate how even seemingly minor or morally neutral details within the text can carry a wider ethical significance. As Nolan argues, in her important study of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Chaucer’s Theseus does not just represent some vaguely-defined princely virtue but rather ‘enacts in a precise way virtues prescribed by medieval moralists’. Even though a work of imaginative fiction like the ‘Knight’s Tale’ cannot be ‘reduced to a particular set of moral values, as if it were a philosophical treatise’, Chaucer still manages to use his fiction ‘to offer a classically inspired, rigorously developed moral programme to comment on and guide the conduct of his contemporaries’.205

203 Boethius, Consolation, IV, pr. 6; V, m. 1; Chaucer, Boece IV, pr. 6; V, m. 1; McIlhaney, ‘Sentence’, 174, 181; Putter, Introduction, 127–8; Curry, Chaucer, 155–8; Jefferson, Chaucer, 48–65. 204 Pocock, ‘Texts’, 24–8; Pocock, Politics, 25–8; Pocock, ‘Reconstruction’, 959–60, 964–5, 969–72, 974–6; Pocock, ‘Concept’, 20–1; Black, Political Thought, 10; Tully, ‘Key’, 9–10; Skinner, Foundations, xi. 205 Nolan, Chaucer, 2–3, 248–9, 261–3.


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Where Nolan would disagree with the approach taken in this chapter is in her claim that rather than Chaucer’s Theseus enacting the Aristotelian virtues such as ‘mansuetude’, magnanimity, liberality, veracity and affability, as she sees the duke doing in Boccaccio’s Teseida, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is best understood in terms of its appeal to another ethical and political language, that of Ciceronian or Senecan Stoicism.206 Chaucer was certainly familiar with Cicero’s thought via the Somnium Scipionis, which was virtually all that was known of Cicero’s De Re Publica in the middle ages, and summarises its teaching at the beginning of his Parliament of Fowls.207 Nolan also suggests that he may have known Cicero’s On Duties and Seneca’s On Clemency. For Nolan, rather than Chaucer’s Theseus demonstrating the Aristotelian virtues set out in works such as Giles’s De Regimine, the duke possesses the Ciceronian or Senecan virtue of patience in the face of adversity and exhibits the four cardinal virtues of prudence, fortitude, justice and temperance emphasised by Cicero, along with the sub-parts of justice: veracitas, reverentia, beneficentia and clementia.208 Similarly for Burnley, Chaucer’s Theseus, as a just, merciful and prudent ruler who uses his reason to conquer his own passions, is the opposite of the tyrant as defined in Cicero’s On Duties and, above all, in Seneca’s On Clemency, i.e., a prince who rules by fear rather than love and whose sadistic cruelty and lack of self-restraint makes him into the servant of his own passions. 209 Certainly, Chaucer’s contemporary, Eustache Deschamps, praised him as a Seneca in his morality.210 In practice, however, it is rather difficult to make a clear distinction between Ciceronian/Stoic and Aristotelian notions of virtue or—what is more important for our purposes here—between medieval conceptions of them. After all, Cicero himself had regarded his own thought as a synthesis of the ideas of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics and, as we have seen, the four cardinal virtues identified by Cicero were themselves included among the twelve virtues which Giles adopted from Aristotle’s Ethics (above, 33). Cicero was happy to take from Aristotle not just

206 207

Nolan, Chaucer, 248–51, 261, 274–5, 279. Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 29–84; Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought,

63. 208

Nolan, Chaucer, 249–53, 261–8, 278, 281. Cicero, On Duties, II: 23–4 (pp. 70–1); Seneca, On Clemency, 1, 8–12, 20, 25–6 (pp. 138, 146–52, 160, 163–4); Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, I: 31; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 16–28. 210 Deschamps, Great Ovid, 2. 209

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his dialectical and rhetorical modes of argumentation but also the definition of virtue as a mean and to recommend specific Aristotelian virtues, such as liberality, gentleness, and honest play, to his readers.211 Inevitably, Cicero differed from Aristotle on particular issues, such as whether the rule of the soul over the body was monarchical or whether, as Aristotle had claimed, it was ‘despotic’. Similarly, the Aristotelian and Ciceronian traditions did have different emphases, for instance on whether prudence should be seen as the prime virtue, as Aristotle maintained, or whether, as Cicero said, justice enjoyed this primacy, a difference which Aquinas sought to reconcile.212 Nonetheless, even for the Aristotelian Giles, justice still ranked second amongst the cardinal virtues and his account of justice as the rendering to each man of his due (G: 46–7, 55–6, 59–60) had shared roots in the thought of both Aristotle (NE: V, v: 17–18) and Cicero.213 Nor, in practice, was there a clear distinction between Chaucer’s Stoic emphasis on an achievable ‘everyday’ virtue and on patience in the face of the inevitable turns of the Wheel of Fortune and Boccaccio’s more optimistic, ‘confidently triumphant’ Aristotelian conception of life and of virtue as a means to an earthly ‘beatitude’ or, in Giles’s own words, ‘perfeccioun and felicite’ (G: 14).214 Thus, whilst Giles argued that rulers should aim at the perfection in which all the virtues are bound together, he nonetheless ranked the ‘active’, ‘political’, life below that of those who devote themselves to the contemplation of God (G: 10–13, 25, 103–6, 111, 118, 247, 291–2). Similarly, whilst urging princes to seek to be like ‘half goodis’, or even ‘in som wise diuinos, goddysch’ in their perfection, Giles also recognized that, in practice, hardly any king was capable of such exemplary virtue (G: 31, 106, 108–11, 141–2, 225. 269, 343, 351, 380).215 In this sense, the Aristotelian conception of virtue as overcoming vice was certainly not incompatible with the Stoic notion of virtue as intended to counter the power of ‘Fortune and hire false

211 Cicero, On Duties, I: 42, 103, 129–30, 141; II: 32, 59 (pp. 19, 40, 50–1, 55, 75, 86); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 46–7, 88, 180; Long, ‘Cicero’s Plato’, 37–8, 54, 59; Erskine, Hellenistic Stoa, 196. 212 Kempshall, Common Good, 116–7; Brown-Grant, French Romance, 21. 213 Cicero, On Duties, I: 15 (p. 7); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 74, 76, 149; Schofield, Stoic Idea, 71–2. Christine de Pizan ascribes to Aristotle the definition of justice as ‘a measure which renders to each his due’ which was usually seen as Cicero’s (Corps du Policie, I: 19 (p. 32); Body Politic, I: 19 (p. 35)). 214 Cicero, Laelius, 185–6; Nolan, Chaucer, 168–9, 193, 249–52. 215 See also Dante, Convivio, IV, vi: 8; IV, xx: 2.


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wheel’ (I: 925), particularly when seen in the light of the Boethian teaching that it is we who chain ourselves to the Wheel of Fortune when, like Palamon and Arcite, we abandon our reason and surrender to our own lower passions, making ourselves into the servants of our passions (G: 50–1) (see below, Chapter Two).216 Indeed, Giles’s account of the virtue of magnanimity repeats Aristotle’s ‘Stoic’ advice about the need to have ‘due measure’ in regard to ‘good and bad fortune’: ‘he will not rejoice overmuch in prosperity, nor grieve overmuch at adversity’ (NE: I, x: 9; IV, iii: 18). As Giles says, the magnanimous man does not set too much store in ‘outward good’ but can suffer good fortune and bad ‘and in eche staat bere hymsilf as he scholde’ (G: 88).217 As Boccaccio’s later De Casibus Virorum Illustrium showed, this Aristotelian poet was also well aware of the ‘slipperiness’ of Fortune and of the insecurity of those whom she raises up. As the Teseida itself says of the death of Arcite, the way of the world is that the higher men rise, the closer they are to their eventual fall.218 In terms of political theory too, Aristotle’s work had been an influence on Cicero’s thought, for instance in its notion of man as a social and political animal, its conception of government as natural and ethical, its idea of the good man as the good citizen, and its equation of justice with the common good (NE: VIII, x: 4).219 In turn, Cicero’s emphasis on public service had provided the basis for a ‘civic humanism’ and public service even before the rediscovery of Aristotle’s political thought in the thirteenth century.220 As Cicero had argued, ‘nothing that occurs on earth, indeed, is more gratifying to that supreme God who rules the whole universe than the establishment of associations and federations of men bound together by principles of justice, which are called commonwealths’. Consequently, all men should have one object: ‘that

216

Nolan, Chaucer, 180–2, 186, 190–1, 250, 269–72. See also Aquinas, Ethics, 193–8, 780; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 227; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 135–6. 218 Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, Prohemiun: 6, 8; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 241; Boccaccio, Teseida, 258. 219 Cicero, On Duties, I: 15 (p. 7); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Poltical Thought, 74, 76, 149; Erskine, Hellenistic Stoa, 117. See also Seneca, On Clemency, 3 (p. 141). 220 Augustine, City of God, XIX: 21 (p. 882); Cicero, On Duties, I: 15 (p. 7); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 73–4, 76, 130–2, 137–40, 149, 177; Procopé, ‘Greek and Roman Political Theory’, 23–24; Luscombe, ‘Twelfth-Century Renaissance’, 311–4; Watt, ‘Spiritual and Temporal Powers’, 406; Penington, ‘Law’, 448; Canning, ‘Law’, 461; Black, Political Thought, 19–20; Black, ‘Individual’, 597; Vanderjagt, Qui Sa Vertu Anoblist, 32–3; Schofield, ‘Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica’, 65, 71–4, 82. 217

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the benefit of each individual and the benefit of all together should be the same’. If true honour and glory lay in virtue then the highest virtue is to serve the state, whose task is to secure the common good, with distinction.221 The Aristotelian and the Ciceronian traditions were therefore united in a conception of humans as distinguished from the other beasts by his possession of reason, the reason which allowed them to achieve the virtue needed for life in society, and in a view of the common good as the ultimate aim of political life.222 Similarly, in both Aristotle’s Politics (AP: II: 4, II: 5; III: 9; IV: 11) and Cicero’s Laelius, ‘friendship’ was seen as the basis of the harmonious unity which preserves the state, with Cicero’s discussion of friendship owing much to that of the Nicomachean Ethics (NE: VIII–IX).223 Thus, as Nolan herself rightly emphasises, Cicero’s brand of Stoicism did not present virtue simply in terms of individual patience and fortitude. Rather, for Cicero, humans could only fulfil their rational and moral natures, and so achieve a unity with divine order and natural law, through the state, with statesmanship itself being the supreme human calling. He therefore rejected Epicurean opposition to engagement in public life and favoured the active political life to that of study, even if ‘ideally, a life combining statecraft with philosophy is the best’. Ciceronian morality not only meant a personal self-sufficiency in the face of adversity or provided only a philosophical consolation in distress but also, as in Aristotle’s ethics, involved a political dimension in its concept of ameliorative justice.224 Cicero’s typology of just and unjust states and his and Seneca’s political teachings about the short-lived and self-destructive nature of tyranny and the need for a ruler to be loved rather than feared were also grounded in Aristotelian political theory which, as we shall see in Chapter Four below, was set out in works such as Giles’s De Regimine.225 Likewise, the Stoic view of the bad man or the tyrant as the slave of his own passions, vices and lower, 221 Cicero, Scipio’s Dream, II: 1 (or see Cicero, De Re Publica, VI: XI); Cicero, On Duties, III: 26 (p. 109); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 75, 104, 120–1, 127–9. See also Seneca, On Clemency, 3 (p. 141). 222 Schofield, Stoic Idea, 64–72. 223 Cicero, Laelius, 189. See also Schofield, Stoic Idea, 3, 11–12, 23, 27, 34–5, 46, 86, 98, 128; Erskine; Hellenistic Stoa, 59. 224 Nolan, Chaucer, 264–66, 269; Bejczy, ‘Concept of Political Virtue’, 9; Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 48, 57–8, 60, 70–3, 120–3, 130, 177; Erskine, Hellenistic Stoa, 151–6, 22, 64–9, 114–5, 207. 225 Cicero, On Duties, II; 23–9 (pp. 71–4); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 144–5, 156, 157; Seneca, On Clemency, 8–13 (pp. 146–52).


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bestial nature was quite compatible with Aristotelian conceptions of the need for ethical self-governance and of tyranny as ‘perverted’ form of kingship in which the tyrant sought his own pleasure rather than the common good.226 The Stoic equation of nature as a guide to reason and virtue which had been an influence on John of Salisbury’s twelfthcentury Policraticus was also equally apparent in Giles’s Aristotelian De Regimine in the following century, as was John’s insistence on the role of the common good in politics and of tyranny as the worst form of government.227 Here, as so often, rather than giving political thought a whole new content, the revival of Aristotelian thought in the thirteenth century often functioned to provide a new mode of expression and authority for what were often very familiar ideas.228 In other words, the prominent strand of Stoic and Ciceronian thought which Nolan so persuasively identifies within the ‘Knight’s Tale’ was by no means at odds with the language of Aristotelian ethics and political thought but, as she herself notes in the case of Brunetto Latini, could readily be combined with, or subsumed within, a more Aristotelian perspective.229 Similarly, Latini was also able to bring together a ‘negative’ ‘Augustinian’ concept of the state as a restraint on human sin with a positive ‘Aristotelian view’ of the nobility of political life and of the state as a means of leading men to virtue and of securing the common good. He therefore regarded Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Boethius and Seneca, not to mention more recent authorities such as St Bernard, as all holding to the same conception of human virtue.230 Other political theorists of the middle ages, including Aquinas, Giles of Rome (G: 87–8), Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, Dante, Nicholas Oresme, Remigio dei Girolami and Jean Buridan, were perfectly happy to quote Stoic thinkers such as Zeno, Cicero and Seneca alongside Aristotle in their discussions of ethics and politics whilst works by Cicero, Aristotle, Seneca and Boethius could all be bound together

226 Erskine, Hellenistic Stoa, 44, 54, 56; Seneca, On Clemency, 25 (p. 163); Aquinas, Ethics, 39–40. 227 Canning, History, 110–14; Cicero, On Duties, I: 11–12, 23, 110, 120 (pp. 6, 10, 43, 47); Cicero, Laelius, 186; Seneca, On Clemency, 19 (pp. 158–9). 228 Black, Political Thought, 21. 229 Nolan, Chaucer, 356, n. 47. 230 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 194, 238, 280, 350–2, 357–8; Staley, Languages, 33. See also Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 229.

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in the same volumes.231 Similarly, Jean Gerson included Seneca’s De Clemencia alongside Boethius and Giles’s De Regimine Principum in the list of texts which he recommended for inclusion in the library of the wise prince.232 The ‘Ciceronian’ and ‘Aristotelian’ strands in medieval political thought were both rather elastic in their content and so can, as Kempshall put it, best be seen in terms of a ‘series of overlapping currents’ rather than as a set of ‘mutually exclusive’ alternatives.233 Indeed, Cicero’s work (along with that of Boethius) was one of the main routes by which Aristotle’s thought had become familiar in the West long before the supposed ‘Aristotelian revolution’ of the thirteenth century. For instance, the view of man as a social and political animal and the definition of virtue as the mean between two opposing vices were well-known to thinkers such as John of Salisbury and Bracton even prior to the translation of the Politics and the Ethics into Latin. As a result, it was aspects of Aristotle’s natural philosophy that were to prove controversial or unacceptable in the thirteenth century rather than his ethics or political theory.234 In this context, Boccaccio’s Teseo and Chaucer’s Theseus did not embody moral programmes or political languages which were at odds with each other; rather both exhibit a Ciceronian or Senecan Stoicism alongside such Aristotelian virtues as ‘eutrapelia’, mansuetude, magnificence and magnanimity. Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes saw Chaucer himself as both a modern Cicero in his rhetoric and the heir to Aristotle in his philosophy.235 Certainly, Chaucer’s poetry was able to combine an Aristotelian cosmology, in

231 Blund, ‘Introduction’, xii; Dunbabin, ‘Government’, 483; Sullivan, ‘Justice’, 128; Kemphsall, Common Good, 15–18, 112, 116, 131, 163, 174, 202, 298; Canning, History, 41; Vanderjagt, Que Sa Vertu Anoblist, 36, 48–9; Brett, ‘Political Philosophy’, 277–8; Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, I: 71–2; Henry of Ghent, Is it Rational, 263–6; Henry of Ghent, Is a Subject, 311; Buridan, Questions, 510; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 128, 135, 251, 285–6, 290, 329; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 99, 154, 157, 161, 209. 255, 298, 303, 317, 358, 412, 430, 479, 480, 524. For Dante’s references to Cicero and Aristotle in his discussions of friendship, see his Convivio, II, xiii: 1; III, iii: 10; III, xi: 3; IV, i: 1. 232 Jean Gerson, Texte de la lettre, 48–52. 233 Renna, ‘Aristotle’, 324; Kemphsall, Common Good, 16–17, 112, 131, 161, 163, 174, 202–3, 298. See also Tierney, Religion, 35; Black, ‘Political Languages’, 318; Coleman, ‘Science’, 184. 234 Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, Introduction: ix–xi, I: 60, 71–3, II: 180, 184, 193, III: 91–3, XI: 3, 14–15, 24–6, XIII: 69–72, 75–6; Condemnation of the 219 Propositions; Giles of Rome, Tractatus de Erroribus Philosophorum, 5–9. 235 Hoccleve, Regiment, 2085–8.


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which all things had their own proper place (see Chapter Five), with the Ciceronian teaching that salvation was achieved by, as The Parliament of Fowls put it, working for the ‘commune profit’ and not breaking the law or being ‘likerous’.236 Just as, in the Teseida, Boccaccio’s Aristotelian duke can provide a Senecan consolation for the death of Arcite, so the Stoic wisdom of Chaucer’s Theseus was perfectly compatible with his possession of all the Aristotelian virtues.237

236 Chaucer, House of Fame, 730–64; Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 71–8. See Cicero, On Duties, I: 63, 71, 86; II: 77; III: 21 (pp. 26, 28–9, 34, 94–5, 108). 237 Nolan, Chaucer, 169, 173–82, 185–7, 193, 263.

CHAPTER TWO

THE ‘KNIGHT’S TALE’ AS ETHICS: THE PASSIONS AND THE AGES OF MAN You who conquer others, strive to conquer yourself, and learn to subdue all excesses of passion (Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 8)

For Giles of Rome, the good government of the commonwealth was grounded in ability of the ruler to govern himself, something which could only be achieved with an understanding of the Aristotelian virtues of the kind which is set out in Part II of Book I of the De Regimine Principum. However, in order to pursue goodness and to eschew evil, a prince not only needed an understanding of the virtues but also required a knowledge of the ‘passions of the soul’, this being the topic of Part III of Book I of the De Regimine (section i, below). Naturally, Giles believed that all men should exercise their reason so as to direct and restrain the appetites and passions which lead us into vice.1 However, since the ruler’s power means that his actions have the potential to do more harm than those of other men, it is particularly important that a prince should exercise such self-control, thereby distinguishing himself from the tyrant who, for all his seeming power, is actually the slave of his own desires, emotions, and passions (G: 26, 41, 104–5, 139, 220, 369–71).2 Consequently, in order to assess Duke Theseus’s virtue in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, we need an understanding of the extent to which he is able to use his reason to master his passions and to restrain his own emotions. For Giles, as for other medieval thinkers, reason, the virtues and the passions were located in different parts of the human soul. As a result, virtue itself could be seen in terms of a ‘psychomachia’, as a battle for control and for rightful order within the soul. Certainly, it was this approach to virtue which Boccaccio was to adopt when he came to explicate the allegorical meaning of the Teseida in the glosses which he provided to his own text. Here, he equated characters such as Palamon 1 2

Aquinas, Ethics, 646–7, 1062, 1347–8. Petrarch, Remedies, III: 30; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 108.

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and Arcite with the appetites and passions associated with specific parts of the soul, analysing these in Aristotelian terms similar to those used in Giles’s De Regimine, a work which, as we have seen, he may well have known at first hand.3 A key issue for an understanding of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is whether, in adapting the Teseida, Chaucer retained—and developed—the moral allegory of the passions and the parts of the soul which Boccaccio had provided for his own work (section ii). Finally, in order for the ruler to achieve virtue, Giles argues that ruler not only has to grasp the nature of the virtues and of the passions but also, as Part IV of Book I of the De Regimine explains, to develop an awareness of the characteristics (the ‘maners’ or ‘thewes’) of different types of people, so as to know which to adopt and which to avoid (G: 139–40). Giles therefore classifies people according to their ‘fortune’ (for instance, whether they are rich, powerful or noble) and their age (whether they are young, old or middle-aged). We have already touched on some of the characteristic virtues, vices and passions of the noble (such as magnanimity and magnificence (G: 150–2)), of the rich (such as their excessive concern with external goods (G: 152–4)), and of the powerful (such as being ‘studious’ about the deeds which bring honour (G: 154–5)) in our consideration of Theseus’s virtue in Chapter One. Here, by contrast, we are more concerned with the relevance for the ‘Knight’s Tale’ of the distinctions which Giles makes between people in terms of their age and of the stereotypical vices and virtues which he ascribes to the young and to the old (section iii). i. The Passions and the Parts of the Soul in Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum Giles of Rome’s account of the passions mirrors that of the virtues in listing twelve main passions (love, hate, desire, abomination, delectation, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, hardiness, wrath and ‘mansuetudo’), four of which are identified as being particularly important for the achievement of virtue (hope, fear, delectation, and sorrow) (G: 132–4).4 All other passions, such as jealousy, graciousness, ‘nemesis’ (indignation at the

3

See above, 19. As we saw above (p. 64–6), Giles uses the word ‘mansuetudo’ to refer both to the virtue which is the mean between wrath and ‘inirascibilite’ and to the passion of the soul which is contrary to wrath (G: 114; NE: IV, v: 1–2). 4


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good fortune of evil men), mercifulness, envy, and ‘schamefastnesse’ or ‘verecundia’ (fear of dishonour) can be seen as sub-types of the twelve fundamental passions. Mercy and envy, for instance, are both forms of sorrow: mercy being the sorrow that we feel for the harm that befalls someone else and envy being the form of sorrow which arises when we grieve at the good fortune of others (OR: 2: 8, 1; 2: 10, 1; G: 134–6). Medieval moralists could sometimes present moral conflict as a battle between the passions and reason. Nevertheless, in general, the passions were not necessarily seen as bad, a view for which theologians from Augustine to Aquinas criticised the Stoics. Rather, if directed rightfully, the passions could become the servants of reason and virtue, as when the passion of compassion moves us to mercy or the emotion of indignation makes us desire to correct a sinner.5 Indeed, whilst for Giles some passions, such as envy and hate, are necessarily bad, others can be either good or bad, whilst some, such as mercifulness, ‘schamefastnesse’, graciousness and ‘nemesis’, are inherently good in that they move us to virtue or lead us away from vice. Like the virtues, the good passions constitute the mean between opposing vices, as when reasonable mercifulness is the mean between being, on the one hand, excessively cruel and, on the other, too tender-hearted (‘mollis’ or ‘nesche’) (G: 136–7).6 Love and hate are the fundamental passions from which all the others flow. In his discussion of how kings should love and hate, Giles rather unsurprisingly concludes that they should love goodness and righteousness and should hate all the vices. Because the goodness that belongs to God and to the community is superior to the profit of the individual, it follows that a king should first love God and the common profit and should, unlike the tyrant, put them before his own singular good. Rulers should therefore cultivate those passions which are inherently good, being gracious in justly rewarding the virtuous and merciful to those who are suffering unjustly. However, whilst ‘schamefastnesse’ is good in itself, this passion is not really suitable for a ruler who should be more virtuous than other men and so should not do things of which he would be ashamed in the first place (NE: IV, ix).7 Similarly, a king should only be ‘nemesci’ in the sense that he should avoid rewarding 5

Lewis, Discarded Image, 158: Augustine, City of God, IX: 4–5; XIV: 8–13; Aquinas, Ethics, 267–79, 588, 804; Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 286. 6 Aquinas, Ethics, 369. 7 See also Aquinas, Ethics, 867–74; Dante, Convivio, IV, xix: 4. IV, xxv: 2.

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evil men. Kings should usually avoid the evil passions of envy and hate, although they should hate vice, which is worthy to be destroyed. In the case of those passions which can be a force for both good and evil, the king should use his virtues to turn them towards the former, so that ‘mansuetudo’ moderates his wrath, fortitude makes him brave or fearful when he should be, magnanimity makes him take on difficult tasks, and humility prevents him from over-reaching himself. He should, therefore, love, desire, have abomination and delectation, and be sorrowful as ‘ordre and reule and resoun’ demand (G: 117–22, 136–7, 152–4). All of the passions end either in delectation or in sorrow. Following Aristotle (NE: X, ii), Giles denies that delectation is necessarily all good or all bad but adopts the ‘mean’ or middle view that some delectation is good and some bad. What is really delectable is that which is pleasurable to the virtuous man not that which only seems pleasant to the corrupted taste of the vicious man. Whereas sensual delectation, such as lechery, is bestial, intellectual and virtuous pleasure is truly human.8 As rulers should be more virtuous than other men, they should take particular delight in virtuous deeds, since this pleasure will encourage them to be diligent in seeking the common good. It is rightful that men should be sorrowful at their own misdeeds but, nonetheless, since sorrow can become a hindrance to doing virtuous deeds, it is seemly that kings should ‘abate and putte off suche sorwe’. They should not be like the rich whose ‘delicate leuyinge’ makes them womanly and ‘nesche’ and so unable to suffer grief, becoming intemperate and prey to their own passions. Sorrow may be reduced by physical remedies such as sleeping or bathing but the best way to avoid sorrow is to avoid vice since evil men are enemies to their own true natures and so have neither joy nor peace in themselves. Another remedy for sorrow is reassurance, which we obtain from the sympathy provided to us by our friends. Sorrow may also be countered by thinking on the truth of things. For instance, when we lose our material wealth and comfort ourselves with the knowledge that such outer wealth is of little worth compared to inner virtue (OR: 2: 16; G: 130–2, 152–4). For Giles, the twelve passions are located within the ‘appetit sencitif ’ within the human soul. In order for virtue to be achieved, this aspect of the soul needs to be placed in a rightful relationship with the other,

8

Aquinas, Ethics, 43, 60, 124–8.


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higher parts of the soul. Here, Giles follows the Aristotelian division of the human soul into three main aspects, namely the vegetative, which is found in all living things and deals with nutrition, growth and propagation; the sensitive, which is possessed by all animals, is responsible for movement, perception and desire; and the rational, which is responsible for intellectual thought and the will (DA: II.3; NE: I, xiii: 9–20; G: 35–6).9 In turn, Giles adopted the standard Aristotelian account of the sensitive soul as itself being divided into three main parts. The first is that of the five outward ‘wittes’ or senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch, the ‘windows of the body’ as they are called in the ‘Tale of Melibee’ (VII: 1421–5). The second aspect of the sensitive soul is that of the five inward senses (or wits) of memory, estimation, imagination, phantasy and ‘common sense’.10 Of far more importance for our purposes is the third aspect of the sensitive soul, i.e., that of the ‘appetite sencitif’ in which the twelve passions are located and which is divided into the concupiscible and the irascible powers.11 These latter were sometimes defined as, respectively, ‘appetite’ and ‘flight’, i.e., the drive towards possessing something that is pleasant and that of fleeing something which is painful, as they are by the anonymous author of The Soul and its Powers (c. 1225).12 More usually, however, seeking the pleasant and avoiding the painful were both be seen as part of the concupiscible drive, as they are by Aquinas, and so distinguished from the irascible which was then defined as the drive to surmount all the

9 See also Giles of Rome, Quodlibeta, 29, 160–2; Blund, Tractatus de Anima, IV–VI, XXII; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 119–20; Hugh of St Victor, Didascalicon, I:3 (pp. 48–50); The Soul and its Powers, 13–18; Albertus Magnus, Opus Philosophie Naturalis, De Anima; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, III: 7–13 (pp. 96–103); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 119–20; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 148, 150; Dante, Convivio, III, ii: 3; III, viii: 1; IV, vii: 6; IV, xxii: 4; Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II: II; Buridan, Questions, 511–12; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 356; Lewis, Discarded Image, 152–4; Kenny, New History, Volume II, 38, 233; Pasnau, ‘Human Nature’, 210; Hewson, Giles of Rome, 96–105. 10 See also Blund, Tractatus de Anima, VIII–XXI; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 120–1. For the meaning of these five inward senses, see Lewis, Discarded Image, 162–5; Carruthers, Book of Memory, 51–3; Pasnau, ‘Human Nature’, 216; Kenny, Medieval Philosophy, 226. For Aristotle, see NE: I, xiii: 9–20. 11 Aquinas, Ethics, 293–4; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 219. 12 The Soul and its Powers, 19–29. As Hugh of St Victor said, the soul is three in one in the sense that it ‘desires one thing through concupiscence, detests another through wrath and judges between these two through reason’ (Didascalicon, 64–5). See also Augustine, City of God, XIV: 6 (pp. 555–6).

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obstacles to our pleasure.13 It is this latter definition which Giles himself adopts when he describes the ‘concupiscible’ as the inner power by which beasts ‘voyden and forsaken yvel thynges and displesynge, and foloweth and taketh goode thynges and likynge’ and the ‘irascible’ as the power by which they ‘putteth of and withstandeth the contrarie that myght hem lette of suche likynge’. After all, Nature would have worked imperfectly if it had given us the desire to pursue good and to forsake evil but had not supplied us with the ability to overcome the obstacles to achieving our desires (G: 35–40). As well as possessing the vegetative and the sensitive aspects of the soul, humans are distinct from the rest of nature in also possessing the rational soul which is made up of the intellect and the will.14 The intellect itself is divided into the intellectual virtues (or powers) which are contained in the ‘intellectus speculatiuus’, which deals with geometry, metaphysics and other such speculative sciences and is ruled by wisdom, and the practical reasoning of the ‘intellectus practicus’, which is ruled by prudence. Unlike the concupiscible and the irascible drives which we share with the beasts, the ‘appetite intellectif’, or the will, is ‘an appetitive power of a specifically human kind’, one which allows us to subject desires and aggression to some degree of rational control (G: 35–40, 190, 369–71, 396). However, as Oresme said, this split within the soul between reason and the appetites means that reason is never entirely in control so that a lapse into bestiality is an ever-present danger.15 For Giles, virtue is not to be found in the vegetative soul which we, as humans, share with the rest of nature (NE: I, xiii, 11). After all, we would not praise a man because he had a good digestive system, nor is digestion directed by reason as virtue is: we cannot will ourselves to have a better digestion.16 Neither is virtue to be found in the five outward senses: we would not honour someone as virtuous because he has a good sense of smell, nor can the sense of smell be controlled by our reason. Rather, virtue lies in the use of our intellectual capacities

13 Blund, Tractatus de Anima, VI (55), VII, XXVI (411, 414–5); Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 237–41; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 125; Aquinas, Ethics, 293. 14 Aquinas, Ethics, 1124. 15 Giles of Rome, In Quosdam Aristotelis Metaphysicorum Locos Questiones, Book 1, Questions 1, 16; Kenny, Medieval Philosophy, 233, 238, 240; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 123–6; Aquinas, Ethics, 438; Blund, Tractatus de Anima, XXII, XXV–VI; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 53, 121, 158; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 333, 358, 374, 376, 383, 479. 16 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 192–3; Aquinas, Ethics, 124–8, 231–40.


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to choose moral ends and the means by which to attain them. Giles therefore locates the virtues in the ‘sensitif’ appetite (i.e., the concupiscible and the irascible), in the ‘intellectus practicus’ and in the will. Prudence, although in a sense a moral virtue, is also, in another sense, a ‘mean’ between the intellectual and moral virtues and is located in the ‘intellectus practicus’ whilst justice is in the will.17 Four virtues are in the irascible (fortitude, ‘mansuetudo’, magnanimity and magnificence) and the six remaining ones (temperance, liberality, proper ambition, truthfulness, friendliness and courteousness) are in the concupiscible (G: 37–46). Similarly, Giles relates the passions to particular parts of the soul. All of the passions are to be found in the two parts of the ‘appetite sencitif’ rather than in the ‘appetite intellectif’, with six relating to the concupiscible (love, hate, desire, abomination, delectation and sorrow) and six to the irascible (hope, despair, fear, hardiness, wrath and ‘mansuetudo’) (G: 114–7).18 This account of virtue in terms of the rightful relationship between reason, the passions, the irascible and the concupsicble had a long history behind it. It can be seen, for instance, in Macrobius’s Commentary on the Dream of Scipio where it is argued that the motion of the soul moves us both to the love of the virtues and to the yearning for the vices: ‘its motion is what makes us angry and makes us lose our tempers in the heat of argument, till its mounting tide ends in the madness of warfare; its motion causes us to be swept away by pleasures and become slaves to passion. If the soul’s motions are governed by reason, their effect is salutary, but if reason is lacking, the end is ruin’.19 As Nicholas Oresme said, if ethics meant the rule of the self then this involved the individual’s mastery of his ‘lusts’ and ‘angry passions’ so that he ‘governs his acts by reason’.20 For Alexander Neckham (d. 1217), this threefold division between reason, anger and lust was so familiar a part of Christian thought that it seemed to be the ‘doctrine of the Church Fathers’.21 In fact, it actually had its origins in passages from Plato’s Republic and from sections of his Timaeus which were not available to medieval readers at first-hand but which had been passed on to the middle ages by Jerome and Augustine who equated Plato’s three

17 18 19 20 21

See also Giles of Rome, Quodlibeta, 99. Aquinas, Ethics, 293. Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, II, xvi: 25 (p. 243). Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 839. Callus, ‘Introduction’, 250.

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elements of the soul with reason, the irascible and the concupiscible and who saw virtue as the rule of reason over the other parts. As Augustine said in The City of God, the Platonists had seen that ‘anger and lust are perverted elements in man’s character, or soul, on the grounds that they are disturbed and undisciplined emotions, leading to acts which wisdom forbids, and therefore they need the control of intelligence and reason’. Only when anger and lust are subordinated to, and guided by, reason are the three elements of the soul put into a just relation to each other.22 Augustine also quoted Cicero’s De Re Publica to similar effect: ‘nature always gives authority to the better for the profit of the weaker’ as when God rules over men, the mind over the body and ‘reason over lust and anger and other vicious parts of the soul’.23 Aquinas explicated this conception of virtue at length: ‘Just as an act of reason consists in the irascible and concupiscible appetites following reason, an act of sin consists in reason being drawn to follow the irascible and concupiscible appetites’ inclination’. Following Aristotle’s Politics (AP: I, 5), he saw the rule of the soul over the body as ‘despotic’ in the sense that the body’s members are like slaves who are unable to resist its commands whereas the rule of reason over the appetites is ‘royal’ or ‘political’ in the sense that these appetites are like free subjects who have the ability to resist the orders of their superior and so have a life of their own.24 As he says in his Commentary on Aristotle’s Ethics, ‘moral science teaches men to follow reason and to refrain from the things to which the passions incline, such as concupiscence, anger and the like’. Some people are perverted in the sense that they follow their desires so as to satisfy their concupiscence and so become the slaves of their passions; others—the incontinent—do resolve to ‘abstain from harmful pleasures’ and yet are still ‘overcome by the urge of passions’. Neither will ‘attain virtuous acts’ but rather will live according to their passions, ‘seeking everything to which the passions incline’.25 As Oresme put it, when the irascible appetite is corrupted, man becomes cruel

22 Plato, Timaeus, 69–72 (pp. 96–100); Plato, Republic, XIII, XXXIII (pp. 131–8, 306–7, 312–4); Augustine, City of God, XIV:19 (pp. 581–2). See also Aristotle, De Anima: III: 10 (p. 213). 23 Quoted in Markus, Saeculum, 206. 24 Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 23, 26; Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 301–2; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 51–3, 58, 70–1, 162; Buridan, Questions, 508–10; Ullmann, History, 178; Blythe, Ideal Government, 42–5; Blythe, ‘Family’, 2, 7–12. See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 156–7, 161. 25 Aquinas, Commentary on the Ethics, 237–40, 285–6, 646–7, 1128, 1269, 1294–6.


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and pitiless; when the concupiscible appetite is perverted, he becomes luxurious and gluttonous.26 This Aristotelian account of the soul, of the passions and of virtue as the rightful ordering of the parts of the soul in relation to reason was not simply the preserve of theologians such as Aquinas and Giles of Rome. Rather, it was to be adopted by poets seeking to justify literature in terms of its moral meaning and significance. For instance, Book IV of Dante’s Convivio, a work which was certainly known to Chaucer, presented Augustine and Aristotle as being in agreement that in order to become accustomed to doing good, man must control his passions (NE: II, i: 7–8).27 More specifically, Dante linked the three aspects of the human soul with the three ‘worthy’ subjects which poetry should address: the vegetative soul seeks what is useful, above all ‘security’; the sensitive soul seeks what is pleasurable, i.e., love; the rational soul seeks what is right, which ‘no-one doubts’ is virtue. It follows that poets should celebrate ‘the three things most necessary’ to the achievement of these goals: ‘valiance in arms, the inspiration of love and right direction of will’, these being, of course, the main themes of both Boccaccio’s Teseida and Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’.28 ii. The Passions and the Parts of the Soul in the Teseida and the ‘Knight’s Tale’ In many ways, the narrative of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ can be seen as characteristic of medieval romance, with Palamon and Arcite as the young, male lovers who undergo the conventional sufferings of obsessive love. Yet, as Nolan has argued, rather than medieval romance constituting a single genre, it may be more useful to see it as being comprised of a wide range of different sub-genres and cycles with the ‘Knight’s Tale’ constituting an example of the roman antique, a literary form which flourished from the twelfth century to the end of the middle ages. Works in this sub-genre sought to provide an ‘authentically ancient’ portrayal of the classical world, as when the ‘Knight’s Tale’ refers to the Greeks’ funeral and cremation rites as being performed ‘as was that tyme the gyse’ (I: 993), whilst still using their pagan characters as moral

26 27 28

Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 50. See also Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 339. Dante, Convivo, IV, xxi: 8; IV, xxvi: 4. Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II: II.

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and political exemplars for their contemporary Christian readership.29 Although the roman antique is a sub-type of the romance, its themes often overlap with the broader political and philosophical issues which traditionally characterize the epic, something which is certainly true of the ‘Knight’s Tale’.30 Indeed, many manuscripts of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ seem to present it as a continuation of Book XII of Statius’ Thebaid by means of a quotation, in Latin, from Statius’s epic which refers to Theseus’s homecoming, a quotation which Chaucer himself may have been responsible for placing as a motto at the start of the text.31 In the middle ages, stories of heroes from antiquity, such as Virgil’s Aeneid and Statius’s Thebaid, were often read as inviting allegorical interpretation.32 For instance, the Super Thebaiden, an interpretation of the Thebaid attributed to Fulgentius although, in fact, it was probably written in the twelfth or thirteenth century, justifies its own allegorical reading of Statius’s epic by claiming that ‘just as there are two parts to a nut, the shell and the kernel, so there are two parts to poetic composition, the literal and the allegorical meaning’. Whereas a child may be ‘happy to play with the whole nut, but a wise adult breaks it open’ to get the tasty flavour of the kernel, so in poetry it is not the literal but the allegorical sense which should be ‘savored on the palate of the understanding’.33 In particular, works such as the Thebaid were often

29 Nolan, Chaucer, 7, 12–13, 278; Minnis, Chaucer, 2; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 129–32, 137; Weisl, Conquering, 11, 19, 21, 50. 30 Muscatine, Chaucer, 185; Muscatine, Poetry, 125; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 67–8; Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 524–5; Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 226; Cooper, Structure, 92; Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 63–4; Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinauce”’, 192–3; Wetherbee, ‘Romance’, 303; Benson, Chaucer’s Drama of Style, 65; Knapp, ‘Robyn the Miller’s Thrifty Work’, 299; Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 192–99; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 137, 147; Martin, Chaucer’s Women, 41, 64. This overlap between epic and romance has been seen as characteristic of medieval and renaissance romance in general (Hieatt, Chaucer, 5–6). 31 Cooper, ‘Generic Variations’, 83–6; Nolan, Chaucer, 248; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 138; Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, x; Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 226; Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 828; Bennett, Commentary, 1; Wise, Influence, 46–7, 135. The quotation from Statius is also used in three manuscripts of Chaucer’s Anelida and Arcite (after l. 22). Chaucer explicitly refers to Statius as a source for the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in his description of the ancient rites at the temple of Diana (I: 2294). 32 Clogan describes the Thebaid itself as ‘an elaborate and sustained allegory of the emotions’ (‘Knight’s Tale’, 130). 33 Fulgentius, On the Thebaid, 239; Fulgentius, Super Thebaiden Commentariolum, 697–8. For this medieval commonplace, see Huppé and Robertson, Fruyt and Chaf, 5–6, 13–15, 21–3; Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 4 (p. 140). The Nun’s Priest famously uses the metaphor of ‘fruyt and chaf ’ (VII: 3443) to express the same idea. See also Dante, Convivio, II, i: 2–4.


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seen in the middle ages in terms of an allegorical ‘psychomachia’, as a battle for—and between the elements of—the human soul. The origins of this approach was to be found in Prudentius’s Psychomachia (c. 405), which presents the human soul as a battlefield in which personified virtues and vices engage in a mortal combat.34 Hence, for the author of the Super Thebaiden, Theseus’s victory over Creon in the Thebaid should be read as an allegory in which the city of Thebes represented the soul of man over which there is a struggle between the vice of pride (personified by Creon) and the virtue of humility (represented by Theseus). Eventually virtue triumphs, leaving the city ‘shattered’ from the struggle but now freed from sin ‘when the grace of goodness comes to its aid’.35 The ‘moving drama’ of Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ is, thankfully, rather more suspenseful and presents us with a rather more interesting series of characters and conflicts than the wooden account of the Thebaid offered in the Super Thebaiden.36 Nevertheless, it too can be read as being influenced by this tradition in which strife between the characters within the story allegorically represents a battle within the human soul, an allegory which Chaucer’s use of the symbolism of the planetary deities, of Venus, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter, invites us to work out. Indeed, one of the few aspects of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ where the critics have been in agreement is in seeing the narrative of the tale as being structured around the symmetry between its human characters and their counterparts amongst the gods: whereas Arcite achieves the victory in combat for which he has prayed to Mars, the god of war (I: 2405), it is Palamon, who has prayed to Venus, the goddess of love, who actually wins the hand of Emily (I: 2242–3). Emily herself is equated with the goddess Diana, to whom she prays to remain chaste (I: 2296), whilst Saturn, who was associated in medieval mythography and astrology with old age, is paralleled by the elderly Egeus (I: 2443–9). Within this system, Theseus, the ruler of Athens and the son of Egeus, is then equated with the kingly Jupiter, the ruler of the gods and the son of Saturn.37

34

Prudentius, Psychomachia; Smith, Prudentius’s Psychomachia, 3–8, 114, 143–57. Fulgentius, On the Thebaid, 243; Fulgentius, Super Thebaiden, 704. See also Lactantius Placidus, Commentary, 639. 36 Nolan, Chaucer, 269. 37 Neuse, ‘Knight’, 248; Burrow, Essays, 28, 43; Muscatine, Chaucer, 178–80; Turner, ‘Structuralist Analysis’, 280–6; Brooks ‘Meaning’, pp. 124–30; Kean, Chaucer, II, 3; Manzalaoui, ‘Chaucer’, 246–7; Scala, Absent Narratives, 102; Minnis, Chaucer, 111–21; North, Chaucer’s Universe, 402, 414, 420; Martianus Capella, Marriage of Philology and 35

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However, if the emblematic symbolism of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ invited the allegorical interpretation of the kind which medieval commentators often applied to stories of ancient heroes, this does not necessarily confirm the validity of any particular allegorization of Chaucer’s work. After all, as Francis Bacon long ago pointed out, it is always possible to offer an allegorical interpretation of stories so that they are ‘delivered of plausible meanings which they never contained’.38 Certainly, modern allegorical readings of Chaucer’s work have often been accused of projecting implausible meanings onto his text.39 For this reason, the glosses which Boccaccio provided to his Teseida, in which the poet explicitly offered an explication of the allegorical meaning of the symbolism of his story in terms of the appetites and passions located within the sensitive soul, are of particular importance for the interpretation of the symbolism of Chaucer’s adaptation of Boccaccio’s work and suggest how audiences of Chaucer’s own day may have approached the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’.40 In his allegorical readings both of his own and of classical poetry, Boccaccio invoked the traditional normative psychology in which virtue was seen in terms of reason controlling the appetites of the soul.41 His authorial glosses which explain the symbolism of the houses of Mars and Venus (to which the prayers of Palamon and Arcite rise up before the tournament in which they fight for the hand of Emily) thus interpret the Teseida in terms of an allegorical psychomachia. However, this is not a psychomachia in Prudentius’s sense of a battle between personified virtues and vices (Faith versus Discord etc.). Rather, the conflict is that between particular parts of the human soul since, for Boccaccio, the houses of Venus and Mars can be linked with specific human appetites, passions and aspects of human soul, which he analyses in the same Aristotelian terms as Giles’s De Regimine, a text with which, as we have seen, he seems to have been familiar. As Mercury, 14 (p. 5); Boethius, Consolation, IV, m.I: 11; Fulgentius, Mythologies, 49–50; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VIII: 12–14 (pp. 479–81); John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 19 (p. 94); Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, V: 445, VIII: 366; Bersuire Reductorium Morale, 11. 38 Whitbread, ‘Introduction’ 30–1. 39 This is most obviously the case with those who reject ‘patristic’ readings of Chaucer’s work. For references, see Rigby, Chaucer, 78–9, 95–6. 40 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 172, 196; Boccaccio, Teseida, 187, 193, 412–3; McCall, Chaucer, 68–70, 171. See also Anderson, ‘Fourth Temple’ 125; Woods, ‘ “My Sweet Foo” ’, 278; Olson, Canterbury Tales, 65; Boitani, ‘Style’, 198. 41 Kirkham, ‘Allegorically Tempered Decameron’, 2–3, 18, 20 n. 6.


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Boccaccio says, ‘in every man there are two principal appetites. One of these is called the concupiscible appetite, whereby man desires and rejoices to have things which, according to his judgement—whether it be rational or corrupt—are delightful and pleasing. The other is called the irascible appetite, whereby a man is troubled if delightful things are taken away or impeded, or when they cannot be had’.42 Boccaccio was also to use this conception of human nature in his reading of Virgil’s story of Dido and Aeneas as an allegory which shows ‘with what passions human frailty is infested’. Here Aeneas is glossed as one who is ‘carried away into wanton behaviour by the passion of concupiscence’ but who eventually, through his own remorse or the reproof of others, returns ‘to virtue’, his ‘new fortitude’ freeing him from the bonds of ‘unholy delight’.43 Unlike Boccaccio, Chaucer does not provide us with an explicit allegorical interpretation of his lengthy description of the dwelling places of Venus and Mars which are depicted on the walls of their temples in the amphitheatre which Theseus has had constructed. Nevertheless, Chaucer does retain many of the symbolic details set out by Boccaccio and so implicitly invites us to identify their allegorical meaning. This is not to claim that Chaucer himself was definitely acquainted with Boccaccio’s glosses, although it is ‘possible, though not certain’ that he may have used one of the manuscripts of the Teseida which contain them.44 Rather, Boccaccio’s commentary on his own work exemplifies the kind of allegorical reading which could be provided to stories of ancient heroes by medieval readers, a mode of interpretation which also underlies the meaning of Chaucer’s own text. Whilst most of Boccaccio’s philological and explicatory glosses to the Teseida would have served Chaucer’s purposes in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ ‘only poorly’, his glosses linking the houses of Venus and Mars with the concupiscible and irascible parts of the soul, which stand out from his other chiose in their allegorical self-exegesis, are extremely relevant for an understanding of the symbolism of Chaucer’s description of the temples of Venus and Mars.45 42 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 196; Boccaccio, Teseida, 412–3; Hollander, ‘Validity’, 169–74. 43 Boccaccio, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, 68–9. 44 Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 65–6. See, however, Minnis, Shorter Poems, 284. 45 Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 66; Hollander, ‘Validity’, 164, 169; Kirkham, ‘“Chiuso Parlare” ’, 324–5. Haller also sees Athens, Thebes and Scythia in terms of, respectively, reason, the irascible and the concupiscible (‘Knight’s Tale’, 81).

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If Chaucer’s temple of Venus lacks much of the detailed symbolism whose meaning Boccaccio lovingly explicates in his gloss to the Teseida, its allegorical significance remains clear.46 For Boccaccio, Venus ‘consists in the concupiscible’, the appetite by which we desire to have that which delights us.47 He was also to use this symbolism in his explanation of the myth of the Minotaur in which Venus was again equated with the concupiscible appetite whose bestial sensuality is the enemy of reason but which can be overcome by the prudent man who, for Boccaccio, was represented by Theseus himself.48 In line with this symbolism, Chaucer’s temple of Venus is decorated with paintings of ‘Hope’, ‘Desire’, ‘Beauty’, ‘Charms’, ‘Riches’ and so on, which, as Boccaccio explains, are those things which inspire, strengthen and stimulate love, but also with ‘Jealousy’, which represents the bitter anguish of love (I: 1925–8). Similarly, Chaucer’s Venus wears a garland of roses (I: 1929), which Boccaccio interprets as standing for ‘the brief delight of those who have chanced to love well according to their desire’ and is accompanied by Cupid (I: 1963), ‘which is commonly called Love’ which strengthens the yearning of the concupiscible.49 However, developing a medieval commonplace, one which Chaucer was to employ in his Parliament of Fowls, Boccaccio also explains that Venus ‘is twofold’.50 As Giles of Rome himself argued, ‘viewed under different aspects, one and the same thing may represent opposites’. He went on to illustrate the point with the help of the stock example of the lion in the scriptures which, when interpreted in bono, represents Christ (the conquering lion of the tribe of Judah of Revelations 5: 5) but which, when read in malo, signifies the Devil (like the roaring lion that goes about the world seeking men to devour in 1 Peter 5: 8) (OEG: 265). Similarly, when she is seen in bono, Venus represents ‘every chaste and licit desire’ such as ‘the desire to have a wife in order to have children’, but, understood in malo, she symbolises that ‘through which all lewdness is desired’. It is this latter Venus, the goddess of lustful love

46 Chaucer also adds some details to his description which are drawn fom the Romance of the Rose (Robertson, Preface, 371). 47 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 199; Boccaccio, Teseida, 417; Hollander, ‘Validity’, 169–74. 48 Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, IV: 10. 49 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 196, 199–208; Boccaccio, Teseida, 412, 417–30. See also Robertson, Preface, 370–1; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 23–4. 50 Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls: 113–413; Economou, Goddess Natura, 131–44; Bennett, Parlement of Foules, chapters 3, 4.


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who is symbolised by the house of Venus in both the Teseida and the ‘Knight’s Tale’, whose ‘trewe servant’ Palamon proclaims himself to be when he swears to ‘holden werre alwey with chastitee’ (I: 2234–6).51 His link to the concupiscible desire to have that which is pleasing is clearly signalled by his prayer to Venus to ‘have fully possessioun/Of Emelye (I: 2242–3). Yet, eventually, through his marriage to Emily, whom the tale equates with Diana, the goddess of chastity, Chaucer’s Palamon is associated, as he is by Boccaccio, with Venus in bono as he learns self-restraint and moderation.52 As Boccacio later put it in De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, although our natures lead us towards concupiscence we can curb our passions and avoid the extremes of foolish love.53 Similarly, whilst seeing desire as exercising a universal dominion over humans, Alan of Lille distinguishes between legitimate ‘Desire’ and corrupt ‘Sport’.54 As Giles of Rome said, lechery, leads us away from reason but, nevertheless, kings should not eschew the ‘seruice of Venus’ altogether but should rather ‘be moderate’, moderating their desire with temperance (G: 68, 339) so that, as Gower taught, they temper their lust in accordance with reason and ‘kinde’.55 Whereas for Boccaccio the iconography of the house of Venus represents the concupiscible, that of Mars stands for the irascible appetite, one which is ‘found very readily in men of much blood’ who ‘become angry easily’.56 It is this Mars, the ‘bringer of strife’, with whom Arcite is associated in the ‘Knight’s Tale’.57 As in the Teseida (Book VII: 29–38) Chaucer’s house of Mars is located in ‘colde, frosty’ Thrace

51 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 199; Boccaccio, Teseida, 417; Hollander, Boccaccio’s Two Venuses, 4–5, 117; Aquinas, Ethics, 1394; Hollander, ‘Validity’, 169–74; Kirkham, ‘“Chiuso Parlare” ’, 325–6; Economou, Goddess Natura, 85; Minnis, Chaucer, 113–6; Hoffman, Ovid, 89–93, 97–8; Twycross, Medieval Anadyomene, 15, 67–8; North, Chaucer’s Universe, 206–7; Kean, Chaucer, 3, 28. Gower’s Venus in the Confessio Amantis is similarly polysemous (Kirk, ‘Chaucer’, 113). The Venus of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls has also been seen as a symbol of ‘excessive sensuality’ (for references, see Minnis, Shorter Poems, 284–7). On the variety of meanings which could be associated with Venus in bono and in malo in specific texts, see Tinkle, Medieval Venuses, 10–19, 27–30. 52 Smarr, ‘Teseida’, 32; Robertson, Preface, 127; Kean, Chaucer, II, 3. 53 Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, xix: 1; III, iv: 10. 54 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 4 (p. 147), pr. 5 (pp. 154–65). 55 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 4559–73. 56 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 196; Boccaccio, Teseida, p. 412. See also Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 889–900. 57 Minnis, Chaucer, 111–13. See also Pierre Bersuire, Moral Reduction, 370–1; Pierre Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 16.

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(I: 1972–4), which, Boccaccio tells us, ‘is a province situated toward the north’ where the inhabitants are therefore irascible and eager for war ‘because they have much blood’.58 As Giles, following Vegetius, said in the De Regimine, the inhabitants of countries to the north which lack sun ‘haue moche blood so that they dreden not woundes’ but are also ‘hasty and foolhardy’ (G: 397–8).59 The house of Mars is situated by a barren and deserted forest with ‘knotty, knarry, bareyn trees olde/Of stubbes sharp and hideous to behold’ (I: 1975–8), the forest representing, according to Boccaccio, the ‘secret schemings’ of the angry to harm others, its barrenness meaning ‘the effects of wrath’ and its lack of men and beasts showing that ‘the angry man does not govern himself or others’. The house is made of burnished steel (I: 1983), representing for Boccaccio the stubborn hardness of the angry man, and has doors of ‘adamante’ (I: 1990), whose hardness symbolises the fact that ‘no human persuasion may pass within to either bend or soften’ the obstinacy of the angry man, its iron pillars similarly representing ‘unbreakable resolve’.60 It is inhabited by ‘Felony’, by ‘cruel Ire, reed as any gleede’ (i.e., ember), representing the flushed appearance of the angry man, by ‘pale Drede’ symbolising those who ‘do not see things happening as they planned in their undertakings’, and by ‘Contek’—Discord—represented by her ‘blody knyf and ‘sharp manace’, who is the mother of Wrath (I: 1995–2004). There too was ‘colde deeth’ (or, perhaps better, ‘Deeth’), that results from the wars born of wrath and ‘Woodnesse, laughynge in his rage’, Boccaccio’s ‘merry Madness’ representing the madness of the unjustly angry, along with ‘Compleint (i.e., Grievance), Outhees (i.e., Outcry) and fiers Outrage’ (i.e., excessively cruel Violence) (I: 2008–2012).61 Whilst Boccaccio always names his personifications, Chaucer sometimes uses periphrasis to reveal something not by naming it explicitly but rather by describing its characteristics. For instance, he refers to

58 For the eagerness for war of those in cold climates and the timidity of those in warmer countries, see Boccaccio, Teseida, 374; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 49; Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 57. For Mars and Thrace, see also Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 2. 59 Vegetius, De Re Militari, I: 2 (p. 50). See also Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 297. 60 Boccaccio, Teseida, 188, 413–4; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 173, 197. On the hardness of adamant stone, see Medieval English Lapidaries, 37, 66–7; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XII.1.14; XVI.13.2; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, XVI: 8 (p. 833). 61 Boccaccio, Teseida, 188–9, 413–5; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 173–4, 197–8.


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Boccaccio’s ‘Betrayals’, ‘with their secret weapons’, in the house of Mars, not by name but simply by referring to ‘The smylere with the knyf under the cloke’ (I: 1999).62 Chaucer also omits some of Boccaccio’s details, such as the altars covered with blood which has been shed in battle, lists many more of those affected by the ‘infortune’ of Mars (Infortuna Minor), including the infant eaten in its cradle by a sow and the cook who is scalded despite his ‘longe ladel’, and adds symbolism of his own, such as the personification of Conquest, ‘sittynge in greet honour,/With the sharpe swerd over his heed’ (I: 2028–30). Yet, despite these differences, the symbolic detail of Chaucer’s houses of Venus and Mars has a similar meaning to that in the Teseida. As Boccaccio explains in his glosses, in this kind of allegorical context, the presence of a god such as Mars should not be read literally. Rather, it constitutes ‘a poetic fiction’, one which symbolizes a force within the soul which moves us to action, in this case the irascible appetite which is within us all.63 Thus when Theseus condemns Palamon and Arcite to death when he discovers them fighting in the grove, he angrily announces ‘Ye shal be deed, by myghty Mars the rede!’ (I: 1747). In other words, humans are not literally the playthings of the gods or the victims of astral determinism. Rather, as Giles of Rome said, following Aristotle’s Ethics, we can use reason to control our appetites so that, like a master with a child, it rules them and leads them to what is best (G: 73, 226; NE: I, xiii, 19; III, xii, 8). Chaucer’s house of Mars may have no windows (I: 1989), thus keeping out the light of the sun which Boccaccio interpreted as ‘the sound advice of reason in the mind of the angry man’ which leads him to peace. Nevertheless, as Boccaccio said, even irascible men of much blood who are prone to wrath can ‘by a very strong effort of reason, restrain and control their anger’.64 As Dives and Pauper puts it, quoting a medieval commonplace, ‘vir sapiens dominatur astris’, i.e., ‘euery wys man is lord and mayster of the planetys’ because, by the use of reason and virtue, he can overcome the influence of the planets.65 Thus, as in the explicit allegorization which

62 Boccaccio, Teseida, 188; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 173. For periphrasis, see Geoffrey of Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, 24. 63 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 48–9; Boccaccio, Teseida, 373; Anderson, ‘Fourth Temple’, 124–5. 64 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 196–7; Boccaccio, Teseida, 412–3. 65 Dives and Pauper, volume I, XX: 3–7; Klibansky, Saturn, 184–4; Coopland, ‘Introduction’, 64. See also Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 412; Roman de la Rose, 17057–70, 17497–512; Romance of the Rose, 264, 270; Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium,

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Boccaccio provides for the Teseida, Chaucer’s Palamon and Arcite can be seen as representing the concupiscible and the irascible appetites which, although an inevitable, and potentially useful, part of human nature, have to be restrained and directed by being put in a rightful relationship with reason.66 If we read the ‘Knight’s Tale’ literally, we seem to be presented with a world which is ruled by capricious gods against whose cruel dominion the imprisoned Palamon complains (I: 1303–33). However, when the tale is read allegorically, the gods can be seen as representing, as they do in the Teseida, our own inner passions: it is we who subject ourselves to them when we give in to our own lower natures.67 As Prudence says in teaching patience and self-restraint to her husband in the ‘Tale of Melibee’, ‘he that is irous and wrooth, he ne may nat wel deme’ (VII: 1124). In this perspective, the ‘furie infernal’ sent by Pluto, at the request of Saturn, which startles Arcite’s horse and so causes the fall which leads to his death (I: 2684–91), is no chance event but rather symbolizes Arcite’s own ‘irascible’ nature: it is his own wrathful passions, as well as his ‘excessive love’, which lead to his downfall when he is at the height of his pride.68 For John of Garland, the Vatican Mythographers and Boccaccio, the Furies represent discord, quickness to anger, vengefulness and the ‘perturbations of the mind’ which arise from mental blindness and the rejection of reason and so result in discord and evil deeds.69 Significantly, just as Arcite’s triumph is overturned when he is thrown from his horse, so Dante describes our wrathful and lustful appetites as being like a horse which will only behave itself when it is mastered by a good rider, i.e., by the reason which shows us what to pursue and what to flee.70 As Manzalaoui says, ‘the astronomical gods are amoral

III, i: 1; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 119; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, p. 164; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, I: 24 (p. 23). 66 Nolan, Chaucer, 188–9. 67 Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 79; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, p. 179–80, 190; Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, 177; Finlayson, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 138; Gaylord, ‘Role of Saturn’, 181–4; Whittock, Reading, 66; Schewitzer, ‘Fate’, 21–30; Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 313–4. 68 Boccaccio, Teseida, 262–3; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 244; Nolan, Chaucer, 269; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 148–9; Gaylord, ‘Role of Saturn’, 183–5. 69 Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, II: 12; III: 6; John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, 199–200; Boccaccio, Genealogie Deorum Gentilium, III: VI; Boccaccio, Espozioni, 501; Smarr, ‘Teseida’, 32; Robertson, Preface, 474–5; Anderson, Before the Knight’s Tale, 96, n. 73. See also Dante, Inferno, IX: 54. 70 Dante, Convivo, IV, xxvi: 4.


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powers; it is their human devotees who can turn these potentials ad bonum or ad malum’.71 In the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Chaucer’s emphasis on the need for reason to control the passions is linked with the Boethian themes which he had added to the narrative of Boccaccio’s Teseida.72 These themes are most apparent in Duke Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech (discussed in detail in Chapters Four and Five, below), an oration which Chaucer much amplifies from his source in the Teseida. However, it is not just at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ that Chaucer invokes Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Rather, as Joseph argues, the situation of the imprisoned Palamon and Arcite at the start of the tale ‘mirrors that of Boethius’ at the start of the Consolation. Here Boethius’s imprisonment symbolizes his continued enslavement to worldly attachments and the imprisonment of the soul within the body, a thraldom from which he is to be released by the enlightenment provided by the teachings of Lady Philosophy about the meaning of true freedom. As Chaucer’s Parson teaches, it was through sin that Man, who was once free is now ‘maked bonde’. As St Paul had said: ‘Allas, I caytyf man! Who shal delivere me fro the prisoun of my caytyf body?’ (X: 149, 344; Romans 7: 23–4). Similarly, Palamon and Arcite’s imprisonment in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, one which contrasts with the greater ease of their confinement in the Teseida, is a Boethian metaphor for their subjection to the passions, to the senses, and to love, the chains which bind them symbolizing the fetters of all those who will not be ruled by reason but have instead bound themselves to the fickle Wheel of Fortune.73 As Chaucer says in his poem Fortune, the power of Fortune does not impinge on he who has developed a Stoic self-sufficiency and so ‘over himself hath the maystrye’.74 Both Palamon and Arcite are fond of bewailing their fate, whether they are released from prison or kept there (I: 1223–1333) but, as Gower said in his attack on those knights who surrendered their reason and fell prey to the sickness, madness and imprisonment of

71

Manzalaoui, ‘Chaucer’, 246. See also Neuse, ‘Knight’, 252; McCall, Chaucer,

171. 72

Edwards, Chaucer, 32. Joseph, ‘Chaucerian “Game” ’, 85–7; Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 227; Kolve, Chaucer, 102–3, 139–42; Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 9–10; Kean, Chaucer, II, 9–14; Chadwick, Boethius, 227–8, 231–2; Albertus Magnus, Questions, 14; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 71–2; Boccaccio, Teseida, 76. 74 Chaucer, Fortune, 13–15. 73

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passionate love: ‘The man who laments for himself in this way is too late, for he himself is the cause of his suffering and not another’.75 In this perspective, when Arcite dies, having been thrown from his horse at the height of his triumph, he is not simply the victim of Fortune’s ‘false wheel’ (I: 925). Rather, whilst we must all die (I: 2845–6, 3029–30), it is those who chain themselves to the Wheel of Fortune by devoting themselves to the pursuit of external goods such as pleasure, power and possessions who put themselves at Fortune’s mercy and so at the risk of premature death.76 As Fortune herself puts it in The Consolation of Philosophy, ‘turning my wheel swiftly, I delight to bring low what is on high, to raise high what is down. Go up, if you will, but on this condition, that you do not think it wrong to have to go down again whenever the course of my sport demands’.77 As Gower said, if Alexander became ruler of the world, ‘Fortune changed her hand in a short time. One day she made him king and the next day she poisoned him so that he died and was buried’ so that all his honours ‘turned into emptiness’.78 Similarly, just as Arcite’s victory over Palamon is a gift of Fortune (I: 2659, 2682), so, when he is raised to the top of Fortune’s wheel, his fall is inevitable. Whilst Arcite, the devotee of Mars is linked with death and Fortune, it is Palamon, the servant of Venus, whose eventual marriage to Emily associates him with Nature, procreation and the power that denies death any final victory (I: 3011–14) who finally triumphs in the tale.79 Whilst Boccaccio provided his audience with his own allegorical explication of the Teseida, he also encouraged his readers to find other meanings in the text for themselves.80 Certainly, in the case of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, it is possible to develop an interpretation of the story of Palamon and Arcite as an allegorical psychomachia by examining it in the light of Giles of Rome’s equation of the four cardinal virtues with particular parts of the human soul: fortitude (‘stawlwordnesse’) with the irascible, temperance (‘temporance’) with the concupiscible,

75 Gower, Vox Clamantis, II: 1; II: 12; V: 1–6 (quotation at p. 202); Gower, Confessio Amantis, Pro.: 529–84. 76 Eberle, ‘Mirrors’, 434; Patch, Goddess Fortuna, 117–20; Bartholomew, Fortuna, 10–22. 77 Boethius, Consolation, II, pr. II: 28–33; Alan of Lille, AntiClaudianus, VIII (pp. 189–91). 78 Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 22057–68. 79 Bartholomew, Fortuna, 88–107. 80 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 198; Boccaccio, Teseida, 415.


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prudence (‘redinesse’) with the intellect and justice (‘rightwisnesse’) with the will (D: 50; G: 40).81 Consequently, whilst Arcite and Palamon are each originally associated with the passions of the irascible and the concupiscible in their devotion to Mars and Venus, they also eventually achieve the characteristic virtues of these parts of the soul. Accordingly, in death, Arcite displays the fortitude which Giles, like Aquinas, associated with the irascible, tempering his wrath and hardiness and so being reconciled to Palamon and commending his soul to Jupiter (I: 2765–97).82 Similarly, Palamon, who had initially declared war on chastity, finally achieves the concupiscible virtue of temperance through which he moderates his passion and finds happiness in marriage to Emily (I: 2236, 3094–3106), the divisive effects of the passions in each case giving way to the harmony which results from the virtues.83 However, the association of specific virtues with particular parts of the soul is perhaps most apparent in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in the cases of Theseus, who is likened to Jupiter and who can be seen as representing the cardinal virtue of justice which should rule the will, and of his father, Egeus, who is associated in the tale with Saturn and who may be seen as the prudence which should govern the intellect. Jupiter was a benign and kingly planet and Jupiter himself was commonly depicted, as he was in Pierre Bersuire’s Ovidius Moralizatus, as ‘a man sitting in his majesty on a burnished throne, holding the sceptre of royalty in one hand’.84 Similarly, in Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia (c. 1147) Jupiter is depicted ‘seated in his council chamber’, shining in ‘regal majesty, wielding in his right hand a scepter, and suspending from his left a scale, in the balance of which he determined the affairs, now of men, now of higher powers’.85 As Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus said, the kingly Jupiter was associated not only with ‘honour, richesse [and] best clothynge’ but also with ‘witte and wisdome and resoun’, ‘reuerence and honeste and fey and lore’ and with being

81 McCall gives this reference as Book II of the De Regimine but it is actually Book I, Part II, chapter 2 (McCall, Chaucer, 84, 174). See also Blund, Tractaus de Anima, VII (72, 79). 82 Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 21. 83 Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 21. 84 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 19 (p. 94); Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, VIII; 366; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 11; Minnis, Chaucer, 117–8; Kean, Chaucer, II, 3, 33–4. 85 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 5 (pp. 100–1).

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‘tristy and trewe’.86 Jupiter, as a planet and a god, was therefore linked with wisdom, authority and moderation, with paternal affection, just judgement and integrity, with peace, meekness and patience, and with magnanimity and so with the desire for honour and acclaim which made men perform virtuous deeds. As C. S. Lewis said, Jupiter is kingly in the sense of ‘a King at peace, enthroned, taking his leisure, serene’. Jupiter makes men ‘temperate, tranquil and magnanimous’ and causes ‘halcyon days and prosperity’ which explains why, in Dante’s Paradiso, ‘wise and just princes go to his sphere when they die’.87 This equation of Theseus with Jupiter (an association found in Statius’s Thebaid itself ) and with the cardinal virtue of justice may seem to be contradicted by the fact that Theseus conquers and destroys Thebes under the banner of Mars (I: 975–7, 990).88 After all, according to Boccaccio, Mars represents the irascible appetite and his temple in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ associates him with the human suffering caused by war (I: 2016) and with the unstable glory of Conquest (I: 2028–30).89 In fact, like Venus, who can represent either licit desire or sinful lewdness, Mars is two-fold in his nature because, as Boccaccio explains, ‘there are two kinds of wrath’. The first, Mars in malo, is ‘getting angry without reason, and this is vicious’ but the second ‘can be reasonable, such as becoming troubled when something is done unjustly’. This second kind of wrath, Mars in bono, ‘accepts the advice of reason in reprimanding or in bringing about amends to what has been ill done. And the author wants this Wrath to be in the house of Mars, because from this are born and can be born every day many just wars’.90 As Brunetto Latini put it, only a man ‘whose feelings are dead’ would feel no anger at all. Thus, ‘the man who is angry when he should be and at the appropriate time 86 Minnis, Chaucer, 117–21, 125–6; Burrow, Ages, 41–3; Burrow, Essays, 41–3; Rigby, Chaucer, 64; Sears, Ages, 111; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VIII: 12 (p. 480). 87 NE, VIII, x: 4; Cicero, Nature of the Gods, 2: 119; Firmicus, Mathesis, I, ii: 2; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 71, 133; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 436; Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, I: 6; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 908–34; Froissart, Le Joli Buisson, 1668–87; Brooks, ‘Meaning’, 125; Sears, Ages, 49, 52–3; Burrow, Essays, 41; Curry, Chaucer, 127; Lewis, Discarded Image, 105–6; North, Chaucer’s Universe, 205, 395, 414; Minnis, Chaucer, 117–21, 139–42; Dante, Paradiso, XX: 31–69. 88 Statius, Thebaid, XII: 650–5. See also Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 30–1. 89 Aers, Chaucer, 26; Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer, 84; Guidry, ‘Parliaments’, 161; North, Chaucer’s Universe, 206; Boccaccio, Teseida, 412–5; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 196–8. On the meaning of Theseus’s banner, see also below, 213–5. 90 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 9–10, 197–8; Boccaccio, Teseida, 414; Kirkham, ‘ “Chiuso Parlare” ’, 325–6.


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and to the appropriate extent’ can be seen as good tempered’, it is the ‘the one who gets angry inappropriately’ who is irascible.91 Hence, when Boccaccio’s Teseo justly wages war ‘to avenge the cruel harassments perpetrated by the Amazon women’, he is inspired to do so by Mars.92 As Lydgate said, Athens was not only the city of Minerva (see below, 114–5) but also, through the influence of Mars, came to ‘Noblesse off knyhthod ther clergie to diffende’.93 Similarly, in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, it is this just wrath, Mars in bono, which Theseus represents, as can be seen in his compassionate response to the pleas of the widows for justice against Creon. As Christine de Pizan explained in her Epistre Othea, ‘every knight who loves or pursues arms and deeds of chivalry and has renown of valour may be called son of Mars’.94 That Egeus is be associated with the prudence that should rule the intellect may also seem surprising given his connection in the tale with Saturn. After all, Saturn was often presented by medieval writers as Infortuna Major, as the ‘wicked’ planet of Chaucer’s Treatise on the Astrolabe which was, as John of Salisbury said, ‘inimical to all’ and whose ‘children’, those under its influence, were usually portrayed as the worst or unhappiest of men.95 Certainly, it is the ‘noyfulle’ influence of Saturn in human affairs, which leads to disasters such as drowning, imprisonment and plague, which is described in detail in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (I: 2454–69). Yet, although the malevolent aspects of Saturn’s influence tended to become ever more prominent in medieval descriptions of him, there was also a tradition of describing the planet/god in more positive terms, linking him to fatherhood and wisdom. In bono, Saturn was associated with thoughtfulness, prudence, deep philosophical reflection, with the power of the intellect and, as in Macrobius, with reason and understanding. Alexander Neckham, for instance, in linking the seven planets with the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, associated Saturn with

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Latini, Book of the Treasure, 154, 164–5, 171–2. Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 20–2; Boccaccio, Teseida, 11–14. 93 Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 118. The late thirteenth-century Fleta (II, 1–2) had thus been able both to praise Edward I as a ‘friend of peace’ whilst also urging those who longed to ‘frequent the contests of Mars’ to support the king. 94 Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, 219; Christine de Pizan, Letter of Othea, 49. 95 Chaucer, Treatise on the Astrolabe, II.4: 30–5; John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 19 (p. 94); Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, IX: 139; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VIII: 12 (p. 479); Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 935–43; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 6–7; Klibansky, Saturn, 130–1, 142–5, 148–9, 158, 177–81, 185–6; North, Chaucer’s Universe, 204–5; Tinkle, ‘Saturn’, 294–5, 298, 301; Kean, Chaucer, II, 3. 92

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wisdom, the first of these gifts: ‘Saturn is rightly described as an old man by the philosophers for old men are of mature judgement’ (Isaias 11: 2–5). Likewise, for William of Auvergne, Saturn had ‘the power to supply and direct the intelligence’, whilst for Christine de Pizan, Saturn, a slow and heavy planet linked with old age, signified ‘wisdom and moderation’ and particularly the wisdom involved in judgement.96 Similarly, in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself, Saturn was associated not only with death and disaster but also with the wisdom which comes from long experience: ‘In elde is bothe wysdom and usage/Men may the olde atrenne and noght atrede’ (I: 2448–9). In this context, Egeus’s affi liation with Saturn, a god/planet linked with fathers and with old men, associates him with the prudence that should rule the intellect just as justice should rule the will.97 As we shall see below, Egeus’s Stoic moralising following the death of Arcite certainly displays this virtue. Like Boccaccio’s Teseida, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ further symbolises the battle within the human soul between vice and virtue, passion and reason, excess and restraint in terms of its opposition between the cities of Thebes and Athens.98 The concupiscible and irascible appetites represented by Palamon/Venus and Arcite/Mars are inherent parts of the human soul. Our task is not to destroy them but rather to direct them properly so that our judgements of what we desire to obtain and to hold on to are rational rather than corrupt. By contrast, Creon, the tyrannical ruler of Thebes, symbolises inhuman vice, which should, as Giles said, be hated and destroyed ‘with myght and strengthe’ (G: 137). Thebes was famous as the city which, as in Statius’s Thebaid, typified ‘fraternal warfare’ and ‘unnatural hate’ and where, as Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies said, ‘once civil wars thundered’.99 As John of Salisbury put it, the Thebans were a people ‘befouled with parricide, incest, deception, and perjury’.100 Similarly, for Lydgate, Thebes showed that a kingdom

96

Klibansky, Saturn, 144, 150, 153, 155–6, 158, 166, 169, 177, 188, 191–3; North, Chaucer’s Universe, 204–5; Seznec, Survival, 90, 94; Astell, Chaucer, 103; Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 129–30; Tinkle, ‘Saturn’, 296–7, 300; Kean, Chaucer, 28–33; Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, II: 1; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 8–10; Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, 214–5; Christine de Pizan, Letter of Othea, 46. 97 Klibansky, Saturn, 141–2. 98 Kirkham, ‘ “Chiuso Parlare” ’, 326–7; Robertson, Preface, 265; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 80–1; Allen and Moritz, Distinction, 25–6; Schweitzer, ‘Fate’, 35–8; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 139–40, 149; Smarr, ‘Teseida’, 34; Hoffman, Ovid, 45–7, 57–60. 99 Statius, Thebaid, I: 1–2; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XIV.4.11; Economou, Goddess Natura, 44–5. 100 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 4 (p. 13).


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divided cannot endure.101 Chaucer’s Arcite refers to this sorry history when he notes that he (and so also Palamon, his cousin (I; 1019)) is of the lineage of Cadmus, the founder and first king of Thebes: ‘Of his lynage am I, and his ofspryng/By verray ligne, as of the stok roial’ (I: 1545–51). At the birth of the city, Cadmus had sown dragon’s teeth from which, as Boccaccio explains in his glosses to the Teseida, many armed men sprang who, as soon as they were born, ‘began to fight among themselves and they all killed each other, except for five who went with Cadmus to found the city of Thebes’. All of Cadmus’s successors ‘suffered unhappy deaths’, including Eteocles and Polynices, the sons of Oedipus by his mother Jocasta, whose fratricidal strife had eventually led to Creon’s becoming ruler of the city, the history of the city being a succession of ‘foul things’ and ‘great infamies’ performed by the Thebans. For the Roman de Thèbes, it was the sin in which the two brothers were created which made them cruel and mad and which led, along with the curse which their own father called down on them, to the downfall and destruction of their city.102 Boccaccio links Thebes with the house of Mars, with its mad Impulses which lead to anger and with Wrath, Discord and Death, and with the temple of Venus which is located on Mount Cithaeron, near Thebes, whose inhabitants ‘offered many sacrifices to the honour of Venus’.103 Thebes was also associated, as in Statius’ Thebaid, with Bacchus, the god of wine. As Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius said, the inhabitants of Thebes worshipped Bacchus as ‘a god greater than Jove’.104 It is this Theban tradition of lust, intemperance and internecine strife, one represented by Creon’s ‘ire’ and ‘iniquitee’ (I: 940), which is continued by Palamon and Arcite and which leads them to their intended fight to the death in the grove, even though the two had originally been sworn brothers-in-arms and were also ‘cosyns and kynnes men’ (I: 1131, 1161).105 For Giles, such strife between close relatives was the worst form of civil conflict: ‘the nere the sibbe the persone is that is

101

Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 105–6. Roman de Thèbes, 21–32, 584–97. 103 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 73, 138–9, 141–3, 199, 197–8, 317, 332; Boccaccio, Teseida, 348, 378–9, 392–3, 396, 398–9, 413–5, 417, 462; Kirkham, ‘“Chiuso Parlare”’, 313; Bennett, Commentary, 41–2; Hoffman, Ovid, 60. 104 Statius, Thebaid, I: 288–9; VII: 145–92, 607; X: 901; XI: 224; Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, II: 264–5; Hoffman, Ovid, 60. 105 Nolan, Chaucer, 182, 184, 187–8. 102

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in strif, wounded and despised, the worse ben the strif, wondes and despisyng’ (G: 303). By contrast, in this allegorical battle within the soul, Athens, the city founded by Minerva, symbolizes, as in Fulgentius’s Mythologies, ‘the mind of the wise man’ which, like Minerva herself, is both ‘armed and noble’ and ‘full of resource’. Minerva represents the contemplative or intellectual life in which we seek ‘for knowledge and truth’, as opposed to the practical or active life (Juno), in which we seek for material possession, and the life of pleasure and voluptuousness (Venus), which is ‘entirely given up to lust’, and the wisdom which abates rage.106 Laurent de Premierfait even argued that the flourishing of philosophy produced by Theseus’s government of Athens led to a ‘vraye cognoissance des choses divines et humaines’.107 Certainly, from Isidore’s Etymologies, through the Vatican Mythographers, to Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, Minerva represented wisdom, skill, reasoning, prudence and strength, with Athens, which was dedicated to Minerva, conventionally being described as the ‘nurse of philosophers’ and the ‘temple’ of science and philosophy, its fame being immortal.108 John of Salisbury, for whom Minerva symbolised the prudence needed by a ruler, also noted that the Athenians held the Thebans ‘in little esteem’, being a people of ‘greater dignity’. The Athenians ‘clothed in the ornate veil of mythology historical facts, the secrets of nature and the origin of customs’, such tales offering not only pleasure but serving ‘the useful purpose of admonition against defects of character and conduct’.109 Boccaccio’s glosses to the Teseida explicitly refer to the fact that ‘the ancients believed that Minerva was goddess of wisdom and in Athens she was honoured more than any other god’ whilst for Chaucer himself,

106

Fulgentius, Mythologies, 64–7, 75–6. Laurent de Premierfait, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 149. See also Higden, Polychronicon, I, 194–5. 108 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, VIII, 11.71–5, XIV.4.10, XXVI.1.44; Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, I: 124; II: 39; III: 10; John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, 279–80; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 30–2; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, I: 2; Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I: X (p. 51); Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 240; Laurent de Premierfait, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 147; Christine de Pizan, Mutacion de Fortune, 13357–70; Eulogium Historiarum, III, 68, 83; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 118–9; Robertson, Preface, 260. 109 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, VI: 22; John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I: 4 (pp. 13–14). 107


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her wisdom was proverbial.110 In his sermon ‘Vivat Rex’ (1405), Gerson reminds his audience of the story of how Minerva (i.e. Pallas Athene) had won the right to give her name to Athens by choosing as the most useful object an olive-branch, a sign of peace, thereby defeating Mars’s choice of a horse, which was a symbol of war and death.111 Athens was also the location of ‘temple of the goddesse Clemence’ (I: 928) and was traditionally associated with the virtue of mercy.112 It is easy to understand why modern readers have sometimes been suspicious of Theseus’s goal of achieving the complete ‘obeisaunce’ of Thebes to Athens (I: 2974) through his foreign policy.113 In fact, even when seen literally, the duke’s actions may have been judged as admirable by the standards of medieval political theorists such as Giles of Rome (see 195–8, below). Certainly, when read in terms of the tale’s allegorical psychomachia, the ‘obeisaunce’ of Thebes to Athens which Theseus seeks to secure at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ has a positive sense, symbolizing, as it does, prudence guiding the intellect, mercy and justice ruling the will, fortitude controlling the irascible appetite, and temperance restraining the concupiscible which, for medieval moralists, was the basis of individual virtue.114 More generally, the obedience of Thebes to Athens signifies not only rightful order within the microcosm of the individual soul and within the polity but also the hierarchical submission of the lower to the higher which, as we shall see, medieval ideology presented as the ideal order of things at all levels of creation, one modelled on the divinely-ordained structure of macrocosm of the cosmos itself (see 240–5, below). However, if the ‘Knight’s Tale’ can be read allegorically in terms of a battle within the soul between reason and appetites, this by no means implies that its characters can be neatly pigeonholed so that, for instance, Palamon and Arcite become nothing more than symbols of the concupiscible and the irascible. Thus if Chaucer’s Palamon is most closely associated with Venus and the concupiscible whilst Arcite is most identified with Mars and the irascible, in practice, the two youths

110 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 50; Boccaccio, Teseida, 376. For Minerva’s wisdom as proverbial in Chaucer, see House of Fame, l. 1072; Troilus and Criseyde, II: 232; ‘Physician’s Tale’ (VI: 49). 111 Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1145. For this story, see Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, I: 2; III: 10. 112 Lactantius Placidus, Commentary, 653; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 32. 113 Aers, Chaucer, 29–30. 114 Kean, Chaucer, II, 41.

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are both prone to the passions of lust and wrath which these gods represent.115 For instance, both fall in love with Emily at first sight: ‘if Palamon was wounded sore’ by Emily’s beauty, ‘Arcite is hurt as muche as he, or more’ (I: 1114–16). Similarly, when they confront each other in the grove, both are described as being as fierce as lions (I: 1598, 1655–6). Certainly, in their relationships and conflicts, in their multiple personality traits, and in their moral development over time, Palamon and Arcite, like the other characters in the tale, are shown to be ‘more human, more generous and more complicated than any single abstract notion’ or allegorical personification.116 Yet, if Palamon and Arcite in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ are not simply expressions of the irascible and the concupiscible, their characters and their significance can nonetheless be seen as being informed by medieval understandings of the workings of these parts of the soul. Certainly, whilst Boccaccio’s glosses to the Teseida suggest that he himself saw this as an illuminating approach to understanding the story of Palamon and Arcite, neither his work nor Chaucer’s can simply be reduced down to a single allegorical meaning. Rather, both the Teseida and the ‘Knight’s Tale’ brought together a multiplicity of medieval discourses about the individual, morality and society; amongst these discourses, those concerning the ‘ages of man’ are particularly prominent. iii. The ‘Knight’s Tale’ and the Ages of Man If heroic tales of antiquity were often read in the middle ages in terms of psychomachia, this approach was also linked with the interpretation of such tales as allegories of the human life-cycle. Certainly, John of Salisbury and the commentary on Virgil attributed to Bernardus Silvestris interpreted the Aeneid in this way. For John, the Aeneid used the ‘cloak of poetic imagination’ to represent the six periods of human life ‘by the division of the work into six books’. As Dante said, the Aeneid describes the progression through the ages of man by means of a ‘figurative method’ so that Books IV to VI of Virgil show ‘how in our 115 Hansen, Chaucer, 209–11, 214; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 81; Ovid, Hoffman, 46–8, 80–3, 97–8. There has been some debate amongst the critics about the extent to which Palamon and Arcite are distinguished, see, for instance, Muscatine, ‘Form’, 918–9, 924–5; Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, p. 100; Brooks, ‘Meaning’, 35–8; Leicester, Disenchanted Self, 336–7; Stock, ‘Two Mayings’, 218–21. 116 McCall, Chaucer, 75; Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 120.


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Youth it is necessary to our perfection to be temperate and strong’.117 This tradition can be traced to Fulgentius’s Exposition of the Content of Virgil which claimed that the Aeneid could be seen as depicting ‘the full range of human life’, Virgil’s ‘tale of arms and man’ providing a demonstration of how Aeneas came to manliness, indicated by ‘arms’, and to wisdom, indicated by ‘man’. Although ‘there are many men’ and ‘not all of them are praiseworthy’, manliness is nonetheless a quality for which ‘man should be praised’, since although ‘wisdom controls manliness, yet the soul’s wisdom stems from manliness’ as wisdom relies on manliness to achieve its purpose. As opposed to this virtuous manliness, Fulgentius saw the Aeneid as depicting adolescence as a time of blindness, pride, passion, lust, confusion of mind, conceit, reckless impulses, instability, a lack of clear-sightedness and a rejection of parental discipline.118 As his modern editor says, Fulgentius’s allegorical interpretation of Virgil is now likely to seem ‘wild and freakish’ to modern readers, as when Aeneas’s shipwreck at the start of the Aeneid is read as ‘an allegory of the dangers of birth’.119 However, if Fulgentius’s allegory twisted the meaning of Virgil’s epic to fit a preconceived idea, this procedure was later reversed so that writers themselves produced poetry in line with the mythographer’s theory. Spenser, for instance, presented his Faerie Queene as a ‘continued Allegory’ which, like other epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid, showed the development of ‘a good gouernour and a vertuous man’ as a model for its reader.120 As a result, if the mythographer’s account of the Aeneid is an eccentric reading of Virgil, it provides a rather more plausible guide to the themes of the works of later poets such as Boccaccio and Spenser and, we shall argue, to Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself. Although it does not take the form of an allegorical biography in which a single individual progresses through the human life-cycle, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ can, like medieval allegorical readings of Virgil, nonetheless be seen as presenting us with a conflict in which maturity,

117 Wetherbeee, Platonism, 105–11; John of Salisbury, Frivolities, VIII: 24 (pp. 402–4); Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid, xii–iii, 14. 23–5; Dante, Convivio, IV, xxiv: 7; IV, xxvi: 4; Baswell, Virgil, 10–11, 85, 96–7, 106, 111, 116, 130. 118 Whitbread, ‘Introduction’, 30–1, 105; Fulgentius, Exposition, 122, 125; Wetherbee, ‘Introduction’, 22–3. 119 Whitbread, ‘Introduction’, 30–1, 105; Fulgentius, Exposition, 122, 125. 120 Whitbread, ‘Introduction’, 108; Edmund Spenser, Letter to Sir Walter Raleigh, 407.

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represented by Theseus, which is associated with prudence, wisdom, learning and intellect, overcomes the irresponsibility of youth, personified by Palamon and Arcite.121 Aristotle’s Politics, and Nicholas Oresme’s commentary on it, explicitly link this progression to moral maturity with the development of the parts of the soul. Just as the body is ‘prior in generation to the soul’, even though it exists for the sake of the soul, so the irrational elements within the soul, the sensitive appetites of the irascible and the concupiscible are ‘prior to’ the rational intellect. As a result, ‘wishing and desire are implanted in children from their very birth but reason and understanding are developed as they grow older’ (AP: VII, 15).122 As Giles of Rome put it, sin constitutes a child-like surrender to passion as opposed to the virtuous use of reason which characterises the mature man. (G: 73). As Aquinas said, following Aristotle (NE: I, iii: 5–7), just as students of moral or political science who are ‘immature in age’ will not achieve the knowledge of virtue which this science teaches, so those who are ‘immature in character’ will fail to achieve such virtue in their actions but will continue to live according to their passions. Consequently, it is the task of public authority to restrain, through fear of punishment, ‘delinquent young men whom paternal admonition is not able to correct’.123 In analyzing the characteristics of the separate age-groups, medieval people were familiar with a variety of different divisions of the human life-cycle including four- and seven-fold divisions in which the individual stages of the human life-cycle could be equated with the four humours, the four seasons, the seven planets and so on.124 For Brooks and Fowler, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ should be understood in terms of such four- and seven-stage schemes of human life.125 Yet, as Burrow persuasively argued, the tale can perhaps best be read in terms of an Aristotelian three-stage scheme of the human life-cycle (DA: III, 12; OR; 2: 12–14) with Palamon, Arcite and Emily personifying youth, Egeus old age, and, in-between them, Theseus representing mature middle age. Indeed, in introducing Saturn, a character who does not appear in

121 Fulgentius, On the Thebaid, 239; Fulgentius, Exposition, 121–3, 127–30, 134; Fulgentius, On the Ages of the World, 194–5; Wetherbee, ‘Introduction’, 22–3; Burrow, Essays, 39. 122 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 331. 123 Aquinas, Ethics, 4, 39–40; Oresme, Livres de Ethiques, 107. 124 Five-, six-, eight-, ten-, and twelve-stage schemes were also known. See Burrow, Ages, passim; Sears, Ages, passim. 125 Brooks and Fowler, ‘Meaning’, 133, 138–42.


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Boccaccio’s Teseida, and by more clearly distinguishing Theseus from his aged father, Chaucer’s tale gives a particular emphasis to this threefold scheme by systematising the parallels between the gods and the three generations of humans.126 Like the four- and seven-stage schemes of the life-cycle, this three-fold division was also very familiar to medieval audiences. It was, for instance, commonly employed in depictions of the ‘Adoration of the Magi’, as in the ‘Wilton Diptych’ where the three kings before the Virgin are portrayed in terms of greying old age, bearded middle age and clean-faced youth (the latter being represented by Richard II himself).127 Whilst, elsewhere, Giles of Rome employed the seven-stage scheme of human life, in the De Regimine itself he adopts the tripartite division of the life-cycle, one to which Dante referred in terms of the Aristotelian ‘arch’ of ascending youth, descending old age and, in-between them, at the apex of the arch, ‘mene age’ (OY: 479a).128 For Giles, each of the three ages has its own characteristic forms of behaviour. The ruler should be familiar with these traits, should take account of them (as the emperor does in the Prose Life of Alexander) and should use them as models (whether positive or negative) for his own behaviour (G: 139–40).129 Following the description of the young in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, (OR: 2: 12), Giles distinguishes six virtues which are typical of children and six characteristic vices. The virtues of the young are that they are liberal, bold and hopeful, magnanimous, unmalicious in that they see only the good in others, merciful and ‘schamefast’. A king should have the first five of these virtues but whilst ‘schamefasteness’ is a virtue in a child, it is not really accounted as such in a king because he should not perform shameful deeds in the first place (G: 140–2).130 The young also have six negative characteristics: they tend to follow their passions and so are lecherous, lustful and intemperate; they are unsteadfast and changeable as a result of their being unstable in their bodily humours; 126 Burrow, Ages, 9–11; Burrow, Ricardian Poetry, 54, 116–7, 126–8; Burrow, Essays, 27–48, 42–3; Aristotle, On Youth, 761. 127 For this convention, see Burrow, Ages, 136; Sears, Ages, 90–4. On the Wilton Diptych, see Monnas, ‘Furnishings’, 201; Gordon, ‘Wilton Diptych’, 22. 128 On the Universe, 401a; Aristotle, On Youth, 761; Dante, Convivio, IV, xxiii: 4–6; Goodich, From Birth, 39, 105; Burrow, Ages, 5–11. Dante combines the tripartite metaphor of the arch with an exposition of a four-stage division of human life (Convivio, IV, xxiii: 7–8; IV: xxiv–viii). 129 Prose Life of Alexander, 13. 130 Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 67v–68v; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 166; Aquinas, Ethics, 874.

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they are credulous and make hasty judgements; they tend to ‘chiden and striuen’; they lie and affirm things which they do not know about; and they are ruled more by passion (i.e. by the concupiscible and by the irascible) than by reason and so are immoderate and unmeasured in their deeds and in their loves.131 If such manners are blameworthy in children, they are all the worse when found in kings, who should be more virtuous than other people (G: 124, 142–4, 228, 234, 240). Richard II himself was to be accused of just such childish inconstancy and wilfulness by those who deposed him in 1399.132 Similarly, Giles follows Aristotle when he sets out the good and the bad characteristics of the old (OR: 2: 13). The old have four good ‘manners’. The first is that they are moderate in their delectation as the coldness of their bodily complexion abates the lecherous desires of their souls. The second is that they are merciful because, in their feebleness, they extend to others the pity that they would have of others (whereas children are merciful because they naively believe other men to be innocent and good). The third is that the old do not affirm as certain that which is doubtful since they have had the experience of being deceived in the past. The final good manner of the old is that they are generally temperate, doing everything in moderation rather than with the excessive passion of the young (G: 147–8).133 In terms of their bad ‘maners’, the old are ‘surquydous’, i.e., they tend not to believe what men tell them; they are ‘suspicious’ in the sense that they tend to suspect the worst of people; they are pusillanimous and, as their body grows old, cold and weak, they become fearful; they are illiberal and niggardly as they are fearful of losing their goods in the future; they lack hope about the future, preferring to talk of their past deeds rather than of things to come; and they lack shame, their miserliness causing them to love profit more than worship, their ‘coldness’ leading them not to desire or to expect to be above other men in honour. Of these six manners, kings may adopt the first in the sense that they should not be too credulous, but should reject the others, being not over-suspicious of their subjects, magnanimous rather than fearful, 131 Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 67v–68v. See also Cicero, On Duties, I: 122 (p. 48); Aquinas, Ethics, 643–5, 1531, 1571, 2149; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 107, 412; Brown-Grant, French Romance, 79–90. 132 Bonet, Tree of Battles, 211; Fletcher, ‘Manhood’, 4–6. 133 Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 68v–69v; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 418; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 36–7; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 34–5.


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magnificent rather than niggardly, and of good hope so that they do not expect to fail in all things, and they should value honour and worship (G: 77, 137, 144–7).134 Being the mean of youth and old age, those men in the prime of life should combine the virtues of both but possess the weaknesses of neither (OR: 2: 14). They should thus be neither excessively bold nor excessively fearful, neither too credulous nor too sceptical, neither intemperate nor feeble, but should rather strength with temperance, prudence and consideration (NE, VI, xi; G: 148–9).135 However, as the characteristics of each age group are only general dispositions, it is also possible for both the young and the old to use their reason to overcome their particular weaknesses and so to become virtuous: the young can achieve the temperance of the old and the old acquire the liberality which is characteristic of youth. Equally, it is possible for the middleaged, whom Giles saw as more easily achieving virtue, to become corrupted in their appetites so that they adopt the evil habits of the old or the young (G: 17–18, 139–40, 149–50, 156–7, 208).136 Within the narrative of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, it is the virtuous aspects of old age, represented by Egeus, and the failings of youth, represented by Palamon and Arcite, which receive particular emphasis. In classical mythology, Aegeus was said to have killed himself when Theseus forgot to raise the white sail on his ship as a sign that he was returning home safely from having killed the Minotaur.137 By contrast, in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, as in the Teseida, Egeus is still alive at the time of the death of Arcite (I: 2905), although Chaucer does not follow Boccaccio in explicitly presenting Theseus and his father as joint rulers of Athens.138 When Arcite dies, Chaucer has Egeus console Theseus by putting words into his mouth which are actually taken from a speech by Boccaccio’s Teseo in which he calls for an end to the mourning for Arcite: just as there was never a man on this earth who died without living, so there was never a man who lived ‘that som tyme he ne deyde’ (I: 2843–6).

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Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 68v–69v. Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 69v; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 352–4; Youngs, Life Cycle, 128–31. 136 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, V, 9 (pp. 111–12); Latini, Book of the Treasure, 146–7, 196–7; Giovanni del Virgilio, Commentary on the Metamorphoses, XV: 5; Curtius, European Literature, 99–100. 137 Plutarch, Lives, I, 27–45; Plutarch, Vitae, I, 11 (Theseus: XXII). 138 Boccaccio, Teseida, 11, 105, 185, 319; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 20, 99, 170–2, 291. 135

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Egeus’s words, in which the world is ‘but a thurghfare ful of wo’ (I: 2847), have been seen as representing the pessimism which Giles, following Aristotle (OR: 2: 13), characterised as one of the ‘euel maners’ of the old who typically ‘ben of euel hope and haue non gode hope and trist on thynges’ and so ‘faile in hope’ about the future (G: 146).139 Yet, Egeus does not claim that the world is simply a ‘thurghfare ful of wo’ but rather characterises it in terms of alternating ‘wo’ and ‘gladness’ and argues that death at least provides ‘an ende of every worldy soore’, words which, although they may seem paradoxical or even platitudinous to us, are intended to ‘gladen’ Theseus and to ‘reconforte’ his subjects (I: 2837–52).140 Although he is pessimistic, Egeus does not fall into despair but rather embodies the Saturnine ‘wysdom and usage’ (I: 2443–9) and the awareness of the inevitability of death which, as in the case of ‘Elde’ in The Parlement of the Thre Ages could be seen as the typical virtues of old age.141 As John of Salisbury said, the old may be feeble in body but they can still offer the commonwealth the wisdom of the mind.142 Whilst Egeus’s words following Arcite’s death may now seem banal, or even as evidence of his ‘marked intellectual and emotional debility’, his consolatio for death was fully in line with the Stoic teaching which passed for wisdom for medieval moralists.143 If it is ‘semelich that kynges and princes scholde be olde in maneres’ (G: 137), as both Giles and Gower advised, then the wisdom of the old is certainly apparent in Theseus’s reference to this life as a ‘foule prisoun’, a reference which, like the seemingly bleak words of his father, is actually intended as a consolation for the death of Arcite, who has at least departed from this prison ‘with duetee and honour’ (I: 3060–1).144 However, whereas Egeus contents himself with the thought that the instability of earthly affairs at least means that joy comes after woe, even

139 Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 69; Boccaccio, Teseida, 343; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 314; Burrow, Essays, 42–3. 140 Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 186–7; Luxton, ‘“Sentence”’, 102–9; Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice, 170–1. 141 Dove, Perfect Age, 48, 53, 92; Burrow, Essays, 28, 43; Burrow, Ages, 150–1, 162–5; Sears, Ages, 43, 61–2, 103, 126, 129; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, X1, 2: 30; Parlement of the Thre Ages, 631–50. On Saturn, see also below, 000. 142 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, V: 9 (pp. 108–9). See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 218–9. 143 Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 186; Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 233; Nolan, Chaucer, 263, 266, 268; Kean, Chaucer, II, 39–40; Curtius, European Literature, 80–2. 144 Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 10, 15 (pp. 237, 244–5).


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though there is ‘wo after gladnesse’ (I: 2841), Theseus, in proposing the marriage between Palamon and Emily, actually offers a practical suggestion as to how to ‘make of sorwes two/ O parfit joye (I: 3071–4). Like the ideal ruler of Giles of Rome’s political theory, the duke is the man in the prime of his life who is positioned at the virtuous mean between, on the one hand, the excessive recklessness of youth and, on the other, the feebleness and lack of hope which are amongst the vices of old age. Whilst he can stoically face up to the inevitability of death (I: 3027–34), his prudence also has a pragmatic and practical aspect which leads him to suggest how to ‘amenden’ that ‘wher moost sorwe is herinne’ (I: 3073–4).145 Given the wisdom displayed by the elderly Egeus, it is with the characteristic lack of prudence of the youthful Palamon and Arcite that Theseus’s mature virtue is most clearly distinguished in the ‘Knight’s Tale’.146 Nowhere are the qualities which Giles’s De Regimine ascribes to each age more apparent in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ than in the contrast between the prudence, the sapientia et fortitudo, of the middle-aged Theseus and the immoderate and unmeasured behaviour of the two youths. In turn, this contrast has an obvious ‘dramatic’ parallel with that between the Knight himself, who is an ideal crusading figure, and his son, the Squire, who is characterised by his devotion to romantic love.147 For Giles, the heat which rules the bodies of the young and their lack of experience and wisdom lead them into passion at the expense of their reason (G: 142–3). Rather than being a spur to prowess, love then becomes a threat to the achievement of chivalric virtue.148 That Palamon and Arcite are guilty of this failing hardly needs emphasising, with each of them claiming to have been mortally wounded by the sight of Emily (I: 1096–7, 1118) and being willing to fight to the death over a woman who, as Theseus points out, ‘woot namore of al this hoote fare,/By God, than woot a cokkow or an hare’ (I: 1599–1660, 1809–10). Indeed Arcite explicitly claims that ‘A man moot nedes love, maugree his heed’ and that love knows no restraints: ‘Love is a gretter law, by my pan,/Than may be yeve to any erthely man’ (I: 1164–71).149 145 Burrow, Ages, 11; Burrow, Essays, 36–42; Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinaunce”’, 207; Matsuda, Death, 174–7, 192–206; Dove, Perfect Age, 4, 7; Nolan, Chaucer, 266. 146 NE, VI, viii: 5–6; Buridan, Questions, 554; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 346–7. 147 Rigby, Chaucer, 30, 39. 148 Brown-Grant, French Romance, 27–31, 51, 59. 149 The source for this quote, which is given in a number of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (Manly and Rickert, The Text of the Canterbury Tales, III, 484), is

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As Aquinas, Dante and Boccaccio agreed, it is the lustful and excessive desires of the young who lack discretion which particularly need to be curbed by reason. Those who surrender to their passions abandon the reason which distinguishes man from the beasts and which he shares with the angels.150 As Boethius had said, he who turns away from goodness and divine reason has ‘ceased to be a man’ and so ‘turns into a beast’. Accordingly, when Palamon and Arcite fight in the grove, they are described in bestial terms, clashing like a ‘wood leon’ and a ‘crueel tigre’, and frothing like ‘wilde boores’ in their fury (I: 1653–60, 1699–1703).151 Finally, Palamon and Arcite are testimony to Giles’s claim that the young are predisposed to be unsteadfast and changeable, being prone to hasty judgements and tending to ‘chiden and striuen’ (G: 143). As Aquinas said, young men are ruled by their passions rather than reason and so readily make and break friendships.152 As we have seen, at the sight of Emily, the two Theban youths instantly renounce the oaths by which they had pledged to be true to each other until death as ‘brother ysworn’: ‘Greet was the strif and long betwix hem tweye’ (I: 1129–1140, 1187). It is the foolishness and pain which result from a surrender to irrational and immoderate passion, both in love and in conflict, which are represented by the pictures in the temples of Venus and Mars where Palamon and Arcite make their prayers before the tournament. In the temple of Venus is shown the folly of Solomon and Turnus (see above, 36) whilst the temple of Mars includes depictions of ‘the derke ymaginyng/Of Felonye’, of ‘crueel Ire’ and ‘pale Drede’, of ‘The smylere with the knyf under the cloke’, of ‘The tresoun of the mordrynge in the bedde’ and of ‘open werre, with woundes al bibledde’ (I: 1995–2002).153 Although Giles of Rome saw men of middle age as being more virtuous than those marked by the hot rashness of youth or the cold fearfulness of old age, he actually says relatively little about the positive virtues

Boethius’s account of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice (Consolation, III, m.12; Boece, III, m.12: 50). See also Rigby, Chaucer, 35. 150 Aquinas, Ethics, 4, 1531; Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, III, iv: 10, 16; Dante, Convivio, II, viii: 2; III, iii: 5; III, x: 10; III, vii: 4; III, x: 1; IV, vii: 6; IV, x: 3; IV: xxii: 4; IV, xxiv: 2, 8; IV, xxv: 3; Dante, De Vulgari Eloquentia, II: II. 151 Boethius, Consolation, IV, pr. III: 42–69; Aquinas, Ethics, 1296–9; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, IV: 8; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 513; Rudd, Greenery, 54–7. 152 Aquinas, Ethics, 1531, 1571–3, 1608. 153 See also Tkacz, ‘Samson’, 128–35.


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of those of middle age. Instead, he briefly describes them as possessing all the characteristic virtues and none of the typical vices of youth and of old age (G: 148–9). Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ provides a more detailed portrait of the man in the prime of life in the form of Duke Theseus. Nevertheless, Chaucer’s duke is not simply an abstraction or a static personification of a virtue in the way that, for instance, Griselda is in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ where she embodies an extreme of humility which, as the Clerk himself notes, could hardly be achieved in real life (IV: 1142–48). Rather, as the mean between youth and old age, Theseus’s character involves a ‘dynamic and sometimes unstable combination, rather than a continuously equable moderation or “mesure”’.154 Thus, when the duke comes across Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove, his immediate response is one of youthful ‘fiery impetuosity’ as ‘he first for ire quook and sterte’ and condemns the two youths to death (I: 1747, 1762). Yet, as Honoré Bonet said, the wise prince will ‘be on his guard against too quick anger, and should expressly refrain from pronouncing execution in his anger’, since anger obscures right and reason.155 Accordingly, whilst Theseus’s judgement is initially prompted by the hastiness characteristic of youth, he does not persist in this youthful folly.156 Rather, in response to the pleas for mercy made by his wife, Hippolyta, by her sister, Emily, and by the other ladies of the court (see also below, 141–5), the duke soon relents. Theseus has been seen as a character who is always changing his mind, yet if he is changeable here, the change he undergoes is that from impassioned anger to reasoned self-restraint.157 As Christine de Pizan said, although ‘anger is a very natural vice’, the good prince will ‘control himself from something so repugnant and degrading’.158 Thus, although the guilt of Palamon and Arcite accused them, Theseus soon pardons them ‘in his resoun’, being swayed by his understanding of the motives of both men (‘every man/Wol helpe hymself in love, if that he kan’) and by the ‘compassioun’ to which he was moved by

154 Burrow, Essays, 38; Wetherbee, ‘Some Intellectual Themes’, 89; Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 123–4. 155 Bonet, Tree of Battles, 213. See also Gower, Vox Clamantis, IV: 11 (pp. 238–9). 156 Burrow, Essays, 38; Wetherbee, ‘Some Intellectual Themes’, 89; Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 123–4. 157 Kempton, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 244; La Farge, ‘Women’, 70–3; Bartholomew, Fortune, 81; Elbow, Oppositions, 82–3; Crane, Gender, 22–3; Windeatt, ‘Postmodernism’, 411; Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 175–8; Blamires, Chaucer, 28–9. 158 Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 53; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 52.

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the tears of the ladies. Whereas Palamon and Arcite have become like beasts in surrendering to their passions, Theseus quickly controls his ‘ire’ and arrives at a measured solution. As he says, a wise lord should avoid acting like a merciless ‘leon’ but should show forgiveness to those who have admitted their fault (I: 1748–1784, 1825). Here, as in other medieval works of morality, an interior monologue shows us, ‘step by step, the rational process involved in deciding upon a virtuous course of action’.159 It is not that Theseus is unaffected by his passions—something which would be superhuman—but rather that he is able to use his reason to bring them under control. Indeed, in order for the duke’s eventual restraint of his emotions to be portrayed in narrative terms, Theseus has first to be shown to be influenced by their power. As Burrow said, Theseus seeks to convert the extremes of passion and emotion into the ritualised expression of ceremonial: irrational lust (Venus in malo) is replaced by marriage (Venus in bono); deadly conflict (Mars) is channelled into the tournament; death (Saturn) is made sense of through mourning and funeral.160 iv. Conclusion: Theseus’s Pagan Virtue If Chaucer’s Duke Theseus can be seen as an ideal figure when assessed by the yardstick provided by the account of the virtues required of a ruler by medieval political theorists (Chapter One, above), then, in displaying such virtue, the duke has also to adopt a rightful relation to the twelve major passions (G: 118–37). Accordingly, he loves and desires the common profit, abominating that which undermines the common good and hating the vice which is contrary to such good. He has the hope and hardiness which allow him to avoid the temptation of despair and which enable him to do good deeds without being over-ambitious in what he seeks to achieve. Having the virtue of fortitude, he is not excessively fearful, yet, as we shall see (below, 193–5), is still cautious enough to take counsel on how to secure the safety of his realm. Whilst he is wrathful, seeking revenge against injustice, he also moderates this passion with ‘mansuetudo’, as when he forgives Palamon and Arcite. He takes delectation in the pleasures of the hunt and yet his pleasure is

159 Hieatt, Chaucer, 31–2; Grudin, Chaucer, 90–1; Brown-Grant, Christine de Pizan, 189–92. 160 Bennett, ‘Chaucer’, 105; Burrow, Essays, 47. See also Smarr, ‘Teseida’, 31.


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not so excessive as to detract from his duties as a ruler. Finally, whilst feeling sorrow, he sees that excessive sadness can paralyse our virtue and social life and so seeks to comfort others in order to abate their grief. Inevitably, as a fallen human, Theseus cannot avoid the passions to which all men are prone, as when his anger flares on encountering Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove (I: 1742–7). Nevertheless, in his ability to overcome and control his own passions and to exercise his reason for the common good, the duke’s virtue is offered up to us as exemplary. In attaining such virtue, Chaucer’s Duke Theseus combined, as a man in his prime, the virtuous ‘manners’ of both the young and the old and adopted the positive characteristics which Giles ascribed to the rich, the noble and the powerful whilst eschewing their stereotypical vices. For medieval political theorists such as Giles of Rome, politics was grounded in ethics in the sense that good ‘governance’ was rooted in the prince’s ability to rule his own passions and appetites. As a pagan ruler, loyal to what Troilus and Criseyde calls the ‘payens corsed old rites’, Chaucer’s Theseus could not be expected to demonstrate the ‘theological’ virtues of faith, hope and charity which were held to be available, through divine grace, faith and scriptural revelation, only to those who were Christians.161 Nonetheless, he could, under the natural law, subordinate and direct his passions so as to exercise the twelve Aristotelian virtues (including the four cardinal virtues) which were accessible through the reason possessed by all men and in the love of which pagans could even be said to exceed Christians.162 Giles had, after all, taken his list of twelve virtues from the work of the pagan Aristotle (NE: II, vii). As was argued in the fourteenth-century Book of Vices and Virtues (a Middle English version of Lorens d’Orléans’s thirteenth-century Somme le Roi) ‘olde philosofres’, including Plato, had said much about the cardinal virtues and, even though they knew nothing of God’s grace, these pagans were still able to come to a moral perfection and disdain for the things of this world which often put Christians to shame.163 For Aquinas, such virtues were an expression 161 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V: 1749. Some pagans were, however, held to have arrived at an ‘implicit faith’ in Christ through their belief in a just god who rewards goodness and punishes evil (Whatley, ‘Uses’, 41, 55–6). 162 McCall, Chaucer, 111–12; Whatley, ‘Uses’, 31–5, 45–50; Swanson, John of Wales, 41, 47–50, 55; Nolan, Chaucer, 251–2, 261–2, 280; Bejczy, ‘Concept’, 13–21; MazourMatusevich, ‘Jean Gerson’, 227–8, 235. 163 Book of Vices and Virtues, 122–4.

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of our ‘natural human life’ as ‘social or political animals’ so that, as the Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime put it, they were virtues by which cities were ruled in ancient times ‘by the teaching of philosophers’.164 For The Book of Vices and Virtues, these natural virtues were the means by which a man could make himself worthy to be a governor, ‘first of himself and sithen of othere’.165 However, if, as an exemplary character, Theseus’s virtue is grounded in the ability to govern himself then, for writers such as Giles of Rome it was, as we shall see in Part II, even more important that he should display this virtue in his rule of other people in his capacity both as the head of a household and as the sovereign prince of a commonwealth.

164 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 240, 252, 325–6, 334, 344, 349–50; Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, 52; McCall, Chaucer, 111, 156. 165 Book of Vices and Virtues, 124.

PART II

ECONOMICS AND POLITICS: THE GOOD RULE OF OTHERS

CHAPTER THREE

THE ‘KNIGHT’S TALE’ AS ECONOMICS: THE GOOD RULE OF THE HOUSEHOLD Iconomique . . . techeth thilke honestete Thurgh which a king in his degre His wif and child schal reule and guie, So forth with al his companie Which in his houshold schal abyde, And his astat on every syde In such manere forto lede, That he his houshold ne mislede Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 1669–78

i. Duke Theseus as ‘Animal Domesticum’ The recent critical focus on Chaucer’s presentation of gender in the Canterbury Tales has meant that Duke Theseus’s behaviour as a head of household has been central to modern scholarly debates about the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’.1 Here, critics have disagreed over the significance of the duke’s victory over the ‘regne of Femenye’, that is over the Scythian kingdom of the Amazons, and his subsequent marriage to its queen, Hippolyta (I: 866–70). For some critics, Theseus’s conquest of the Amazons and his marriage to Hippolyta in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ symbolize, as they do in Boccaccio’s Teseida, the triumph of reason and restraint over sensuality and excess, so that—by medieval standards—legitimate order is re-established within the world.2 For others, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ distances itself from the duke’s actions, showing us that, rather than wooing Hippolyta as Boccaccio’s Teseo does, the duke regards the queen simply as a spoil of war. Her treatment is thus more like that of a slave than of a lover as Theseus seeks to obliterate the feminine Other which threatens the order that he aspires to establish

1 For critical debates about Chaucer’s gender ideology, see the references in Rigby, Chaucer, chapter 4 and Rigby, ‘Wife of Bath’. 2 Kirkham, ‘ “Chiuso Parlare” ’, 326–7; Smarr, ‘Teseida’, 30; Robertson, Preface, 264–5; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 81; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 138–40; Nolan, Chaucer, 169, 270; Crane, Gender, 16; Kean, Chaucer, II, 6–7; Scala, Absent Narratives, 111; Ingham, ‘Homsocial and Creative Masculinity’, 29–30.

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or at least, as Wallace puts it, ‘elects to rule without benefit of queenly or wifely counsel’.3 As we shall see (section iii, below), Theseus’s treatment of Hippolyta’s sister, Emily, in particular his requirement that she should marry the victor of the tournament between Palamon and Arcite and his eventual arrangement of her marriage to Palamon, has proved equally controversial and has provoked a very similar debate. A focus on the gender ideology of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is by no means anachronistic as a context for judging the virtue of Duke Theseus as a ruler. On the contrary, for medieval political theorists such as Giles of Rome the role of the ruler as head of household was crucial for the health of the body politic as a whole. Here Giles’s outlook was in line with that of a long tradition of thought which, from Aristotle onwards (AP: I: 2; III: 9), had presented man as a ‘companable beest’, as a social animal. By nature, humans are reliant on their fellows not only for the food and drink, clothing and protection from enemies which are necessary for physical survival but also for the education and government which allow them to live well.4 As social animals, humans are members of a number of different communities, including those of the street or neighbourhood, the city, and the kingdom, but it is the community of the household which is the foundation of all the others (AO: I, i: 2; G: 160–70). If the household is the basic building block of the commonwealth then, if a king is to rule his realm wisely, he needs an understanding not only of ethics, so as to govern himself, and of politics, so as to govern his realm, but also of the science of ‘economics’—of ‘iconomyk’, or ‘housbondrie’—which teaches the good government of the household. In this perspective, the good rule of the household was not simply a private matter. Indeed, Giles himself argued that the little ‘world’ of the ruler’s household should ideally mirror that of the greater world, which is the ‘hous of the heighest prince that is God’ so that just as not all things within God’s creation are equally ‘arayed’ or equally fair,

3 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 45, 53; Boccaccio, Teseida, 45, 50–1; Crane, Gender, 79–80; Sherman, ‘Politics’, 89–90, 94; Weisl, Conquering, 47, 52–3; Hansen, Chaucer, 219–20; Ganim, ‘Chauerian Ritual’, 69; Kempton, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 242; Broughton, ‘He Conquered’, 54; Fowler, ‘Chaucer’s Hard Cases’, 133–7; Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 213; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 107, 114–9; Guidry, ‘Parliaments’, 159. 4 Augustine, City of God, XII: 28 (p. 508); Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, XI: 3; Aquinas, Commentary on the Ethics, 275–6, 290; Wimbledon, Redde Ratione Villicationis Tue, 57–81; Oresme, Livre de Politique, 48, 126, 132.

economics: the good rule of the household

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so a lord’s servants should be dressed in accordance with their rank (G: 160–70, 178, 280, 293–4, 395). Similarly, thinkers such as Nicholas Oresme equated the household and the state, with the rule of the king in his kingdom being like that of the father in the household.5 Certainly, the household and its management were central to the conspicuous consumption, marriage arrangements, artistic patronage, political allegiances and religious life of the later medieval nobility and of the royal courts of Europe.6 A household in its complete form is a community which, according to Giles, is made up of three lesser ‘communities’, or relationships, which together form a unity.7 Book II of the De Regimine, which partly draws on the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica, discuss the rightful ordering of each of these relationships in turn.8 In Part I of Book II, Giles examines the community of husband and wife, this being the relationship which creates the household (section ii, below). Marriage is natural to humanity: the human is an ‘animal coniugale’ by kind. Indeed, wedlock is the most natural and basic of all forms of human community: man is an ‘animal domesticum’ before he is an ‘animal politicium’ (NE: VIII, xii: 7).9 Then, in Part II, he turns his attention to the second relationship within the household, that between parent and child which completes or perfects the household (section iii, below). Finally, in Part III, he looks at the relationship between master and servant which maintains the household (G: 170–8; section iv, below). What are the implications of Giles’s teachings about the good rule of the household for an assessment of Duke Theseus’s conduct as husband to Hippolyta, as guardian to Emily and as the master of a household? ii. Husbands and Wives: Conquering the ‘Regne of Femenye’ The ‘Knight’s Tale’ opens with Theseus having defeated Scythia, the ‘regne of Femenye’, and married its queen, Hippolyta (I: 865–84). In order to judge the moral significance of the duke’s victory, we need an

5

Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 148. Starkey, ‘Age of the Household’; Mertes, English Noble Household, Woolgar, Great Household; Given-Wilson, Royal Household; Vale, Princely Court, 15–16. 7 See also Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 50, 70–1; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 302. 8 Part II of the De Regimine does not, however, rely on the Oeconomica in the way that Parts I and III do on Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics. 9 Aquinas, Ethics, 1720; Oresme, Livre de Yconomqiue, 809. 6

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understanding of the connotations of the Amazons and, more generally, of femininity within the culture of Chaucer’s own day. The ‘Knight’s Tale’, like Boccaccio’s Teseida, was faced with a potential narrative problem in having to describe Theseus’s defeat of female opponents. In general, medieval writers tended to assume that, as Giles himself explicitly argued, women lacked the wisdom, physical strength and courage needed for success in battle or to play a role in political life (AO: I, iii: 4; G: 192, 306–7, 311, 401).10 Accordingly, as Bartholomaeus Anglicus said, when Alexander the Great made the Amazons into the subjects of his empire, he claimed that ‘it is nought semely to ouercome wymmen with swerde and with wodenesse but rather with fayreness and with loue’, not with violence but rather ‘with frenshepe and with loue’. Bartholomaeus also refers to how Hercules (who accompanied Theseus on his campaign to Scythia) and Achilles had also previously tamed the fierceness of the Amazons ‘more by frenshippe than by strengthe’.11 In describing Theseus’s victory over the Amazons, Boccaccio thus sought to have it both ways. On the one hand, he justified the need for the military conquest of Scythia in terms of the injustices committed by the Amazons. He explains that the Amazons were ‘wild and ruthless women’ who agreed upon the ‘foolish design’ of governing themselves, something they achieved by murdering their husbands and then killing any man who dared to enter their realm. As a result, Teseo received ‘bitter complaints about the ‘excessive cruelty’ of the Amazons and gathered an army to ‘avenge the cruel harassments’ which they had perpetrated. On the other hand, Boccaccio also portrayed the female warriors as worthy opponents of the duke in their performance of ‘manly’ deeds of arms, first offering a spirited resistance to the landing of the Greek forces and then holding out against their siege, only submitting when further resistance was futile. Finally, when the Amazons surrender to Teseo, Boccaccio shows the duke falling in love with Hippolyta, their beautiful queen, with the couple enjoying a ‘joyous and sweet’ married

10

Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, IV: 3; Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 814,

828. 11 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, XV: 12 (pp. 731–2). On overcoming the Amazons by friendship and love, rather than the sword, see Eulogium Historiarum, Volume II, 36. See also Higden, Polychronicon, II, 393–5, 403. According to Bartholomaeus Anglicus, ‘Amazon’ means ‘without breast’, as the women burnt off one breast so as to fire their bows (p. 731); see also Higden, Polychronicon, II, 394.


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life together. Many of the other Amazons also followed the example of their queen in taking Greek knights as ‘their lords’.12 In massively compressing his source, Chaucer does not have to confront the problems involved in having the chivalrous Theseus overcome a kingdom of women, something which might be considered (in the words of a later Amazon queen seeking to deter an attack from Alexander) an achievement of ‘litil worschepe’.13 The Knight does however tell us that the duke has ‘conquered’ the Amazons after a ‘grete bataille’ and siege (I: 866, 877–81). For some critics, the account of these events in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, in which ‘Hippolyta marries Theseus after his conquest’ of the Amazons, differs from that in Boccaccio’s Teseida in which, Hippolyta ‘negotiates with both Theseus and her Amazons to bring about a peace treaty’ and then ‘marries Theseus of her own free will’.14 Yet, in fact, the nature of Theseus’s ‘conquest’ of the Amazons in the ‘Knight’s Tale seems very similar to that of his victory in the Teseida as can be seen when Boccaccio’s Hippolyta advises the Amazon women that they face defeat by the duke and so should be ‘begging his favor’ in order to save their lives. Rather than fight on, they should ‘surrender’ themselves to him since it would be no disgrace to be ‘conquered’ by such a man.15 It is true that, unlike Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan who describe Theseus, ‘the good and valiant king of Athens’ as being ‘deeply in love’ with his bride, Chaucer’s Knight does not specify that Theseus was in love with Hippolyta.16 Nevertheless, the fact that the Knight does not explicitly tell us whether the marriage between Theseus and Hippolyta’s was the result of love or of ‘a rape in the course of a military conquest’ does not mean that the latter must necessarily have been the case, as some critics have suspected.17 After all, the Knight does inform us that the conquest of the Amazons was achieved by means

12 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 20–55; Boccaccio, Teseida, 11–52. See also Statius’s reference to Theseus’s ‘fierce battles’ with the Amazons (Thebaid, XII: 519–22). 13 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, XV: 12 (p. 731); Prose Life of Alexander, 65–7. 14 Hamaguchi, ‘Domesticating Amazons’, 337. See also Crane, Gender, 79–80. 15 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 43–4; Boccaccio, Teseida, 424. 16 Christine’s account of the war between the Amazons and the Greeks is slightly different from those of Boccaccio and Chaucer in that her Hippolyta is not the queen of the Amazons, Theseus does not besiege the Amazon ladies, and Theseus overcomes Hippolyta in single combat (City of Ladies, I: 18; see also Christine de Pizan, Mutacion de Fortune, 13771–13851). 17 Fowler, Chaucer’s Hard Cases’, 136; Hamaguchi, ‘Domesticating Amazons’, 337.

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both of the duke’s ‘wysdom’ and ‘chivalrie’ (I: 865) or, as Lydgate put it, not only through his use of ‘force’ but also by means of ‘noblesse’.18 As Mann argues, Theseus’s conquest of the Amazons ‘culminates not in enslavement, but in a marriage; it is the separateness of “Femenye”, its severance from the masculine world that is resisted: the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta signals its reintegration’, although this reintegration is achieved by means of subordination.19 Thus, rather than the Knight hinting that Theseus is a rapist, he portrays the duke as consistently treating Hippolyta with the kind of respect which Giles advises a husband to show to his wife. As Giles said, a husband should not act towards his wife as though she were a mere servant, as wives were unnaturally and irrationally regarded in barbarous lands (G: 192–4, 201–3, 275).20 If marriage is natural in the sense that it is natural for husband and wife to enjoy each other’s love and friendship, then it is particularly important that a king or a prince, who should be superior to other men in their virtue, should show himself to be loving and faithful. Although he should be set above his wife, a king or prince should also love her and regard her as his friend, companion and his peer, one who has her own sphere of control (AP: I, 2; AO: I, iii: 1–3; III: ii–iv (pp. 407–17); NE: VIII, x: 5; VIII, xi: 4; VIII, xii: 7; G: 174–80, 192–4, 201–6).21 That Theseus treats Hippolyta with the kind of respect which Giles advises seems to be implied by the great ‘feste that was at hir weddynge’ (I: 883) and the ‘greet solempnytee’ when the two arrive in Athens (I: 870).22 Later, when Theseus rides out to hunt in ‘joye and bliss’, Hippolyta and Emily ‘riden roially’ with him (I: 1684–7, 1750). On the day of the tournament between Palamon and Arcite, the queen and her sister have the places of honour behind Theseus and the two combatants as the court rides out to the amphitheatre, where they are then seated next to the duke as their rank requires (I: 2569–79). In order to encourage the companionship expected within marriage, Giles urged that excessive ‘unevenness’ or incompatibility of age or status should be avoided in the choices of a spouse which means 18

Lydgate, Fall of Princes, p. 119. Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 171 (original emphasis). 20 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 46–7. 21 Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 305–6; Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 811–6, 835–8; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 302, 436–7, 439, 443–4; Brown-Grant, French Romance, 136, 177. 22 See also Lydgate, Siege of Thebes, 4509–11. 19


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that a king should choose a wife of noble blood and of a similar age to himself.23 She should also have wealth and, particularly important for a ruler, should possess many kin and friends who will extend her husband’s ties of peace. In addition to these external ‘goods’, a king’s wife should also be beautiful and healthy since this both encourages her husband’s fidelity and also means that her beauty and strength will be passed on to her children (G: 186–90, 197–8, 201). Hippolyta is described at length in these terms in the Teseida, where she is said to be ‘marvellously beautiful’, being young, ‘endowed with wealth and royal lineage, prudent and well-bred, daring in arms by nature and immeasurably noble’.24 Similarly, in Anelida and Arcite, Chaucer praises the beauty of Theseus’s ‘hardy quene’: ‘al the grounde about her char she spradd/ With brightnesse of the beaute of her face,/ Fulfilled of largesse and of all grace’.25 Likewise, in the ‘Knight’ Tale’ itself, rather than presenting her as a rape victim, Chaucer’s Knight describes Hippolyta as the ‘faire, hardy queene of Scithia’ (I: 882) and so as a worthy match for the valiant duke. Given that, as the Knight apologises, he does not have time to give a full account of Theseus’s defeat of Hippolyta (I: 875–92), his tale does not explain how the Amazons came to rule Scythia or the reasons why Duke Theseus went to war against them. Nevertheless, as we have seen, the audience’s approval of the duke’s actions seems to be assumed not only by the Knight’s description of the duke’s victory as having been achieved by means of his ‘wysdom and his chivalrie’ (I: 865) but also by the triumphal welcome which he receives on his return to Athens (I: 870–3, 895, 905, 915–7). The laurel-crowned triumph which Theseus receives to celebrate his victory is described by Chaucer in far more detail in his Anelida and Arcite, where, significantly, the Amazons are described as the ‘aspre folk of Cithe’.26 That ‘aspre’ does not just mean ‘fierce’ but also has negative connotations of bitterness or harshness (as in Statius’s and Boccaccio’s references to the cruelty of the Amazons) can be seen in Chaucer’s other uses of the word, as when Cressida complains of her ‘aspre and cruel peyne’ in being separated from Troilus.27

23

Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 331. Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 44; Boccaccio, Teseida, 43–4. 25 Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 36–42. 26 Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 22–46. See also Statius, Thebaid, XII: 519–39. 27 Statius, Thebaid, IV: 394–5; V: 144–6; Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, IV: 847 (see also IV: 827). 24

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Similarly, in Chaucer’s Boece, Lady Philosophy refers to that fortune which ‘semeth scharp or aspre’ even though it actually serves a positive purpose and to the ‘aspre and sorweful thingis’ which test the patience of those who suffer them.28 If the rightfulness of Theseus’s victory over the Amazons is simply taken as given in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, the allegorical significance of his triumph over the ‘regne of Femenye’ then seems all the more foregrounded. For Giles, it was self-evident that there was a natural hierarchical order in which the husband would always be above his wife and in which the woman would, as both the Bible and Aristotle taught (Genesis 3: 16; AP: I, 12–13; AO: I, iii: 4) and Chaucer’s Parson agreed (X: 925–6, 929–31), be obedient to her husband (G: 182–4, 278). As Giles said, a wife should be subject to her husband because the superior reason of the male means that he is ‘maister ouer a womman’ and ‘lord’ in the household.29 For this reason, at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, when Theseus seeks to persuade Emily to marry, he asks her to take Palamon ‘for housbonde and for lord’ (I: 3081). For Giles, women, being of lesser reason, are like children and so, in sense, are like a man who is ‘not compleet and parfit’. As a result, like children, they are more inclined to ‘folwen passions’ than are men, who are ‘more stedefast in resoun’, and they are more intemperate and unstable in their desire and will.30 Since all ruling involves correcting and chastising the faults of those who are ruled, a husband should correct the typical feminine failings of being vicious, argumentative and ‘unstedefast and unstable’ of will. He will then ensure that his wife becomes temperate, stable, steadfast, soft, still and silent (G: 186–9, 192–4, 197–209, 201–9, 275). For this reason, Nicholas Oresme, in arguing against the succession of women to the throne, cited the polity of the Amazons, which was ruled by queens instead of kings, as ‘une chose hors nature’.31 Even Christine de Pizan, the most systematic medieval defender of women, who certainly did not accept that women were of ‘lesser reason’ or virtue than men, taught that a woman should normally ‘obey and comply with’ her

28 Chaucer, Boece, IV, pr. 7: 104; IV, pr. 6: 273–4 (see also II, pr. 1: 99; IV, pr. 4: 150; IV, pr. 7: 86). 29 Rigby, Chaucer, 121. See also Dives and Pauper, VI, v: 4–6; Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 17533–44; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, IV: 2. 30 Aquinas, Ethics, 1376. 31 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 155–6.


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husband’s wishes and ‘be ruled by him’.32 When Theseus conquers the ‘regne of Femenye’, his victory therefore symbolises the re-establishment of what medieval thinkers commonly saw as the rightful order within the world, an order which is also represented by the subordination of Thebes (the passions) to Athens (wisdom) and by the submission of the youthful Palamon and Arcite to the mature wisdom of Duke Theseus (see above. 123–6).33 However, Theseus’s triumph over the ‘regne of Femenye’ also has a further allegorical dimension in the sense that within medieval culture ‘feminine’ qualities were not seen as only being possessed by women, who were then regarded as being rightfully subordinate to men. Rather, since women were usually presented as being of lesser intelligence and reason than men, the feminine could also used to symbolise the lower aspects of human nature which were shared by both men and women. As Chaucer’s Parson said, Eve, in the story of the Fall, represented the flesh and Adam represented reason (X: 330–1), both of which all humans have in common (even if men were held to be more reasonable). As we saw above (31), Giles himself adopted this outlook and presented virtue as a form of rightful hierarchy in which, just as humans have lordship over the beasts, men should be the masters of women, and those with wisdom should rule over those of lesser wit and understanding, so our bodies should be ruled by the soul and by the reason which we share with the angels (AP: I, 5). As a result, he saw sin as a form of disorder, a servile, bestial, womanly and child-like surrender to the vileness of our lower natures and irrational passions. However, just as men can surrender to their ‘feminine’, fleshly nature, women, like the young and the old, can use their reason to overcome their natural appetites, desires and characteristic failings, even if, since their reason is less than men’s, this self-mastery is particularly difficult for them (G: 12–13, 73–4, 130–2, 197–204, 209, 273–5; OEG: 9, 41, 93, 105–7, 169, 323, 357). Accordingly, Theseus’s conquest of the ‘regne of Femenye’ in the ‘Knight’s Tale not only refers literally to his defeat of the Amazons but also allegorically represents, as in Fulgentius’s reading of Virgil’s Aeneid (see above, 117), how the hero of his tale has conquered his own lower appetites and passions and so come to

32 Christine de Pizan, Three Virtues, 57, 62–4, 146; Rigby, ‘Wife of Bath’, 145–7. See also AE: III: i (p. 401). 33 Burger, Chaucer’s Queer Nation, 26–7, 78; Tinkle, Medieval Venuses, 29.

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maturity, inner manliness and wisdom.34 Indeed, in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, when Theseus pardons Palamon and Arcite in the grove where the two youths have been fighting, he does so partly on the grounds that in his youth he himself has known the folly of love, having been ‘caught ofte in his laas’, and experienced ‘hou soore it kan a man distreyne’ (I: 1811–1818). The duke may be alluding here to two infamous episodes in which he was involved in his youth. The first was when he and his friend Pirithous resolved that they would take only the daughters of Jupiter as their wives and the young, hot-headed Theseus (‘iuventute fervens’) duly abducted Helen, the daughter of Jupiter and Leda.35 According to Boccaccio, some said that Theseus took Helen to Athens, from whence she was restored, still a virgin, to her brothers Castor and Pollux, whilst others claimed that he bore her with him into Egypt.36 The second incident which Theseus may have in mind is that of his betrayal of Ariadne, an episode to which Chaucer refers in The House of Fame and recounts in detail in The Legend of Good Women. In the latter, Chaucer tells how Ariadne and her sister Phaedra, the daughters of Minos, the king of Crete, showed the ‘yong’ Theseus (l. 2075) how to defeat the Minotaur and to escape from the Labyrinth and how, in return, Theseus promised to marry Ariadne. When Theseus and the two sisters fled from Crete, he took Ariadne as his lover and yet eventually, having decided that Phaedra (who was intended as the bride of Theseus’s son) was more beautiful than her sister, left Ariadne alone to her fate on an island where she was at the mercy of ferocious beasts. Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Chaucer’s House of Fame and Legend of Good Women make it clear that Theseus was ‘fals’ and a ‘traytour’ and that he ‘betrayed’ Ariadne.37 As Gower said in his telling of the tale,

34

Fulgentius, Exposition, 122, 125. Boccaccio’s refers to the forgiveness which Theseus received for this episode as a reason for the duke’s later pardon of Palamon and Arcite (Teseida, 399; Book of Theseus, 143). 36 Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I: X (pp. 50–2); see also Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, II: 133. The same episode led to Theseus’s and Pirithous’s descent to the underworld to carry off Persephone, to which Chaucer refers (I: 1200; see above, 70–2). See also Ralph Higden, Polychronicon, II, 380–3. 37 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII: 172–81; Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, II: 124; Chaucer, House of Fame, 405–26; Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, 1894–2227. For Chaucer’s sources for the story of Ariadne, see Frank, Legend of Good Women, 111–13; Minnis, Shorter Poems, 348. 35


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Theseus was a ‘noble kniht’ but his ingratitude towards Ariadne was a ‘gret unkinde dede’.38 Ironically then, by allegorically referring to Theseus’s overcoming of his youthful folly in terms of his conquest of the ‘regne of Femenye’, the Knight is able to ascribe the culpability for the duke’s youthful mistreatment of women to Theseus’s own lower, immature and ‘feminine’ nature. The reason and wisdom of Theseus as the mature ruler of Athens who is in the prime of life is distinguished here not only from the hotheaded impulsiveness of Palamon and Arcite but also from that of his own youthful self.39 The ‘Knight’s Tale’ therefore stands in line with the medieval tradition of Ovidian commentators such as John of Garland and Giovanni del Virgilio who presented the victory of Theseus and Hercules over the Amazons as the triumph of manly virtue over vice and weakness of character.40 Giles of Rome recommends that rulers should show mercy against offenders by keeping in mind the general ‘brotelnesse’ (that is, frailty) of mankind (G: 364). In the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Theseus goes a step further and invokes his own youthful weakness as a justification of his willingness to forgive Palamon and Arcite. Yet, whilst medieval philosophers, theologians and poets frequently used women to symbolize humanity’s lower, carnal natures and appetites, Giles of Rome did manage to note one praiseworthy female quality which rulers should emulate, namely that of mercy. Giles argued that whereas the young are characteristically merciful because they believe others share their own innocence and the old are merciful because they would like mercy from others, women tend to be ‘merciable’ because they are ‘nesche of herte’ and so cannot ‘suffry hard doyng. Therfore wymmen hauen mercye and rewthe anon whanne he seeth othere suffre harde peyns’ (G: 198–9).41 This view of women as sympathising with the suffering of others and hence as the more clement sex meant that they were conventionally presented as merciful intercessors. 42 38

Gower, Confessio Amantis, V: 5474–9 (see also VIII: 2511–12, 2556–8). Hoffman, Ovid, 41–6. 40 Hoffman, Ovid, 41–6; Giovanni del Virgilio, Commentary on the Metamorphoses, IX: 1, 9. John of Garland thus refers to the Amazons as ‘effrontes’ (John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, 367–8). 41 On the need for rulers to be merciful, see below, 204–10. 42 Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, chapter 5; Waugh, ‘King’s Anger’. See also Kipling, Enter, 320–7; Bumke, Courtly Culture, 352; Giancarlo, Parliament, 146–7; Huneycutt, ‘Images’, 67–70; Laynesmith, Last Medieval Queens, 7, 32–4, 95, 106, 139; Parsons, Intercessionary Patronage’; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 236–46; Schieberle, ‘ “Thing Which A Man Mai Noght Areche” ’, 100–1. 39

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The most obvious model for women acting in this capacity was, of course, the Virgin Mary, who is hailed in the Invocacio ad Mariam in Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Prologue’ as the ‘welle of mercy’ who helps those who pray to her and who even anticipates their need (VIII: 37, 53–5).43 However, this intercessory role was also frequently projected onto earthly queens. For instance, on the arrival of Anne of Bohemia in England in December 1381 for her marriage to Richard II, she was immediately asked to be a ‘mediatrix’ with her husband on behalf of the city of London, whilst even before the queen’s arrival in England she was said to have requested pardon from the king for the rebels of 1381.44 Even more well-known are the ‘entreaties and arguments’ by which the queen sought to save the life of Sir Simon Burley, who was condemned to death in the ‘Merciless Parliament’ of 1388.45 Similarly, in literature, women, particularly royal women, are often presented as merciful intercessors, as in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ when Queen Guinevere and other ladies obtain mercy for the rapist-knight whom King Arthur has condemned to death (III: 882–98), or when Alceste, ‘whilom quene of Trace’, obtains mercy for Chaucer from the God of Love in The Legend of Good Women (F: 431–4). It is this characteristically feminine mercy which comes to Theseus’s aid when, for an instant, he falls prey to vengeful wrath and pronounces the death sentence on Palamon and Arcite when he comes across them fighting in the grove (I: 1742–7). As Chaucer relates the process of inner deliberation by which Theseus arrives at forgiveness (I: 1760–1825), Hippolyta, her sister and the other ladies of the court who beg the duke to relent (I: 1748–59) (a detail which is missing in Boccaccio’s Teseida) become ‘allegorical figures in a psychomachy of the ruler’s decision making’. The ‘compassioun’ which Theseus is said to feel for the women’s anguish at the plight of Palamon and Arcite (I: 1770–1) and which leads him to be merciful is ‘itself a womanly quality implanted in him’, one which is essential if he is to be a just lord.46 If women have to be subordinated to men, their qualities are not entirely alien to the manly ruler but rather, like the good ‘manners’ of 43

Waugh, ‘King’s Anger’, 126–9; Parson’s ‘Queen’s Intercession’, 152–5. Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 103–4; Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 103; Knighton’s Chronicle, 243. 45 Westminster Chronicle, 330–1; Kirkstall Abbey Chronicles, p. 71; see also Chronique de la Traison et Mort, 133; Knighton’s Chronicle, 503. 46 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 135; Boccaccio, Teseida, 151–2; Crane, Gender, 22–3; Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 171–80; Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 112–3. 44


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the young and the old, should be internalised by the wise prince: the subordination of the feminine is not presented to us as an obliteration of something which is entirely ‘Other’.47 The behaviour of the women of the court in weeping, falling to their knees and even seeking to kiss Theseus’s feet when they plead for pardon for Palamon and Arcite (I: 1748–1759) may seem extreme but, in fact, their actions hark back to the Old Testament story of Queen Esther, a character whose meekness was proverbial for medieval writers, including Chaucer himself.48 When Esther begged her husband, King Assuerus, for mercy for the Jews, she is said to have fallen ‘down at the king’s feet and wept’ (Esther 8: 3). This image of the queen on her knees, imploring her husband for mercy on behalf of others was a common one in medieval chronicles and literature. Walter Map, for instance, referred to Queen Constance, wife of Louis VII of France, throwing herself ‘at the king’s feet’ to save the life of her chamberlain.49 Edward III’s Queen Philippa was said to have pacified her husband by praying ‘on her knees’ for mercy for the carpenters whose shoddy work had led to a number of knights being ‘grievously hurt’ in a London tournament of 1331.50 Much more famous is the incident in 1347 which was celebrated by Froissart when Queen Philippa was said to have thrown herself ‘on her knees before the king, her lord’ on behalf of the six burghers taken as hostage by Edward III for the surrendered town of Calais.51 Anne of Bohemia was frequently depicted in the same role. According to the Westminster chronicler, the queen ‘threw herself at the king’s feet and humbly begged’ for the life of John of Northampton in 1384, whilst in 1392 she ‘prostrated herself at the king’s feet in earnest and tireless entreaty’ on behalf of the city of London whose liberties had been seized by the king, a scene then re-enacted in the ceremony of reconciliation

47

Schieberle, ‘ “Thing Which A Man Mai Noghe Areche”’, 92, 96. Huneycutt, ‘Intercession’; Parsons, ‘Queen’s Intercession’; 1437, 153; For Esther’s meekness and ‘debonairte’, see Chaucer’s ‘Merchant’s Tale’ (IV: 1744–5), Book of the Duchess: 987, and Legend of Good Women (F: 250); for her ‘good conseil’, see the ‘Merchant’s Tale’ (IV: 1371–3) and the ‘Tale of Melibee’ (VII: 1101). See also Lydgate, On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage, 604; Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies, II: 32. 49 Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, trans. James, 250; Walter Map, De Nugis Curialium, ed. Wright, 217. 50 Waugh, ‘King’s Anger’, 116–7; Stow, Survey, 240. 51 Robertson, ‘Elements of Realism’, 233–4; Waugh, ‘King’s Anger’, 117–9, Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 99–103; Froissart, Chroniques, V, 198–206; Froissart, Chronicles, 186–88. 48

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between the citizens and the king.52 In such cases, in order to advise the prince or even to challenge a decision made in a moment of anger, as Hippolyta and Emily do when confronted with Theseus’s sentence of death on Palamon and Arcite, those who seek to offer counsel to him have first to show that they are not a threat to him, empowering their voice by a rhetorical presentation of themselves as powerless.53 For Hamaguchi, Chaucer’s portrayal of the Amazonian women’s ‘exaggerated feminine gesture’ in weeping and falling to their knees when they beg Theseus to have mercy on Palamon and Arcite (I: 1748–59) reveals the poet’s appreciation of the ‘subversive power of mimicry’ and reveals Hippolyta’s ‘solidarity’ with the Theban youths in their ‘common experience of Theseus’s tyranny’.54 Yet, in fact, rather than mimicking the femininity expected of her, when the queen weeps at the plight of Palamon and Arcite, she is actually said to be moved by ‘verray womanhede’ (I: 1748). Her behaviour here is in line with that of the Amazons in the Teseida where, rather than being presented as essentially Amazons who then have to ‘mimic’ femininity once they have been conquered by Theseus, Hippolyta and Emily are portrayed as, in essence, women who, following their defeat, soon return to their true natures. Having surrendered to the duke, the Amazons laid down their arms and quickly abandoned their masculine mode of behaviour and speech. They vowed never again to ‘return to their folly’ and ‘returned to the way they used to be: beautiful, charming, fresh and graceful’. As a result, ‘the royal court was entirely changed back to what it had been before, so that one scarcely believed, it seemed, that the women had ever been without men’.55 Similarly, when Theseus marches on Thebes at the start of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, he makes no use of Hippolyta’s martial skills but rather sends his wife and her sister ‘Unto to the toun of Athenes to dwell’ (I: 971–3). As Caxton’s translation of Jacobus de Cessolis’s Game of Chess said, ‘hit is not good that men have their wyves in the felde with hem but that they abyde in the cytees’.56 For both Boccaccio and Chaucer, it is the Amazon’s masculine, martial spirit which is seen as

52 Westminster Chronicle, 92–3, 502–3; The Brut, II, 347; Saul, Richard II, 132–3; Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 107–11; Richard of Maidstone, Concordia, 289–90, 297–8. 53 Ferster, Fictions of Advice, 54; Schieberle, “Thing Which A Man Mai Noght Areche” ’, 92–3, 99, 104–7. 54 Hamaguchi, ‘Domesticating Amazons’, 333, 343–5. See also Ganim, ‘Chaucerian Ritual’, 76. On mimicry, see Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 115–20. 55 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 45–6; Boccaccio, Teseida, 45–6. 56 Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, IV: 3.


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an aberration and their eventual submission to men, as when Hippolyta and Emily fell to their knees before Theseus, which is presented as the expression of their authentic self. In their display of the quality which Theseus later refers to as ‘wommanly pitee’ (I: 3083), the women of the court are not so much depicted as ‘mimicking’ femininity as acting in accordance with what writers such as Giles saw as their characteristic female virtue. In his behaviour as a husband, as more generally, Chaucer’s Duke Theseus represents the virtuous mean. As the Parson said, the fact that Eve was made from Adam’s side, not from his head or his foot, signified that whilst ‘a womman sholde be subget to hire housbonde’, she was not created as his slave but rather as his ‘felawe’ whom he should love as Christ loves the Church (X: 927–9).57 Giles of Rome put forward the same idea but, like Aquinas, expressed it in the language of Aristotelian political theory: the husband’s rule over his wife is ‘politik’ or ‘cyuyle’ in nature, i.e. it is like that of a ruler who is restrained by the ability of his subjects to appeal to charters and agreements made with him rather than that of the ‘real’ (i.e. royal or regal) ruler whose will is law. Marriage therefore involves a contract between the couple so that the husband does not enjoy absolute power over his wife, who has consented to be his partner and who is in some sense his peer (AO: I, iv: 1; III, ii; G: 190–2).58 As Nicholas Oresme said, if the male is superior to the female, this does not mean that the female is bad but simply ‘less good’.59 It is this view of woman as man’s respected inferior, as an obedient partner to her husband whose merciful qualities and counsel can nonetheless still benefit him, which is symbolised both by Theseus’s conquest of the ‘regne of Femenye’ at the start of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ and by the duke’s subsequent treatment of Hippolyta in the course of the tale. iii. Parents and Children: Theseus and Emily The second relationship which makes up the community of the household is that between parents and their children. If, for Giles, 57

See also Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 17521–32; Dives and Pauper, VI, iv: 27–39. Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 302; Aquinas, Ethics, 1004, 1015, 1684, 1694, 1719; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 51–3, 58, 70–1; Fortescue, Governance, I; Fortescue, In Praise, IX–XIII; Blythe, ‘Introduction’, 22–3; Blythe, ‘Family’, 7–12; Blythe, Ideal Government, 63–5. 59 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 53. 58

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the husband’s rule over his wife is ‘politik’ or ‘cyuyle’ in nature, then a father’s rule over his children is ‘real’, that is, royal or regal. In this sense his power is complete or absolute, being based on the laws and commands which he alone makes, although, unlike the self-interested power of the tyrant, this absolute power is to be used for the benefit of the child who is subject to it.60 Just as God rules the world wisely for the benefit of his creation, so a father should be busy in looking after his children. Since, as always, a ruler should be more virtuous than other men (AP: III, 4), the common good requires that a ruler’s children should be brought up even better than those of others. His children should therefore be taught good manners, virtue and the basics of the faith so that they learn how to be restrained, moderate and moral in their speaking, looking and hearing and in their taking of food and drink. Such an education will discourage the passion, strife and lechery to which children are naturally inclined, it being particularly important that good habits are imprinted on them while they are young and impressionable (G: 190–2, 210–37, 240–3). Although Duke Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ does not have any children of his own, the tale does implicitly raise the issue of his behaviour in loco parentis since he is, in effect, guardian to Emily, Hippolyta’s younger sister (I: 871).61 Here, Chaucerian scholars have been divided over how readers are supposed to respond to the duke’s decree that he will ‘yeve Emelya to wyve’ to the winner of the tournament between Palamon and Arcite (I: 1854–61). The duke makes this decision without consulting Emily herself even though, as she makes clear in her later prayer to Diana, the goddess of chastity, her own preference is to remain a virgin all her life (I: 2305–6). Theseus’s plans are foiled when the triumphant Arcite is thrown from his horse and dies, but he is eventually able to marry Emily to Palamon as a means of securing peace between Athens and Thebes (I: 2974, 3094–6). For some critics, Theseus’s arrangement of Emily’s marriage to Palamon provides the ‘Knight’s Tale’, like Boccaccio’s Teseida, with an optimistic ending in which, despite the ever-constant threat of chaos, the duke is able to reestablish the rightful order, peace and unity which are also represented

60

Blythe, Ideal Government, 63–5. It is easy to understand, therefore, why a critic might refer to Emily as the duke’s ‘daughter’ (Galloway, ‘Authority’, 34). For Emily, see also Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 38. 61


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by his defeat of the Amazons and of Thebes.62 Theseus here is interpreted as a kindly guardian, one who, following the death of Arcite, tenderly leads the swooning, shrieking Emily, who by now has accepted that she is to marry the victor of the tournament, away from Arcite’s corpse (I: 2817–19). For others, Chaucer’s narration allows us to sympathise with Emily’s desire to remain a virgin and so to question Theseus’s need for control over others. Both the wishes she expresses in her prayer in the temple of Diana and her eventual silence when Theseus arranges her marriage to Palamon in order to secure the ‘obeisaunce’ of Thebes (I: 2874) are then read as revealing the masculine coercion which is at the heart of the conventions of romance. The duke’s treatment of his sister-in-law is therefore seen as laying bare the high-handedness, political opportunism or even tyranny which is the basis of his polity. The seeming wedded bliss of Palamon and Emily at the end of the tale is therefore interpreted as being undermined by all that has gone before. In this perspective, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ seems to criticise Duke Theseus for overruling Emily’s desires, stifling her voice and treating her as a prize to be won rather than respecting her as an autonomous agent in her own right.63 How does a knowledge of what Giles’s De Regimine claims about the characteristic vices and virtues of young women help us to resolve this debate? As Giles says, much of what he had written in the De Regimine about wives also applied to daughters. Nevertheless, he does offer some specific guidance about the nature and education of girls. If all humans are inclined towards evil, women, being of lesser reason than men, are even more prone to temptation, and young women are yet more so still.64 Like wives, daughters should therefore be continent, chaste, abstinent and sober. They should be prevented from straying and roaming about by being kept busy in appropriate occupations such as silk-working or reading so that they do not have the time or opportunity to become

62 Cameron, ‘Heroine’, 122–7; Kirkham, ‘“Chiuso Parlare”’, 305, 326–9, 351; Wood, ‘“My Sweete Foo”’, 295, 305’; Muscatine, ‘Form’, 922–6; Ruggiers, Art, 159–63; Halverson, ‘Aspects’, 618–20; Kean, Chaucer, II, 6–7, 49–51, 139; Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 109–11; Bartholomew, Fortuna, 103–7. 63 Neuse, ‘Knight’, 250; O’Brien, ‘Fire’, 162–5; Weisl, Conquering, 19, 47, 58–61, 118–9; Ferster, Chaucer, 35; Martin, Chaucer’s Women, 52; Rock, ‘Forsworn’, 429; Crane, ‘Medieval Romance’, 49–53; Fowler, ‘Chaucer’s Hard Cases’, 137; Hamaguchi, ‘Domesticating Amazons’, 346–54. 64 See also Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 381–2.

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‘strumpetes and gygelottes’.65 They should learn to be still and quiet, thereby avoiding the common female fault of falling into chiding and strife. Such ‘ornate’ seemliness will make them all the more loved by their eventual husbands (G: 186–9, 197–9, 201, 245–9). Chaucer’s Emily herself seems to be innocent of most of the faults which Giles saw as being typical of women and girls and for which the female sex were regularly criticised in works such as Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium.66 Far from being garrulous or falling into chiding and strife, Emily is decorous and modest, displaying an angelic beauty which manifests her inner virtue (I: 1035–55, 1098–1101, 1114–8).67 Indeed, if anything she is rather too silent for the taste of many modern critics.68 Far from being a ‘strumpet’ or a ‘gygelotte’, Emily actually expresses her desire to remain a virgin all her life (I: 2305–6). Whereas Boccaccio’s Emilia is aware that she is being observed by male eyes when she walks in the garden outside the cell where Palamon and Arcite are imprisoned and is said to respond to this attention out of a vanity about her looks which all women ‘have innate in their hearts’, Chaucer’s Emily is oblivious of the Thebans’ admiring gaze. As Theseus later says, she knew no more of their love for her, or the conflict to which it gave rise, ‘than woot a cokkow or an hare!’ (I: 1806–10).69 Emily thus lacks most of the failings which Giles saw as being typical of women whilst, in pleading alongside Hippolyta for the life of Palamon and Arcite, displaying their characteristic virtue of being merciful (I: 1748–9). At one point, the behaviour of Emily may seem to support Giles’s accusation that women, in being of ‘feble complexioun’ in their bodies, are more likely to be ‘vnstedefast and vnstable’ in their desire and will than are men (G: 199). So, when Arcite parades triumphantly around the amphitheatre following his victory over Palamon, Emily casts a ‘freendlich ye’ down on him, such an attraction, we are told, being typical of women who ‘folwen alle the favour of Fortune’ (I: 2676–83). However, the authenticity of these lines is open to doubt because they do not appear in many manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, including those usually seen as authoritative such as the Hengwrt and Ellesmere, 65 The young Virginia in the ‘Physician’s Tale’ is praised for avoiding wine and the feasts, revels and dances which are often the occasion of ‘daliaunces’ (VI: 58–69). 66 Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I: XVIII. 67 On female beauty, see Bumke, Courtly Culture, 325. 68 See, for instance, Broughton, ‘He Conquered’, 60; Ganim, ‘Chaucerian Ritual’, 77; Guidry, ‘Parliaments’, 157–8. 69 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 80–2; Boccaccio, Teseida, 82–5.


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and it is possible that they are an addition to Chaucer’s text by a later scribe.70 Certainly, the Knight’s misogynist aside about women being attracted to those who are favoured by Fortune is rather inappropriate in its context, given that Theseus’s declared purpose in organizing the tournament between Palamon and Arcite was precisely to give the hand of Emily to the victorious knight on whom ‘Fortune yeveth so fair a grace’ (I: 1860–1). It is Theseus’s peremptory decision to ‘yeve Emelya to wyve’ (I: 1860) as a reward to the winner of the tournament between Palamon and Arcite without bothering to consult Emily herself that has been the main source of disagreement amongst critics about the duke’s treatment of his sister-in-law. After all, as her later prayer in the temple of Diana reveals, she herself wishes to remain a ‘mayden’ all her life, rather than becoming a ‘love’, a ‘wyf’ or ‘with childe’ (I: 2305–2311, 2329–30). Certainly, whilst giving the hand of a princess in marriage as the prize in a tournament was a common motif within medieval literature, this arrangement was not usually presented as being carried out against the wishes of the woman herself.71 Emily’s desire to remain single, thereby disrupting the system whereby men create social ties with other men by means of their ability to bestow in marriage even those women whom they do not own, is certainly very unusual within the narrative of a medieval romance.72 Works of imaginative fiction from the middle ages could ask their readers to identify and to some extent to sympathise with a daughter who opposes her father’s desire for her to marry against her own wishes, as in the case of Vienne’s defiance of her father, the Dauphin, in Paris and Vienne. However, here, as in other idyllic romances, Vienne’s refusal to take a husband chosen for her by her father arises from a romantic desire to marry someone else, rather than from a desire not to marry at all.73 Similarly, within the ‘Knight’s Tale’, whilst Theseus naturally regards the idea that the conflict between Palamon and Arcite could be resolved by having Emily marry both of

70 Benson, Riverside Chaucer, p. 839; Crane, Gender, 175; Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 149–50, 302 n. 10. 71 Picherit, ‘Le Motif du Tournoi’, passim. 72 On this system of exchange, see Rubin, ‘“Traffic in Women”’, 542–3, 547. 73 Paris and Vienne, 51–6. For a survey of ‘idyllic romances’, see Brown-Grant, French Romance, chapter 2.

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them as being absurd (I: 1835–6), he does not even stop to consider the possibility that Emily might not wish to marry in the first place.74 If anything, Emily’s declaration of her wish not to be a mother is even more unusual. Indeed, for Priscilla Martin, Emily is the ‘only woman in English literature until the twentieth century to express the desire not to have children’.75 Emily’s plea to Diana that she be allowed to remain a virgin certainly appears rather more admirable than the desires expressed by the intemperate Palamon and Arcite in their prayers to Venus and Mars, her wish to serve the ‘goddesse of clene chastitee’ (I: 2326–30) seeming to embody the ideal of virginity which medieval theologians commonly presented as the highest spiritual state (OEG: 203; G: 178; see also the ‘Parson’s Tale’ (X: 947–9).76 Certainly, Diana, as the goddess of chastity, could be used to represent a virtuous ‘honesty of the body’ within medieval literature, as she is in Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea.77 Even modern readers who do not share the medieval ideal of virginity expressed in works such as Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Tale’ (VIII: 120–231) have been understandably sympathetic to the Amazonian desire for feminine autonomy expressed in Emily’s prayer to remain a virgin and so have seen Chaucer as being critical of Theseus’s attempt to arrange her future without consulting her wishes.78 Nevertheless, the text of Chaucer’s tale contains a number of pointers which might make us question the extent to which we, as readers, are expected to approve of or to identify with Emily’s wish to remain single. These cues work at all four levels of ‘governance’: the self-government involved in ethics; the good rule of the household; the virtue needed for the common good of the state; and that involved in bringing humanity’s affairs in line with the good order of the cosmos. Firstly, at the level of individual ethics, Emily’s actions in making her devotions to Diana at the appropriate astrological are equated with those of Palamon and Arcite and so seem to invite us to find a parallel between

74 For the absurdity of the idea that a wife could have two or more husbands in Giles, see G: 180–4; see also the ‘Parson’s Tale’ (X: 920–2) and Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 812–3. 75 Martin, Chaucer’s Women, 50. Female saints who, like the Second Nun’s Saint Cecelia (VIII: 120–61), desire to remain virgins are, of course, a far more common occurrence. 76 Coghill, ‘Chaucer’s Narrative Art’, 124. For Diana as virgin huntress, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, I: 466–87. 77 Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, 236–7; Christine de Pizan, Letter of Othea, 59. 78 See, for instance, Hamaguuchi, ‘Domesticating Amazons’, 352–4.


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her prayer—and its outcome—and those of the two hot-headed Theban youths.79 As we have seen, although the irascible Arcite prays in the temple of Mars for victory, he eventually acquires wisdom, tempering his wrathful passion and, on the point of death, being reconciled with Palamon (I: 2763, 2783–97). Arcite’s earlier wise words about how we ‘witen nat what thing we preyen’, as when men wish for the riches which later bring about their murder (I: 1251–67), are, ironically, ultimately shown to apply, above all, to his own appetites and desires. Similarly, although the wish to possess Emily which Palamon makes in his prayer to Venus is eventually granted, he too has to moderate his desires and learn patience as he is made to wait for ‘lengthe of certeyn yeres’ (I: 2967) before he can marry his love. The tale therefore shows us that, whilst human appetites and passions are not wrong per se, both the hot passions of the irascible and the concupiscible pursuit of sensual pleasure have to be restrained if virtue is to be achieved.80 In terms of the parallels between the characters which the narrative and symbolism of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ sets up, Emily’s prayer to remain a virgin also represents an extreme of desire and appetite, one which she too must eventually moderate in order that the tale can reach a happy ending. As Giles said, one of the faults of the young is that ‘thei han no mesure in here dedes’ and their passionate likes and dislikes will not be abated by reason (G: 143). If this is the case then, as McCall has suggested, it may be useful to interpret Emily’s devotion to chastity in terms of the Aristotelian concept of ‘insensibility’ which Giles of Rome sets out in the De Regimine in his discussion of the virtue of temperance.81 For Giles, as for Aristotle and Aquinas, temperance is the mean between two opposing vices. On the one hand is an excess indulgence in ‘delectation’, a failing which characterises the lustful Palamon. On the other, there is also the opposite failing of insensibility, of forsaking and fleeing ‘sencible delectacioun and likynge more than reson axeth’ even if, in practice, the weaknesses of human nature mean that the virtue of temperance is much more likely to be needed to moderate an excessive devotion to the ‘seruice of Venus’ than it is the opposite deficiency (NE: III, x: 1; III, xi: 1, 7; G: 68–71).82 In terms of individual ethics, the marriage 79 80 81 82

Curry, Chaucer, 124–6. Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 812–3; Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 286, 298. McCall, Chaucer, 71–2, 171 n. 22. Aquinas, Ethics, 342, 630–1; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 165, 225–6.

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of Emily to Palamon represents a middle way between the excess of Palamon’s declaration of war upon chastity (I: 2236) and the immoderation of Emily’s ‘insensible’ prayer never to be a wife or a mother (I: 2310): the passions associated with Diana and Venus temper each other so as to arrive at the virtuous mean. This interpretation of Emily’s prayer in terms of ‘insensibility’ may seem to be undermined by the fact that Emily herself does not renounce pleasure altogether but rather explains her desire in terms of her wish to continue indulging her love of ‘huntynge and venerye’ and her pleasure in walking ‘in the wodes wilde’ (I: 2308–9). In fact, Giles followed Aristotle and Aquinas in specifically relating the virtue of temperance to taste and, above all, to touch, these being the strongest senses and so the ones most in need of moderating by the virtuous mean of temperance if lechery and gluttony were to avoided resisted (NE: III, x: 8; G: 69–71).83 ‘Insensibility’ in this context does not involve a renunciation of all pleasure but rather relates to the indulgence of particular senses, including those of the ‘works of Venus’ which Emily renounces in her rejection of marriage. Reading Emily’s devotion to the goddess Diana as an instance of ‘insensibility’ certainly helps make sense of the representation of Diana in her temple at Theseus’s amphitheatre, which may otherwise seem rather puzzling. The pictures on the wall of the temple of Diana show the cruel fates of those who suffered the goddess’s ‘vengaunce’ and ‘ire’ (I: 2302) and, as in the temple of Mars, the calamitous effects of the ‘unfettered actions of its deity’.84 Understandably, the goddess’s victims include those who are punished because they have offended her through a lack of chastity such as Callisto (I: 2056–9), who was turned into a bear after she had pledged her virginity to Diana but became pregnant by Jove, and Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and killed by his own dogs after he had seen Diana bathing naked

83

Aquinas, Ethics, 596–614; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 220–1. Rudd, Greenery, 61; Bartholomew, Fortuna, 87–8. Boccaccio does not describe the temple of Diana in the same detail as those of Mars and Venus; some of the details in Chaucer’s temple of Diana, including the depictions of Callisto and Atalanta, are actually taken from Boccaccio’s temple of Venus and were also used in the temple of Venus in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls (Boccaccio, Teseida, 196–200; Boccaccio Book of Theseus, 178–81; Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 286). For the anger and mercilessness of Diana, see also Ovid, Metamorphoses, XII: 27–9; XIII: 184–5). 84


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(I: 2065–8, 2303).85 However, they also include Meleager, who killed the Calydonian boar sent by Diana to destroy the crops and flocks of the Greeks after they had failed to do her reverence and whose presentation of the dead boar to his love, Atalanta, caused the quarrel with his uncles that eventually led to his own death (I: 2071–2).86 Even more surprisingly, the victims of those associated with Diana even include Daphne, who was turned into a laurel tree by her father, Peneus, the river-god, precisely to thwart the desires of Apollo and to maintain her virginity as Diana herself had done (I: 2063–4).87 Here, rather than being presented positively, the goddess of chastity seems more to resemble Mars and Venus in representing an ‘arational and destructive force’, one which, in its ‘unreasonable restraint against the senses’, is ‘cruel and spiteful’, linking Emily and Diana with the ‘aspre’ nature of the Amazons, just as Palamon and Arcite’s devotion to Mars and Venus associates them with the destructive passions symbolized by Thebes.88 Diana here seems to be associated with the ‘insensibility’, which Aquinas and Giles condemned, rather than with the virtue of temperate chastity, which, naturally, they praised. As in the temples of Mars and Venus, the goodess is identified with a passion which, in its extreme form at least, is shown to have negative consequences even though, when moderated and undertaken at the right time and for the right motive, it may, like the irascible anger represented by Mars, be a necessary or even virtuous aspect of human life.89 If Emily’s delight in the pleasures of hunting and of the outdoors are problematic at the level of individual ethics, her wish to remain single can also be seen as perverse at the second level of ‘governance’, that of ‘economics’ and of the obligations which writers such as Giles assigned to women within the household. As we have seen, Emily’s

85 For Callisto, see also Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 286. It was actually Juno, Jove’s wife, who turned Callisto into a bear (Ovid, Metamorphoses, II: 466–94; Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, II: 58; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 203; Boccaccio, Teseida, 423–4; Hoffman, Ovid, 82–5). For Actaeon, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, III: 138–55; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 182; Boccaccio, Teseida, 200; Hoffman, Ovid, 87–8. 86 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII: 260–444. See also Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V: 1464–84; Hoffman, Ovid, 88–9. Theseus and Pirithous were involved in killing the boar (Ovid, Metamorphoses, III: 303, 403–7). 87 Ovid, Metamorphoses, III: 544–67. See also Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, III: 726–7; Hoffman, Ovid, 85–7. For the laurel tree as ‘ever virgin’, see Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, IX: 11. 88 McCall, Chaucer, 71–2, 92. On Thebes, see above, 112–15. 89 Aquinas, Ethics, 349, 800–5.

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wish to remain a virgin does not arise from virtuous motives or some higher spiritual purpose, such as the ascetic renunciation of pleasure or a commitment to the positive virtues of chastity, as does that of Cecilia in the ‘Second Nun’s Tale’, who retains her virginity even after her marriage.90 Rather, like the wishes expressed in the prayers of Palamon and Arcite, Emily’s desire to remain single so as to continue enjoying the pleasures of the hunt is presented as the product of self-indulgence and of the wilfulness which is characteristic of youth. Medieval texts frequently presented a devotion to the delights of the outdoors, particularly those of hunting, as a sign that a character is being irresponsible in refusing to take on the public duties which inevitably come with adulthood. If the joys of hunting are not forbidden to those of gentle blood, they should not be indulged to excess (see above, 75–80), as the Ovide Moralisé taught when it invoked the story of Diana and Actaeon as a warning against an excessive love of hunting and against being idle.91 As Christine de Pizan said, the good knight should not amuse himself ‘too much’ with the pleasures of Diana.92 Such irresponsibility is exemplified by those such as in the case of Marie de France’s Equitan who, in his devotion to a life of ‘pleasure and amorous dalliance’, left the administration of his lordship to his seneschal: ‘Never, except in time of war, would the king have forsaken his hunting, his pleasures, or his river sports, whatever the need might be’.93 Chaucer himself used this convention in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ where Walter, marquis of Saluzzo, who is ‘yong of age’, is criticised for setting so much store by the pleasures of the moment, particularly those of hawking and hunting, that ‘Wel ny alle othere cures leet he slyde’. He gave no thought to the future, neglected common profit and, ‘worst of alle’, like Emily in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, refused to marry and produce an heir (IV: 64–140). Similarly, Melibee, the ‘yong man’ in the tale told by Chaucer the pilgrim, puts his wife and daughter at risk when, for his ‘desport’, he leaves his household undefended and goes out ‘into the feeldes hym to pleye’, (VII: 968). By contrast, as we have seen (above, 74–80), although Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ also took delight in hunt90 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 427; Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 295–8; Wood, Chaucer, 74–5; Aers and Staley, Powers, 258; Burrow, Essays, 35; Brown-Grant, French Romance, 82, 86, 97. 91 Ovide Moralisé, III: 591–603. 92 Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, 288–9; Christine de Pizan, Letter of Othea, 89–90. 93 Marie de France, Die Lais, 13–28; Marie de France, The Lais, p. 56.


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ing, being, like Emily, a servant of Diana (I: 1682), he does so moderately and reasonably, turning away from his indulgence in these pleasures as soon as more important responsibilities arise, such as putting an end to the bloody private battle between Palamon and Arcite (I: 1696–1713). As Aquinas explained, whether or not something is a vice depends on particular circumstances so that those soldiers who refrained from all pleasures would not be said to be guilty of insensibility if they did so in order to ‘devote themselves more fully’ to their duty of fighting for the commonwealth.94 However, whilst men have public duties, the responsibilities of women such as Emily were, according to medieval moralists, more focused on the household (AO: III, i; G: 177). It is this household role, one which Giles saw as the inevitable accompaniment of mature womanhood, which Emily eventually comes to accept at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Thirdly, as well as being troublesome at the level of individual ethics and of ‘economics’, Emily’s desire to remain a virgin is also problematic at the level of politics, i.e., in relation to securing the common good—marriage and the ‘commune profit’ being two themes which Chaucer also brought together in his Parliament of Fowls.95 As we have seen (above, 97–8), although the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is a romance, it is also a narrative whose romance elements are subordinated to the wider political issues associated with the epic. Consequently, although Theseus emphasises Palamon’s long devotion to Emily as a reason why she should consent to take him as her husband (I: 3075–89) and the Knight tells us of the happiness of the couple once they are married, their union is not simply a means of resolving a narrative of individual romantic love but is also a political issue and an aspect of Theseus’s foreign policy. Indeed, in line with both actual practice and contemporary literary convention (as in Chaucer’s own Parliament of Fowls), in which the arrangement of the marriages of medieval rulers and members of the high nobility were discussed by, or ratified at, representative assemblies, we are explicitly told that the marriage pf Emily to Palamon is a course of action which has been arrived at ‘With al th’avys’ of the duke’s parliament (I: 2969–76, 3076).96

94 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, I, 5 (p. 28); Aquinas, Ethics, 263. Similarly, what would count as virtuous chastity on the part of a wife would constitute a sin if indulged in by a nun sworn to total chastity (X: 937–49). 95 Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 71–84. 96 Giancarlo, Parliament, 137–40; Bennett, Parlement, 140–80.

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The use of marriage to help secure alliances between noble families or to bring peace between warring states was, it hardly needs saying, a commonplace of both the practice and the theory of medieval political life. As Henry III said in 1254 when seeking a wife for the future Edward I: ‘friendship between princes can be obtained in no more fitting manner than by the link of conjugal troth’.97 Similarly, when the marriage between Richard II and Anne of Bohemia was arranged, the couple, who were still in their mid-teens, had not even met. Rather than being a matter of private emotion, Richard’s betrothal to the sister of Wenzel, king of Bohemia and of the Romans, who at this point seemed likely to follow his father, Charles IV, as Holy Roman Emperor, was more a question of helping to detach the house of Luxemburg from their former French allies and, following the papal schism of 1378, of buttressing the alliance between two supporters of the Roman pope, Urban VI, against the French-backed Clement VII at Avignon.98 Indeed, the lack of a dowry from the cash-strapped Wenzel and the large loans which Richard II was obliged to make to his brother-in-law meant that the king was said to have ‘purchased’ his bride. As the Westminster Chronicle observed, ‘the English king laid out no small sum to secure this tiny scrap of humanity’.99 Richard’s second marriage, in 1396 when he was 29, to Isabel, the six-year-old daughter of Charles VI of France, was a less unusual match for an English king (both Edward I and Edward II had married French princesses). Its aim was also diplomatic as it helped to seal the twenty-eight year truce which had just been arrived at between the two kings.100 As Adam of Usk later said, the marriage between Richard and Isabel had been arranged with the intention that ‘bonds of friendship should be established between these kings and their successors’ and ‘peace and harmony’ brought into being between them.101 Similarly, in encouraging Richard II to marry Isabel, Philippe de Mézières had listed making ‘honourable alliances’ as one of the four main reasons why a king should marry (the others being to produce heirs, to secure internal peace and to avoid fornication) and argued that the marriage would so closely unite the two kingdoms by means of ‘true paternal

97 98 99 100 101

Robertson, Preface, 262; Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 539; Parsons, ‘Mothers’, 63–4. Saul, Richard II, 82–95; Saul, Three Richards, 140–5; Tuck, ‘Richard II’, 205–19. Adam Usk, Chronicle, 6–7; Westminster Chronicle, 25; Tuck, Richard II, 61. Saul, Richard II, 225–30; Saul, Three Richards, 145–6. Adam Usk, Chronicle, 102–3.


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and filial love’ that they would become as one.102 For Walsingham too, the object of the marriage was to bring ‘perpetual peace’ between the two kingdoms, with Richard receiving his new bride as a ‘gift’ from the French king.103 As Hoccleve said in his Regiment of Princes, rulers could ‘purchaseth pees by wey of mariage’, thereby both benefitting their subjects and pleasing Christ.104 Naturally, it was to be hoped that royal couples would be happy together, as Richard II and Anne of Bohemia seem to have been (the king famously ordered the destruction of the manor-house at Sheen where the queen had died) but, when it did occur, romantic love was more likely to be the consequences of a royal marriage than it was to be a cause.105 In this context, Emily’s marriage is not simply a question of personal preference but is rather a matter of state. As the Prose Life of Alexander showed, although mighty conquerors needed to be ruthless in obtaining victory, afterwards they needed to be humble and courteous so as to win the loyalty of those who have been conquered.106 Thus, just as Theseus first conquers the Amazons but then seeks to reconcile them to his triumph through his marriage to their queen, so, at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, the duke seeks to secure the ‘obeisaunce’ of Thebes to Athens by means of the marriage of Palamon to Emily (I: 2974). Finally, as well as relating to self-rule, to the good order of the household, and to the public realm of politics, the marriage between Emily and Palamon in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is given a wider philosophical and cosmological significance. In seeking to call an end to the mourning for the death of Arcite and to persuade Emily to marry Palamon, Duke Theseus delivers a lesson about the ‘faire cheyne of love’ within which the ‘Firste Movere’ has constrained the cosmos (I: 2986–3074).107 His words are taken from The Consolation of Philosophy in which Boethius explains that this bond of love not only puts each conflict warring element in its own particular place, ruling the motions of the heavens and creating the order of the universe, but is also expressed in the love which rules human hearts when it ‘joins peoples’ and when it ‘ties the

102 Philippe de Mézières, Letter to Richard II, 34–5, 69; Middleton, ‘War’, 125–6; Staley, Languages, 134–5. 103 Walsingham, Chronica Maiora, 297. 104 Hoccleve, Regiment, 5391–5404; Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinaunce”, 198–9. 105 Saul, Richard II, 455–7; Adam Usk, Chronicle, 18–19. 106 Prose Life of Alexander, 28–30. 107 Theseus’s speech is examined in detail in Chapter Five, below.

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knot of holy matrimony/ That binds chaste lovers’.108 In 1422/3, Lydgate was to use this idea to celebrate the marriage between Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and Jacqueline, the heiress of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, hailing marriage alliances as a divinely-ordained means of creating peace between nations and of creating harmony and unity in the world.109 So, in taking Palamon as her husband in ‘the bond/ That highte matrimonie’ (I: 3094–5), Emily not only learns to temper her own wilfulness and to help achieve the public good of peace between ‘peoples’ (in this case, of Athens and Thebes) but also submits to the divinely-ordained harmony of the universe. However, marriage not only provides an earthly microcosm of the harmony which binds the universe as a whole but also relates to another Boethian theme of Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech, that of the divinelyordained cycle of life and death. As part of his consolation for the tragic death of Arcite, the duke explains that although the First Mover has ordained that each individual thing which comes into being must also perish, he has also wisely provided that the ‘speces of thynges’ shall endure (I: 3011–3040). In the case of humans, this renewal of life takes place, of course, through procreation. As the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica says, ‘Nature is intent on multiplying severally her types . . . when the union of the sexes has of necessity arisen’. By this means, Nature ‘fulfils her purpose of perpetuating existence; preserving the type when she is unable to preserve the individual’ (AO: I, iii: 1, 4). Thus, for Boethius, it is divine providence which moves the heavens and stars, mingles and transforms the elements and ‘renews all things that are born and die through the growth of their young and their seedlings in their likeness’, this cycle of life and death being represented by the passage of the seasons.110 Of course, as a pagan, Theseus understands life only in terms of the natural cycle by which, as Nature puts it in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature, man ‘is called from non-being into being’ but then in turn has to die whilst being ignorant of the spiritual rebirth which God makes available to him, the supposed ‘knowledge’ of which is available only through faith and Christian theology, not through natural reason.111 Nevertheless, in seeking to offer a consolatio for the death of Arcite,

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Boethius, Consolation, II, m. VIII: 1–27. Lydgate, On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage, 601–3; Strohm, England’s Empty Throne, 192–3. 110 Boethius, Consolation, II, pr. II: 9; IV, pr. VI: 82–6; IV, m. VI: 16–48. 111 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (pp. 124–5). 109


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Theseus, in proposing the marriage of Emily to Palamon, does suggest a practical remedy by which the sorrows of the two, at the death of Arcite, can be turned into one ‘parfit joye’ (I: 3068–74). Ironically, the theme of marriage and procreation as part of the divinely-ordained cycle of life and death is alluded to in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ by means of an allusion to Diana herself who is prayed to by Emily not only as the goddess of chastity but in terms of all ‘thre formes’ which the goddess has within her (I: 2313). As Boccaccio explains in one of his glosses in the Teseida, this is a reference to Diana not only as she is on earth, as the goddess of hunting and of chastity, but also to her in the heavens as the Moon (Lucina) and in the underworld as Prosperina, the wife of Pluto, king of hell.112 Accordingly, the ‘Knight’s Tale’, depicts Diana not only as a huntress (I: 2079–80) but also as looking down towards Pluto (I: 2081–2) and as ‘Lucyna’ (I: 2077–8), the goddess of childbirth for whose aid the pregnant woman depicted in her temple cries out (I: 2085–6).113 Certainly, despite the orthodox view, as expressed by Giles (OEG: 203; G: 178) and Chaucer’s Parson (X: 947–9), that virginity was spiritually superior to marriage, it was perfectly acceptable, from at least the twelfth century onwards, for medieval Christian writers and poets to present the work of procreation, as governed by ‘Nature’, who is the vicar of God, as necessary, natural, virtuous and divinely-ordained.114 As the Parson said, sex between husband and wife with the ‘entente of engendrure of children to the service of God’ was not only licit but was actually an act of ‘meritorie’ (X: 938–41). In Aquinas’s words, the ‘use of sex properly ordered for its purpose of human reproduction is no sin’. Even before the Fall, it was in man’s nature, like that of animals, ‘to reproduce by intercourse, and nature has provided him with the organs needed for the purpose’.115 Similarly, for Giles, Nature has ordained each thing for a single purpose and a wife’s purpose is that of 112 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 182, 208; Boccaccio, Teseida, 201, 432. For classical references, see Bennett, Commentary, 86. See also Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, II; 100; III: 7; Bersuire, Moral Reduction, 371; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 28. 113 For those who called on Lucina (or ‘Ilithyia’) for help in childbirth, see Ovid, Metamorphoses, V: 303–4; IX: 282–3, 293–4; X: 506–11. For Lucina as the moon, the sister of Phoebus Apollo, the sun, see Chaucer, ‘Franklin’s Tale’ (V: 1036, 1045) and Troilus and Criseyde, IV: 1591; for Diana as the goddess of hunting and sister of Phoebus, see Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, 970–90. 114 Curtius, European Literature, chapter 6; Economou, The Goddess Natura, passim; Cohen, ‘Be Fertile’, 272–94; Gratian, Treatise, 51. 115 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 148, 429–32.

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procreation. Marriage is the rightful context for procreation through which humans perfect their own natures, perpetuate themselves (and so, in a sense, overcome their own mortality), and achieve a greater degree of happiness (G: 174–80, 192–4). Inevitably, given humanity’s fallen state, the natural desire to procreate could be perverted and become the work of Venus in malo, i.e. of lechery and excess, but provided it was governed by reason and moderation, this desire was seen as legitimate and honourable. Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature, a work familiar to Chaucer, therefore echoes Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy in seeing the order which God has created within the world as consisting of ‘a mutually related circle of birth and death’ by which ‘the series of things should ever be knit by successive renewals of birth’, like being produced from like by the lawful propagation which is overseen by Venus.116 As Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia said, the human loins may be ‘wanton’ but their use ‘will be enjoyable and profitable, so long as the time, the manner and the extent are suitable’. Reproduction prevents earthly life from passing away and material existence dissolving into ‘primordial chaos’, the process of generation meaning that death is never fully triumphant and that mankind never withers ‘utterly at the root’.117 Similarly, in Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius, Nature teaches that, whilst lechery is wrong, man should not ‘prevent conception by blocking its channels’ but should ‘exercise the seminal power entrusted to him and give rise to a long procession of offspring’. He should not ‘remain ever virgin’ (as Emily prays to do) but rather should marry in ‘good season’, whilst he is young, taking as his bride the virtue of ‘Moderation’.118 Jean de Meun’s Nature also presents procreation as natural and inevitable: ‘creatures capable of reproduction will always produce similar creatures, or will come together according to their natural inclinations and the affinities between them’. Again, this instinct can be corrupted, when man’s desire is only for delight, but nevertheless, as Reason teaches, Nature

116 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (pp. 122–3), pr. 5, pr. 4 (pp. 133, 145–7), pr. 5 (pp. 154–7, 162–5), m. 8 (pp. 194–5), pr. 8 (pp. 205–7). For Chaucer’s knowledge of this work, see below, 000. 117 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 4 (p. 87); II: 5 (pp. 99–100, 103); I: 11 (pp. 116–7); II: 14 (p. 126). For Chaucer and Bernardus, see below, 246. 118 Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, IX: 10–14. For Hauvilla, see Wetherbee, Platonism, 242–53.


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has made the work of procreation pleasurable so that ‘the succession of generations should not fail’.119 Thus, whilst Gower’s Mirour de l’Omme praised those virgins who did not seek to change their condition by marrying, he also saw the ‘increase of sons and daughters that God the Creator may always be praised by his creatures’ as natural and as a reason why marriage should be held in esteem. God had, after all, told Adam and Eve to ‘increase and multiply and fill the earth’ (Genesis 1: 28, 3: 16) even if, as Christine de Pizan said, this text did not provide (as the Wife of Bath perhaps sees it (III: 27–9)), a warrant for lechery.120 Similarly, Gower’s Confessio Amantis presents Nature as the ruler of all sublunary creatures and marriage as the means by which the demands of natural procreation and of human reason can be reconciled.121 In The Parliament of Fowls, Chaucer too presents Nature as the power controlling procreation, which rightly takes place within marriage, one associated with the legitimate love represented by Venus in bono, Venus-Cytherea, as opposed to VenusLuxuria, the ‘goddess of enticement and lasciviousness’.122 Whilst those who remain chaste for higher spiritual reasons are virtuous, there is also a virtue in following what nature and reason require of us. To do otherwise, as does Emily in her desire to remain a virgin, is a wilful opposition to the divinely-ordained cycle by which life restrains the power of death.123 Just as earlier Theseus had first issued an angry sentence of death on Palamon and Arcite but then turned to a merciful means of resolving their conflict, so, having previously high-handedly announced that Emily should marry the winner of the tournament, the duke, at the end of the tale, seeks to work by gentler means and seeks to convince Emily that she should take Palamon as her husband. As the head of household and as Emily’s nearest male relative, Theseus could expect to have a dominant role in arranging her marriage, as the pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica recommended (AO: III, i (p. 403)). As Nicholas

119 Romance of the Rose, 67–9, 270, 292–4; Roman de la Rose, 4347–4532, 17484–90, 18951–19024; Fleming, Roman de la Rose, 118–21, 195–203. For Chaucer’s knowledge of the Rose, see below, 246, 252. 120 Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 16861–72, 17209–20; Christine de Pizan, Reply to Pierre Col, 138–9. See also Dives and Pauper, volume I, 79. 121 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 5307–81, VIII: 2330–49. 122 Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 113–413; Economou, Goddess Natura, 131–44; Bennett, Parlement, chapters 3, 4. 123 Economou, Goddess Natura, 30, 36, 89; Bartholomew, Fortuna, 87–8.

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Oresme said, whilst a mother could be consulted about the marriage of her children, ‘the final arrangements are the prerogative of the husband, especially the choice of persons and the dowry and the final consent’.124 Nevertheless, whilst medieval marriages were essentially matters of property and connection, the consent of both partners was required for a marriage to be valid. For this reason whilst Boccaccio’s Teseo simply tells Emily to marry Palamon (‘You will see to it that what I want is done’), Chaucer’s Theseus seeks to persuade her to ‘rewe’ her ‘grace’ upon the Theban, and to show him ‘pitee’ and ‘gentil mercy’ in accepting him as her husband (I: 3075–3093; G: 192?).125 If Emily does not obtain her wish to remain a virgin, her prayer that, if this were not possible, she should be wed to the one who ‘moost desireth’ her does seem to be granted, Emily herself having accepted that she would have to marry one of the two Thebans (I: 2333–5, 2363–4). The ‘Knight’s Tale’ therefore has it both ways, showing Emily submitting to Theseus’s arrangements for her in her role as a good ‘daughter’ but also being invited to give her consent to this outcome as is required of one who is to become a wife. Certainly, rather than Emily suffering her fate as an oppression, once married she is said to have loved Palamon ‘so tendrely,/ And he hire serveth so gentilly,/ That nevere was ther no word hem bitwene/ Of jalousie or any oother teene’ (I: 3096–3106). In terms of both morality and literary convention, it was a ruler such as Gower’s incestuous Antiochus, who sought to prevent his daughter from taking a legitimate husband, who was likely to be seen as a tyrant rather than one who, like Duke Theseus, provides Emily with a husband with whom she lives happily ever after.126 Where we are asked to identify with a daughter against her father’s plans for her marriage, as in Paris and Vienne, the text is likely to present his arrangement of a husband for her as an initial, narrative obstacle which has to be to be overcome rather than, as in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, as a means of providing a happy resolution to the story. In other words, far from showing Theseus in a bad light, his arrangement of a marriage which both brings personal happiness to his

124

Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 828. Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 320; Boccaccio, Teseida, 352; Staley, Languages, 14–15; Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 407–10; Rigby, English Society, 317–8; Ward, Women, 15; Ward, English Noblewomen, 12–13, 16, 22–4, 28–30. 126 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VIII: 247–2008. For the theme of father-daughter incest, see Brown-Grant, French Romance, chapter 4. 125


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‘daughter’ whilst also helping to cement the peace between Athens and Thebes was, by medieval standards of ethics, ‘economics’ and politics, actually a demonstration of his virtue as a ruler. iv. Masters, Servants and Possessions Finally, Giles turns his attention to the relationship between masters and servants and to the general administration of a household. Theseus’s role as the master of his household has received much less critical attention than the gender issues raised by his relationships to Hippolyta and Emily. Nevertheless, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ does include a number of details about the administration of his household, details which, when interpreted in the light of Giles’s work, seem to reflect positively on the duke’s wisdom and virtue. The smooth running of the household requires instruments which are either ‘soul-less’ (i.e. buildings, possessions and money) or ‘souled’ (i.e. human servants) (AP: I, 4; AO: I, vi: 1; G: 252–55).127 In terms of his ‘unsouled’ instruments, a ruler should, firstly, be magnificent in his housing. Such expensive and wonderfullyconstructed buildings should not be made for reasons of vainglory but, since it is rightful that a ruler should be more noble and glorious than other men, he should be housed as his rank and wealth require, with room for many servants (NE: IV, ii: 16; G: 256–9). As Fortescue said, ‘it is necessary that the king has such treasure that he may make new buildings when he wants to, for his pleasure and magnificence’. If a king did not spend on buildings and the other trappings of royalty, ‘he would live then not like his estate, but rather in misery, and in more subjection than does a private person’.128 Richard II’s household has been seen as particularly grand and the late fourteenth century as a period in which, perhaps in emulation of the grandeur of the royal court, there was a marked growth in the magnificence and ritual of noble households.129 That Chaucer’s Theseus displays the prudent magnificence for which ‘wise’ and virtuous rulers such as Arthur had long been praised in literature and which Giles advises a ruler to display is made evident in his account of the duke’s ‘paleys riche’ (I: 3525), one which is able to

127 128 129

Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 51; Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 809. Fortescue, Governance, 7 (p. 98). Woolgar, Great Household, 197–8.

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accommodate the many people who arrive on the day of Palamon and Arcite’s tournament (I: 2494–5, 2513).130 For Giles, the magnificence of the ruler’s buildings has the advantage of making his subjects reluctant to rise against him, his grandeur proclaiming his secure hold on power and the futility of seeking to ‘ouersette’ him (G: 256). Theseus certainly uses his palace to help impress his majesty upon his subjects when he appears ‘at a wyndow’ of his residence, the crowd below listening in respectful silence as his herald announces the duke’s merciful decree that the tournament between Palamon and Arcite should not be a ‘mortal bataille’ and then loudly hailing his wisdom with a cry that ‘touchede the hevene’ (I: 2528–64).131 Secondly, in addition to recommending the ruler to have a magnificent palace, Giles advises the ruler, as head of his household, to know what furnishings are necessary for its good running because, although he should not covet endless riches, the rightful acquisition of those goods which are necessary to maintain him in his estate is both virtuous and honourable (G: 259–73). In the ‘Knight’s Tale’, when the duke entertains the guests who arrive for the tournament which he has organized, he lays on a lavish feast at which is displayed ‘The riche array of Theseus paleys’ (I: 2190–2205).132 Giles himself is more concerned to justify private property in general than to specify the particular belongings which a ruler needs (G: 254, 259–64), but Fortescue’s list of the items which befit a king’s majesty includes expensive horses, rich clothes, jewels and furs, rich hangings for his houses, and vessels and ornaments for his chapel.133 So, when Theseus, the court and those who are to fight at the tournament between Palamon and Arcite ride out through Athens, the streets of the city are ‘Hanged with clooth of gold, and nat with sarge’ (I: 2567–8). Similarly, at Arcite’s funeral, Theseus honours the dead knight by having his bier covered with ‘clooth of gold, the richeste that he hadde’ and by a funeral service involving expensively arrayed horses and golden vessels (I: 2872, 2889–96, 2907). Since, as Giles said, tables do not lay themselves nor doors open of their own accord, and as it would be unseemly and unworthy for a lord 130 131

Wace, Roman de Brut, 11059–70. For Theseus’s ‘god-like’ appearance before his subjects, see also below, 198–

201. 132

See also the Alliterative Morte Arthure, 166–204. Fortescue, Governance, 7 (p. 98). Fortescue was familiar with Giles’s De Regimine Principum (ibid., 1 (pp. 83–4). See also Stratford, ‘Richard II’s Treasure’, 212–4; Alliterative Morte Arthure, 205–19. 133


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to perform such tasks for himself, the magnificent ruler has need not only of material possessions but also of ‘souled instruments’, of servants, attendants and ministers (AO: I, ii: 1).134 A well-run household, with its multitude of servants performing their own specialist tasks, will be supervised by one chief servant, or ‘procuter’, so as to allow the ruler to devote himself to his task of working for the common good of his subjects (AO: I, v: 2; G: 255–7, 273–80, 283–5).135 That Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ has an array of servants, each with his own task and place within the household hierarchy, is evident from Chaucer’s references to the minstrels and to the attendants who serve at the feast before the tournament between Palamon and Arcite, whilst the servants and officers of the duke’s court are also said to include pages, squires, heralds and chamberlains (I: 1418, 1427, 1440, 2197, 2533, 2599). The obedient service which Theseus receives from his men is evident before the funeral of Arcite when the duke orders that the oak trees in the grove where he came across Palamon and Arcite fighting should be cut down and laid in piles for Arcite’s cremation: ‘Hys officers with swifte feet they renne/ And ryde anon at his commaundment’ (I: 2865–9). Theseus’s expenditure on the ‘mynstralcye’ which accompanies the feast before the tournament between Palamon and Arcite (I: 2197; see also I: 2523–4) could have been the occasion for negative comment by medieval moralists since such expense was often seen as wrongful prodigality rather than virtuous liberality. This critical tradition went as far back as the Church Fathers and was continued through texts such as the De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi, which warned rulers who would be just against rewarding the ‘unchaste’ or ‘minstrels’, through to the ecclesiastical councils of the thirteenth century.136 Such criticism was a staple of the pulpit in late medieval England with preachers such as John Bromyard denouncing the ‘harlotry’ of minstrels and the prodigality, vainglory and lewdness of the rich who maintained them.137 Giles

134 For the servants and their duties, see Woolgar, Great Household, chapter 3; Mertes, English Noble Household, chapters 1, 2; Fifteenth-Century Courtesy Book; John Russell, Boke of Nurture. 135 See also Black Book of Edward IV, 81. 136 De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi, 51; Bumke, Courtly Culture, 230, 277–8; Chambers, Medieval Stage, I, 23–4, 31–42. Aristotle’s Ethics had warned against heaping gifts on ‘flatterers and others who minister to their pleasures’ (NE: IV, i: 35; Aquinas, Ethics, 732). See also Chaucer, ‘Parson’s Tale’, X: 813. 137 Owst, Literature, 10–13, 301, 304, 311, 327, 334–5; Robert Mannyng, Handlyng Synne, 46–56. See also Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 14–42.

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of Rome himself attacked rulers whose profligacy and desire for glory led them to give to those ‘to wham it nedeth not’, such as ‘mynstrelles’ and flatterers (G: 79). Yet, maintaining minstrels was not necessarily always seen as bad. For instance, whilst Honoré Bonet warned princes that giving money to ‘minstrels, fawners and flatterers’ was ‘pains thrown away’, he still concluded that this did not mean that rulers should never employ such people but simply that they should reward them ‘without excess’.138 Walter of Milemete even allowed that hearing ‘temperate songs’ was an ‘honourable’ form of diversion for a king, one which would strengthen his body and improve his intellect.139 Certainly, the employment of pipers, harpers and minstrels was the norm within the households of late medieval kings such as Richard II.140 Accordingly, literary allusions to minstrels at feasts, as in Wace’s, Roman de Brut, Boccaccio’s Teseida, Chaucer’s own ‘Squire’s Tale’ (V: 78) or the late fourteenth-century Emaré, could often simply function as a reference to something that, as the livery accounts of the English court show, was an expected part of royal (and noble) life.141 Indeed, whilst rulers such as Frederick II could be praised for not giving to minstrels, romances could also praise the liberality of kings who rewarded minstrels.142 The early fifteenth-century Learn to Say Well, Little or Nothing even aligns ‘mynstrallis’ with priests among those who speak truly to the lord against the ‘gloseres’ who lie to them and flatter them.143 Thus, whilst the Theseus’s generosity to minstrels had the potential to demonstrate the vice of prodigality, its lack of negative consequences within the context of the ‘Knight’s Tale seems rather to be a demonstration of his virtuous liberality and courtly largesse. For instance, whereas the prodigality and excess of those rulers who were attacked for giving to minstrels and others was often seen by medieval moralists as being at the expense of the poor,

138

Bonet, Tree of Battles, 213. See also Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 425. Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 46. See also Chambers, Medieval Stage, I, 58–61. 140 See, for instance, C.P.R., 1377–81, 488–9; C.P.R. 1381–85, 384; C.P.R. 1385–89, 24, 426; C.P.R. 1388–92, 385, 493; C.P.R. 1391–6, 13; C.P.R. 1396–99, 104; C.C.R. 1385–9, 107. 141 Wace, Roman de Brut, 10542–52; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 328; Boccaccio, Teseida, 364; Emaré, 388–90, 466–8; Burnley, Courtliness, 61; Black Book of Edward IV, 48, 71, 131–2, 247 n. 218; Vale, Princely Court, 50, 103, 105, 196, 217, 292–4; Chambers, Medieval Stage, I, 46–52. 142 Bumke, Courtly Culture, 229–30. 143 Learn to Say Well, 73–96, 145–52. See also Emaré, 13–18. 139


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Theseus is specified as giving out gifts to both ‘the meeste and the leeste’ (I: 2198).144 The prudence which Theseus displays in his employment of servants can perhaps be most clearly seen when the duke acts in line with Giles’s advice about not advancing men too quickly to high office, something which often leads to insolence on the part of the newly rich, but instead to promote them gradually as they prove their worth (OR: 2: 16, 4; G: 283).145 Arcite’s career, in which, disguised as a ‘povre laborer’ and going by the name of Philostrate, he enters service at the Athenian court certainly involves being tested in this way. First, he offers himself for manual work at the gate of the court to a ‘chamberleyn’ who was attached to Emily and for two years hews wood and carries water as ‘Page of the chambre of Emelye the brighte’. Eventually, his diligent service and the evident gentility of his words and deeds lead to his promotion as squire of the duke’s own chamber, a position in which he then served for three years.146 Arcite’s good service, in time of peace and of war, made him more dear to Theseus than any other man, so that he eventually achieved the rank of ‘squier principal’ in the royal court (I: 1408–48, 1497–8, 1730).147 In fact, all the time that ‘Philostrate’ is dutifully serving Theseus as his squire, he is, as Arcite, actually the duke’s ‘mortal enemy’ and under pain of death if he is found in ‘any contree of this Theseus’ (I: 1209–15, 1553–4). But, as Giles himself said, ‘we may not ise the herte of a man’ but can only judge him by his actions over a period of time (G: 279). As Green has emphasised, Arcite’s phenomenal rise from being a labourer to a chief squire is inherently improbable and owes more to the romance convention of the noble who disguises himself as a servant but whose innate gentility cannot remain hidden (I: 1431) than to the reality of contemporary

144 Owst, Literature, 11, 327; Gower, Mirour de l’Omme: 8413–60; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 2149–76. 145 Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Rhetoricam Aristotelis, 70v; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 227. 146 It is difficult not to see Arcite’s transfer from Emily’s service to that of the duke, a detail not found in Boccaccio’s Teseida where Arcite enters straight into the service of the duke (Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 106; Boccaccio, Teseida, 115) as being in some way reminiscent of Chaucer’s own career which began, in the household of Elizabeth, the countess of Ulster, the wife of Edward III’s son Lionel, before he moved into the king’s own household, where he too was to achieve the rank of esquire (Chaucer Life-Records, 13–18, 95; Pearsall, Life, 38, 49; see however, Green, ‘Arcite at Court’, 256–7). 147 For pages, squires and chamberlains, see Mertes, English Noble Household, 23–4, 26–7, 30. See also Bennett, Commentary, 34–5.

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social life.148 Nevertheless, in promoting ‘Philostrate’ on the basis of his ‘vertu’, Theseus does act in accordance with Giles’s advice about judging servants by their deeds and rewarding them on their merit even if, in hiding his true identity, Arcite has, as Palamon later says, actually ‘japed’ the duke for ‘ful many a yer’ (I: 1436, 1729). v. Conclusion: Theseus and the Virtues of the Active Life Like all medieval Christian thinkers, including even those who, like Brunetto Latini, praised the nobility of politics as a profession, Giles of Rome accepted that theology was the highest form of human knowledge and that the ‘contemplative’ life, in which men forsake worldly honours and riches and aspire to become as one with God, was spiritually superior to the ‘politic’, ‘active’ or ‘civil’ life, in which men rule a household or a realm (G: 10–13, 25, 111, 118, 217, 224–5, 247).149 Yet, whilst accepting the superiority of the contemplative life, Giles nonetheless recognized that nobles, princes and kings, who had the responsibility of ruling over others, actually had more need of the science of politics than of divinity, and it is this science which is explicated, at length, in his De Regimine (DEP: 119, 321; G: 224). Like a long line of thinkers, from Augustine and Gregory to Christine de Pizan and beyond, Giles argued that the ‘politic’, ‘active’ or ‘civil’ life of those with wealth and power, one which Aquinas had seen as being modelled on God’s ‘management’ of the universe, was legitimate and virtuous provided that those with power used their position and their skills to promote the well-being of those who were subject to their authority.150 Ideally, of course, the ruler should combine the virtues of both the contemplative and the active life so as to eschew a ‘voluptuous’ or ‘wilful’ existence in which a man is ruled by his passions (DEP: 7–9, 81; G: 12–13). In practice, however, Giles’s treatise on government is far more concerned with the prince’s involvement in the active than in the contemplative 148

Green, ‘Arcite at Court’, 255–7. Giles of Rome, Quodlibeta, 13–33; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 1, 3, 4, 146, 272–3; Dante, Convivio, I, i: 3–4; II, v: 3; IV, Xvii: 16; IV, xxii: 10. 150 Augustine, City of God, V: 19 (pp. 213–4); V: 26 (pp. 221–3); XIV: 22 (p. 584); XIX: 19 (p. 880); Gregory, Moralia, 19:44–5; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 3–4, 266, 272–3, 350; Book of Vices and Virtues, 220–1; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 61, 176, 451–3; Walter Hilton, Mixed Life, 7–16; Christine de Pizan, Three Virtues, 44, 50; Brown, Pastor, 46–7, 188–9; Rigby, ‘Wife of Bath’, 143; Minnis, ‘“I Speke of Folk in Seculer Estaat” ’, 35–7. 149


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life and it is this focus which helps make Giles’s work such a useful context within which to assess the virtue of the actions of the pagan Duke Theseus in Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’. If, as Chaucer’s Parson said, heaven is given to those who will labour, ‘and nat to ydel folk’ (X: 716) then for Giles, as for thinkers such as Walter Hilton, the rightful rule of a man over his household, children, servants, neighbours or tenants was a legitimate form of ‘traveile’ through its exercise of charity and the putting away of idleness (G: 247).151 The rightful order of the kingdom is secured by the good government of all its households, but such good government is even more important in the case of the royal household as its misrule is especially prejudicial to the realm as a whole (G: 170). As Philippe de Mézières put it, when the king’s household was well regulated, his subjects, along with people from other lands, would associate him with the wisdom of Solomon.152 For Giles, rightful order and virtue is achieved when we model our lives on the hierarchial structure of nature itself, a hierarchy within which the higher—the husband, the parent or the master—should rule over the lower—the wife, the child, the servant—for the latter’s own benefit. It is this virtuous order, one in which a wife is expected to defer to the husband who is her ‘lord’, which Theseus achieves as the head of a household in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ and which, as we shall see, represents, in microcosm, the good government which the duke is expected to achieve as ruler of his wider realm in time of peace and of war.

151 152

81.

Walter Hilton, Ladder of Perfection, 1: 2–3. Philippe de Mézières, Le Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 230; Black Book of Edward IV,

CHAPTER FOUR

THE ‘KNIGHT’S TALE’ AS POLITICS: THE GOOD RULE OF THE COMMUNITY Right so bitwixe a titleless tiraunt And an outlawe or a theef erraunt The same I seye: ther is no difference. Chaucer, ‘Manciple’s Tale’ (IX: 223–5)

i. Theseus: True Prince or Tyrant? For medieval writers such as Boccaccio, Laurent de Premierfait and John Lydgate, Duke Theseus was, at least at the time of the events recounted by Chaucer’s in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, a noble knight and a model prince. In their eyes, Theseus was the most illustrious of the famous ‘kings’ of Athens as a result of his personal bravery, his defeat of the tyrannical Creon, the harmony and riches which his government brought to its citizens, and the fame which his promotion of philosophy, poetry and oratory gave to the city.1 Giovanni del Virgilio, for instance, interprets the story of Medea’s attempted poisoning of Theseus allegorically: ‘Per Theseum intelligo hominem virtuosum. Per Medeam intelligo personas malas que odiunt virtuosos et persecuntur ipsos’.2 Modern scholars have sometimes read Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ as being in line with this tradition in its presentation of the duke as an ideal ruler, as one who, in Burnley’s words, constitutes the ‘anti-type of the tyrant’ when judged by medieval standards.3 Yet, as we have seen, the portrayal of Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ has often been read in a more negative light. Here, Chaucer is seen as depicting not only the duke’s shortcomings in terms of his ethics as an individual or as a head of household but also as exposing his failings as a ruler in time of peace and as a military leader in time of 1 Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, ix: 1–8; Laurent de Premierfait, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 127, 147–9; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 118–9, 121–2. For the less creditable events of Theseus’s later life, see 202, below. 2 Giovanni del Virgilio, Commentary on the Metamorphoses, VII: 22. 3 Olson, Canterbury Tales, 66; Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 107–9. Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 27; See also the list of references, above, 5–6.

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war. Rather than being an ideal prince, Chaucer’s Theseus seems to be ‘Renaissance machiavel’ who is motivated by his own ‘will to power’ rather than by the pursuit of the common good.4 Indeed, a number of critics have explicitly claimed that if the Knight, as narrator of the tale, regards Theseus as a hero, Chaucer himself, as author of the tale, makes it clear that the duke is a ‘tyrant’. For those who adopt this approach, the complaint which the imprisoned Palamon apparently makes about Theseus’s ‘tirannye’ (I: 1111) would seem to have plenty of justification.5 In particular, for David Aers, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ demonstrates that Chaucer was aware of the similarities between ‘the organized violence initiated by national rulers’ and other forms of criminality. The poet’s account of the scenes of violence which are depicted in the temple of Mars (in the form of the ‘open werre’ which results in ‘A thousand slayn’ and ‘The toun destroyed’) therefore seems to liken the violence undertaken by the state with that of the individual robber or murderer (I: 1965–2016). In linking the violence of the state to that of the criminal, Chaucer therefore makes the basis of Theseus’s own government clear: it is ‘military domination’. Aers argues that to attribute such views to Chaucer is no modern anachronism since such views were current in the middle ages. As evidence, he cites the famous story recounted by Augustine in The City of God (one repeated by John of Salisbury, Chaucer and Gower) about Diomedes (or Dionides) the pirate who told Alexander the Great that he, as a robber, simply did with his ‘tiny craft’ what the emperor himself did with a mighty navy. For Aers, this passage shows that ‘St Augustine himself likened the order of kingdoms to that of robber bands, asserting that the only difference between them is the impunity of the offical rulers’.6

4 Webb, ‘Reinterpretation’, 289–96; Underwood, ‘First’, 461; Neuse, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 252; Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer, 84; La Farge, ‘Women’, 69–72; Sherman, ‘Politics’, 105; Guidry, ‘Parliaments’, 141, 147, 161–2. See also the references above, 6–7. 5 Webb, ‘Reinterptation’, 296; Neuse, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 250; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 191; Aers, Chaucer, 26–7; Kolve, Chaucer, 98–102; Ferster, Chaucer, 40–44; Hamaguchi, ‘Domesticating Amazons’, 344–5; Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, 194–217; Rogers, Upon the Ways, 35. 6 Aers, Chaucer, 25–6; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 229, n. 10; Augustine, City of God, IV: 4 (p. 139); see also Wetherbee, ‘Chivalry’, 220–2; Fowler, ‘Chaucer’s Hard Cases’, 133; Guidry, ‘Parliaments’, 141. Augustine’s source may have been Cicero, De Re Publica, III, xiv (p. 202), a text unknown to the middle ages. For the later use of Augustine’s story of Alexander and the pirate, see Cary, Medieval Alexander, 81–3, 95–8, 104, 156–8, 197, 252–4, 263, 281–2, 349, 302; John of Salisbury, Frivolities, III: 14204–5; Gesta Romanorum, 524; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 1; Chaucer,

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Against the claim that Augustine saw states as being like gangs of robbers, it has been objected that his story of Alexander and Diomedes was not intended to show that state violence per se was wrong but rather that it was kingdoms ‘without justice’ which were like ‘gangs of criminals’.7 The problem with this reply is that Augustine himself argued that ‘true justice is found only in that commonwealth whose founder and ruler is Christ’ (i.e, in the City of God itself). Rather than existing on earth in the past or present, as Thesian Athens did, Christ’s kingdom, which is ‘spiritual instead of physical’, is, for humans (if not for angels), a thing of the future, one whose time would arrive at the Last Judgement. In this case, all states, even those with Christian rulers, would be nothing but ‘gangs of criminals on a large scale’.8 In order to judge whether Chaucer’s Duke Theseus is a tyrant or not, we thus need an understanding of how medieval philosophers characterised political power and of how they distinguished the rightful exercise of force by legitimate rulers from the criminal violence which characterises the tyrant (section ii, below). Does the duke himself, in preaching the need to make a virtue of necessity, promote a quietist acceptance of tyranny (section iii)? Are the duke’s own actions in line with the teachings of mirrors for princes about the need for rulers to rule by counsel (section iv) and to show mercy to those who are subject to them (section vi) or is he guilty of the vainglory in time of peace (section v) and of cruelty and illegality in time of war (section vii) which are typical of the tyrant? Would the fact that Theseus was a pagan affect the legitimacy of his governance in the eyes of those, including Giles of Rome, who assumed the truth of Christian theology (section viii)? ii. Kingship and Tyranny in Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum If, as Augustine said, no earthly kingdom could ever achieve ‘true justice’ then, as we have seen, his claim could be interpreted to mean that all states were simply ‘gangs of criminals on a large scale’, being the expression of a vicious will to power that was both the consequence of and ‘Manciple’s Tale’ (IX: 223–34); Gower, Confessio Amantis, III: 2363–72; Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1172–3. See also also Kalning, ‘Virtues’, 144. 7 Augustine, City of God, IV: 4 (p. 139); Rigby, Chaucer, 59. 8 Augustine, City of God, II: 21 (p. 75); IV: 4 (p. 139); V: 17 (p. 206); XV: 1 (p. 596); XV: 8 (p. 607); XVII: 7 (p. 731); XIX: 27 (p. 893); Markus, Saeculum, 52–5, 64–5; Blythe, Ideal Government, 101–2.

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a punishment for human sinfulness. In practice, however, Augustine’s doubts about the possibility of earthly states ever attaining true justice were ‘quite irrelevant to the development of medieval political ideas’.9 After all, even Augustine himself had argued that when the representatives of the authority of the state imposed the death penalty on criminals they should not be seen as being guilty of murder, because in doing so they were acting in accordance with the laws of the state, which was ‘the justest and most reasonable source of power’.10 Consequently, even if in his later works (or in parts of them at least) Augustine can be read as seeking to desacralise the political realm and to reject a view of the state as a means to salvation, he nonetheless continued to see the institutions of the state as helping to hold the wicked in check and securing the space needed for the exercise of virtue on earth.11 Certainly, in practice, he was prepared to allow that Christian rulers could ‘rule with justice’ when the combined individual virtue with a willingness to ‘put their power at the service of God’s majesty’. Augustine even praised the virtue of the pagan heroes of Rome who did not succumb to the temptations of material gain or sensual indulgence but rather acted and ruled for ‘common good’ and pursued ‘their country’s wellbeing with disinterested concern’.12 It was this more positive strand of Augustine’s political thought which was to be emphasised by those early medieval thinkers who developed a theocratic notion of kingship as a form of Christian ministry whose purpose was to bring justice and peace in this life. Here, it was not the state per se, but rather the rule of the tyrant which was seen as a punishment from God. In turn, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, this positive attitude towards the state was further developed under the impact of Ciceronian and Aristotelian political ideas. Certainly, in terms of actual political practice, Church and state were interdependent, with England’s government, even in the fourteenth century, still being largely staffed by churchmen.13 As a result, whilst late medieval theorists, such as John of Wales, James of Viterbo, Nicholas Oresme and Jean Gerson, were extremely familiar with Augustine’s words about kingdoms which 9

Tierney, Religion, 39; Canning, History, 42; Markus, Saeculum, 157–65, 227. Augustine, City of God, I: 21 (p. 32). 11 Tierney, Religion, 39; Markus, ‘Roman Empire’, 347–8, 353; Markus, ‘Two Views’, 69–70, 98–9; Markus, Saeculum, 52–5, 64–5, 69–71, 75–6, 83–6, 93–7, 100, 134–6, 146–7, 199; Canning, History, 40–3; Leyser, Authority, 7. 12 Augustine, City of God, V: 15, 24 (pp. 204–5, 220). 13 Rigby, English Society, 222–3. 10


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were like bands of robbers or pirates, it was those kingdoms that lacked justice which they criticised in this way.14 For Jacobus de Cessolis, far from Augustine’s story of Diomedes showing that all states were necessarily robber bands, the pirate’s words of reproof to the emperor actually helped turn Alexander into a virtuous and just prince.15 Compared to many of his contemporaries, Giles of Rome has been seen by modern commentators as being less positive in his characterisation of the state and as retaining more of Augustine’s scepticism about its moral capabilities.16 Nevertheless, like other Aristotelians, including Aquinas, Giles did adopt the Philosopher’s definition of man as a political animal, as one who by nature is a ‘cyuel beste’ (AP: I, 2).17 For Giles, in order for humans to survive they have not only to be members of households but also of the wider communities of the neighbourhood and the city which provide the social ties, material goods and the security which are necessary for human life (AP: III: 9; G: 169, 177, 289–91, 294–5, 383–5). However, the ‘city’ (meaning here, as in Augustine, any political community with one law and common governor, even when this is actually an entire kingdom (G: 8, 375–6)) does not merely permit humans to live sufficiently and safely.18 Life in the city also allows humans to use their capacity for language and reason so as to make moral choices and to live virtuously. Man may be a domestic animal before he is a political one but, in enabling man to complete his nature as a rational and moral being and allowing him to seek the common good, the community of the city can nonetheless be seen as ‘more principal’ than that of the household. Giles thus cites Aristotle’s view that disobedience to the law and to princes was more harmful than disobeying one’s doctor since doctors only healed the body whereas true princes and lawgivers sought the ‘profit of the soule and to brynge citeseyns to vertues’ (AO: I, i: 2; G: 169, 177, 289–95, 328–9,

14 Jonas of Orelans, De Institutione Regia, 196; Tierney, Religion, 35, 39; Swanson, John of Wales, 47, 71; Markus, ‘Two Views’, 94–9; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 156, 283, 292; Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1172–3; James of Viterbo, On Christian Government, II: X (pp. 151–3); Ryan, ‘Rulers’, 514; Blythe, Ideal Government, 239. 15 Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 1. 16 McAleer, ‘Giles’, 36; Blythe, Ideal Government, 62, 74–5. 17 Giles of Rome, Quodlibeta, 34; Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 309–10; Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: I (p. 3); Markus, ‘Two Views’, 91–6; Oresme, Livres de Politiques, 48, 126, 132. See also Dante, Convivio, II, iv: 1; IV, xxvii: 2. 18 Augustine, City of God, XIX: 7 (p. 861); Latini, Book of the Treasure, 279.

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334–5, 381–5).19 Unlike Augustine, Giles, along with other thirteenthcentury Aristotelians, was therefore prepared to accept that dominion (if of a non-despotic variety) had existed even before the Fall being, in Aristotelian terms, an expression of human nature and a means of meeting basic human needs.20 Since the Fall, humanity’s sinful state inevitably means that there is always a danger that political power will be used for the ruler’s own personal profit or to satisfy what Augustine had called the libido dominandi but, nonetheless, superiors can still seek to rule those subject to them with virtue and in charity.21 It is to the good government of the city as taught by the science of ‘polecie’ or ‘politica’ that Giles turns his attention in Book III of the De Regimine in which he provides an account of the rightful laws and customs by which the community should be governed in time of peace (Part II) and of the measures needed to defend the city in time of war (Part III).22 That Giles did not regard state power per se as illegitimate can seen be from his classification of different forms of government in terms of whether their rulers are virtuous or evil. Following Aristotle (AP: III, 7) and Aquinas, Giles distinguished six types of polity in terms not only of who rules (one man, a few, or the many) but also in terms of for whose benefit they govern (either that of the rulers themselves or that of the community as a whole).23 Of these six forms of government, three are virtuous because their rulers use their power to bring about the common good. These are monarchy, in which a king governs; aristocracy, in which the ‘optimates’, the best men, rule; and ‘policia’ (Aristotle’s ‘constitutional’ rule) where popular approval is needed for all legislation and where the people choose the ruler, officials and judges, who are then responsible to the community. The three remaining forms are all evil or, in Aristotle’s terms, ‘perverted’ because those in power rule in their own sectional interest (NE, VIII, x: 2; AP: III, 7). These are tyranny, where the ruler uses his power for his own personal gain; oligarchy (‘eligarchia’) where a few men, usually the rich, rule for their

19 Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 299, 301; Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 808–9. 20 Markus, ‘Two Conceptions’, 98–97; Blythe, Ideal Government, 75, 100, 104; McAleer, ‘Giles of Rome’, 26–7. 21 McAleer, ‘Giles’, 29–36; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 471. 22 Part I of Book III of the De Regimine provides a fascinating account of the foundation and rightful social ordering of cities but is less relevant than Parts II and III for our assessment of Theseus’s polity here. 23 Aquinas, Commentary on the Politics, 329–32.


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own advantage by despoiling their subjects; and ‘democracia’, in which the majority use their power at the expense of the rich. (G: 28, 117–20, 211, 266, 280, 325–6, 344–5).24 As Nicholas Oresme said, such evil and self-interested forms of rule were not genuine polities but rather an unnatural corruption of them.25 Having distinguished three virtuous forms of government, Giles then sought to identify which of them was the best. Whereas a writer such as Ptolemy of Lucca saw the ‘policia’ as the ideal form of government, Giles’s own explicit preference is for monarchical rule: ‘it is bettre that a cite other a prouynce be irewled by on than by manye’ (G: 326–8).26 Whilst a ‘policia’ is a perfectly legitimate form of government, it is inferior to government by an ‘aristocracy’, which comes nearer to unity; in turn, an aristocracy is inferior to monarchy, in which the ruler is ‘hymself on’, which embodies ‘parfite vnyte’. Reassuringly for the Capetian rulers for whom he was writing, Giles argued that not only was monarchy the best form of government but that, in turn, hereditary kingship descending via primogeniture was (in practice, if not in terms of strict logic) the best form of monarchy since it was the one most likely to avoid civil strife and tyranny and to secure the common good (G: 59, 212, 295, 300, 326–32, 374, 389, 411).27 In defence of his belief that monarchy was the best form of government, Giles invoked the authority of Aristotle (G: 328–9). In fact, whilst Aristotle had seen the ‘monarchy of the perfect man’ as the ideal form of constitution in theory (‘per se’), he had also argued that such a ‘god among men’ is seldom or never to be found. He therefore concluded that, in practice (‘per accidens’), the best form of polity may be one with a ‘mixed’ constitution which combines the virtues, or at 24 See also Aquinas, Ethics, 1672–8, 1697–8; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 434; Giles of Rome, Tractatus de Peccato Originali, f. 4. 25 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 89–90, 128, 143, 146, 156, 162–6. 26 Scanlon, Narrative, 115–6; Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, XV: 36–8; Aquinas, Ethics, 1674. Even Ptolemy did allow that, in practice, ‘royal’ rule by a hereditary ruler who enjoys an immunity from judgement by his subjects may be the most appropriate form of polity, particularly in larger territorial units or where the subjects lacked virtue and needed the discipline of strong kingship (Blythe, ‘Introduction’, 22–30, 35–6, 40–1, 46; Blythe, Ideal government, 104–8; Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, 2:8; 4:1; 4:7). On the need for a single ruler, see the speech by the bishop of Exeter in the parliament of 1397 (Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 347). 27 Blythe, Ideal Government, 73–4; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 2; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 154; Watts, Henry VI, 18, 57. For an emphasis on the fact that Richard II was king by succession, ‘not by election’, see Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 3. See also Peter of Auvergne, Commentary, 247–8, 254–6.

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least limits the vices, of the different forms of government (NE: VIII, x: 2; AP: II, 6; IV, 8–11).28 This was certainly how his work was read or was used by many medieval political theorists, from Aquinas in the thirteenth century to Fortescue in the fifteenth, who, whilst in theory often accepting that monarchy was the best of Aristotle’s ‘simple’ (or pure) forms of government in theory, still, in practice, advocated various forms of constraint on the power of rulers.29 By contrast, whilst Giles recognized both ‘real’ (i.e., royal or regal) rule, where, although being willing to take counsel, the king makes the laws according to his own will, and ‘political’ (‘politik’ or ‘cyuyle’) rule, where the ruler is subject to law made by the citizens, as legitimate forms of polity, he himself favoured ‘real’ rule, which he equated with the rule of God within the universe or of reason within the individual human (G: 190–1).30 With his parallel between the position of the king within his realm with that of God in the universe, it is understandable that Giles has been regarded as a particularly forceful exponent of unlimited monarchy and of the ‘descending’ or ‘real’ concept of power (G: 28, 83, 117–20, 190, 211, 266, 279–80, 327; OEG: 291, 335). Here the ruler is seen as separate from and superior to the rest of the political community, appointed by and answerable to God, as opposed to the ‘ascending’ or ‘politik’ concept in which the ruler is part of, and so responsible to, the political community.31 Naturally, those who favoured the descending conception of monarchy insisted that a ruler should be just and should listen to the advice of wise counsellors. However, if the prince chose not to live up to this virtuous ideal, there was little that his subjects could do to restrain his actions. As Giles says in the De Ecclesiastica Potestate (On Ecclesiastical Government), God ‘permits the wicked to have power when He knows that they will use it ill’ in order to punish the tyrant’s subjects for their sins (Job 34:30; Hosea 13:11).32 Giles’s stress on the

28

Mulgan, Aristotle’s Political Theory, 68–9, 71, 76–7, 82, 100–115; Ross, Aristotle, 254–7; Shields, Aristotle, 367–8; Barker, ‘Introduction’, lii–liv; Dunbabin, ‘Government’, 483; Dunbabin, ‘Aristotle’, 67–9; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 13; Blythe, Ideal Government, 19–24; Blythe, Ideal Government, 16–23. 29 Pennington, ‘Law’, 447; Gilson, Christian Philosophy, 328–30; Tierney, Religion, 88–90; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 290; John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, XIX, 35 (pp. 206–8); Blythe, ‘Introduction’, 32–6, 40; Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, 4:1.2; 4:19–20; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 152–3, 167, 240–1, 279; Osborne, ‘Dominum Regale’; Blythe, Ideal Govermnent, passim. 30 Blythe, Ideal Government, 67–70. 31 For the ascending and descending conceptions of power, see above, 27–8. 32 See also Augustine, City of God, V: 24–6 (pp. 219–23); VII: 31 (p. 292).


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need for the subject to render worship, obedience and reverence to the ruler, with the dangers of tyranny being preferred to the even worse evils which would result from civil disobedience, has therefore been cited as a direct source for the kind of absolutist government which Richard II attempted in the last two years of his reign.33 In practice, as Richard was to discover to his cost, this notion of absolutist rulership was ill-suited to the reality of fourteenth-century England. Here, although kings had no superiors or equals, there had long been a recognition, in both theory and practice, that for the king’s rule to be effective, he had to rely on the co-operation of his magnates who, as Walter of Milemete said, are ‘the cause of the peace of the kingdom’.34 Hence, whilst Bracton claimed that ‘no-one may question’ the acts of the king, who ‘may not be under any man’, he also argued that the king was under God and the law and that, in practice, the law acquired its force not only from the authority of the king but also from the approval of the ‘magnates and the general agreements of the res publica’. Similarly, although the Fleta followed Bracton in repeating the traditional maxim of Roman Law that ‘What pleases the prince has force of law’, it added, like Britton, added that, in reality, law in England was promulgated with the advice of the magnates.35 Whilst as Oresme pointed out, the teaching that ‘What pleases the prince has force of law’ could be used as a licence for tyranny, this was not necessarily the way that it was interpreted by medieval writers. For James of Viterbo, the maxim meant that ‘what pleases a ruler with right reason has the force of law’, which, given that nearly all rulers claim to be rational and ruling for the common good, left it rather open as to precisely which particular laws were grounded in reason.36 Given this 33 On the link between Giles and Richard, see Carlyle, History, V, 74–77; VI, 10; Jones, Royal Policy, 155–7; Saul, ‘Richard II’s Ideas of Kingship’, 30; Saul, ‘Kingship’, 44–5, 48–9, 51–2; Saul, Richard II, 249–50, 385–6; Canning, History, 133–4; Chronicles of the Revolution, 248, n. 19; Rigby, ‘Society and Politics’, 38–47. For dissenting views, see Tuck, Richard II, 203; Tuck, Crown and Nobility, 222; Reitemeier, ‘Born’, 157. For Richard II’s stress on obedience, see Walker, ‘Richard II’s Views on Kingship’, 51–3; Bennett, Richard II, 194; Taylor, ‘Richard II’s Views on Kingship’; Hanrahan, ‘“A Straunge Successor” ’, 338–9. 34 Political Thought in Fourteenth-Century England, 6–14, 21, 34; Michael, ‘Iconography’, 43. 35 Bracton, Laws, II, 19, 33; Fleta, II, 2; Britton, 1. See also Gratian, Treatise, 8; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 156–7. 36 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 243; Lewis, ‘King Above Law?’; James of Viterbo, Is it Better, 322–5; Godfrey of Fontaines, Are Subjects Bound, 319–20; Offler, Church, 2–3.

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emphasis on the need for counsel in order for the ruler’s edicts to be seen as legal, Richard II’s experiment in ‘descending’ government was soon to be denounced as tyrannical by those who opposed him, their rhetoric perhaps being influenced by those such as Ptolemy of Lucca who favoured an ascending view of power but also invoking the royal coronation oath in which the king swore to maintain the ‘just laws and customs which the people have chosen’.37 Yet, even if Giles’s advocacy of strong monarchical rule may have been an influence on Richard II’s descending conception of kingship, Giles himself saw the authoritarian government which he favoured as being the opposite of the kind of tyrannical rule which was to be ascribed to Richard by his enemies, tyranny being a form of government which he saw as combining the worst aspects of both oligarchy and democracy.38 Therefore, whilst the De Regimine provided a defence of strong monarchy, it also offered ‘a warning against royal tyranny’.39 For Giles, the difference between monarchy and tyranny was not essentially one of constitutional structure but was rather grounded in the morality of the ruler.40 In a monarchy, the prince loves God and the common good and so seeks the worship which comes from bringing his subjects to virtue; in a tyranny, the ruler will only affect to do this whilst actually pursuing his own singular good and pleasures at the expense of justice and the friendship which should exist between ruler and ruled (AP: IV: 2; V, 1, 11; NE: VIII, xi: 6; G: 28, 117–20, 211, 266, 280, 328–9, 332–8, 344–5).41 As a result, if the idealisation of kingship 37 Theilmann, ‘Caught’, 609–11; Blythe, ‘Introduction’, pp. 35–6, 40–1, 46; Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, 2:8; 4:1; 4:7; Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 417, 419; Chronicles of the Revolution, 172, 175–8, 180. See also Peter of Auvergne, Commentary, 250. Whilst the articles of deposition of 1399 themselves do not specifically use the term ‘tyrant’ to refer to Richard, they do, nevertheless, constitute a systematic accusation of tyranny against him (Rigby, ‘Society and Politics’, 44–5; Rigby, ‘Ideology’, 316). The charge of tyranny was explicitly made against Richard II after 1399 by both John Gower (Tripartite Chronicle, 312) and Thomas Walsingham (Chronicles of the Revolution, ed. Given-Wilson, 75). 38 See also Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 167, 235. Aquinas, On Princely Government (V (p. 25)0, by contrast, offers a number of reasons why the consequences of tyranny may be less evil than those of democracy. 39 Perkins, Hoccleve’s Regiment, 90. 40 Scanlon, Narrative, 115. 41 Aquinas, On Princely Government, III (p. 15); John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, I (p. 78); Oresme, De Moneta, 42; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 439; Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, II, v; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 115–6; Wimbledon, Redde Ratione Villicationis Tue, 315–17; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 15–16, 34–5; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 13, 32–3.


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found in works such as Giles’s De Regimine meant that they could be appealed to by those who sought to maximise royal authority, the critiques of tyranny provided in mirrors for princes, including Giles’s, meant that their rhetoric could also be used to criticise the failure of individual rulers to live up to the monarchical ideal.42 Like most ideology, medieval political theory, including its Aristotelian variants, was rather elastic in nature and so could be adapted for a wide range of different, and even conflicting purposes.43 Thus, whilst the De Regimine was familiar to the supporters of authoritarian kings such as Edward II and Richard II, we also know that copies of Giles’s text were owned by those who opposed them, not least Thomas, duke of Gloucester, uncle to Richard II, whose conflict with the king led to his eventual murder in 1397.44 Trevisa’s translation of the De Regimine was itself produced under the patronage of Sir Thomas Berkeley, an ally of Gloucester and a supporter of Bolingbroke who was actively involved in the deposition of Richard II in 1399.45 Such men were likely to have been sympathetic to Giles’s claim that a ruler who lacks prudence and who does not rule for the common profit is ‘not a verrey kyng’ or a king ‘in dede’ but is only a king ‘by name’ and merely the ‘signe of a kyng’ and so ‘not worthi’ to be a prince (G: 50, 154, 329, 348–9, 377).46 As Isidore of Seville’s much quoted words said: ‘Rex eris, si recte facias: si non facias, non eris’ (‘You will be king if you behave correctly, if not, you will not be’).47 Similarly, for Gratian, a king could not expect others to obey his laws if he was not willing to follow them himself.48 As Bracton put it, there is no true ‘rex’ where the will rules, rather than the ‘lex’.49 As the Chandos Herald said of the overthrow of the ‘proud and ‘scornful King Pedro of Castile who had been deserted 42

Tang, ‘Royal Misdemeanour’, 99–103, 105, 107, 117. Renna, ‘Aristotle’, 324. 44 Kantorowicz, King’s Two Bodies, 136; Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 2, 6, 60–2, 71, 94. 45 Somerset, Clerical Discourse, 74–6; Saul, Richard II, 442–3; Fowler, Life, 115–6; Hanna, ‘Sir Thomas Berkeley’, 888–91; Grassnick, ‘“O Prince”’, 164–5; Record and Process, 169, 185; Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 416, 422, 426–7; Adam Usk, Chronicle, 66. 46 Fowler, John Trevisa, 30; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 283, 292; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 8, VI: 14 (pp. 234, 243); Gower, Tripartite Chronicle, 326; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 209; Valente, Theory, 19. 47 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, IX.III.4; Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia, 184, 194; Schulz, ‘Bracton’, 151–3, 164–5; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 157. See also Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, II, v: 6. 48 Gratian, Treatise, 29. 49 Bracton, Laws, II, 33. 43

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even by his friends and family, ‘anyone who is not loved by his people should not be called lord’. By contrast, the Black Prince won the affections of all his subjects because ‘he did so much good for them’.50 This doctrine could then be used to present the tyrannical ruler as, in effect, a usurper, even if he had originally acceded to the throne by rightful means.51 The author of Richard the Redeless made this point with the help of medieval animal-lore when, ironically, he compared Richard II to the usurping partridge who takes the place of another on the nest, thereby managing to equate his successor, Henry Bolingbroke, who had actually overthrown Richard by force, with the rightful parent to whom the partridge chicks return once they have hatched.52 Accordingly, despite its stress on the virtues of obedience, Giles’s De Regimine did not argue that any amount of tyranny was to be preferred to the evils created by rebellion. Rather, like Aquinas, Giles claimed simply that ‘som tyraundise’ or ‘som what of tyraundise’ may be a lesser evil than that caused by the subject’s disobedience to the ruler (G: 388–9).53 This left it rather open as to just how much tyranny was acceptable in any particular case. Certainly, whilst the ruler himself can make positive law and so, in a sense, is above the law, he is nonetheless still subject to the natural law ordained by God. In turn, for Giles, as for Gratian, in so far as the positive law (i.e., the law of particular communities) embodies the natural law which is valid everywhere (NE:

50 Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 1620–2, 1758–9; Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, 105, 107. See also Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 246. 51 Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, 161, 181–5; Wilks, ‘Chaucer’, 516–8. 52 Richard the Redeless, III: 37–61. Barr sees the partridge analogy as backfiring on its author by associating Bolingbroke with a bird known for being deceitful (Piers Plowman Tradition, ed. Barr, p. 272), but medieval writers distinguished the usurping partridge, who could be equated with the Devil, from the rightful parent-partridge, who could be equated with Christ. On the partridge, see Jeremias, 17:11; Physiologus, 46–7; Bestiary, 151; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 2 (p. 222); Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, 637; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XII, 7: 63; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 124; Keen, Chivalry, 130–1. 53 Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: VI (pp. 29–31). For the Middle English ‘som’ and ‘som what’ of tyranny, Giles’s original Latin text has ‘aliquo’ and ‘aliqualis’ (Giles of Rome, De Regimine Principum, Libri III, 549). Henry de Gauchy’s French translation does not include this phrase (Giles of Rome, Li Livres Du Gouvernement Des Rois, 366). Jehan Wauqelin’s mid-fifteenth-century French translation (for which, see Brown-Grant, French Romance, 189) says that subjects should obey their rulers when they are tyrannical in ‘aulcune chose’ or when they perform ‘aulcune tyrannie’, which accords with Trevisa’s translation (Brussels, Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique, MS 9043, ff.303v–304 (microfilm)). On this issue, see also Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: VI (p. 29).


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V, vii: 1), it can be said to take precedence over the ruler’s will since no-one is a ‘rightful kyng’ unless he obeys the law of ‘kind’ (G: 377–9).54 Giles, unlike Aquinas, Engelbert of Admont, John of Paris, Boccaccio and Nicholas Oresme, did not follow Cicero in explicitly arguing that, if needed, a tyrant could be overthrown or that it was positively virtuous to do so.55 Nevertheless, since tyranny was illegitimate and unnatural (AP: III, 17) he believed that it was unlikely that it would be willingly endured by anyone. When a king is excessively tyrannical he is therefore likely to face the opposition of ‘excellent men and noble’ whom he has sought to destroy. In line with Aristotle (NE: IV, v: 7; AP: V, 10) and Cicero, Giles, like many other medieval political thinkers, therefore concluded that tyranny will always destroy itself as its evil cannot be long endured and inevitably generates resistance: the more tyrannical a ruler is, the shorter his reign will be (G: 25, 117–20, 328–9, 332–8, 340–9).56 As a result, whilst Giles’s views were at the far end of the spectrum from those of Ptolemy of Lucca in the sense that he favoured ‘regal’ rather than ‘political’ lordship, in practice, the two men had much in common in terms of the actual behaviour which they expected of a ruler.57 Both adopted the Aristotelian ideal of the just ruler who ‘constrained his own actions in order to achieve the common good’ and who was not a true lord unless he was virtuous. Such a ruler would govern for the common good rather than his own private gain and would be subject to the natural and positive law. He would seek to involve his subjects in government by circulating office among a wide range of people rather than appointing ministers for life (AP: II, 5; G: 307–8, 311) and by taking counsel from those who were expert and experienced, and who were prepared to speak the truth rather than merely

54 Kempshall, Common Good, 267; Gratian, Treatise, 3–7, 28–9; Henry Bracton, Laws, II, 26–7; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 303. 55 Cicero, On Duties, III: 19, 32 (pp. 107, 111); Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: VI (pp. 31–5); Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, II, v: 7; Wimbledon, Redde Ratione Villicationis Tue, 89–90; Nederman, ‘Opposite’, 190–1, 197; Catto, ‘Ideas’, 13–14, 19; Blythe, Ideal Government, 142–3, 133, 238–9. 56 Cicero, On Duties, II: 23 (p. 71); Wood, Cicero’s Social and Political Thought, 191; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, I: 3; Oresme, De Moneta, 42–8; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 146–7, 152, 184, 225, 239–53; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 144; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3249–64; Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: X (pp. 57–9); Aquinas, Ethics, 808; Adam Usk, Chronicle, 37; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 160 (p. 620); Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 157; Watts, Henry VI, 20. 57 Theilmann, ‘Caught’, 601, 610–11.

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flatter their ruler (G: 351–9).58 Similarly, whilst Giles’s ideal hereditary monarchy was, in constitutional terms, the opposite of the city-states described by Brunetto Latini in which the ruler was chosen by the citizens for a fixed term, the two thinkers were nevertheless in agreement about the conduct and morality which they expected of rulers and their subjects and their works could be found bound together in the same volume, as they were in a manuscript presented to the future Edward III c. 1326. Both, for instance, recommended that the ruler should be firm but merciful and should govern by counsel, and that subjects should revere, honour and obey their lords. It is important that a ruler should be feared by his subjects but it is even more important that he should be loved (G: 390–2).59 Giles therefore made a clear distinction between strong but rightful kingship and the excesses which are typical of illegitimate tyranny. The issue here is whether Theseus’s actions in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ reveal him to be a ‘verrey kyng’ when judged in terms of the moral and political theory set out in the De Regimine or whether they show him to be a vicious and self-interested tyrant. iii. Making a Virtue of Necessity: A Tyrant’s Plea? That Chaucer presents Theseus as a tyrant seems, to many critics, to be made particularly clear by the ‘First Mover’ speech which the duke delivers at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. The detail of the cosmography which the duke sets out in his speech is examined in detail in Chapter Five, below. Here we are more concerned with the practical lessons and political implications which Theseus draws from his philosophical oration and, in particular, with his conclusion that the wise man is one who knows how to ‘maken vertu of necessitee’ (I: 3041–2).60 To many readers, Theseus’s advocacy of the ‘willing acceptance of whatever

58 Blythe, ‘Introduction’, 32; Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, 4:7–8. 59 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 118, 266–7, 352, 362, 371–4; Liber Custumarum, pp. 16, 23–5; Staley, Languages, 35, 94; Cicero, On Duties, II: 23–6 (pp. 70–2); John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV: 8 (p. 40); Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, 318; Gower, Vox Clamantis, V: 14 (p. 243); Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, II, v: 14; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 146; 183; Nederman, ‘Opposite’, 180, 192; Watts, Henry VI 29, 59. 60 For the origins of the phrase ‘to make a virtue of necessity’, see St Jerome, ‘Apology in Answer to Rufinus B.III’, 520. For Chaucer’s other uses of the phrase, see the ‘Squire’s Tale’ (V: 593) and Troilus and Criseyde, IV: 1586.


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vicissitudes life sends’ and the ‘sober acceptance of things as they are’ would seem to be tyrannical in the sense that it brands ‘any protest about anything’ as folly. Any challenge to the existing social and political order would therefore seem to be ‘presented as rebellion, not just against Theseus but against the supreme deity’. Just as Chaucer’s Parson condemns the ‘gruchchyng and murmuracioun’ of those who complain about their poverty and interprets the grumbling of servants against the lawful commands of their sovereign as an evil that ‘spryngeth of impacience agayns God’ (X: 498–508), so Theseus’s speech has been interpreted as teaching that the man that ‘gruccheth’ against anything is guilty of the folly of being a ‘rebel’ against the power that rules all things (I: 3045–6).61 Certainly, from John of Salisbury, through Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt, to Pierre Bourdieu, making a virtue of necessity has been seen as a strategy by which people can reconcile themselves to tyranny and oppression.62 Yet, despite Theseus’s teaching that we should make a virtue of necessity, it would be wrong to see him simply as the advocate of a quietism in the face of tyranny and injustice. In fact, neither the duke’s actions nor his philosophical reasoning imply that nothing in this world can be altered, that tyranny must be uncomplainingly accepted or that humans cannot strive for justice or happiness. After all, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ opens with the duke interrupting the celebration of his own victory over the Amazons in order to overthrow the inhuman, impious and tyrannical Creon, the lord of Thebes (I: 859–1004).63 For Giles of Rome, the unhappy end of Creon, who is killed in ‘pleyn battle’ by Theseus (I: 987–8), would hardly have been surprising. As Giles notes, whilst one virtuous king will not set himself against another and whilst a tyrant is unable to overcome a ‘verrey kyng’, a tyrant who is not overthrown by his own people may still be defeated by another tyrant

61 Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia, 220; Burrow, Ricardian Poetry, 129; Phillips, Introduction, 52; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 191; Neuse, ‘Knight’, 250; Brown and Butcher, Age of Saturn, 232; Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, pp. 203–12; Ingham, ‘Homosocial and Creative Masculinity’, 35; Utz, ‘Philosophy’, 161; Ingham, ‘Psychoanalytical Criticism’, 476. 62 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, III: 10 (p. 184); Shakespeare, King Richard II, I.iii.275–309; Bourdieu, Outline, 77–8. For a critique of Bourdieu, see Scott, Weapons, chapter 8. 63 See also above 62–3. For Creon’s tyranny, see also Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 66.

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or be destroyed by a virtuous ruler.64 However, this still leaves open the question of whether, in defeating the tyrannical Creon, Th eseus himself is simply another rival tyrant or whether Creon is overthrown by the ruler of a good ‘regne’. Is Theseus’s campaign against Creon simply a ploy which, as Giles notes, tyrants often adopt to make sure that potential opponents are employed in fighting abroad or does it indicate that he is a true prince who engages in a ‘just war’ as defined by medieval standards? (G: 342–3, 346–9)? Despite the Sixth Commandment’s prohibition of killing (Exodus 20: 13) and Jesus’s injunction to offer the other cheek to those who strike us (Luke 6: 29), Christian theologians and legists such as Augustine, Gratian and Aquinas been able to develop a doctrine of the just war in which it was licit or even meritorious to kill those who were wicked and unjust, provided that this was done from a desire for justice and with a righteous conscience rather than out of a mere lust for dominance.65 The peacemakers were doubtless blessed, but nonetheless, as Caxton’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Livre des Faits d’Armes et de Chevalerie put it, the scriptures could also be read to show that God was ‘fiers and gouernor of hoostis and bataylles’.66 Of course, writers such as Augustine and Honoré Bonet were well aware of the misery created by warfare and regarded war as a product of human sin and injustice. Yet, since it is even ‘worse that the unjust should lord it over the just’, Augustine was still able to conclude that the victory of the just could be seen as an instance of ‘good fortune’: ‘when victory goes to those who were fighting for the juster cause, can anyone doubt that victory is a matter for rejoicing and the resulting peace something to be desired?’.67 Thus the English writers who saw the victories of Edward III and the Black Prince in the Hundred Years War (or, later, those of Richard II in Ireland) as proof that their cause enjoyed divine approval (whilst their defeats were, of course, the result of ‘Fortune’)

64 See also Oresme, Livre de Politique, 156 (citing Deuteronomy 9: 5 and Ecclesiasticus 10: 8), 239–40. 65 Keen, Laws, 8–9, 66–7; Russell, Just War, 17, 22–4, 57, 67, 215, 217–9, 259–60, 264–5, 273, 275; Contamine, War, 263–7, 282–4; Lowe, Imagining Peace, 14–18, 21, 32; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVIII.I.2–3; Dives and Pauper, Vol. I, Part 2, 54–5. 66 Christine de Pizan, Book of Fayttes of Armes, 9–10; Christine de Pizan, Livre des Faits d’Armes, 7; Dives and Pauper, Vol. I, Part 2, 55. See Isaias 1: 9; Romans 9: 29. 67 Augustine, City of God, I: 21 (p. 32); III: 10 (p. 98); XIV: 28 (p. 593); IV: 15 (p. 154); V: 12–21 (pp. 196–216); XV: 4 (pp. 599–600); XVIII: 22 (p. 787); XIX: 15 (p. 875); Bonet, Tree of Battles, 79, 81–2, 125; Wright, ‘Tree of Battles’, 14–16.


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also took it for granted that these triumphs was achieved by pillaging, killing and burning towns down to the ground and were accompanied by stripping the bodies of the dead who were left in heaps after battle, such unprecedented destruction being ‘well and honourably done’.68 In literature too, it was simply assumed that the campaigns of virtuous heroes, such as King Arthur’s conquest of Norway, would be accompanied by great destruction, with towns burnt, houses plundered and multitudes slain.69 For those who see Chaucer’s crusading Knight as an estate ideal, the Knight’s own campaigns can be seen as being legitimate in terms of medieval notions of the just war. As Chaucer’s contemporary, Philippe de Mézières argued, rather than shedding the blood of their fellow Christians, Christian rulers and knights should ‘turn their weapons against the enemies of the Faith’ who were to be found in the Baltic and in the Holy Land.70 In this tradition, violence was regularly justified by the commonplace that war was a means of securing a just peace. As Giles argued, following Aristotle (AP: VII, 14), Cicero and Augustine, ‘we werryeth not to haue werre but for to haue pees’ (G: 439).71 As Geoffrey Baker said of the Black Prince’s 1355 campaign in south-west France, his troops pillaged and burned the enemy’s territory, thereby ‘doing everything that would bring the country to the king’s peace’.72 Such a ‘just war’ came to be seen as legitimate not merely in the narrow sense that it was waged in self-defence (as was allowed by natural law) or that it allowed the recovery of lost goods or rights but also because it constituted a more general punishment for wickedness and sin. As Aquinas said, the just war was one which had a just cause (‘those whom we attack must have

68 Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, 14–23, 28–9, 33–4, 39–40, 44, 51–9, 62–3, 70, 77, 81; Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 167–75, 220–4, 236–9. 494–8, 511–4, 645–56; Anglo-Norman Letters, 202–3, 207–8. See also Offler, Church, 6–7. 69 Wace, Roman de Brut, 8905–62; Stanzaic Morte Arthur, 9–16; Alliterative Morte Arthure, 9–53, 3150–75. 70 Simonie, 241–51; Philippe de Mézières, Letter to King Richard II, 14–15, 28–35, 70–1; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 17, 229, 284; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 126–8; Russell, Just War, 35–9, 51, 76, 94–5, 112–15, 124, 195–201, 205–6, 253–6, 284–5; Porter, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’. 71 Cicero, On Duties, I: 35 (pp. 14–15); Augustine, City of God, XIX: 12 (p. 866); Keen, Laws, 8; Russell, Just War, 16, 60, 220, 260–1, 264, 266; Lowe, Imagining Peace, 16, 21, 23; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 167, 173, 234; Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 56; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 282; Gower, In Praise of Peace, 64–84; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3594–626; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 9 (p. 236); VI: 13 (p. 243). 72 Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, 62. See also ibid., 38.

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done something wrong which deserves attack’), and which was carried out with a just intention (‘to promote good and avoid evil’).73 Writers such as Giles of Rome recast traditional notions of the just war into Aristotelian terms in which wars were seen as rightful when they were engaged in for the ‘comyn profyt’. Such wars in which blood could be rightfully shed included those fought for the defence of the realm or those in which a true king ‘riseth agenst a tyrant’. As John of Naples said, whilst pagans were wicked ‘with respect to their faith’, they could still be morally good so that even unbelievers could fight a just war.74 For Giles, as for Honoré Bonet, war was like the letting of blood in medicine: regrettable but sometimes a necessity if the ‘comune profit and pees’ of the realm were to be maintained (G: 263, 342, 348, 359, 396–7, 401, 439).75 Even Gower, whose Confessio Amantis attacked war as against the law of nature and of charity, was prepared to accept that ‘war in defence of oneself, or of the weak and helpless, may be justified’.76 One problem here was, as Christine de Pizan pointed out, that in war both sides tend to claim that their own cause is just. In practice, then, the key issue in deciding whether a war was to be seen as just or not was often whether it had been waged on valid authority, i.e., that of some lawful public power, namely of the Church or a sovereign prince, rather than merely being an act of private vengeance.77 If, as legists such as John of Legnano and Baldus de Ubaldis said, just wars are legitimate but unjust wars are unnatural and so ‘are not really wars at all’, does Duke Theseus’s campaign against Creon of Thebes meet the medieval requirements of a just war?78 Theseus’s war against Thebes is certainly valid in the legal sense of having been declared by a ruler with the authority to do so, since he is the sovereign 73 Russell, Just War, 5, 18, 25–6, 97–8, 137, 220, 257, 264–5, 268–9; Barnes, ‘Just War’, 774–7; Gratian, Treatise, 7; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 367; Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, 159–60; Dives and Pauper, Vol. I, Part 2, 54–5. 74 Lowe, Imagining Peace, 31–2; John of Naples, Should a Christian King, 336, 345–6. 75 Russell, Just War, 19–20, 264–6, 273, 275; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 125, 154. 76 Gower, Confessio Amantis, III: 2251–66; Saul, ‘Farewell’, 134. 77 Keen, Laws, 7–22, 64–71, 83–4; Keen,’Treason Trials’, 96–7; Vale, War, 27; Russell, Just War, 18, 22, 26, 45–6, 49–50, 63–4, 68–9, 87–9, 91–2, 100–1, 128, 138–40, 143, 145, 222–3, 259, 293; Barnes, ‘Just War’, 775–6; Wright, ‘Tree of Battles’, 15–16; Watts, Henry VI, 37; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 367; John of Naples, Should a Christian King, 335; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 128–9, 149; Christine de Pizan, Book of Fayttes of Armes, 10–11, 191, 200; Christine de Pizan, Livre des Faits d’Armes, 8, 132, 140. 78 Keen, Laws, 8–9, 66–7; Russell, Just War, 165. For Theseus’s war against the Amazons, see below, 000.


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prince of Athens, its ‘lord and governour’ (I: 861) or ‘rex Athenarum’ as Laurent de Premierfait’s compendium of the Thebaid calls him.79 However, Theseus’s war also seems to be a just one, at least when judged by medieval standards, in terms of its causes and intentions with his attack on Creon being launched in response to the plea for ‘mercy’ (I: 950) from the widows of those killed by Creon.80 In the De Regimine, Giles quotes Hippodamus to the effect that the good ruler will defend the rights of ‘orphans’ but glosses this as meaning ‘alle persones vnmyghty that myghte not by hemself meyntene here owne right’ (G: 317). Following Isaias I: 17 and Jeremias 7: 6, widows had long been used alongside orphans to symbolise the powerless whom the good knight and the just ruler should defend.81 For Gower, as for many others, ‘if a tyrant takes away the rights of a maiden or widow, then a knight must give them aid’, and it was this aspect of Theseus’s rule which was to be emphasised in Lydgate’s Fall of Princes.82 As Giles put it in De Ecclesiastica Potestate, the good king will use his civil might to be ‘the comforter of those who mourned’ (Job 29: 25) and so will inflict bodily punishment ‘upon those who injure others and who bring sorrow to others’ (OEG: 43).83 It is just this comfort to those who mourn which Chaucer’s Theseus, even at the moment of his triumphal return to Athens after his victory over the Amazons, offers to the widows to whom Creon has brought sorrow, asking who has injured them and enquiring how their distress ‘may been amended’ (I: 909–10). Chaucer here follows Statius in showing Theseus as being moved to pity by the widows’ tears.84 It is the plight of the Greek widows which is the main focus of the illuminations in a lavishly-illustrated, late fourteenth-century manuscript of the Thebaid, 79 British Library, MS Burney 257, f. 4v. The text of the compendium is also given in Bozzolo and Jeudy, ‘Stace et Laurent de Premierfait’. Premierfait also refers to Theseus as the ‘roy de Athenes’ in his De Cas de Nobles Hommes et Femmes (p. 40). Similarly, the Knight’s Tale refers to Theseus’s ‘court roial’ (I: 1497). 80 Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinance”, 196–7. 81 See, for instance, De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi, 51; Jonas of Orelans, De Institutione Regia, 188, 214; Gratian, Decretum, 1224–5. 82 Duby, Three Orders, 95, 182, 348–9; Lull, Book of the Ordre of Chyvalry, 38–41; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VI: 18 (p. 317); Gower, Mirour de l’Omme: 23593–604; Gower, Vox Clamantis, V: 1, VI: 10 (pp. 196, 237); Latini, Book of the Treasure, 361, 375; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 235; Keen, Chivalry, 9, 109, 157; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 75; Christine de Pizan, Book of Fayttes of Armes, 11–12; Christine de Pizan, Livre des Faits d’Armes, 8–9. 83 Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia, 200. 84 Statius, Thebaid, XII: 587–9.

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now preserved in the British Library, with seven of the ten illustrations to Book XII depicting the widows, including one of them pleading to Theseus for help at the Temple of Clemency.85 However, Theseus not only sympathises with the widows but also, as Seneca had taught, seeks to come to their aid and to ameliorate their suffering by bringing justice to them.86 Indeed, Chaucer’s description of the duke magnanimously dismounting in order to console and promise remedy to the widows who entreat him for justice (I: 952–3) (as opposed to Boccaccio’s Teseo who remains in his chariot) has strong parallels with the familiar story of the Emperor Trajan who, as he was about to set off for war, dismounted to provide justice to a widow whose son had been murdered, in reward for which the pagan emperor was uniquely, with the help of Pope Gregory’s intercession, released from the pains of hell.87 Accordingly, whilst, as Brunetto Latini pointed out, propaganda about the ‘crimes of the enemy’ is always (as it still is today) one of the standard preparations for war which any ruler has to employ, Creon’s crimes within the diegesis of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ do seem real enough.88 That Creon should be seen as a ‘tiraunt’ (I: 961) is certainly made evident from the cruelty which motivates his treatment of his defeated enemies, a pleasure in domination being one of the classic hallmarks of the tyrant.89 ‘Fulfild of ire and iniquitee’ and ‘for despite and for his tirannye’, Creon has done ‘vileyne’ to his enemies’ bodies, refusing their widows the right to bury or cremate them and instead piling them into a heap where ‘houndes ete hem in despit’ (I: 940–7). For Statius, Creon was cruel and bloodthirsty in his offence, one which was against ‘human law’, Nature and the gods, since, according to ancient beliefs, his refusal to allow the bodies to be cremated barred their souls from entering the next world.90 Boccaccio’s Teseida enlarges on this point, claiming that the ancients believed that the souls of the dead went first to hell then,

85

British Library MS Burney 257, ff.192v–210. This manuscript is discussed in C. Bozzolo and Jeudy, ‘Stace et Laurent de Premierfait’. 86 Nolan, Chaucer, 266, 269; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 257. 87 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 57–61; Boccacio, Teseida, 55–61; Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 172–3; John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, 106–7; Dante, Purgatorio, X; 73–96; Minnis, Chaucer, 123–4. For a survey of this subject, see Whatley, ‘Uses’. 88 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 378. 89 Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 279. 90 Statius, Thebaid, XII: 165–6, 545–645. Statius was believed in the Middle Ages to have converted to Christianity before he had written the Thebaid (Dante, Purgatorio, XXI: 82–102, XXII: 73–93). See also Coleman, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 91; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 144–5.


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having been purged by punishment, proceeded to ‘a delightful place called Elysium’ before eventually returning to this world. No soul was allowed to begin this progress ‘until the body from which it came forth had been buried’ which meant that the relatives and friends of the deceased ‘were anxious to bury the bodies of those who died’.91 Even medieval Christians, for whom, strictly speaking, the lack of a funeral had no impact on the fate of the soul of the departed, saw the denial of the right to burial as an act of cruelty (Psalms 78: 2–3) and listed burial of the dead as one of the seven corporal acts of mercy.92 Funerals may be for the benefit of the living rather than of the dead but, as Augustine said, the bodies of the dead should not be ‘scorned and cast away’. A decent funeral is a sign of familial loyalty and love on the part of those who remain: ‘Hence the burials of the righteous men of antiquity were performed as acts of loyal devotion’.93 For this reason, Lydgate was to follow Boccaccio in presenting Creon’s refusal to allow the bodies of his enemies to be buried as a sign of his iniquity and tyranny.94 Similarly, in the introductory compendium and concluding summary which he added to Statius’s Thebaid, Laurent de Premierfait referred to the ‘impiety’ and ‘inhumanity’ of the usurper Creon in prohibiting funeral rites to be held for the Greek noblemen whom he had killed in battle.95 The immorality of Creon’s refusal of proper burial to the dead is also emphasised by its contrast with the elaborate funeral which Theseus provides to honour the memory of Arcite at the end of the ‘Knight’s Tale’.96 It would therefore seem that, in presenting Theseus as providing justice and mercy to the Argive widows, Chaucer stood in a long tradition,

91 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 74–5; Boccaccio, Teseida, 381. See also Statius, Thebaid, XII: 558–61. 92 For the seven corporal acts of mercy (Matthew, 25: 35–6 and Tobias, 12: 12), see Duffy, Stripping, 63–4, 357–66. For concern about the lack of decent burials because of the high mortality of the Black Death, see The Black Death, ed. Horrox, 70, 74; for funeral ritual in late medieval England, see Dinn, ‘Death’. For the increasingly elaborate ceremony of funerals and burial in the later middle ages, see Vovelle, La Mort, 147–54. 93 Augustine, City of God, I: 12–13 (pp. 21–3). See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 231. 94 Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, ix: 6; Lydgate, Siege of Thebes, 4493–4; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 75, 122. For Laurent de Premierfait, too, Creon was a usurper who was guilty of excessive pride (De Cas Des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 148). 95 British Library MS Burney 257, ff.1–4v (Laurent’s compendium); XII); ff.210v–22 (Laurent’s summary). On Creon’s ‘inhumanity’, see also Statius, Thebaid, XII: 165–6. 96 Smarr, ‘Teseida’, 30.

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from antiquity to the later middle ages, in which, as Boccaccio said in the Teseida, the duke was seen as ‘a very famous avenger of any wrong in behalf of anyone who appealed to him’.97 Far from being an advocate of passivity in the face of tyranny, Theseus’s heroic labours, for which the Ovide Moralisé describes him as worthy, gentle, noble and valiant, were seen as having overcome cruelty and oppression, as when his victory over the Minotaur freed Athens from the ‘yoke’ of King Minos’s cruel tribute.98 Similarly, Ovid, Statius and the Ovide Moralisé all refer to Theseus’s defeat of Sinis the robber, who turned his great strength ‘to evil uses’ by bending down pine trees to use as catapults to as to ‘shoot men’s bodies far out through the air’, an act of cruelty which, as the glosses to a thirteenth-century manuscript of the Thebaid explains, meant that ‘he was a tyrant’.99 Whilst modern readers may be tempted to see Theseus’s conquest of Thebes as a ‘war of imperialist expansion’, medieval thinkers could be more sympathetic to the idea that legitimate rulers ‘by right and the vocation of their function’ were entitled to ‘put down the impudence of tyrants who tear all the earth asunder in warfare or take pleasure in pillaging and ravaging the poor’.100 As Lydgate admiringly said of Theseus, echoing the words of Chaucer’s Knight (I: 862–3), he excelled all others in his conquests.101 Finally, that the doctrine of making a virtue of necessity which Theseus propounds in his ‘First Mover’ speech does not entail a fatalistic passivity and that the duke believes that humans can actively use their agency to seek happiness can be seen from the practical consequences which Theseus himself actually draws from his speech. After all, although the duke has argued that we have to make a ‘virtue of necessity’ in coming to terms with the death of Arcite, he then goes on to propose that Emily and Palamon should marry so that ‘wher moost sorwe is herinne/ Ther wol we first amenden and bigynne’ (I: 3073–4). Hence, the fact that not everything in the world can be changed by human action (e.g., 97

Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 73; Boccaccio, Teseida, 379. See also Plutarch, Lives,

I, 85. 98 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII: 404–52; VIII: 169–71, 262–3; John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, 305–6; Ovide Moralisé, VII: 1681–91; Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, vii: 8; II, x: 5; Laurent de Premierfait, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 128–9; Christine de Pizan, Mutacion de Fortune, 13389–456; Hoffman, Ovid, 40–1, 50. 99 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII: 440–3; Statius, Thebaid, XII: 576; Ovide Moralisé, VII: 1708–12; British Library, MS Burney 258, f. 108. 100 Aers, Chaucer, 25, 29–32; Duby, Three Orders, 228–9. 101 Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 119, 121.


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the inevitability of death) does not lead Theseus to claim that nothing in the world can ever be altered or that one must accept all things as they are, a philosophical error for which John of Salisbury criticised the Stoic thinkers whose moral teachings he otherwise so admired.102 Like Boccaccio’s Teseo, who argues that one should make a virtue of necessity ‘when one must’, Chaucer’s duke does not teach that we must accept everything as it is but simply argues that we must ‘take well’ those things which ‘we may nat eschue’ (I: 3041–6).103 Sometimes, as in the case of the inevitability of death, reality cannot be altered. As The Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge (or Ars Moriendi) said, since God has willed that we must die, we must use our reason to accept this fate ‘withoute any grutcheinge or contradiction’, thus heeding the words of the wise Seneca: ‘Blame thou not that thou maiste not chaunge’.104 Neverthless, reality can be sometimes be changed for the better, as Theseus shows by his overthrow of the tyrannical Creon or by his arrangement of the marriage of Palamon and Emily. Far from lapsing into passivity, the duke’s use of the Boethian idea of ‘conditional necessity’ allows him an emphasis on free will and human action in response to woe which provides a contrast to the fatalism which, as Minnis has argued, Chaucer often presents as the characteristic outlook of his pagans.105 For many modern readers, the duke’s philosophy of making a ‘virtue of necessity’ has seemed to be a counsel of despair. In fact, in the context of bringing an end to the mourning for Arcite and of securing the ‘blisse’ of the marriage of Emily and Palamon, the duke’s advice was intended as a counsel of hope, one which, in comforting the grief of others, was in line with Giles’s advice to the ruler on how to avoid a paralysing excess of sorrow on the part of his subjects (G: 131–2). iv. Counsel and Obedience That Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech by no means implies that he is a tyrant is suggested not just by its content but also by the context in it is delivered, namely in a ‘parlement’ (a detail which does not appear 102 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 21, VII: 1 (pp. 105, 218). See also Boethius, Consolation, I, pr. 3; Fulgentius, On the Ages of the World, 142. 103 Boccaccio, Teseida, 344; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 315. 104 The Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge, f. 126. 105 Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 79–80; Minnis, Chaucer, Antiquity, 128; Olsson, ‘Securitas’, 138; Elbow, Oppositions, 115; Chadwick, Boethius, 245.

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in Boccaccio’s Teseida) which the duke has summoned to discuss ‘certein pointz and caas’ (I: 2970–1).106 These issues include the alliances between Athens and ‘certein contrees’ (as Giles said, a city can better withstand its enemies when it enters into confederation with others (G: 295)) and how to create a permanent peace between Athens and Thebes by securing the obedience of the latter (I: 2972–4, 3076).107 For Giles a willingness to take counsel from others was an instance of the prudence needed by a ruler. A ruler is unwise ‘that tristeth al to his owne witt’, because many men know more things and can call on a wider range of experience than a single individual (G: 52–3, 124, 354–5, 357).108 The need for counsel on the part of a ruler, had, of course, long been a truism of medieval political theory. As early as the seventh century, the De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi had urged the ruler ‘to have experienced, wise, and prudent advisors’ whilst texts such as Jacobus de Cessolis’s Game of Chess, saw an unwillingness to be reproved by others as the classic failing of tyrants such as Nero and Nebuchadnezzar.109 As John of Salisbury had put it, ‘it is impossible to administer princely power wholesomely if the prince does not act on the counsel of wise men’.110 In imaginative literature too, as in Middle English romance, a willingness to receive and act upon good counsel and an ability to impart it to others was a touchstone of the virtue, competence and maturity of the knight and the ruler.111 Since a refusal to take counsel was one of the features which distinguished a wilful tyrant from a rightful ruler, it was inevitable that Richard II would be accused of this failing when he was deposed in 1399. The Articles of Deposition accuse the king of subverting the authority of his parliament, of ruling by his own arbitrary will and foolish desires, 106

Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 313; Boccaccio, Teseida, 343. Chaucer himself was knight of the shire for Kent in the ‘Wonderful Parliament’ of 1386 (Olson and Crow, Chaucer Life-Records, 364–9; Roskell, House of Commons, II, 522–3; Pearsall, Life, 201–5). 108 See also Quillet, ‘Community’, 545–6; Watts, Henry VI, 25–8, 61, 77. 109 De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi, 51; Bumke, Courtly Culture, 278; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, I: 1, 3; IV: 8; Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 4, 215, 337; Blythe, Ideal Government, 70–1, 185; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 157. 110 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, V: 6 (p. 85). See also Brunetto Latini, Book of the Treasure, 367–8, 372–3; Bracton, Laws, II: 19, 21 Fleta, II, 2; Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 35; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 209; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 138–9; Oresme, Livres de Politiques, 135, 193–5; Christine de Pizan, Corps de Policie, 16, 34–7; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 18, 35–7. 111 Barnes, Counsel, ix–xi, 9–10, 13–15, 29, 42, 49, 53, 58–9, 62, 64, 72, 81, 90. See also Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3887–90; Alliterative Morte Arthure, 144–9, 415–7. 107


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and of ‘sharply and violently’ rebuking his lords and justices who, as Giles had advised, sought to say what they saw as the truth rather than merely what would please the king.112 Other critics, such as Gower and the author of Richard the Redeless, attacked the king for being guided by immature ‘fools’ rather than by the ‘principles of older men’, an echo of the Old Testament story of Roboam (2 Paralipomenon 10: 1–19), who was overthrown as a result of attending to the advice of the young and the pleasure-loving rather than to that of sober, ancient counsellors.113 As Jacobus de Cessolis said, the wisdom of the young is uncertain: the Emperor Alexander conquered more lands ‘by the counceyl of olde men than by the strengthe of the yong men’.114 By contrast, just as Giles of Rome advises princes to pay particular attention to the advice of the ‘eldeste wise barons that loueth the regne’, and lists war and peace as one of the five main issues on which a ruler should take counsel (G: 53, 359), so Theseus’s foreign policy is arrived at with the help of ‘al the conseil and the baronage’ (I: 3096). As when he listened to the pleas of the women of the court for mercy for Palamon and Arcite (above, 141–5) and to the consoling words of the elderly Egeus (I: 2837–52), the duke shows himself willing to listen to the advice of others. As Prudence advises in the ‘Tale of Melibee’, ‘Werk alle thy thynges by conseil, and thou shalt never repente’ (VII: 1002; Ecclesiasticus 32: 24).115 As Wallace says, in Chaucer’s work, the man who enjoys power often faces the socially destructive temptation to ‘stand alone, to try and work out everything for himself’.116 Yet, in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Theseus is able to resist this urge, displaying instead the willingness to be guided by good counsel which Chaucer’s Parson saw as part of the virtue of humility (X: 482). If Theseus’s readiness to seek counsel from his leading subjects can be read as a sign of his willingness to adopt virtuous means as a ruler, does his end of achieving the complete ‘obeisaunce’ of the Thebans (I: 2974), which is his purpose in summoning his parliament, suggest that his statecraft should be seen in a more negative light? Understandably,

112 Rigby, ‘Society and Politics’, 44–6; Record and Process, articles 8, 16, 20, 23, 28 (pp. 175, 177–9, 181); Saul, Richard II, 441. See also Gower, Tripartite Chronicle, 312–3. 113 Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 7 (p. 222); Gower, Tripartite Chronicle, 290–1; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 4027–146; Richard the Redeless, III: 254–62; Wimbledon, Redde Ratione Villicationis Tue, 327–41; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 329. 114 Jacobus de Cessolis, The Game of Chess, II: 4. 115 See also Chaucer’s ‘Miller’s Tale’ (I: 3530) and ‘Merchants’ Tale’ (IV: 1485–6). 116 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 109.

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modern readers are likely to be suspicious of obedience as an aim of political policy particularly when, as in Theseus’s case, it is of such obvious pragmatic advantage to the ruler who proclaims the need for it.117 By contrast, medieval political theorists, not least Giles of Rome himself, tended to present obedience in positive terms as an aspect of virtue and, in particular, of the virtue of justice.118 It is through obedience to the king and his laws that the city or realm is made safe (OR: 1: 4: 12). Such obedience is not a form of slavery but rather of freedom because, as Homer, Aristotle and Augustine were agreed, true slavery is when a man submits to his own lower, bestial nature: just as the soul rules the body so the king and his laws should rule the realm (AP: IV, 4; V, 9; G: 331, 387–90).119 Predictably, in support of his view that superior powers, whether of secular rulers or spiritual prelates, should be obeyed willingly, Giles appealed to Romans 13: 1 which, with its claim that each man should be ‘subject to the higher powers’, was one of the central biblical texts within medieval political theory (OEG: 13).120 Even in Brunetto Latini’s ideal city-state, where the ruler was chosen by the citizens, the citizens were still expected to be ‘firm and obedient’ to his commandments and to be ‘amiable and obedient towards their lord’.121 Following Cicero, writers such as Ambrose, Augustine, Isidore of Seville, ‘Bracton’, Robert of Basevorn and Thomas Hoccleve, as well as Giles of Rome himself, all defined the just man as ‘he who renders to everyone his due’, whether it is to his superior, equal or inferior (OEG: 139).122 But if justice meant that each man should receive his due, it followed, as Aquinas, the Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, Bishop Brinton, Hoccleve and Giles were all agreed, that justice (or, more precisely, justice ‘distributiua’) required that whilst rulers should care for those beneath them, subjects should

117

Aers, Chaucer, 29–30; Ferster, Chaucer, 35; Brown and Butcher, Age of Saturn,

233. 118

Blythe, Ideal Government, 48, 83–4; Aquinas, Ethics, 225. Augustine, City of God, IV: 3 (p. 139). See also Gower, Confessio Amantis, Pro. 101–10, 1053–75. 120 See, for instance, Carlyle, History, I, 89–90; McIlwain, Growth, 151–2; Markus, ‘Latin Fathers’, 100; Jonas of Orelans, De Instiutiune Regia, 222; Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1140. 121 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 118, 362. 122 Cicero, De Officiis, I: 15, 17, 20; Guenée, States, 41; Augustine, City of God, God XIX: 2 (p. 882); Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, II.24.6; Bracton, Laws, II, 23–7; Basevorn Form of Preaching, XXXIX; Hoccleve, Regiment, 2465–71. 119


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‘give reverence and obedience to men of higher rank’ (G: 58–60, 387).123 Like all ideologies, Giles’s social and political theory worked by invoking a series of positive but indeterminate abstractions and then investing these terms with a particular, loaded social content so that, in this case, justice and freedom came to mean subordination and obedience. More generally, obedience could be equated with peace, as it was by Augustine who defined whom peace as the ‘ordered agreement’ which results from the subordination of the lower to the higher, as when wives obey the orders given to them by their husbands, children obey their parents, and servants obey their masters, such orders being given not out of a ‘lust for domination but from a dutiful concern for the interests of others’. Earthly peace should therefore be modelled on the ‘true peace’ of Heaven in which ‘no inferior will feel envy of his superior’ so that, ‘although one will have a gift inferior to another, he will also have the compensatory gift of contentment with what he has’. Here, ‘both those put in authority and those subject to them serve one another in love, the rulers by their counsel, the subjects by obedience’.124 As the chancellor said in addressing parliament in 1383, obedience to the king and his ministers was the basis of all ‘peace and tranquillity’ in the realm.125 Moreover, whilst the subordination of Thebes to Athens is undoubtedly useful to Theseus in pursuit of his foreign policy, such pragmatic gain was by no means seen as being at odds with achievement of virtue. Rather, as we have seen, the mastery of Thebes by Athens is equated with the rightful victory of vice over virtue, reason over passion, and the superior over the inferior (see above, 112–15). A similar combination of morality and political advantage can be seen in King Arthur’s conquest of Norway in Wace’s Roman de Brut by which the king not only virtuously overthrows the usurper, Riculf, on behalf of the rightful heir, his brother-in-law Loth, but also gives his kinsman the throne on condition that he ‘held it from him and acknowledged him as overlord’.126 For John Lydgate, Theseus’s rule also combined

123 Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia, 222–2; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 416; Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, 58; Brinton, Sermons, II, 458; Hoccleve, Regiment, 2468–2471; De Quadripartita, 35; Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 3; Toste, ‘Virtue’, 91–3. For justice ‘distributiua’, see above, 40–1. 124 Augustine, City of God, XIV: 28 (p. 593); XIX: 14 (pp. 873–4); XXII: 30 (p. 1088); Markus, ‘Two Views’, 70. 125 Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 150. See also ibid., 347. 126 Wace, Roman de Brut, 9805–52.

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virtue with practical benefit, his wisdom and prudence bringing peace and accord to the divided city of Athens so that it became famous not only for its ‘wisdam’ but also for the abundance and riches which accompanied Theseus’s conquests and which medieval writers commonly presented as the reward for good government.127 Similarly, in the world of Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’, it is Theseus who makes peace where there is hate by reconciling Athens and Scythia, Palamon and Arcite, and Thebes and Athens, who provides justice to the widows oppressed by Creon at the start of the tale, and who brings together Palamon and Emily in marriage at its end. v. Theseus the Vainglorious? Perhaps the episode in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ where Theseus’s behaviour does most seem to resemble that of a tyrant is that prior to the tournament between Palamon and Arcite in which the duke appears before his subjects ‘at a wyndow set/Arrayed right as he were a god in trone’ (I: 2528–9). This passage does not appear in Boccaccio’s Teseida and so critics have been tempted to see Theseus’s apparent vainglory in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as a sign that Chaucer is presenting the duke as a tyrant who rules for his own personal glory rather than for the good of his people.128 Jones, for instance, regards the manner in which Theseus presents himself to his subjects as one of a series of references in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ by which Chaucer links Theseus with the tyrants of the contemporary Italian city-states.129 In particular, the duke’s god-like appearance ‘at a wyndow’ seems to resemble the behaviour of the usurper Giovanni dell’Agnello, Doge of Pisa, of whom Matteo Villani said ‘never was a ruler more odious or overbearing’. As Theseus does, Giovanni ‘placed himself at the window’ of his palace ‘where the people could see him as if he were some sacred relic’, arrayed in cloth of gold and requiring all to kneel before him as though he were the pope or emperor.130

127 Laurent de Premierfait, De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 147; Fleta, II, 2; Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 118–9, 121–2; Rigby, ‘Urban “Oligarchy”’, 64–5. 128 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 169; Boccaccio, Teseida, 183; Neuse, ‘Knight’, 252; Aers, Chaucer, 28, 32. 129 Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, 190–217. 130 Jones, Chaucer’s Knight, 211–12; Trease, Condottieri, 73.


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Undoubtedly, medieval writers such as Brunetto Latini did routinely criticise the foolishness of the ‘vainglorious’ and ‘arrogant’ man who glorifies himself with ‘beautiful clothes and other showy things’ and who is ‘accompanied by great fanfare by which he will be exalted’.131 Whereas texts such as Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes advised virtuous rulers to be ‘debonair’ (i.e., pleasant and courteous) rather than disdainful in order to win their subjects’ love, the sin of vainglory and loving adulation was regarded as a typical failing of the tyrant.132 It was certainly a fault for which Richard II was to be criticised by his opponents, as when the ‘Articles of Deposition’ accused him of dissipating his wealth ‘upon the ostentation, pomp and vainglory of his own person’.133 Above all, medieval preachers attacked pagan rulers such as Gaius, the emperor of Rome, for whom it was not enough to be ‘lorde over all men’ but who also demanded to be ‘worshipped as a god’ and whose presumption, even when ‘he was moste in ys pride’, was inevitably punished by death.134 Yet, despite such attacks on the vainglory of rulers, Chaucer’s explicit description of Theseus’s god-like appearance before his subjects is by no means open only to a negative interpretation. We have already discussed this issue in general terms when considering Theseus and the virtue of magnificence which was expected of a ruler (see above, 47–58). More specifically, just as Christ could be described as a victorious conqueror, king and general or God depicted as the ruler within the ‘palace of the universe’, so, in turn, earthly rulers could be described as being god-like in their pre-eminence.135 As Caxton’s translation of Ramon Lull’s Book of the Order of Chivalry put it, just as God, the ‘lord and souerayne kynge aboue’, has lordship over all heavenly and earthly things, so kings, princes and great lords ‘have puyssaunce and seygnorye vpon the knyghtes’ who, in turn, ‘haue power and dominacion ouer the moyen peple’.136 As the Secretum Secretorum said, in being wise,

131

Latini, Book of the Treasure, 164; Aquinas, Ethics, 789. Lydgate, Siege of Thebes, 244–82; Oresme, Livre de Politques, 246, 299–300. See also Ainsworth, ‘Froissardian Perspectives’, 62 and above, 000. 133 Eulogium, III, 378 (for a translation, see English Historical Documents, IV, 172–3); Record and Process, article 15 (p. 177). 134 Owst, Literature, 150. 135 Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae, 29, 81–2, 172; Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 4 (pp. 144–5); Watts, Henry VI, 19. 136 Lull, Book of the Ordre of Chyualry, 1–2. 132

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just and merciful, a king could be seen as ‘god-like’.137 Similarly, John of Salisbury claimed that an attack on the head of state was close to sacrilege because the prince has ‘the likeness of deity upon earth’ whilst John of Wales argued that the prince should be more virtuous than other men because he was ‘vicarius et ymago dei in terris’.138 In Caxton’s translation of Jacobus de Cessolis’s Game of Chess, the king within his realm ‘representeth God’ whilst Bracton argued that, in dispensing justice, the king, and even lesser justices partook ‘in the nature of God himself’ and were thus sitting ‘in throno dei’.139 Even the author of God Save the King and Keep the Crown! (1413), who stressed how the king and the commons were mutually dependent on each other, could still claim that since God had given the king the power to punish wrongdoers so ‘As a god, in erthe a kyng hath myght’: ‘Eche a kyng hath goddis power,/Of lyfe and leme to saue and spille’.140 Giles of Rome himself presented the ruler, as head of the realm, as having ‘the liknesse of God’ who is ruler of all. In him, ‘Goddis good is forsympelliche represented in oon singuler persone’ and it is therefore rightful that he should be magnificent so as to receive the reverence and worship which belong to him, his family and household (G: 81, 83).141 If, for Hoccleve, ‘a kyng, by way of his office,/To God ylikened is’ then kings were most ‘lyk to God’ when they were being merciful. This is, of course, Theseus’s purpose in appearing before his subjects to proclaim that the tournament between Palamon and Arcite should not be a ‘mortal bataille’ (I: 2537–60).142 As we have seen, in terms of the parallels which the ‘Knight’s Tale’ sets up between the gods and its human characters, when the duke appears before his subjects like ‘a god in trone’, he is being equated with Jupiter and with the justice which should rule the will.143 Rather than being a criticism of Theseus, the allegorical parallel made between him and Jupiter actually redounds, in this context at least, to the duke’s credit.144 Indeed, medieval kings 137

Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 123–4, 224; Aquinas, Ethics, 169, 220. John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, VI: 25, 26, VIII: 17 (pp. 259, 267, 336); Swanson, John of Wales, 88; Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 103; Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, XIII: 67; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 153. 139 Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, XIII: 67–8; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 1; Bracton, Laws, II, 20–1, 33. 140 God Save the King, 89–90, 105–6, 138–44. 141 Scanlon, Narrative, 108, 110. 142 Hoccleve, Regiment, 2409–10, 3368–70; Kean, Chaucer, II, 35. 143 See above, 000. 144 North, Chaucer’s Universe, 414, 420; see also above, 109–10. 138


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had long been presented, quite unremarkably and with no sense of blasphemous presumption, as ‘types’ of Christ the King (Majestas Domini), who was represented as seated on a throne holding an orb, sceptre or sword to symbolise his supreme power. Richard II was depicted in this way in his Westminster Abbey portrait.145 In 1392, on the occasion of the king’s reconciliation with London, the capital was equated with the heavenly Jerusalem, with Richard II cast as a Christ-king whose arrival in the city was marked by the Great Conduit miraculously running with wine instead of water.146 Whilst Christian theologians and clerics, such as Augustine and the preacher who attacked the deification of Emperor Gaius, could certainly have criticised Duke Theseus had he himself claimed to be a god, this does not necessarily mean that he is being criticised in the context of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ when he appears before his subjects arrayed like a god.147 Indeed, in its commentary on Statius’s Thebaid, the Super Thebaiden, explicitly equates Theseus (‘theos suus’) with God who, coming to the aid of the widows (i.e., ‘human feelings’), defeats Creon, who represents the vice of pride.148 Finally, if Chaucer’s depiction of the god-like Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ should be read as cuing a negative response to him on the part of the reader, we might expect, in terms of both medieval political theory and literary convention, the duke’s pride to be punished in the course of the tale’s narrative. Certainly, for medieval political theorists such as Giles of Rome, the rule of the tyrant could not endure for long. Yet, unlike the vainglorious Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar of the ‘Monk’s Tale’ who face righteous opposition from those who object to their tyranny and who are eventually punished by God with death or with loss of their estate and dignity (VII: 2159–2182, 2236), Chaucer’s Duke Theseus suffers no reversal of fortune which would indicate that he

145

Minnis, Chaucer, 122; Hepburn, Portraits, 15; Scheifele, ‘Richard II’, 265; Kipling, Enter, 11–47, 158–63; Bennett, Richard II, 56; Saul, Richard II, 238–9; Harriss, Shaping, 489. For an extreme example of such political Christology, see Kantorowicz, ‘Deus Per Naturam’. 146 Richard Maidstone, Concordia, 291; Westminster Chronicle, 505–7; Barron, ‘Richard II’, 152–3; Kipling, ‘Richard II’s “Sumptuous Pageants”’, 88–98. For this tradition see also Kantorowicz, Laudes Regiae, 71–2. 147 Augustine, City of God, II: 5 (p. 52). See the Prose Life of Alexander which praises the emperor for being troubled when the Persians worshipped him as a god and for insisting on his own mortality (p. 59). 148 Fulgentius, On the Thebaid, 243; Fulgentius, Super Thebaiden Commentariolum, 704.

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has been guilty of hubris.149 On the contrary, we are told that he lived ‘in joye and in honour’ for the rest of his life (I: 1028–9) even though other medieval writers, including as Boccaccio, Laurent de Premierfait and Lydgate, could cite the events of the duke’s later life, in which he reaped the disastrous consequences of believing the false accusations of attempted rape made by his wife, Phaedra, against her stepson, Hippolytus, as evidence of how even noble and wise rulers could be cast down by the Wheel of Fortune.150 Whereas Nero’s subjects in the ‘Monk’s Tale’ rise in revolt against his sadistic delight in bloodshed (VII: 2480–2, 2527–2550), Theseus’s appearance in majesty is met with a hushed reverence from the people who then acclaim his merciful proclamation that the tournament between Palamon and Arcite should not be a battle to the death: ‘God save swich a lord, that is so good/He wilneth no destruccion of blood’ (I: 2530–2, 2537–64). Nor, unlike Richard II, whose ‘ostentatious’ display was said by those who deposed him to have been based on the impoverishment of his own people, is there any indication that Theseus’s magnificence has been acquired at the expense of his subjects.151 Rather, we are told that by his campaigns, the duke has conquered ‘many a riche contree’ (I: 864). Indeed, Lydgate in his account of Theseus was to praise the ‘abundance’ which the duke’s victories brought to the Athenians, just as the capture of ‘considerable wealth’ on the Black Prince’s campaigns was said to have ‘enriched’ England.152 As Walter of Milemete said to Edward III, by acting wisely, the king would not only please God and 149

Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia, 212–4. Following Ovid (Metamorphoses, XV: 492–550; see also Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, I: 46; II: 128), Boccaccio tells the story of how even Theseus, ‘vir aliter prudens’, was deceived by his wife Phaedra, who wrongfully accused her step-son Hippolytus, Theseus’s son from his marriage to Hippolyta, as a warning against credulousness and rash judgement. In fleeing Theseus’s anger, Hippolytus was killed in a fall from his chariot and Phaedra then killed herself in shame. Whilst Theseus grieved at these events, the ‘Athenienses ingrati’ rose against him and drove him into exile (De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, I, x–xi). Laurent de Premierfait followed Boccaccio in seeing Theseus as the victim of a rebellion by the ungrateful Athenians who rendered him evil in return for his goodness and also referred to the story of how Theseus had been deceived by his wife Phaedra, which led to the death of Hippolytus (De Cas des Nobles Hommes et Femmes, 129, 149–152). Lydgate also noted that although Theseus lived long and in honour, he was eventually faced with the ‘cruel violence’ of his disobedient subjects and that his fate showed that God would punish those who were unjust, as Theseus had been in so readily believing his wife’s accusations against his chaste son (Fall of Princes, 122–31). 151 Record and Process, 177. See also Westminster Chronicle, 162–3. 152 Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 119, 122; Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, 70. 150


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gain eternal salvation but would also be able to ‘gain money, possessions and treasure . . . to defeat castles and cities; to subject diverse kingdoms and foreign peoples to your authority . . . (and) to achieve conquest whenever it pleases you’.153 Similarly, in literature, as in the Alliterative Morte Arthure, rulers could be hailed both for their defeat of wicked enemies and for their conquest of rich territories.154 As a result, neither a close reading of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in terms of its internal, narrative logic nor a contextualised reading of it in terms of contemporary representations and concepts of kingship requires us to interpret Theseus’s appearance before his subjects ‘Arrayed right as he were a god in trone’ to mean that Chaucer presents the duke to us as a tyrant. Even a theologian like John of Wales, who naturally saw the deification of humans by the ancients as literally mistaken, could still argue that this practice had once been socially useful in the sense that it encouraged rulers to undertake tasks which helped to safeguard the state.155 As Christine de Pizan said, since the ‘ancients of old’ lacked the true faith, they believed that those people who surpassed others in their virtues, such as the just and merciful Julius Caesar, must have been gods. However, even though this belief was, in itself, erroneous, the virtue which occasioned it was real enough: ‘Julius Caesar had many great virtues’.156 As we saw in Giles’s account of the virtue of magnanimity (above 58–63), whilst loving worship too much can be vainglorious, caring too little for praise can also be a vice as such men may not be motivated to perform deeds which are worthy of praise and honour (G: 85–94). Indeed, Aristotle had argued that the receipt of honours by the ruler actually helped prevent tyranny by providing an alternative form of reward to rulers who might otherwise be tempted to use his office as a means of his own personal gain (NE: V, vi: 5–7).157 As Brunetto Latini said, honour was a just ‘reward for virtue’, so that whilst ‘the great’ should give assistance to ‘the small’, in turn, ‘the small should give honour and reverence to the great’.158 In Gower’s words, ‘His royal majesty is to be revered above all others, so long as he governs the

153

Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of the King, 29–30. Alliterative Morte Arthure, 12–53, 395. 155 Swanson, John of Wales, 70. 156 Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 57; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 55. 157 Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 301–2. 158 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 181, 229, 363–4. See also Aquinas, Ethics, 216–9, 317, 383, 735–89, 1011; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 4. 154

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affairs of his kingdom honourably’.159 Boccaccio thus concluded his De Casibus Virorum Illustrium by advising rulers to seek ‘honours, praise, glory and fame’ but also to show themselves worthy of such honours by their prudence, justice and mercy.160 vi. Justice and Mercy For medieval political theorists such as Giles of Rome, it was the task of the true king, as defender of the common good, to maintain justice and to enforce the law so as destroy evil doers and chastise those who trespass (G: 290, 337). Yet, in punishing wrongdoers, the prince had to tread a middle path between, on the one hand, the excessive cruelty which characterises the tyrant and, on the other, an excessive leniency which would allow crime to go unchecked. For many critics, even those who see the duke as achieving wisdom and mercy by the end of the tale, Theseus’s earlier judgements are often violent, hasty and arbitrary as, for instance, when he imprisons of Palamon and Arcite without any hope of release or when he condemns the two youths to death when he encounters them fighting in the grove.161 Certainly, Giles himself recognized that, in practice, there is no ruler who is not guilty of ‘some tiraundise’, since such perfection would mean that a king was more like ‘an half god’ than a fallen man.162 His conclusion was simply that the ruler should be as much like a ‘ful kyng’ and as unlike a tyrant as possible, although some tyranny could be less harmful than the evils that came of disobedience to the ruler (G: 343, 388–9). Rather than debating whether Theseus’s judgements are simply either just or unjust, it may be useful to examine the duke’s decisions in terms of Giles of Rome’s distinction between four possible levels of punishment and mercy which a prince could adopt. At one extreme is the harshness which results from the tyrannical vice of succumbing to the passions, as in the case of Nero in both Giles’s De Regimine (G: 26) and Chaucer’s ‘Monk’s Tale’ (VII: 2463–94) and of Creon in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (I: 940–7). Here the ruler shows a complete lack of mercy and pity and instead delights in forms of punishment which are

159 160 161 162

Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 18 (p. 247). Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, IX, xxvii: 10–11. See references above, 5–6. See also John of Salisbury, Stateman’s Book, VII: 17 (pp. 282–3).


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unjust, irrational, excessively wrathful and vengeful, as Richard II was said to have done by those who deposed him in 1399 (G: 95–7, 136).163 However, at the other extreme, is the opposite failing where the ruler is so ‘inirascible’ and forgiving that he becomes ‘mollis (nesche) and wommanliche’. This passion too is unreasonable and ‘vnsemliche’ in a prince because allowing crimes to go unpunished means that men would ‘do wrong to othere men and than policie myghte not dure’, resulting in ‘harme and peyne’ to the community (G: 95–7, 129, 136–7). Even Seneca, for whom clemency was the most becoming of virtues in a ruler, warned against total or ‘promiscuous’ forgiveness since the result would be chaos: ‘to pardon everyone is as cruel as to pardon none’.164 As Gower said, whilst a king should be merciful, he should not be pusillanimous: ‘For if Pite mesure exceded,/Kinghode may noght wel procede/To do justice upon the riht’. If one cannot be too just, one can be too lenient.165 In between these extremes of tyrannical cruelty and excessive leniency is just punishment, which is a work of virtue and reason. Ideally, Giles argued, rulers should hate sin rather than the sinner, but sometimes the common profit can only be maintained ‘by destroyeng euel doers’. The ruler thus needs ‘cyule myght and power, richesse and catel’ so as to be able to punish evil deeds (NE: X, ix: 8–10; G: 120, 122, 129, 137, 337, 350, 358, 378, 391–2).166 Even Johannes de Hauvilla, who was well aware of the tyrannical abuse of power by the mighty and who called on rulers to be gentle and loving to their subjects, nonetheless concluded that persuasion and ‘sweet words’ are not always enough. Sometimes, it is necessary for a ruler ‘to grow angry, to substitute blows for appeals and to impose the yoke firmly upon those who must be tamed’.167 As Latini said, kings and tyrants are similar in their power; the difference

163 Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, VII: 2; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 434–5; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 1; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 301–2, 381; Seneca, On Clemency, 25 (pp. 163–4); Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 17–28; Record and Process, articles 4, 11, 16 (pp. 174, 176–8). See also Lacy, ‘Mercy’. 164 Gratian, Treatise, 12; Seneca, On Clemency, 2–3 (pp. 140–1). See also John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV: 8 (p. 40); Liber Custumarum, 25. 165 Aquinas, Ethics, 800–05; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3514–3350; Peck, Kingship, 149. 166 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 292, 420; Fleta, II, 1–2; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 523–3. 167 Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, VII: 2, VIII: 2; Aquinas, Ethics, 2140–9.

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between them is that ‘the tyrant performs works of cruelty gladly; a king only by necessity’.168 Yet, if just punishment is the virtuous mean between excessive harshness and excessive leniency, for Giles, this justice itself has two aspects to it. On the one hand, in correcting evildoers, it is sometimes necessary, as Aristotle (NE: V, x: 4–8) and Aquinas had argued, to punish them more harshly than the law specifies and, sometimes, even to put them death (G: 120, 122, 129, 137, 337, 350, 358, 378, 391–2). On the other, whilst it is ‘nedful’ that rulers should sometimes ‘be drad’ by their subjects, Giles also maintained, like Cicero and Seneca, that ‘kynges and princes scholde more desire for to be loued of the puple than idrad’.169 As Seneca had argued, it is clemency ‘which constitutes the great distinction between king and tyrant’.170 ‘Mercy and truth preserve the king and his throne is strengthened by clemency’ (Proverbs 20: 28).171 As Walter of Milemete said, the wise king will both punish wrongdoers and yet ‘exercise mercy by sparing many’ so that he ‘simultaneously generates love and fear in the hearts of his subjects’.172 Similarly, for Jacobus de Cessolis, whilst a king should do justice and punish rebels, he should not be quick to avenge himself but should rather be merciful and debonair to his subjects.173 As the chancellor claimed in the parliament of 1395, whilst the king had been obliged to campaign in Ireland so as to conquer the ‘rebels’ there, he was also full of pity and mercy and had no desire to inflict harm or to exact vengeance.174 Although he might sometimes have to punish those who disturb the peace ‘cruelliche’, the ruler should not hate wrongdoers so much that he never shows any mercy, such mercifulness being one of the virtuous manners of the young which rulers should adopt. ‘Glanvill’, John of Salisbury, Giles and Honoré Bonet were all in agreement that rulers should sometimes punish trespassers ‘more myldeliche’ than the law

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Latini, Book of the Treasure, 374; Liber Custumarum, pp. 24–5; Seneca, On Clemency, 4, 11, 25 (pp. 143, 151, 163–4); Aquinas, Ethics, 1375. 169 Cicero, On Duties, II: 23–4 (pp. 70–1); Seneca, On Clemency, 1, 8–12, 20, 25–6 (pp. 138, 146–52, 160, 163–4); Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, I: 31; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 16–28; Skinner, Foundations, 33–4. 170 Seneca, On Clemency 12 (p. 152). 171 Hohlstein, ‘Clemens Princeps’, 209–16; Jonas of Orleans, De Institutione Regia, 184, 186, 212; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3103–4214. 172 Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 33, 36, 55; Fleta, II, 1–2. 173 Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 1; IV: 8. 174 Rotuli Parliamentorum, III, 329.


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says. As Gower said, the ruler should act moderately ‘unless the affair should require otherwise’ (G: 95–7, 128–9, 141–2, 378, 391–2, OR: 1: 13, 13).175 As Theseus put it in seeking to persuade Emily to have pity on Palamon and to take him as her husband, ‘gentil mercy oghte to passen right’ (I: 3083–9). Giles listed ten factors, ranging from an awareness of the general frailty of mankind to the character of the individual wrongdoer which should prompt a judge to mercy and concluded that if ‘iuges scholde be more mylde than cruel’, this was even more true for kings and princes (G: 364–7). As Aquinas said, follwing Aristotle (NE, V, x), the variability of human affairs meant that the law could not always be applied uniformly so that rulers should judge according to ‘equity’, following the spirit, rather than the strict letter, of the law and being willing to mitigate punishment, although not to such an extent that the law ceased to be a deterrent to others.176 Is Theseus guilty of injustice or tyranny in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ when he refuses to ransom Palamon and Arcite and keeps them in fetters (I; 1023–4, 1175–6, 1279, 1342–3) or when he later condemns them to death (I: 1747)? In eventually forgiving the two Thebans, does the tale show the duke changing from excessive harshness to equity and mercy? It is certainly understandable why critics have seen Theseus’s refusal to allow Palamon and Arcite to be freed by means of a ransom as the act of a tyrant.177 After all, in the wars of Chaucer’s own day, it was normally assumed that a prisoner of war would be allowed to go free in return for the payment of a reasonable sum, one which was ‘in line with the prisoner’s estate’. The captor who, in effect, denied a prisoner his freedom by demanding an excessive level of ransom was, as Honoré Bonet put it, ‘not a gentleman but a tyrant’.178 Chaucer himself had enjoyed the benefit of being ransomed following his capture on campaign in France in 1359–60.179

175 Glanvill, 1–2; John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV: 8 (pp. 39–40); Fleta, II, 1–2; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 8, VI: 9, VI: 10 (pp. 234, 236, 237); Bonet, Tree of Battles, 212; Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, XIV: 394. For a general survey of this subject, see Waugh, ‘King’s Anger’. 176 Aquinas, Ethics, 1078–89; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 323. 177 See, for instance, Webb, ‘Reinterpretation’, 291–4; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 176–7; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 82. 178 Bonet, Tree of Battles, 152–3. 179 Chaucer Life-Records, 23–8.

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However, for Bonet, whose arguments were adopted by Christine de Pizan, this right of ransom applied only in the wars of modern times between Christians, whereas in ancient times, according to the written law of the guerre mortelle (see below, 214–15), ‘a man could at will kill his prisoner’ or enserf him. Even in Bonet’s own day, it would have been considered wrong for a man to break his oath if he had sworn to remain a prisoner given that his captor ‘could have killed him if so minded, on the day he captured him’.180 Indeed, the word Latin for slave (‘servus’) was believed to be derived etymologically from ‘one who has been saved’ from death by their captors ‘whose right it is to kill them’, an etymology repeated by Giles in his defence of servitude (G: 275–7).181 For this reason, Boccaccio’s Teseo considers whether or not to have the two youths put to death: ‘he hesitated to let them go, lest they should prove troublesome to him’. However, since Palamon and Arcite have not actually been ‘treacherous’ to him, he decides that ‘eternal imprisonment’ is the most fitting punishment.182 As Boccaccio said in De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, a villainous enemy of society should be kept in chains.183 In this context, one where prisoners could be slain according to the laws of the guerre mortelle, when Theseus imprisons Palamon and Arcite for life, he is actually refraining from implementing these laws with their full severity. It is perhaps for this reason that when the duke finds Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove, Palamon confesses to Theseus that he is guilty of having ‘ broken wikkedly’ from the duke’s prison (I: 1735–6). Furthermore, when Theseus eventually allows Arcite to go free, at the request of Pirithous, he magnanimously does so ‘withouten any raunsoun’ (I: 1205). Consequently, when the imprisoned Palamon complains that his and Arcite’s lineage has been brought low ‘by tirannye’ (I: 1110–11), we do not have to accept his words as accurately characterising Duke Theseus’s treatment of him and his cousin. Firstly, as Wallace points out, ‘it is not at all clear whose tyranny he is speaking of’. It may be that of Theseus but it may equally be that of Creon or, as Wallace himself argues is more likely, that of the wilful gods themselves, of whose cruel 180 Bonet, Tree of Battles, 134–5, 149, 152–4, 159–60; Christine de Pizan, Book of Fayttes of Armes, 218–24; Christine de Pizan, Livre des Faits d’Armes, 156–61; Keen, Laws, 104, 158–9. 181 Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, V.XXVII.32; IX.IV.43. 182 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 71–2; Boccaccio, Teseida, 76. 183 Boccaccio, De Casibus Virorum Illustrium, IV, ii: 3. See also Robertson, ‘Elements of Realism’, 231.


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despotism Palamon later explicitly complains (I: 1303–33).184 Secondly, the imprisoned Palamon is scarcely presented to us as a reliable judge of what has happened: on the contrary, at this stage of the narrative his intemperance and passion have led him into a hateful enmity against Arcite, his kinsman and sworn companion. Whereas Arcite counsels him to deal forbearingly with the adversity which Fortune has sent them (I: 1084–91), Palamon’s complaints, which echo those made by Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy before he has been enlightened by Lady Philosophy, reveal an impatience which is to be corrected in the course of the narrative of the ‘Knight’s Tale’.185 By these standards, the key question raised by Palamon’s complaints about Theseus (if, indeed, the duke was their target) is not that of the virtue of the duke’s treatment of him but rather Palamon’s own impatience and surrender to the passions. As the De Regimine says, when someone is punished, he can show himself worthy of mercy ‘if he taketh that ponyschynge pacientliche, aworthe, and gruccheth not in the penaunce that is isette hym, it is to doynge the more merciabliche by hym’ (G: 366, OR, 1: 13, 18). Palamon’s impatience can thus be contrasted with the virtue shown by the king of Armenia in a story told in Gower’s Confessio Amantis. The king had been captured by Pompey as the enemy of Rome and was then imprisoned for ‘many a day/ In sor plit and povere’. However, on seeing the patience and ‘ful gret humilite’ with which he suffered his adversity, Pompey took pity on him and restored him to his throne so that peace was established between them.186 Of course, if prisoners were supposed to endure punishment in the right frame of mind then rulers, who after all had the power of life and death in their hands, were also enjoined to impose it in the correct spirit. As Gower advised Richard II: ‘Do not let an angry impulse rush upon you, O king, but further the causes of justice with self-control. When wrath impels the spirit, it deprives it of the power of reason and negates the mind’s allotted tasks’.187 It is this wrath which threatens to overwhelm Theseus when he interrupts the combat of Palamon and 184 Wallace ascribes these words to Arcite, as well as to Palamon (Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 107–8), but this does not affect the validity of his point. Burrow argues that the ‘tirannye’ of which Palamon complains is that of Creon (‘What is Remembered’, 79). 185 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, I, m. V; IV, pr. I; Haller, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 68–74; Joseph, ‘Chaucerian “Game”’, 85–6; Kean, Chaucer, II, 12–14. 186 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3215–48. 187 Gower, Vox Clamantis, IV: 11 (pp. 238–9).

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Arcite in the grove and summarily condemns them to death (I: 1747). Here, it is not the guilt of the two youths which is at issue. After all, as Palamon confesses to Theseus, he and Arcite are the duke’s ‘mortal foes’ (I: 1724, 1736). He has planned to make war on Theseus so that he can win the hand of Emily (I: 1483–6) and has ‘ broken wikkedly’ from the duke’s prison (I: 1735–6) whilst Arcite had been released from prison on the express condition that he should lose his head if he was ever to be found in Athens again (I: 1209–15, 1725–6). For these crimes, Palamon admits that ‘both han we deserved to be slayn’ (I: 1741). Rather, what is at issue is the Duke Theseus’s ability to restrain his own passions and to moderate his own wrath, to use his prudent ‘experiencia’ to judge Palamon and Arcite as individuals and to listen to the feminine voices which beseech him for mercy (see above, 36–8, 141–5). In practice, as a result of his ability to reason and to let the virtuous passions of mansuetude and mercifulness influence his thoughts, Theseus is soon able to overcome his wrath and so forgives Palamon and Arcite their crimes. As the duke himself says: ‘Fy/Upon a lord that wol have no mercy’ and so treats all men alike, whether they are proud and ‘despitous’ or, as Palamon and Arcite have shown themselves to be, humble and repentant (I: 1773–1781). However, in shifting from punishment to pardon in his treatment of Palamon and Arcite, Duke Theseus is not simply changing from the vice of excessive cruelty to the virtue of mercy. In fact, when judged in terms of Giles’s scale of justice and punishment, the duke can be said to shift not from cruelty to forgiveness but rather from the severity of strict legality to the superior justice of mildness and mercy (OR: I, 13: 13), not from vice to morality but from goodness to the highest form of virtue. vii. Theseus: Bloody General or Prince of Chivalry? For Brunetto Latini, in lordships ‘there are two seasons, one of peace and another of war’.188 Accordingly, the medieval king was not only required to be the fount of justice for his subjects but also had to function as chief war-lord. In Kaeuper’s terms, the medieval state was not only a ‘law-state’ but was also, and increasingly so in the later middle

188 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 377. See also Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3594–99; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 294 citing Ecclesiastes 3: 8.


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ages, a ‘war-state’.189 It was not surprising, then, that political theorists such as Giles of Rome presented the ‘craft of cheualrie’ as one of the four types of wisdom or prudence which the ruler needed for the good government of the realm (the others being the ethical prudence required for self-rule, the economic prudence needed for the rule of the household, and the political prudence necessary to be a good ruler or a virtuous subject).190 Just as the concupiscible part of the soul can help lead man towards good and the irascible part can enable us to overcome those things which hinder virtue, so a ruler needs not only the wisdom to make laws in time of peace but also to be skilled in deeds of arms in order that he may overcome the enemies of the realm and threats to the common profit.191 Nevertheless, although the ruler should be able to set an example to his men by knowing how to fight in battle, his principal task is that of commanding his forces. As was said in Vegetius’s late fourth-century Instituta Rei Militaris, the source for much of Giles’s discussion of the technical aspects of the art of war, cleverness in battle is more likely to bring victory than mere strength of arms.192 Although a ruler should not be ignorant of warfare, as women are, it is more important that a prince should have a strong mind than a strong body: he should always seek to be wiser than other men, even if he is not the greatest warrior (G: 242–5, 394–7, 412). As Walter of Milemete said in addressing Edward III, a king who has learned the wisdom and morality needed to be a ruler ‘will without doubt be able to overwhelm his enemies easily; to acquire for his lordship various and diverse kingdoms and provinces; to subjugate to himself many foreign peoples and nation . . . and also to act sensibly and prudently in all his royal deeds’. In doing so, he would be like the mighty Alexander who, with the help of the advice of the wise Aristotle, had ‘overwhelmed his enemies, won wars, blockaded castles and cites, acquired diverse

189 Kaeuper, War, pp. 1–3, 202; Political Thought in Early Fourteenth-Century England, 63; Bracton, Laws, II, 19; Jacobus de Cessolis, The Game of Chess, II; 4. For a critique of Kaeuper, see Ormrod, Political Life, 85–6, 113–14, 126–9. 190 Giles also added a fifth type of wisdom, that of the subject in knowing how to ‘holde the lawes and heestes of the prince’ (G: 396). See also Albertus Magnus, Questions, 99–100; Oresme, Live de Politiques, 121. 191 See also Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 301; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 156. 192 Vegetius, De Re Militari, I: 1 (p. 49); Jacobus de Cessolis, The Game of Chess, II; 4; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 85–9. Vegetius’s work was often found in the same manuscripts as Giles’s De Regimine (Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, 65–6).

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lands and peoples under his lordship, and subjugated a great empire under himself.193 If, for medieval rulers, warfare was an expected part of political life, Theseus’s conduct in time of war must be central to any assessment of the virtue of his polity. For a medieval writer such as John Lydgate, Theseus’s Athens was the birthplace of chivalry: ‘There first off knyhthod ros the hih noblesse’. It it was therefore by his high prowess and ‘knyhthod’ that Theseus was able to overcome the Amazons and the tyrannical Creon.194 Yet for many modern critics, it is precisely the duke’s behaviour during wartime which makes his lack of virtue particularly apparent. Despite the Knight’s explicit narratorial praise of Theseus’s ‘wysdom’ and ‘chivalrie’ (I: 865), Chaucer’s tale has been read as implicitly disclosing to the reader that the ‘bloody Theseus’ is a ‘general of cavalry not a prince of chivalry’.195 Chaucer’s Theseus has therefore been seen as being guilty of a greater cruelty than Boccaccio’s Teseo. For instance, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ lacks the passage from the Teseida in which Theseus gives medical help to the wounded Thebans and buries their dead, replacing it instead with a description of the passage in which the duke’s men pillage the corpses of the Thebans for their harness (I: 1005–8).196 Even those who have adopted a generally positive view of the duke have sometimes been prepared to see him as acting wrongly and using excessive force when, following his defeat of Creon, Theseus destroys Thebes, tearing down its walls (989–90), and then (as we have seen) refuses to ransom the captured Palamon and Arcite (I: 1023–4).197 For many critics, if the Knight, in telling his tale, is explicitly seeking to show chivalry as a ‘civilizing’ force, the tale itself ends up by implicitly undermining his project. As a result, as

193 Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 28–9. For Alexander as a virtuous conqueror, see also Le Roman de Toute Chevalerie, II, 65–7; Prose Life of Alexander, 28, 34, 108. 194 Lydgate, Fall of Princes, 75, 122. 195 Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer, 84; Broughton, ‘He Conquered’, 44, 48, 50, 52. For Chaucer as a parodist of chivalry who held ‘strong antiwar views’, see Lowe, Imagining Peace, 99. 196 Underwood, ‘First’, 466; Rogers, Upon the Ways, 26–7; Patterson, Chaucer, 168–9, 202, 230; Knapp, Chaucer, 22–3; Reiss, ‘Chaucer’, 396; Ferster, Chaucer, 34, 40; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 175–6, 189–91; Aers, Chaucer, 25–6; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 146, 149; Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 69–70; Boccaccio, Teseida, 72–3. 197 Roney, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, 115–6; McAlindon, ‘Cosmology’, 45–8; Kolve, Chaucer, 101; Joseph, ‘Chaucerian “Game” ’, 86; Guidry, ‘Parliaments’, 141, 147. On the right to ransom, see above, 207–8.


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Wetherbee argues, the reader comes to realize that the chivalric code is ‘flawed’ and ‘incapable of dealing with its own inherent violence’. The nightmarish vision of war provided in the temple of Mars in Theseus’s amphitheatre (I: 1995–2040) reveals to us the reality of a world whose violence and complexity exceed the understanding of the Knight’s idealistic code of values.198 We have already argued that Theseus’s war against Creon was a just war in terms of its causes and aims and in having been legally declared by the duke as the sovereign ruler of Athens (above, 186–9). However, for a war to be seen as just, it not only needed a legitimate cause; it also had to be conducted according to the mixture of custom, canon law and civil law which together constituted the jus armorum, the law of arms. As Gower said, ‘even in a just cause, you can do wrong’.199 In assessing the duke’s virtue in time of war, we therefore need to examine not only his motives for fighting but also his actual conduct. When Theseus wages war on Thebes, destroys the defeated city and despoils its territory or when his men ransack the dead for their armour and clothing (I: 989–90, 1004–8), would his actions have marked him out as a tyrant when judged by the standards of Chaucer’s own day? Alternatively, as Porter has argued in relation to the Knight’s own crusading combat, was such behaviour actually in accordance with contemporary conceptions of how the just war was to be waged?200 Theseus’s war against Creon begins when he rides on Thebes openly displaying both his banner and his pennon (I: 975–83) as kings, dukes, counts and barons were entitled to do in war and at the tournament.201 Giles of Rome noted the practical importance of ‘baners and penouns and other signes’ as a means of communication amidst the confusion of battle (G: 411–2).202 However, for a medieval audience, Theseus’s display of his banner and pennon also had a more general significance in the sense that once the prince’s banner was unfurled, he had given a challenge to combat and was now ‘committed on his honour to fight’. As Isidore of Seville had said, following Cicero, ‘No war is considered just,

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Wetherbee, ‘Chivalry’, 220–2. Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 24013–48. 200 Porter, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’. 201 As opposed to the bannerets, who bore only a banner, and lesser knights, who bore only a pennon (Vale, War, 84–5). 202 Vegetius, De Re Militari, 114. 199

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unless there is a declaration . . . or there is property to be reclaimed’.203 In displaying his banner, Theseus thereby signalled that ‘a state of war legally existed. From this moment on, the laws of war were in force’. The prince’s banner indicated the allegiance of his army and so its legal title to wage public war at his command: this was open warfare not a breach of a truce or merely an act of private plunder.204 Such banners also functioned as a means of proclaiming to an enemy what rules an army would observe in battle in terms of five different conditions of war. The first was that of the truce, a temporary cessation of a war, signalled by a white flag or a baton. The second was the limited guerre couverte ‘in which men could wound and kill without blame but could not burn or take spoil’. The third was public or open war between Christians (bellum hostile) in which enemies could be killed and spoil taken but in which quarter could be given and prisoners had the right to be ransomed. ‘The usual sign of such war was the display of the banner of the prince in whose name it was fought’. ‘Because a banner was a sign of high social status (any knight could carry a pennon), a battle in which banners were displayed was a much more serious affair than one in which only pennons were shown’.205 The fourth condition of warfare was that of war to the death (guerre mortelle). ‘This is what the lawyers called Roman war, fought by the rules which in antiquity had applied in the wars of the Roman people. There was no privilege of ransom; the conquered could be slain or enslaved’.206 Christians could fight such ‘Roman’ wars, most obviously in the crusades, against non-Christian opponents, as in the ‘mortal batailles’ in which the Knight himself has been involved (I: 61). However, at times, even in wars between Christians, commanders could proclaim that no quarter would be given and no prisoners taken. It may be no accident, then, that Theseus marches against Creon displaying the ‘rede statue’ of Mars on his banner (I: 975) since ‘the usual sign of war to the death was the carrying of a red flag or banner’, with red being seen

203 Cicero, On Duties, I: 36 (pp. 15–16); Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVIII.I.3; Jean of Naples, Should a Christian King, 335; Buridan, Questions, Bennett, Commentary, 11. 204 Keen, Laws, 107–8; Keen, ‘Treason Trials’, 93–4, 102; Schless, ‘Knight’s Tale 965–67’, 81; Bellamy, Law, 35–7, 47–9, 51, 62, 67, 71. 75, 95, 104, 200–2. For an example, see Gesta Henrici Quinti, 17–19. 205 Keen, Laws, pp. 103–112; Vale, ‘Violence’, 143–4. 206 Keen, Laws, 104; Contamine, War, 283–4. See also Stanzaic Morte Arthur, 13–14.


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by medieval heraldic writers as the colour signifying the ferocity of the prince against his enemies.207 At the Battle of Crécy, for instance, the French king was said to have raised the Oriflamme standard as a sign that ‘the mercy of the French was entirely consumed’ so that ‘no-one was to take prisoners on pain of death’.208 In other words, in the middle ages, as now, what was illegal in time of peace could be seen as lawful, expected, accepted and even wise during a publicly authorised war. In the case of a just war, all the lawyers were agreed that ‘there was no limit on the taking of spoil and prisoners’. As Bartolus of Sassoferrato said, ‘in such war captives can be enslaved, and goods taken in its course become the property of the captors’. In time of war, it was not unjust or unreasonable to despoil the goods of the enemy or even, provided the war was not between Christians, to enslave captives. Even in war between Christians, when a prisoner did have the right to be ransomed, prisoners could be kept under lock and key, ‘or even in irons’, whilst in a war to the death ‘there was no privilege of ransom; the conquered could be slain or enslaved’. The rightful spoil of the victor did not only include that taken on the battlefield: ‘a soldier might plunder civilians just as freely as men in arms, because they gave “aid and countenance” to the war of their party’. The plunder of towns stormed in the prince’s service was his, ‘as were all prisoners of “public” standing’, but, in return, the prince was under an obligation to share this spoil with his men who had won him his victory. As Vale puts it, for the nobility of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, personal profit in time of war was ‘quite consistent with the ideals of chivalry and the achievement of honour and renown’.209 Writers such as Honoré Bonet make it clear that when prisoners or booty are taken they should pass into the hands of the lord in whose name the conflict has been fought. Once war is declared, a king’s soldiers ‘may take spoil’ from the enemy ‘at will’: ‘All that a man can win

207 Keen, Laws, 104–6; Keen, ‘Treason Trials’, 93–4; Vale, War, 157; Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinaunce” ’, 197. For Theseus’s banner, see also Chaucer, Anelida and Arcite, 30–1. For the redness of Mars, see Firmicus, Mathesis, I, ii: 1; I, x: 14; on the symbolism of red and white in the tale, see Blanch, ‘White and Red’. 208 Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, 43; Chandos Herald, Life of the Black Prince, 955–8, 973–9, 1005–1010. 209 Froissart, Chronicles, 227–8; Keen, Laws, 12–13, 64–5, 70, 104–8, 130, 137–40, 144–53, 156–8; Vale, War, 28, 155–6; Russell, Just War, 7, 27, 52–3, 71, 162–3, 165, 171, 178, 279, 245–6, 277–8; Bradbury, Medieval Siege, 320–4. On the forms of spoil, see Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, XVIII.II.8.

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from his enemy in lawful war he may of good right retain’. All such booty ‘should be at the king’s disposal, and he should dispose of it at his pleasure to those who, according to his estimation, have helped him to win’. For Bonet, ‘to kill an enemy in battle is allowed by law’, but afterwards ‘mercy should be shown to him, unless there were a risk of his escaping, with the result of prolonged war, damage or mischief’. The captor should allow prisoners to be ransomed although, as we have seen, this requirement applied only to war between Christians.210 In other words, following his declaration of a guerre mortelle, Theseus’s actions, even when pillaging the Theban dead, are in accordance with the laws of war as set out by medieval legists and theologians and as contemporaries understood them to have operated in the ancient world.211 As Nicholas Oresme put it, whilst the acquisition of wealth without violence is the most natural and just form of acquisition, this does not mean that obtaining wealth by means of war is never honest or just.212 Having defeated Creon in ‘pleyn bataille’, Theseus then besieges the city of Thebes, winning it ‘by assaut’ and then tearing down its walls (I: 988–90). Here, the laws of a fifth condition of war came into operation, those relating to siege warfare, laws which were characterised by their own particular ‘savage severity’. Legally, a town or fortress could either be surrendered or, as was the case with Thebes, taken ‘by assaut’ (I: 999). In the latter case, when entry had been refused to a besieger, ‘the rule was war to the death without quarter’ not only against combatants but even ‘against all the able-bodied male inhabitants of the town’.213 In 1346, following the stubborn resistance of Calais against Edward III, the king at first demanded the ‘unconditional surrender of its residents, whether for ransom or for death’.214 At Carcassone, in 1355, when the citizens would not submit to their ‘natural lord’, the Black Prince ‘ordered the town to be burnt’.215 Similarly, when Henry V besieged 210 Gratian, Treatise, 7; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 134–5, 149, 152–4, 159–60; Christine de Pizan, Book of Fayttes of Armes, 218–24; Christine de Pizan, Livre des Faits d’Armes, 156–61; Keen, Laws, 158–9; Robertson, ‘Elements of Realism’, 227–8. 211 For Chaucer’s awareness of historical difference in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, see Benson, ‘Knight’s Tale’; Minnis, Chaucer, 21–2, 29–30, 63–4, 127–35; Spearing, Textual Subjectivity, 133. 212 Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 810. 213 Keen, Laws, 119–21; Keen, ‘Treason Trials’, 94–6. 214 Strohm, Hochon’s Arrow, 99; Knighton’s Chronicle, 85; Froissart, Chroniques, V, 201; Froissart, Chronicles, 186–8. 215 Life and Campaigns of the Black Prince, 53, 65. See also ibid., 29–31, 35.


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Harfleur in 1415, he reminded its defenders of the text of Deuteronomy 20: 10–17: when a city immediately surrenders to an attacker, ‘all the people that are therein shall be saved’, but if it resists and is taken by siege, ‘thou shalt slay all that are therein of the male sex, with the edge of the sword . . . And thou shalt divide all the prey to the army’.216 As a result, ‘in a city taken by storm almost any licence was condoned by law’, with the lives and goods of the inhabitants being seen as forfeit. Again, when Theseus ‘rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter’ in the captured city of Thebes and ‘dide with al the contree as hym leste’ (I: 989–90, 1004), he was acting in accordance with standards which, to medieval moralists, seemed ‘just and natural’ and which medieval chronicles such as Froissart accepted as the normal practice of contemporary warfare.217 Indeed, the Roman de Thèbes, whilst describing Theseus as a ‘gentle duke’ and as a very good and courageous knight nonetheless has him burn the city of Thebes, along with many of its inhabitants (‘a grant douleur ardent la gent’), as he had vowed to do if Creon would not surrender to him. Afterwards he threatens those of his prisoners who will not surrender to him with being burnt alive, torn apart before him or massacred.218 Similarly, John of Garland saw the destruction of the walls of Thebes as one of the duke’s virtuous labours, one which ranked alongside his defeat of the giants who terrorised travellers on the road to Athens and his victory over monsters such as the Minotaur.219 In her account of Creon’s crimes, Christine de Pizan gives the credit for the fall of Thebes not to Duke Theseus but rather to the Argive widows but even she has the women avenge themselves on Creon by breaking into his city and ‘putting all those inside to death’.220 One modern sense of the word ‘chivalry’ is the ritualized display of the tournament or the leisured refinement of courtly life.221 For writers such as Giles of Rome, by contrast, the ‘chivalrie’ by which Theseus wins his victories had nothing to do with mannered courtliness or even with gentlemanly fair play but rather meant the practical expertise in warfare, the ‘wysdom’ which allowed victory to be achieved as easily as 216

Gesta Henrici Quinti, 35–7, 49, 155. Froissart, Chronicles, 45; Keen, Laws, 121–4, 131–3; Bradbury, Medieval Siege, 296, 301–9, 317–25. 218 Roman de Thèbes, 11824, 11841–3, 11926, 11936, 11958–77. 219 John of Garland, Integumenta Ovidii, 305–6; Hoffman, Ovid, 42. 220 Christine de Pizan, City of Ladies, II: 17. 221 See, for instance, Miller, ‘Subjectivity’, 554–5. 217

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possible by attacking the enemy when he was most vulnerable.222 Giles’s own recommended tactics therefore include throwing lime in the face of the enemy so as to blind them and attacking opponents when they are asleep or eating and so are unarmed and unprepared for battle (G: 419–20, 433). The ethics of warfare are not so much concerned with how men fight but rather with why they do so. Basically, the ends justified the means. As Honoré Bonet put it, once war has been declared, ‘I may conquer my enemy by craft or fraud without sin’.223 As Boccaccio’s Teseo says when justifying his siege tactics to Queen Hippolyta: ‘We do . . . what a good warrior is accustomed to do, that is we take advantage so that our men may be saved more readily and the enemy vanquished’.224 As a result, whilst modern critics have sometimes seen Duke Theseus as being a bloody general rather than a prince of chivalry, medieval writers saw no necessary contradiction between the two. That bloody violence and chivalric virtue were by no means incompatible is certainly apparent in the Vox Clamantis where Gower urges Richard II to adopt his father, the ‘just’, ‘honourable’, and ‘worthy’ Black Prince, as a model for his own conduct as a ruler. For Gower, the Black Prince was as great a prince as any, one who had brought peace and prosperity to his subjects. Yet he then goes on to praise the prince for having ‘plundered foreign lands’ and having ‘boldly penetrated deep among his antagonists’ in order to ‘seize booty’. In fighting his enemies, the just, worthy and honourable prince had ‘pursued and destroyed them, he cut them down and killed them just as a wolf driven by hunger scatters a sheepfold’. ‘Harshly assaulting his foes’, his sword was often ‘sated with enemy gore, a torrent of blood slaked the thirst of his weapons’, and ‘he attacked strongholds, annihilating the people’ within. Naturally, Gower believed that ‘Peace excels over every good’. Nevertheless, he argued, ‘when our tried and tested rights call for war, it should be waged. There is a time for war and there are likewise times for peace (Ecclesiastes 3: 8), but keep your self-control in all your actions’. It is this rational self-control, the ability to remain, 222 The Gesta Henrici Quinti notes how, at the siege of Harfleur, the English tried to follow Giles’s advice, where this was possible (28–9, 40–1, 42–3). See also Lowe, Imagining Peace, 33. 223 Russell, Just War, pp. 155–7, 272; Bonet, Tree of Battles, 154–5; Walter of Milemete, On the Nobility, Wisdom and Prudence of Kings, 59; Wright, ‘Tree of Battles’, 16–28. For an example, see Alliterative Morte Arthure, 1975–6. 224 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 41; Boccaccio, Teseida, 39–40.


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in Gower’s words, ‘sober’ even when one’s sword is ‘drunk with blood’, that Chaucer’s Theseus represents when he wages war against Creon, defeating him as a ‘noble conqueror’ and restoring the bodies of the widows’ husbands to them (I: 991–99).225 As Giles says, the shedding of blood should not be spared when it is the means by which ‘rightwisnesse and the comyn profit may be defended’ (G: 401). We do not, therefore, have to suspect Chaucer of being ironic when, having shown the precariousness of ‘Conquest’ in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, where it is portrayed seated ‘in greet honour,/With the sharp swerd over his heed/Hangynge by a soutil twynes thred’ (I: 2028–30), he went on, in ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse’, to salute the new king, Henry IV, as ‘Conqueror of Brutes Albion’ (22–4). Like the victorious Duke Theseus, who was crowned with the laurel leaves of the conqueror (1025–7), the prince was perfectly entitled to have his victories hailed by his subjects whilst also being expected to remain ever vigilant against the temptations of pride and vanity.226 viii. Conclusion: Theseus’s Pagan Lordship Whilst, in theory, Augustine’s thought had the potential to lead Christian theologians and philosophers to reject earthly governments as simply ‘gangs of criminals’, in practice, medieval political theorists were able to arrive at a defence of the legitimacy of the temporal power in terms either of its restraint on the vice of fallen human nature or its positive encouragement of virtue. As in Chaucer’s ‘Manciple’s Tale’, it was illegitimate tyrants, rather than earthly rulers per se, who were seen as being like outlaws or a thieves on a grand scale (IX: 223–34). Medieval political theory was extremely diverse but most thinkers accepted the ideal of a strong ruler who was individually virtuous, who ruled according to the law, and who was willing to be governed by counsel even if political theorists were less agreed on the constitutional details of who should make the law or who precisely was entitled to give counsel. In practice, such constitutional issues only became a problem, both in the 225 Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 13; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 3594–9; Keen, Chivalry, 230; Wood, Chaucer, 73–4; Blanch and Wasserman, ‘White and Red’, 175, 181–90; Gaylord, ‘Role of Saturn’, 175, 182. 226 Nicholson, ‘Theseus’s “Ordinaunce”’, 197, 205. For the crowning of victors with laurel, see Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, XVII: 43 (pp. 940–2), XVII: 89 (p. 979).

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reality of medieval political life and for political theory, when the political community came to believe that a ruler was not guided by reason, that he was over-riding the law of the land, or that he was listening to the advice of fools and flatters rather attending to wise counsel, faults for which Richard II was to be attacked by his political opponents. Could such tyrannical rulers be removed or did their abuse of power have to be endured by their subjects, either as a punishment from God for their sins or as a lesser evil than the consequences of political disobedience? Was the king immune from human punishment and so only subject to the constraints of his own conscience?227 In a sense, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is able to avoid having to answer these divisive questions by showing us instead the ‘monarchy of the perfect man’ (or at least as perfect as fallen humans can aspire to be). If, as Gellrich says, ideology works by a process of displacement then the ‘Knight’s Tale’ achieves its ends by displacing the issues of political structure which it raises onto questions of individual morality.228 Promonarchical theorists such as Giles of Rome who favoured the rule of the ‘best kyng’ to that of the ‘beste lawe’ (or at least to the best positive law (G: 376–9)) inevitably faced the the enforcement dilemma which naturally arose when, in practice, the ruler was not the most virtuous man (or was not perceived as such by his subjects), let alone if he lapsed into tyranny.229 The ‘Knight’s Tale’ was able to sidestep this dilemma by presenting us with a ruler who personifies Aristotelian virtue and Stoic self-restraint, who manages to restrain his own passions, who achieves justice and mercy and who governs with the ‘avys’ of his parliament (I: 3076). Similarly, in having the inhuman Creon overthrown by the ruler of another polity in the name of justice and mercy, the tale was able to show vice being defeated by virtue without having to confront the far more controversial issue of whether a tyrant could rightfully be deposed by his own subjects. However, if medieval Christian theologians were willing to allow that earthly kingdoms could aspire to achieve justice, even if this justice was necessarily incomplete and partial, the problem still remained as to whether those states which, like Thesian Athens, were ruled by non-Christians could achieve the justice which allowed the violence of 227

Dunbabin, ‘Aristotle’, 77–9; Watts, Henry VI, 36, 38; Lewis, ‘King Above Law’, 263, 265; Nederman, ‘Property’, 336–40; Lahey, ‘Wyclif’, 18. 228 Gellrich, Discourse, 272. 229 Renna, ‘Aristotle’, 311–21. See also James of Viterbo, Is It Better.


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the state to be distinguished from that of the criminal gang. After all, if, as Augustine had argued (following Cicero’s De Re Publica), a true commonwealth requires ‘a common sense of right’ and of justice, it must follow that where there is no justice there is no commonwealth. But if justice is the virtue which ‘assigns to everyone his due’, then, as Augustine concluded, there can be no justice or true commonwealth where the state, as in the case of pagan Rome, takes man ‘away from the true God and subjects him to unclean demons’, leading him to worship evil spirits and malignant devils such as the ‘shameful’, ‘debauched’ and ‘contemptible’ Jupiter.230 If Augustine was willing to praise the rule of the Christian Emperor Theodosius as just, compassionate and merciful for having ‘cast down the images of Jupiter’ and for helping the Church against the ungodly, his logic would have led to a very different assessment of the polity such as that of Chaucer’s pagan Duke Theseus, a ruler who hailed Jupiter as the ‘prince and cause of alle thyng’ (I: 3035–6).231 This characterisation of the government of pagan rulers such as Theseus as illegitimate was no mere logical possibility. Rather, it was precisely the conclusion which Giles of Rome himself was to arrive at in his De Ecclesiastica Potestate, which was written some twenty years after the De Regimine. Giles’s aim in this work was to show that ‘royal power should be subject to priestly power’, particularly that of the pope, since rightful kingship was itself ‘instituted through’ the priesthood, an office which had predated, and was superior, to, that of kings. For Giles, the only legitimate forms of non-Christian kingship were those of the Jews of the Old Testament, who were then God’s faithful people. Hence, the rulers of those states who, like Theseus, were pagan unbelievers were not real kings but rather were ‘thieves and robbers’ whose acts of aggression constituted forms of criminal violence and whose governments had

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Augustine, City of God, II: 25–9 (pp. 81–8); XIX: 21 (pp. 881–3). Augustine’s definition of justice was taken from Cicero (who, in turn, was quoting Scipio), in a passage which no longer survives in his De Re Publica. For this definition of justice, see also Robert of Basevorn’s Form of Preaching, XXXIX (p. 180); Latini, Book of the Treasure, 240; Hoccleve, Regiment of Princes, 2645–7; Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 35; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 32. For Augustine on Jupiter, see City of God, II: 7 (p. 55); II: 15 (p. 65); III: 15 (p. 108); IV: 9 (p. 145); IV: 26 (p. 168); V: 8 (p. 189); VII: 2 (p. 255); VII: 9 (pp. 265–7); VII: 33 (p. 294). For Jupiter in malo, see also Gower, Confessio Amantis, V: 835–82; Chaucer, The Former Age, 56–7; and Alexander and Dindimus, 554, 659–62. For Jupiter as a pagan idol, see Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Tale’ (VIII: 284–5, 364–6, 509–11). 231 Augustine, City of God, V: 24–6 (pp. 220–3).

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been created by ‘invasion and usurpation’ (OEG: 23–5, 29–37, 101–3, 131, 137–9, 173, 205–7, 217–9, 277–85, 291–3, 373, 381–91).232 The result was a hierocratic view of the world as a monarchy whose head was the pope, in which temporal power was wielded at the command of and by permission of the pope, and in which the king’s rights and prerogatives were dependent upon the Church, a view defended in England by Archbishop Pecham against Edward I.233 However, the stark contrast which Giles’s De Ecclesiastica draws between legitimate Christian (and Old Testament) rulers and the illegitimate states of unbelievers, one which would have very negative implications for how we would judge the polity of a pagan such as Duke Theseus, was hardly typical of medieval Christian thought—even that of Giles himself. Thus, as we have seen, even Augustine, who was certainly no defender of pagan Rome, allowed that at least some of Rome’s wars were motivated by a ‘disinterested concern’ with the common good. When the Romans were ‘subjected to unprovoked attacks by their enemies, they were forced to resist not by lust for glory in men’s eyes but by the necessity to defend their life and liberty’. As a result, ‘the increase of empire was assisted by the wickedness of those against whom just wars were waged’. Although the Romans had failed to worship the true God and so did not possess ‘true virtue’, they did, nonetheless, possess a ‘sort of virtue’ even if this was eventually corrupted so that their desire for glory passed into a debauched libido dominandi.234 Naturally, pagan rulers were denounced when they persecuted Christians, as is Almachius, the prefect of Rome, in Chaucer’s ‘Second Nun’s Tale’. However, this did not mean that the legitimacy of pagan lordship was rejected per se, especially when, as in the case of Duke Theseus, they embodied the cardinal virtues of justice, prudence, fortitude and temperance. Indeed, so taken for granted was it that pagan

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Dyson, ‘Introduction’, xxiii. On kingship and the Jews, see also Augustine, City of God, XVI: 43 (p. 710); XVII: 6–7 (pp. 729–31); XVIII: 20 (p. 786); James of Viterbo, On Christian Government, II: III (pp. 64–6). For the later, somewhat surprising, uses to which of Giles’s arguments could be put, see Walsh, Fourteenth-Century Scholar, 381–4, 402, 405. 233 Rigby, English Society, 220. 234 Augustine, City of God, III: 10 (p. 98); XIV: 28 (p. 593); IV: 15 (p. 154); V: 12–21 (pp. 196–216); XVIII: 22 (p. 787); XIX: 15 (p. 875). Ptolemy of Lucca and William of Ockham thus cited Augustine as an authority for the view that Roman republic was the embodiment of political virtue. See Blythe, ‘Introduction’, 27, 34–6, 40; Ptolemy of Lucca, On the Government of Rulers, 2:9.4; 3:4–6; 4:19.5; William of Ockham, Short Discourse, 60–1.


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rulers could govern with virtue and justice in this life that it inevitably posed the question of whether such virtuous non-Christians could achieve salvation in the next world, a question addressed in poems such as St Erkenwald and by the famous story of Trajan which is discussed in Langland’s Piers Plowman.235 Similarly, whilst Giles’s De Ecclesiastica Potestate sets up a clear opposition betwen the just rule of princes who worship the true God and the unjust rule of those pagans who refuse to serve their rightful lord, his own De Regimine adopted a different approach. As Wallace has emphasised, rather than being concerned to produce a ‘timeless statement’ of principle, works of medieval political theory were often intended ‘to intervene in the specific struggle of a specific secular or religious ruler against a specific enemy at a particular moment’.236 This was certainly true of the De Ecclesiastica, a tract which was written in order to defend a particular viewpoint in the midst of an intense political conflict, that of Philip IV of France against Pope Boniface VIII. The De Regimine, by contrast, is much more ‘a general survey of the principles of politics’ and so came to have a validity well beyond the immediate circumstances of its origin and which, unlike the littleknown De Ecclesiastica, became a standard work of political theory.237 As opposed to the dichotomy between true believer and pagan which Giles’s purposes lead him to set up in the De Eccelsiastica, the De Regimine presents us with a gradated hierarchy of virtue: if belief in the law of the Gospel allows Christians to attain a higher level of virtue and goodness than those who are unbelievers, this does not mean that all unbelievers are equally unjust or that all pagan states were equally invalid (G: 379–80).

235 St Erkenwald, 225–56; Langland, Piers Plowman, XI: 140–169, XII; 281–4; Whatley, ‘Heathens’. For medieval versions of the story of Trajan, see the references in Whatley, ‘Uses’ and also Jacobus de Voragine, Golden Legend, I, 178–9; Dante, Purgatorio, X: 73–96; Dante, Paradiso, XX. 236 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 3; for examples, see Swanson, John of Wales, 83. Of course, a text written as a response to a particular occasion, not least Augustine’s City of God, could also come to have a significance well beyond the immediate circumstances which gave rise to it (Knowles, ‘Introduction’, xv–xvi, xxxiii). Furthermore, even texts which arose from particular circumstances could also include much that was commonplace, as when Giles’s De Ecclesiastica invokes the hierarchical nature of the universe in his justification of the superiority of the spiritual over the temporal power (OEG: 59). 237 Dyson, ‘Introduction’, xi–xii, xx–xxi; Walsh, Fourteenth-Century Scholar, 381.

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That even unbelievers—such as Duke Theseus—could achieve a kind of just rule and possession is evident in Giles’s claim in the De Regimine that the positive law of particular human communities is grounded in a wider, natural law, one which has the same force among all people since it is grounded in a universal human reason and is ‘written in our hearts’ (NE, V, vii: 1; AP: IV, 1). The ‘law of kynde and the lawe of men’ do help us to ‘come to good’ even if, of course, this good does not match that which is achieved with the help of Christian faith (G: 340, 365–73, 379–80).238 Even before the arrival of the law of the gospel, man’s natural inclination ‘to lyue cyuel lyf and in comynte’ meant that the citizens of pagan states such as Rome did not spare ‘to put hemself to peril of deeth for the comon profit’ (G: 118, 291–5, 327, 332–3, 340). If Christianity ‘passeth alle othere lawes’ in being without error, this does not mean that other faiths are completely wrong but rather that in them ‘falsede is imedled wyth trouthe’ (G: 218). When intemperate rulers such as Sardanapalus and Dionysius performed tyrannical deeds, they did so not because they were pagans but rather because they were corrupt individuals whose vices were recognized by their contemporaries (G: 73, 120). Indeed, for Giles, the government by some of others was not only an arrangement which was natural to humanity but was also a principle which was to be found throughout nature. Following Aristotle, Gratian and Aquinas, he argued that just as it is natural for the diverse members of any body to be governed by one part that is chief so the body politic required a member which ruled over the others. As for the Stoics, nature would provide an example of right living and order. For instance, just as it is natural for bees ‘to lyue in companye’ so it is ‘kyndelich for hem to be vnder oo kynge’ (G: 327).239 Giles had no need to explicate this allusion for, in the animal-lore inherited from the classical world and which was developed in medieval bestiaries and in encyclopedias such as that of Bartholomaeus Anglicus, bees were seen as model citizens, each working at its own specific task for the com-

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Barr, ‘Treatment’; Bracton, Laws, II, 26–7; Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 303. Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, XV: 36–8; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 154; On the Universe, 399b, 400b; Gratian, Treatise, 42; Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: XII (p. 67); Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, 105; Henry of Ghent, Is it Rational, 263; Scanlon, Narrative, 114. On the need for a chief member in any composite body, see also Jonas of Orleans, De Instiutione Regia, 222–4; James of Viterbo, On Christian Government, II: X (p. 152); Dante, Convivio, IV, iv: 2; Dante, Monarchy, I: V (p. 10); Bonet, Tree of Battles, 114–5, 126–7; Offler, Church, XIII: 2. 239


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mon good and being obedient to their virtuous and merciful ‘kings’—it being unthinkable that the hive might be headed by a queen.240 As John of Salisbury paradoxically said, the ideal body politic should ‘imitate nature’, otherwise it would deserve to be condemned as ‘bestial and brutal’. Nature’s design is thus ‘disclosed even by creatures which are devoid of reason’, as can be seen from Plutarch’s supposed advice to Trajan ‘to borrow the pattern of civil life from the bees’ who combine the labour for the common good of the ‘lower orders’ with the prudence of their royal ruler.241 This view of pagan government as capable of being legitimate and just was a standard idea in the work of medieval Christian writers such as John of Salisbury, John of Wales, Nicholas Oresme and Philippe de Mézières.242 Even the greatest pagan thinkers may have been mistaken in matters of eternal salvation but ‘philosophers’ and ‘catholics’ were seen as being in agreement that the common good, which was represented by the body politic, ‘ought to be preferred to the private good’.243 Accordingly, pagans were frequently cited as models of just rulers and subjects. As Christine de Pizan said, ‘The noble Romans were pagans and unbelievers, yet were so well governed that we ought to take them as an example’.244 Aquinas even argued that the rule of the infidel over Christians could sometimes be legitimate since the distinction between the faithful and the infidel which is made in divine law ‘does not invalidate the government and dominion of infidels over the faithful’. It follows, therefore, that ‘unbelief is not itself incompatible with dominion since dominion derives from the law of nations which

240 Seneca, On Clemency, 4, 19 (pp. 142, 158–9); Virgil, Georgics, IV: 67–263; Staley, Languages, 297–300; Bestiary, 178–9; Book of Beasts, 153–7; Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, II, XII.8.1–3; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VI: 18 (p. 318); XVIII: 12 (pp. 1141–8); Latini, Book of the Treasure, 117–8; George, Naming, 217; Hassig, Medieval Bestiaries, 52–61; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, 152; Richard of Maidstone, Concordia, 296; Mum and the Sothsegger, 975–1086. See also Mohl, ‘Theories’, 32; Barr, ‘Treatment’, 60–1; Barr, Socioliterary Practice, 161–75. For Chaucer on the ‘bisy bee’ who serves ‘withouten gile’, see the ‘Second Nun’s Tale’ (VIII: 195). 241 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, VI: 21–22. 242 Eberle, ‘Mirrors’, 434; Swanson, John of Wales, 41, 47–50, 55, 68–9, 71; Nicholas Oresme, De Moneta, 45; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 240; Owst, Literature, 183–4; Vale, War, 151–6; Kalning, ‘Virtues’, 139–40, 143–5; Nederman, Medieval Aristotelianism, II: 191–2. 243 Henry of Ghent, Is it Rational, 260–2, 267. 244 Christine de Pizan, Body Politic, 20; Christine de Pizan, Corps du Policie, 18.

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is human law’.245 The claims about the illegitimacy of non-Christian forms of secular government which Giles made in the De Ecclesiastica were, therefore, exceptional even amongst those who took the papal side in the conflict between Boniface VIII and Philip IV. For instance, although James of Viterbo was a defender of the papal position, his De Regimine Christiano did not adopt Giles’s radical position that all temporal power is unjust unless it originates in true spiritual authority. For James, temporal power, even among unbelievers, is the product of human nature, or even of nature per se since ‘a kind of government’ exists even amongst the beasts. Even pagan government does have ‘a kind of validity and legitimacy’ in its securing of the common good.246 Inevitably, those on the opposite side in the quarrel between king and pope were even more prepared to argue for the legitimacy of state power which had not been sanctified by the Church. Accordingly, John of Paris’s On Royal and Papal Power (c. 1302) claimed that temporal government did not require prior legitimation by the spiritual power but rather had its roots ‘in natural law and the law of nations’, being derived from man’s nature as a ‘political and civil animal’.247 Thus, if Giles of Rome’s immediate polemical purposes in the De Ecclesiastica led him to denigrate the rulership of unbelievers, his De Regimine offered an alternative view of pagan polities, one which was in line with the mainstream of medieval political theory. Here, pagan rulership was seen as natural, just and legitimate, even if it could not match the excellence of Christian kingship. Accordingly, although Theseus was a pagan who worshipped Jupiter, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ portrays him not as a robber and a usurper but as a ruler who is just and merciful, who takes counsel from others, and who seeks the common good rather than his own individual profit. In forgiving Palamon and Arcite and seeking to reconcile Athens and Thebes through the marriage of Palamon and Emily which is arranged at his parliament, Theseus’s actions combine the virtue of ‘mansuetude’ which Giles recommends in Book I of the De Regimine with the rightful control of those within his

245 Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: IV (p. 21); Aquinas, Selected Political Writings, 153–5, 157; Russell, Just War, 223–4, 255, 286. 246 James of Viterbo, On Christian Government, II: III (pp. 64, 66); II: VI (pp. 97–100); II: VII (pp. 101–4); II: VIII (pp. 126–7); II: X (pp. 136–8, 140, 147–149, 151–3); Walsh, Fourteenth-Century Scholar, 382. See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 239. 247 John of Paris, On Royal and Papal Power, I (pp. 76–9); IV (pp. 88–91); V (pp. 92–3). See also William of Ockham, Short Discourse, 52–4, 60–1, 74–99, 111–7, 120, 124, 159–61.


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household which Giles advises in Book II and the mixture of severity and mercy, of just war and the pursuit of peace, which Giles counsels to the prince in Book III. Read in this context, Chaucer’s portayal of the pagan Duke Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ provides a mirror for contemporary princes in the guise of an allegorical narrative fiction about the ancient world.

PART III

THE FIRST MOVER AND THE GOOD RULE OF THE COSMOS

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ‘KNIGHT’S TALE’ AS COSMOGRAPHY: THE GOOD RULE OF THE UNIVERSE Et si ne doys pas oublier le noble livre Du Gouvernement des Princes . . . et Boece de consolacion Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 229 (p. 222)

i. Theseus’s Cosmography: Wisdom, Delusion or Opportunism? In medieval rhetorical theory, the ending of a text was seen as the most appropriate place for the expression of those opinions which an author especially wanted to emphasise. As Christine de Pizan put it, ‘a work stands or falls by its conclusion’.1 Accordingly, at the end of the pilgrimage to Canterbury, the Host invites the Parson to tell a final tale so as to ‘knytte up wel a greet mateere’ (X: 16, 28–9). As Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde puts it, ‘Th’end is every tales strengthe’.2 Given this privileged status, the views expressed in the famous Boethian ‘First Mover’ speech with which Duke Theseus concludes the ‘Knight’s Tale’ must be central to any assessment of the duke’s virtue. Indeed, the explicit introduction of these Boethian elements is one of the major differences between Chaucer’s tale and Boccaccio’s Teseida.3 Boethian philosophy, cosmography and morality were certainly seen by medieval writers as being compatible with the kind of Aristotelian ethical and political theory which was expounded by writers such as Giles of Rome. For Albertus Magnus, Aristotle and Boethius had both taught that bodily pleasures were the chains which bound us to our lower natures but that we could be freed from these chains by ‘the true pleasures of understanding’. Similarly, Philippe de Mézières and Jean Gerson both recommended Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy as useful reading for rulers alongside works such as Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics, which

1

Christine de Pizan, Reply to Pierre Col, 132; Bonaventure, Commentary, 231–2, Dante, Convivio, II, viii, 2–3 (p. 58); Minnis, ‘Theorizing’, 16. 2 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, II: 256–60. 3 Nolan, Chaucer, 279.

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were Giles’s sources for De Regimine Principum, as well as the De Regimine itself.4 It is this wider cosmographical and philosophical context, rather than the detail of Giles’s political writings, which provides the framework for the discussion of Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech offered in this chapter. As we have seen, Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech has been a touchstone for the mutually exclusive interpretations of the tale which modern scholars have put forward. We have already examined some of the practical implications which Theseus draws from his speech, including his advice that we should make a ‘vertue of necessitee’ (I: 3042–3) and his recommendation that Emily should consent to marry Palamon. Here we are more concerned with the broader cosmology which underlies the duke’s moral outlook. In particular, how does the duke attempt to resolve the problem of theodicy which medieval cosmography inevitably raised, that is how can a belief in a deity who manifests his beneficence in his creation be reconciled with an awareness of the existence of human tragedy and suffering? If, as Theseus claims, the divine wisdom of the First Mover has bound the whole world with a ‘faire cheyne of love’, why is it that life on Earth actually constitutes, as Theseus himself admits, a ‘foule prisoun’ (I: 2987–93, 3061)? What, then, does Theseus claim in his address to his parliament, and why have his views been interpreted in such different ways by modern critics? Theseus’s argument is based on the cosmological premise that the world is governed by the wisdom and beneficence of Jupiter, the ‘First Moevere’, who is the ‘prince’ of the entire universe and the source of all the different parts of nature (I: 2987, 2994, 3004–9, 3035–6). To guarantee order amongst the diversity of his creation, the First Mover has, in his exalted plan for the cosmos, constrained the four elements which make up the world (earth, air, fire and water) within a ‘fair cheyne of love’ (I: 2987–93). Duke Theseus takes as the foundation of his argument the fact that the First Mover is ‘parfit’, ‘stable’ and ‘eterne’ (I: 3004, 3009). However, he is also aware that, as experience clearly shows, all things in the world in which we ourselves live, whether the mightiest oak or the hardest stone, are ‘corrumpable’ and ‘nat eterne’: ‘al this thyng hath ende’ (I: 3016–26). Since nature’s form is derived 4

Albertus Magnus, Questions, 13–14; Philippe de Mézières, Songe du Vieil Pelerin, 229 (p. 222). Gerson’s list of recommended reading included Boethius, Giles, Vegetius, Seneca’s De Clemencia and Aristotle’s Ethics, Economics and Politics (Jean Gerson, Texte de la lettre, 48–50).

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from the unity of the First Mover who is the ‘cause of alle thyng’, it would seem that it is the ‘wise purveiaunce’ of the First Mover himself which has ordained that everything on Earth should only last for a certain time (I: 2994–3015, 3036, 3046). As humans themselves are a part of this natural order, it follows that all men must die, kings and servants alike (I: 3027–38). Theseus then goes on to use the fact that all men must die to provide various solacia for the death of Arcite. He claims, for instance, that, through death, Arcite has at least departed from the ‘foule prisoun of this lyf ’ and, moreover, has done so in ‘duetee and honour’ (I: 3047–66).5 The fact of human mortality also provides grounds for the duke to justify ending the mourning for Arcite, which by then had lasted the ‘lengthe of certeyn yeres’ (I: 2967, 2978). Theseus argues that because the First Mover himself has ordained that we must all die, it is foolish and futile to complain about this fact or to resist this ordinance since to do so is to make oneself a ‘rebel’ against He who governs all things (I: 3039–46, 3057–8). He therefore seeks to persuade Emily and Palamon to accept each other as husband and wife (I: 3075–93), arguing that if the First Mover has decreed that all creatures must die, he has also wisely ordained that each species as a whole (such as humanity) should endure (I: 3011–3014). Although we live in a world marked by corruption and death, there is also the possibility of regeneration and new life. Accordingly, Theseus is able to conclude that, despite all the suffering which exists in the world, we can still find reasons to thank Jupiter for his grace and can identify the means by which sorrow can be amended and woe replaced by joy (I: 3067–74). The sadness resulting from the death of Arcite is succeeded by the happiness and mutual love of the marriage of Palamon and Emily, within which there was never a word ‘Of jalousie or any oother teene’ (I: 3101–06). Given its importance as an attempt to impose a meaning on the events recounted in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, it is hardly surprising that Duke Theseus’s cosmographical conclusion to the tale has been the subject of intense debate amongst Chaucer’s modern readers. On the one hand, the duke’s philosophising has frequently been seen as a sign that Chaucer is presenting Theseus to his audience as a ruler who is wise and virtuous and whose prudence makes him into an ideal ruler

5 For the consolatio mortis, see Bishop, Pearl, pp. 15–23; Bishop, ‘Chaucer’; Bishop, Narrative Art, 45, 47. For this life as a prison, see The Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge, f. 125v.

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by medieval standards.6 This association of Theseus and philosophical wisdom can be traced at least as far back as the twelfth century when Bernardus Silvestris used the ‘demigod’ Theseus to represent ‘the cooperation of divine theorica and human practica to form philosophy’.7 On the other hand, Theseus’s cosmographical musings have often been seen as unsatisfactory and implausible. The point here is not simply, as is inevitably the case, that modern readers (myself included) judge Duke Theseus to be deluded in his philosophical outlook. Rather, as Strohm argues, it is Chaucer himself who is seen as taking care to ensure ‘that his audience understands Theseus to be wrong’.8 In Hirsch’s terms, what is at issue is not merely the ‘significance’ of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ for us now but rather the ‘meaning’ of Chaucer’s text, whether or not we ourselves agree with it.9 For those who see Chaucer as presenting Theseus as being mistaken in his philosophical teachings, the duke is, at best, well-intentioned in his unsatisfactory and hollow attempts to make the best of a bad situation, in his misplaced optimism about the benign rule of Jupiter in the world, and in his failure to grasp the malign role of Saturn in human affairs. At worst, his weak and contradictory philosophising, with its garbled misunderstanding of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, is seen as being simply a mask for his own opportunist political agenda.10 6 Halverson, ‘Aspects’, 615–20; Coghill, ‘Chaucer’s Narrative Art’, 124–5; Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 121–6; Mann, ‘Chance’, 90; Muscatine, Chaucer, 183–4; Robinson, Chaucer, 135–43; Kean, Chaucer, II, 5, 41–51, 78; Whittock, Reading, 75; Bartholomew, Fortuna, 103–4; Hieatt, Chaucer, 39–40; McCall, Chaucer, 81–2; Jordan, Chaucer, 157–8, 184; Olson, Canterbury Tales, 68; Ruggiers, Art, 162–66; Pearsall, Canterbury Tales, 124–5; Manzalaoui, ‘Chaucer’, 247; Lawler, One and the Many, 91–5; Curry, Chaucer, 161–3; Wood, Chaucer, 47; Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents, 131–3. See also the references in Rigby, Chaucer, 74, n. 43. 7 Wetherbee, Platonism, 108–9. 8 Strohm, Social Chaucer, 132–3. For the implausibility of the kind of arguments used by Theseus, see Blackburn, Think, 163–76. 9 Hirsch, Validity, 8, 38–9, 57, 62–7, 127, 141, 216, 255. 10 Burrow, ‘Canterbury Tales’, 123; Neuse, ‘Knight’, 250; Fifield, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 95; Blake, ‘Order’, 12–19; Benson, Chaucer’s Drama, 85–8; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 187–95; Aers, Chaucer, 30–2; Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, 150–81; Ferster, Chaucer, 33–5, 40; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 79–81; Burlin, Chaucerian Fictions, 105–6; Olsson, ‘Securitas’, 135, 145–50; Payne, Chaucer, 220, 229, 237, 253–8; Cooper, Structure, 103–5; Mehl, Geoffrey Chaucer, 162; Ganim, ‘Chaucerian Ritual’, 77; La Farge, ‘Women’, 75; Brown, Chaucer at Work, 75–6; Bishop, Narrative Art, 47; Rogers, Upon the Ways, 29–37; Patterson, Chaucer, 203; Knapp, Chaucer, 27–8; Knight, Geoffrey Chaucer, 90; Spearing, ‘Introduction’, 75–8; Brown and Butcher, Age of Saturn, 229–36; Thompson, Chaucer, 79, 118; Tasioulas, ‘Science’, 181; Gellrich, Discourse, 257–70; Ingham, ‘Psychoanalytic Criticism’, 476; Broughton, ‘He Conquered’, 59–60; Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 90, 101–10, 144–51; Simpson, Reform, 310–11; Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical


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It is easy to understand why critics have often found Theseus’s philosophy to be rather unconvincing. After all, the fact that all things in the world must one day perish hardly seems to offer an ‘experiential proof of a stable and eternal first mover who binds all in a chain of love’ but appears rather to suggest that God is at best indifferent to the world or, at worst, actively malicious in His interventions in it. The inadequacy of Theseus’s optimistic claim seems to be made all the more apparent ‘by the contexts in which Chaucer has placed it’, that is, after a lengthy description of Arcite’s death agony which was brought about by the machinations of the gods.11 Many critics have therefore seen Theseus’s explicit conclusions about the benevolence of Jupiter who rules the universe as the ‘prince and cause of alle thyng’ (I: 3036) as being implicitly undermined by the events of the tale itself. After all, despite Theseus’s philosophical optimism, it could be argued that what the ‘Knight’s Tale’ actually demonstrates is that it is the influence of Saturn, Infortuna Major, whose negative effects include treason, destruction, sickness and death and who ‘Hath moore power than woot any man’ (I: 2453–69), and of the other members of the ‘arbitrary Olympian clique’, which is paramount in human affairs.12 Certainly, when Venus and Mars argue about whether Palamon or Arcite should win the hand of Emily, the mighty Jupiter cannot resolve their conflict and it is eventually Saturn who finds a means by which to settle their dispute (I: 2438–77). For those who adopt this perspective, it cannot be assumed that the duke’s philosophy is an expression of Chaucer’s own views. On the contrary, there is a distance between what Theseus claims about the nature of the world and what the poet actually shows to be the case, a distance which allows us to adopt a critical assessment of the duke and the tale’s claims to achieve a successful containment of the dark and violent elements which it presents to us: we should not be ‘taken in’ by the tale.13

Space, 232–4. See also the references in Rigby, Chaucer, 75, n. 74; 76, n. 103 and in the notes to I: 2987–3089 in Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 841. 11 Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 189–90; Aers, Chaucer, 24; Salter, Chaucer, 31–6; Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, 175–80; Thompson, Chaucer, 79; Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 232–4. 12 Fifield, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 95; Blake, ‘Order’, 12–19; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 179–80; Minnis, Chaucer, 139–41; Burnley, Chaucer’s Language, 79; Cooper, ‘Classical Background’, 263; Rayner, Image, 125; Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 534. See also the references in Rigby, Chaucer, 76, n. 103. 13 Sherman, ‘Politics’, 98, 112; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 189; Simpson, Reform, 310–11.

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Yet, although some commentators have been tempted to read Theseus’s speech ironically, seeing it as deliberately implausible and inherently unconvincing, the duke’s claim that the ruler of all things has both bound the entire universe with a fair chain of love and ordained that all things must die was not only taken by Chaucer from Boccaccio’s Teseida but, more broadly, was the orthodoxy of medieval cosmography.14 Indeed, so taken for granted were such ideas about the universe that Theseus tends simply to assume them as the premise of his argument. As a result, it may be useful if this underlying cosmology is explicitly set out (section ii) before we go on to examine how Theseus puts it to work in the detail of his ‘First Mover’ speech (sections iii–v). ii. Medieval Cosmography: Order, Diversity and Hierarchy Duke Theseus’s aim in his ‘First Mover’ speech is to persuade Palamon and Emily to marry as part of his wider foreign policy of having ‘fully of Thebans obeisaunce’ (I: 2694). Yet, in order to achieve this eminently practical goal, Theseus feels obliged to resort to some rather abstract speculation about the nature of the cosmos. As we have seen, modern readers have often interpreted the metaphysics and ethics which he propounds as simply a mask for his own self-interest. Medieval readers, by contrast, may have found this marriage of ethics, politics and cosmology far less surprising, given that it was a commonplace of contemporary political theory that the prince’s good rule of himself and of others should be modelled on the good rule which was apparent in the divinely-ordained order of the universe. As Aquinas said, in order to ‘see what a king should do’, we should consider ‘what God does in the universe’: the government of creation thus ‘allows us to deduce the principle of civil government’.15 If ideology works by a process of displacement then medieval political ideology did not only involve a reduction of political issues down to the level of individual ethics (above, 220). An alternative strategy was to shift the ground of the argument by inflating questions of political structure into matters of cosmological significance. As Giles argues, a king should seek to rule his kingdom ‘as God ruleth and gouerneth al the worlde’, this principle of monarchical subordination being equally appropriate for all levels 14 15

Boccaccio, The Book of Theseus, 314; Boccaccio, Teseida, 344. Aquinas, On Princely Government, I: XIII; I: XIV (pp. 69, 73).


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of existence, from the cosmos, through the state and the family down even to the individual, within whom the soul should rule the body (G: 31, 81, 83, 190, 327).16 This equation between the place of the ‘First Mover’ as the ‘Prince’ (I: 2994) of the entire cosmos and Duke Theseus’s position within his realm is made apparent within the ‘Knight’s Tale’ when the duke is described as having ‘wroght’ the most ‘noble’ amphitheatre the world has ever seen, one which was round in shape ‘in manere of compas’ (I: 1881–1913) and so can be seen as allegorically symbolizing the cosmos.17 Following on from Plato’s Timaeus, in which God is seen as the ‘constructor’ and ‘maker of the cosmos’, works of medieval theology and cosmology had long presented God as the master craftsman of creation and as the one ‘master artisan and creator’.18 Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature (c. 1170), a work which was familiar to Chaucer, described God as ‘the choice architect of the universe’, ‘the golden constructor of a golden construction, the skilled artisan of an amazing work of art’, and ‘the operative producer of an admirable work’; it was He who created the ‘marvellous form’ of the world ‘by the command of His deciding will alone’.19 Medieval depictions of God, whom John of Salisbury described as the ‘master builder of nature’, could therefore show Him with compass in hand, as the architect of creation, forming the universe from chaos, the compass itself being a symbol of the order of his creation as he ordains the planets in their circular motion within the perfect ‘rounded form’ of the heavens. As Plato had said, the sphere was the shape with the ‘greatest degree of completeness and uniformity’. Similarly, for Aristotle, the primum mobile of the fixed stars ‘moves eternally in a perfect circle, striving to be as like God as it is possible to be’.20 The

16

Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 167, 286, 290, 293; Blythe, Ideal Government, 63, 74. Schweitzer, ‘Fate’, 35; North, Chaucer’s Universe, 420. On the design and meaning of the amphitheatre, see also Kolve, Chaucer, 105–30. Boccaccio’s Teseo arranges the tournament at an existing amphitheatre (Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 136; Boccaccio, Teseida, 197. 18 Plato, Timaeus, 28–9 (pp. 40–1); Augustine, City of God, XII: 4 (p. 475); John of Salisbury, Frivolities, VII: 5 (p. 231); Friedman, ‘Architect’s Compass’, 424–6; von Simson, Gothic Cathedral, 29–31; Kean, Chaucer, II, 24. For the knowledge of Plato in the middle ages, see below, 239–40. 19 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr 4 (pp. 144–5). For the prince’s ‘architectonic’ rule, see Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 284–5. 20 John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 1 (p. 56); Plato, Timaeus, 33, 44 (pp. 45, 61); Ovid, Metamorphoses, I: 32–5; Bible Moralisée, IV; Grant, Planets, 191, 195; Aristotle, On the 17

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circle embodied the uniformity, symmetry and harmony of parts which medieval writers saw as the definition of beauty and whose order led men to an understanding of the Creator. As Augustine argued, just as the uniformity of the equilateral triangle means that it is more beautiful than the non-equilateral triangle, so, in turn, the square with its equal angles and sides was more beautiful too; ‘but most beautiful of all is the circle, in which no angle disturbs the continual uniformity of the whole’. So too for Bartholomaeus Anglicus, the circle is ‘most parfyte among alle figures’: ‘For heuene is rounde in schappe, and the planetes meuyth all rounde aboute, and so doth alle the sterres’. Indeed, God himself can be conceived of in terms of the perfection of a circle, one whose ‘myddel poynt is euerywhere and the roundenesse nowhere’.21 As is said of God at the end of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, he is ‘Uncircumscript, and al maist circumscrive’.22 Just as when God had created the heavens he imposed order on chaos and ‘enclosed the depths’ with ‘a certain law and compass’ (Proverbs 8: 27) so Theseus, in siting his amphitheatre in the grove where he came across Palamon and Arcite fighting superimposes order, in the form of his circular amphitheatre, on a place characterized by its wildness and lack of boundaries.23 This link between the good order of the cosmos and the good rule of the individual is also apparent in the medieval conception of virtue, one shared by Giles of Rome, which was based on the traditional idea that each individual human is a microcosm of the macrocosm of the universe and so comprises all the steps of the natural hierarchy within him or herself.24 Man is therefore a ‘lasse world’ in himself: like stones,

Heavens, 286b; On the Universe, 391b, 399a Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 3 (p. 75); I: 4 (p. 89); Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VIII: 1 (pp. 442, 444–5); VIII: 2 (pp. 449–50); VIII: 6 (p. 456); Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, III.31–37; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 64–6; Chadwick, Boethius, 242–3; Economou, Goddess Natura, 7. 21 Binding, High Gothic, 41–2. See also Dante, Paradiso, XIX: 40–5; Romance of the Rose, 259; Roman de la Rose, 16727–8; Kean, Chaucer, II, 24; Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, XIX: 127 (pp. 1368–70). This image of God as a circle whose centre is everywhere is also found in The Romance of the Rose, having first been used in the twelfth-century Liber XXIV Philosophorum (Romance of the Rose, 295, 349; Roman de la Rose, 19100–01). 22 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, V: 1865. 23 Dante, Convivio, III, xv: 7; Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 229–30; Scala, Absent Narratives, 103; Hanning, ‘Struggle’, 531–3. 24 For this idea, see Formicus, Mathesis, II, Pro.: 2; Augustine, City of God, V: 11 (p. 196); VIII: 6 (p. 307); Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, 40, 224; Fulgentius, Of the Ages of the World, 192, 195; Gregory, Moralia, VI, 20: 20–6; John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, IV, 1 (p. 3); Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (pp. 118–23);


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he exists; like plants, he grows; like animals, he has the five principal senses; like angels (although to a lesser extent), he possesses the power of reason which distinguishes him from animals (G: 35–6, 190, 369–71; DA: II.3).25 Like Augustine, Giles argued that it is through his possession of reason that man is said to have been made ‘in the image of God’ and been given lordship over all corporeal things (Genesis 1: 27–8; OEG: 93, 347–9). Just as God rules the macrocosm of the entire world, so reason should rule the microcosm of the individual, with the soul governing the body and reason controlling the appetites and passions: order, rightful rule, and reason within the individual are all one (G: 138, 190).26 Christian thinkers took over the Stoics’ conception of nature as embodying a rational and harmonious order which provided a model for individual human virtue and justice, a conception which, in turn, was in line with that of Plato’s Timaeus.27 In the De Regimine itself, this outlook is largely taken for granted and so for its explicit formulation in Giles’s work we have to turn to his De Ecclesiastica Potestate. The De Ecclesiastica did not have the same circulation in the fourteenth century as that enjoyed by Giles’s De Regimine. Nevertheless, Chaucer was extremely familiar with the kind of cosmology offered there by Giles from his reading of works by authors such as Boethius, Macrobius, Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun.28 These writers all attempted to link their characterisation of the nature of the cosmos with their ethics and political ideals. The central conception of medieval cosmography was the claim that the universe was a material expression of an idea which had previously existed in the mind of God. This was a doctrine which had its origins in Plato’s Timaeus, a work which, for most of the middle ages, was the only text

Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, I: VIII: 1 (p. 441); Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 146–7; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Manzalaoui, pp. 80–1; Secretum Secretorum, ed. Steele, p. 143; Roman de la Rose, 19011–23; Romance of the Rose, 293–4; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 292; Gower, Confessio Amantis, Pro. 945–953; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VII: 8 (p. 268); Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 26869–26940; Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1139; Lewis, Discarded Image, 153, 169–70; Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame, 37; Conger, Theories, especially, chapters 1 and 2; Barkan, Nature’s Work of Art, chapter 1. 25 See also above, 93–4, on man’s possession of the vegetative, animal and rational powers of the soul. 26 Augustine, City of God, I: 20 (pp. 31–2); XI: 29 (p. 464); XII: 24 (p. 503); XIV: 15 (p. 574); XIX: 15 (p. 874); XXII: 24 (p. 1072). 27 Erskine, Hellenistic Stoa, 16, 22, 114–5, 207; Wetherbee, Platonism, 31, 35; Hadas, ‘Introduction’, 13, 21. 28 Green, Poets, 143–7; Dronke, ‘Chaucer’, 154–67; Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 126.

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by Plato that was known at first-hand (via its partial translation by Chalcidius) and one that was seen by writers such as John of Salisbury as having anticipated Christian wisdom, including even the doctrine of the Trinity.29 From Plato, this outlook had passed, via neo-platonism and the works of Augustine and Boethius, into the mainstream of medieval Christian thought.30 Its essentials remained in place even after the revival of interest in Aristotelian thought in the thirteenth century since, in many respects, Aristotle’s works did not so much provide medieval thinkers with a radically new content but rather equipped them with new modes of expressing and defending what were often very familiar ideas.31 Whether in Augustine’s neo-platonism or Giles of Rome’s Christian Aristotelianism, the fundamentals of the rightful ‘order’ which God had ordained within nature, society and the individual were presented in the same way, and it was this cosmological outlook which underlies Duke Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech. Central to this cosmological orthodoxy were the concepts of ‘order’, ‘diversity’ and ‘hierarchy’. For both Augustine and Giles of Rome, rightful ‘order’ in the world, whether within nature, society or the individual, consists of each thing being in its ‘owne place’, performing its own particular function and being in accord with its own nature, powers, purpose and activities as they have been ordained by God. More than eight centuries before Giles, Augustine had claimed that God had ordered all things within creation so that each sought its own place; the De Regimine expressed the same idea but with the help of Aristotelian natural philosophy.32 Echoing the words of Aristotle (OH: 310a–b, 311a–b) and of Boethius’s Consolation, Giles argued that each object has a property, such as lightness or heaviness, which gives it its proper place, whether high or low, and that each thing, even the soulless elements, seeks to rise or fall to that place and then to remain there. Fire, for instance, has been endowed by nature with both lightness, so that it may rise up, and with heat, so that it ‘putteth of contraries’, and so is able to ascend to its own proper place (G: 38–9, 120, 193; OEG: 57,

29 Plato, Timaeus, 29–31 (pp. 41–3); John of Salisbury, Frivolities, VII: 5 (pp. 328–33); Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 23; Leff, Medieval Thought, 16, 176; Wetherbee, ‘Intellectual Themes’, 77; Wetherbee, Platonism, 28–31. 30 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, III, m. IX: 8–9; Haskins, Renaissance, 344. 31 Black, Political Thought, 21; Russell, Just War, 264. 32 Augustine, City of God, V: 8 (p. 189); XI: 27–8 (pp. 461–3); XIII: 18 (p. 529); XIX: 12 (pp. 869–70).


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165, 249–51, 261, 287, 295, 336, 367).33 Predictably, perhaps, Giles also followed Augustine in concluding his discussion of the rightful ordering of the universe, society and the individual in his De Ecclesiastica by invoking the text of Wisdom 11: 21 as an authority for the claim that God has ‘ordered all things in measure and number and weight’, this being one of the most popular of all Biblical texts in medieval theology and literature (OEG: 391).34 Similarly Plato’s Timaeus had presented God as bringing the original disordered state of the elements into order by giving them ‘a definite pattern of shape and number’.35 Just as Augustine had seen the beauty of God’s creation as lying in the harmonious proportion of its parts, so that nothing within it is marred by any excess or deficiency, so Giles, invoking the Aristotelian concept of the ‘mean’, presents nature itself as working by the mean, ordaining nothing with too much or too little and giving everything its own proper function and place (NE: I, ix: 5; II, ii: 6; II, vi: 4, 5, 9; G: 193, 295).36 What, then, is the specific nature of the rightful order which God has ordained as the ‘mean’ for the world? Here, once more, Augustinian neo-platonism and Giles’s Aristotelianism were in agreement that, as Augustine had put it, the divinely-approved order apparent in all things consisted not of a simple uniformity but rather of an organic interdependence of complementary parts, of a ‘harmonious union in plurality’, from the single feather of a bird through the human body to the heavens themselves (G: 58–9, 234, 295–301).37 Potentially, such diversity was a threat to order. As Giles said in the De Ecclesiastica, quoting the Codex Theodosianus, ‘where there is multitude, there is confusion’ (OEG: 279). After all, the fact that different angels have their own specific purposes means that ‘discords’, ‘contests’ and ‘disputes’ can be experienced even within the angelic hierarchy itself, although for Giles as for Augustine these disputes were, unlike those on Earth,

33 Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, IV, m. VI: 16–24; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 84, 151; Dante, Convivio, III, iii: 1. 34 Augustine, City of God, V: 11 (p. 196); XI: 30–1 (pp. 465–6); XXII: 19 (p. 496); Curtius, European Literature, 504. For the use of this text, see also Langland, Piers Plowman, XX: 254–5; Oresme, Livre de Politiques, 288. 35 Plato, Timaeus, 53 (pp. 72–3). 36 Augustine, City of God, XI: 22 (p. 454); XXII: 19 (p. 1061), XXII: 24 (pp. 1073–4). 37 Blythe, ‘Introduction’, p. 50; Augustine, City of God, V: 11 (p. 196); XII: 4–5 (pp. 475–7); XII: 23 (p. 503); XII: 28 (p. 508); XIX: 11–13 (pp. 865–71); XXII: 18 (p. 1059); XXII: 24 (pp. 1073–4); Grant, Planets, 148–9; On the Universe, 392a–b, 396a–b, 397a, 399a–b; Lawson-Tancred, ‘Introduction’, 68–72.

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‘wholly without sin’ or fault (OEG: 305).38 In order for discord and confusion to be avoided and for plurality to cohere into a harmonious, complex whole, all things in the universe had to be ‘mutually ordered’ in a rightful fashion (OEG: 279). For medieval theologians and philosophers, such rightful mutual ordering required that all things within the cosmos should be ranked hierarchically according to their powers, perfection and ‘excellence’, with the lower always serving and being subordinated to the higher (OEG: 59).39 Aquinas put it, ‘in all multiplicity there must be some controlling principle’ or, as James of Viterbo said, the attainment of order within any multitude ‘requires inequality and degree’.40 Giles himself cited St Augustine for whom the supreme wisdom of God had ordained a peace and order within the entire universe which consisted not just in everything being assigned its own ‘proper position’ but also in an arrangement of ‘equal and unequal things’ through which each contributes ‘to the government and rule of the universe’ (OEG: 259–61).41 From Augustine, for whom ‘if all things were equal, all things would not be’, through Aquinas, for whom ‘if there were a dead level of equality in things, only one kind of created good would exist’, to Gerson, who repeated Augustine’s words about order being an arrangement of equal and unequal things, each in its proper place, inequality was seen as the essence of the variety of diverse things which make up creation.42 This hierarchical outlook was particularly associated with the thought of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite whose works, written in the early sixth-century, circulated widely in western Europe from the twelfth century onwards and were eventually to be cited as a justification for the superiority of the spiritual power over the temporal.43 For writers such as Giles, the harmony which Pseudo-Dionysius had identified among the nine ranks of the angelic hierarchy provided a model for how

38

Augustine, City of God, XXII: 30 (p. 1088). Canning, History, 32; Eccleshall, Order, 11–13, 32, 47–8, 58; Gierke, Political Thought, 10–11, 28, 30. 40 Aquinas, On Princely Government, 7; James of Viterbo, On Christian Government, II: V (p. 84), II: X (p. 152). See also Bonet, Tree of Battles, 114–5, 126–7. 41 Augustine, City of God, XIX: 13 (pp. 870–2). 42 Lovejoy, Great Chain, 67, 76–7; Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1149. 43 Lewis, Discarded Image, 70–5; Tierney, Religion, 43; Pseudo-Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy, 153–75. See also Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, II: 8–18 (pp. 70–84); Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 3 (pp. 75–6); II: 5 (pp. 98–9); II: 7 (pp. 106–7). For the technical sense of ‘hierarchy’ in Pseudo-Dionysius, see Luscombe, Medieval Thought, 25. 39


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order and diversity were to be reconciled in general.44 Indeed, despite the disorder which characterises Hell, Giles even identified a hierarchy of powers among the wicked demons, although here there were only four ranks, rather than the nine found among the angels. Giles cites Pseudo-Dionysius in support of the view that the order of the universe itself requires that ‘the lowest be led back to the highest through the intermediate’. The ‘beautiful order’ and ‘astonishing beauty’ which God has given to the universe are based on the principle that inferior bodies are ‘ruled through’ the superior which is set above them, with spiritual substances being superior to the corporeal (OEG: 19, 25–7, 57, 191, 217, 233–43, 279–81, 307). All powers, whether among the angels or in the rest of creation, exist in a ‘certain order and proportion’ so that some are superior and others are inferior. The fact that some powers are lower than others does not mean that they are to be despised or to be seen as superfluous, but, nonetheless, they are still lower (OEG: 117–29, 221–3). As Giles said, God distributes powers to all things but does so to a ‘greater or lesser’ degree in each case. Here, as in Augustine, God’s providential design could be seen in the hierarchical division of all things into those of a higher and lower degree of existence, descending in the way in which they receive God’s goodness from those which are intellectual, such as angels and men, down through those which are sentient, such as animals, and those which are non-sentient, such as plants, to those which are merely inanimate, such as stones and metals (OEG: 287).45 This vision of the hierarchical order which God has instituted within the universe as a whole was inevitably employed by medieval thinkers to argue that the prevailing inequalities of medieval society were rational, natural and divinely ordained and so were beneficial to all in society, high or low, rich or poor, ruler or ruled.46 If, as Pseudo-Dionysius had shown, even the angels are ranked hierarchically, it followed that, as Giles said, the ‘principalities and powers which exist among men’, whether within the church or within the secular government, must be ‘even more clearly ranked’ (OEG: 19, 25–7, 51, 57, 191, 217, 233–43, 279–81). The whole universe is ‘so connected’ and ‘so ordered that’ the lower always serves the higher, and the more imperfect always serves 44

See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 10; Dante, Convivio, II, vi: 2–4. Augustine, City of God, V: 11 (p. 196); VIII: 6 (p. 307); XI: 16 (pp. 447–8); XII: 2 (p. 473); Dante, Convivio, III, vii: 3. See also Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 89–90, 112–3. 46 Gierke, Political Thought, 7–8; Eccleshall, Order, 9–13. 45

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the more perfect. Just as water and earth meet the needs of plants, plants benefit animals, and animals serve men, so human servants should faithfully serve and love their lords (G: 259–60, 263, 274–7; OEG: 93, 97). As Giles said in the De Regimine, just as within inanimate objects one element is the master of the others, within the well-ordered human body the soul has supremacy over the body, and within nature humans have supremacy over the beasts, so no community is properly ordered unless some rule, as chief and sovereign members, and others are ruled, being subject and obedient, with the husband being set over the wife, the father over the children and the lord over the servant.47 It is therefore unworthy for the higher elements to serve the lower, and it is beneficial to all when some are subject to others and when the lower (such as churls or women) serve the higher (such nobles or men) (G: 50–1, 122, 138, 150, 170–6, 190, 211, 255, 259–63, 273–5, 280–3, 297–9, 301–6, 333, 345, 385, 411). For Giles, few examples were needed in support of such claims ‘for all agree as to the truth of these things’ (OEG: 169). Finally, this view of the hierarchical nature of the universe could be invoked not only to legitimate contemporary social inequalities but also to justify a particular view of individual morality. Hence, the order which should characterise the virtuous individual should, like that of the good government of the state, be modelled on the good rule which God himself had ordained for the cosmos as a whole. This mixture of ethics and cosmography can again be traced back to Plato’s Timaeus which had argued that God had created the world by turning the original ‘inharmonious and disorderly motion’ of the universe into the order which he judged was ‘in every way better’. Then, in order to benefit humanity, God had given us sight so that we might use the ‘untroubled course’ of the eternal and unchanging heavens ‘to guide the troubled revolutions in our own understanding’. By this means, we can ‘correct the disorder of our own revolutions by the standard of the invariability of those of god’. The good life was achieved when reason and the soul mastered the body, the senses, the passions and the appetites; the wicked life occurred when this rightful hierarchy was inverted.48 The Stoics too argued that true happiness was to live a virtuous life in

47

See also above, 139. Plato, Timaeus, 28 (pp. 40–1), 29 (p. 42), 38 (p. 52), 42 (p. 58), 44 (pp. 60–1), 47 (p. 65). 48


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accordance with nature, reason and moderation ruling the passions, so that death and disaster became, as Seneca said, ‘an opportunity for virtue’. This mode of argument then passed into medieval Christian thought via the works of Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Augustine and Jerome and, of course, via Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which was to be a key source for Duke Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech in the ‘Knight’s Tale’.49 iii. The ‘First Mover’ and the ‘Fair Chain of Love’ Given the dominance within medieval thought of a view of the cosmos, of social and political relations, and of individual morality in terms of a series of ordered hierarchies, it was inevitable that Chaucer’s poetry would engage with this conception of the world. After all, if learning and didacticism were ‘fundamental elements in the medieval conception of serious poetry’, ‘both are present in abundance’ in the work of Chaucer who, as Wetherbee says, was ‘probably the most learned of medieval English poets’.50 This was how Hoccleve portrayed Chaucer in his Regement of Princes, hailing him not only as the successor to Virgil in his poetry but also as ‘the heir in philosophie/To Aristotle in our tonge’.51 Chaucer was certainly familiar with the commonplace of medieval cosmography and ideology that all things in the universe had their own proper place, an idea which, as we have seen, constituted the basis of medieval natural philosophy.52 As the Eagle explains to Chaucer in the House of Fame: ‘every kyndely thyng that is/Hath a kyndely stede ther he/May best in hyt conserved be/. . . Thus every thyng by thys reson/Hath his propre mansyon/To which hit seketh to repaire’.53 This cosmography, in which everything is assumed to have its own proper place, is also central to the morality expounded in the ‘Parson’s Tale’. Inevitably, like Augustine and Giles of Rome, the Parson defended this outlook with an appeal to Wisdom 11: 21: ‘God hath creat alle

49 Sandbach, Stoics, 31–45; Palmer, Seneca’s De Remediis Fortuitorum, 2–15; Seneca, On Providence, 27, 32, 36–40, 43; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 257. 50 Wetherbee, ‘Some Intellectual Themes’, 75; Lynch, Chaucer’s Philosophical Visions, 6–9; Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 1, 28–9. 51 Hoccleve, Regiment, 2085–90. 52 Delany, Chaucer’s House of Fame, 72. 53 Chaucer, House of Fame, 730–64.

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thynges in right ordre’ so that ‘alle thynges been ordeyned and nombred’. For the Parson, as for Thomas Wimbledon, only in Hell is there ‘noon ordre of rule’ (Job 10: 22) so that ‘they that been dampned been nothyng in ordre, ne holden no ordre’ (X: 217–8).54 In turn, the Parson applied this conception of creation to the social order, arguing that God had ordained that, as reason requires, some men should have ‘hyer degree and som men lower’ so that we should all accept this order uncomplainingly (X: 482, 499, 505–7, 763–5, 773, 1055, 1080). If the ‘Parson’s Tale’ ends the pilgrimage to Canterbury with a vision of rightful order, hierarchy, reason, harmony and common profit in the cosmos, society and the individual, a very similar vision informs the ‘First Mover’ speech with which Duke Theseus concludes the first of the Canterbury Tales. Drawing heavily on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which was one of the most popular didactic works among courtly audiences in the later middle ages and which he himself had translated into Middle English, Chaucer attributes to the duke a cosmology which had its origins in Plato’s Timaeus and whose central tenets were known to Chaucer through the work of writers such as Macrobius, Bernardus Silvestris, Alan of Lille and Jean de Meun.55 In the Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius moves from recommending a Stoic patience in the face of adversity to a transcending Platonic vision of the ordering of the universe as a whole;56 in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Theseus’s argument proceeds in the opposite direction, using the divine plan for the cosmos as a basis for his advice about how we should live in this world. Nevertheless, his conclusions were very much in line with those which Boethius offered centuries previously and which Chaucer himself had sought to make available in Middle English. Within medieval cosmography, the ‘First Mover’, whom Theseus invokes as the creator and beneficent cause of all things (I: 2987–8, 3036), was, as in Aristotle’s Metaphysics, another term for God, whom

54

Wimbledon, Redde Rationen Villicationis Tue, 94–6. For Chaucer’s knowledge of Macrobius, see the ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ (VII: 3123–4); Book of the Duchess, ll. 284–7); Parliament of Fowls, ll. 36–84; Romaunt of the Rose, ll. 7–10. For Chaucer and Bernardus Silvestris, see Dronke, ‘Chaucer’, 154–65; Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 126. For Chaucer’s familiarity with Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature and Anticlaudianus, see Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 316 and House of Fame, 986. For Chaucer and the Romance of the Rose, see the Merchant’s Tale (IV: 2032) and Book of the Duchess, l. 334; for Chaucer’s allusions to his own translation of the Rose, see Legend of Good Women, F: 329, 441; G: 224, 431, 460. 56 Chadwick, Boethius, 228–9. 55


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the Philosopher, without the aid of Christian revelation and by the use of natural reason alone, had argued must be a ‘living being’ who is eternal, unmoving and ‘most good’ (AM: 342–7).57 For Plato’s Timaeus, rather than having existed for all eternity, the world had been brought into being through the goodness of a maker who was ‘the best of causes’.58 Theseus equates the First Mover whom, like Aristotle, he sees as ‘stable’ and ‘eternal’, with Jupiter (I: I: 3004, 3035).59 Literally, of course, medieval Christians would have seen this view as mistaken. For Augustine, Jupiter was a ‘wicked demon’ who did not possess the powers ascribed to him by the ancients. However, even Augustine was prepared to concede that the pagan conception of Jupiter as the supreme god did anticipate the Christian notion of destiny in the sense of a chain of causes dependent upon the will and power of the one true god.60 Certainly, in medieval allegorical poetry, Jupiter (Jove) could be identified, as he is in Boccaccio’s glosses to the Teseida, with the Christian God.61 Given a belief in a First Mover, it was logical to claim, as Theseus himself does, that the diversity of creation was derived from this original unity (I: 3005–6). As was said in the On the Universe (De Mundo), a work which was wrongly attributed to Aristotle in the middle ages, the earth, the sea, the sun, the moon and all the heavens ‘are ordered by a single power extending through all, which has created the entire universe out of separate and different elements’.62 This argument was also to be found in Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia. Here Bernardus developed Plato’s distinction between, on the one hand, unchanging ‘being’ and, on the other, the ‘becoming’ in which things come into being and then cease to be which characterises the world of material objects. He relates these forms of being to the two principles of created life: ‘unity and diversity’. Of these, unity is eternal and diversity is derivative, the eternal unity that is God having limited the boundlessness 57 Grant, Planets, 515–23. For the differences between Plato and Aristotle’s first mover, see Economou, Goddess Natura, 7–8. See also Aristotle, Physics, VII: 1; Giles of Rome, Commentaria in Octo Libros Phisicorum Aristotelis, 161. 58 Plato, Timaeus, 28 (p. 41), 29 (p. 41). 59 See also On the Universe, 400b. 60 Augustine, City of God, I: 33 (p. 44); IV: 161–7 (pp. 155–6) V: 8 (pp. 188–9); Tinkle, ‘Saturn’, 302. 61 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 283; Boccaccio, Teseida, 445; Van Dyke, Chaucer’s Agents 131–2. See also Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, IX: 203–7, 220–1; Lydgate, On Gloucester’s Approaching Marriage, 602. 62 Grant, Planets, 148; On the Universe, 396b.

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of diversity and formed it into ordered substances.63 As Giles of Rome puts it, ‘alwey multitude cometh of oon’ (G: 173). Thus, if Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech does not allow much room for opposition to the argument that Nature is derived from something ‘parfit and stable’, it may be because this claim, unlikely though it may seem to many of us now, was the fundamental premise of medieval cosmography.64 Perhaps the most surprising step in Theseus’s argument for a modern audience is his subsequent claim that although creation is derived from something that is flawless and stable, this creation turns out to be imperfect, its nature ‘descendynge’ from its perfect origin ‘so til it be corrumpable’ (I: 3010). Yet, once again, this was a standard idea of medieval cosmography, which, as we saw in the case of Giles’s work, took the existence of order, diversity and hierarchy within the universe as its premise. Cosmographers divided the universe into three main parts: firstly, God and the Empyrean heaven which is his abode; secondly, the nine other heavens (i.e., the crystalline heaven or primum mobile which directs the movements of the other heavens, the heaven of the fixed stars and the orbs within which the seven planets move); and finally the sublunary or terrestrial world. As God, like the heaven which is his dwelling place, is eternal, permanent, changeless, perfect and unmoving, He is more perfect than the planets and stars and the orbs which circle the Earth: ‘something that causes motion is naturally prior to, and more perfect than, something that is only moved’.65 However, although they are in motion, the heavens are, in turn, more perfect than the sublunary world since they are a realm of—as Bernardus Silvestris put it—‘endless calm’ and ‘perpetual quiet’. The heavens are incorruptible and unchanging in their inner nature, if not in their position, their circular motion itself being perfect, regular, undeviating and uniform and not subject to the rectilinear rise and fall of the terrestrial world.66 As Oresme said in his commentary on Aristotle’s 63 Plato, Timaeus, 27–8 (pp. 40–1); Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 4 (p. 88), II: 13 (pp. 118–9). 64 Brown and Butcher, Age of Saturn, 235. 65 Grant, Planets, 492–3, 521; Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (p. 124); Latini, Book of the Treasure, pp. 8–9; Dante, Convivio, II, iii: 2; II, iv: 1; II, xv: 5. 66 Grant, Planets, 191–7, 203, 207–8, 488–9, 492–4, 571; Aristotle, On the Heavens, 288a; On the Universe, 392a; Albertus Magnus, Opus Philosophie Naturalis, De Celo et Mundo, c.i–vi; Giles of Rome, Quodlibeta, 25–6; Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 3 (p. 75); II: 3 (p. 93); II: 5 (pp. 103–4); Romance of the Rose, 260–2, 292; Roman de la Rose, 16771–924, 18891; Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, VIII: 445–9; Dante, Convivio, III, ix: 5.


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Ethics, just as the heavenly bodies are ‘plus nobles’ than human bodies, so the Intelligences which move them are more noble than the human soul and understanding.67 In turn, the heavenly bodies themselves could be ranked in perfection, with those nearer to the first heaven, or to God, being more perfect than those nearer to the sublunary world.68 As On the Universe put it, the heavenly body which is nearest to God ‘most enjoys his power, and afterwards the next nearest and so on successively until the regions wherein we dwell are reached’.69 A similar doctrine of cosmological ‘degeneration’ can be found in Macrobius’s neo-Platonic Commentary on the Dream of Scipio (c. AD 400), a work with which Chaucer was certainly very familiar. Here, although the ‘Mind’ which emanates from God is said to ‘form and suffuse all below with life’, its splendour being reflected in all of creation ‘like a countenance reflected in many mirrors arranged in a row’, these mirrors are also said to follow each other ‘in a continuous succession, degenerating step by step in their downward course’.70 Finally, in this descending, cosmological hierarchy, we arrive at what Theseus refers to as the ‘wrecched’ (I: 2995) sublunary world in which, as Aquinas said, things ‘tend to be defective for the most part’.71 As On the Universe argues, ‘the Earth and the things upon the Earth, being farthest removed from the benefit which proceeds from God, seem feeble and incoherent and full of much confusion’. Here, as Theseus points out, everything is made of the four basic elements of fire, earth, water and air (I: 2992; see also I: 1246–7) along with their associated qualities of heat, coldness, moistness and dryness. These elements and qualities can negate or come into conflict with each other and are constantly seeking to dissociate themselves from each other, a situation which could, potentially, result in chaos.72 As in Plato’s Timaeus, a belief in an eternal creator who had shaped things ‘in the best possible way’, 67

Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 343. Grants, Planets, 220–30. See Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VIII: 1 (p. 445). 69 Grant, Planets, 224; On the Universe, 397b. 70 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, I, xiv: 15 (p. 145); see also ibid., I, xiv: 9 (p. 144). 71 Aquinas, Ethics, 697; Albertus Magnus, Opus Philosophie Naturalis, De Celo et De Mundo, c.vi. 72 Grant, Planets, 191–2, 224; On the Universe, 397b. See also Bonet, Tree of Battles, 118–9; Albertus Magnus, Opus Philosophie Naturalis, De Elementis, De Generatione Elementorum. 68

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according to a model which was changeless and fixed, was perfectly compatible with a recognition that while the heavens were perfect and unchanging, the four elements which make up this world are subject to a process of ‘cyclical transformation’ by which one turns into another.73 As the Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime says, ‘the elements are in continual motion with respect to generation and corruption—in their parts, not in the whole’ as they ‘alternately act and are acted upon at the will of the Maker’.74 How, then, is order to be maintained if the world is characterised by constant change? Duke Theseus’s answer to this question is that the First Mover has bound the world with a ‘faire cheyne of love’ which constrains the four elements, ‘The fyr, the eyr, the water and the lond’ within ‘certeyne boundes, that they may nat flee’ (I: 2987–93). As The Parliament of Fowls puts it, Nature, the vicar of God, ‘Hath knyt by evene noumbres of accord’, everything that is hot, cold, heavy, light, moist and dry.75 Again, like so much of medieval cosmography, this view had its origin in the Timaeus which claimed that ‘god’ had created the world out of fire and earth and had then placed water and air as a unifying bond between them. By these means, he had brought concord to the cosmos and so had ‘bound the world into a visible and tangible whole’, a doctrine which John of Salisbury equated with the account of creation contained in the book of Genesis.76 This idea was familiar to Chaucer from the opening of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which Nature separates the elements from their primal chaos and ‘set them each in its own place and bound them fast in harmony’, so that all things were set ‘within their determined bounds’.77 More specifically, Chaucer took the idea of the ‘fair chain of love’ from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy. Here, although the parts of nature, such as the day and the night or the sea and the land, are said to be ‘in competition with each other’ or even at war with each other, they are also ‘held in balance by eternal law’. This order, which ‘binds all things together’, banishing ‘discordant war’ and replacing it with ‘concord’, is the order of ‘love’.

73

Plato, Timaeus, 29 (p. 41), 38 (p. 52), 43 (p. 59), 46 (p. 64), 49–50 (pp. 67–8). Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, 242–3. 75 Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls, 379–81. See also Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, III: 8–14. 76 Plato, Timaeus, 32 (p. 44); John of Salisbury, Frivolities, VII: 5 (p. 231). 77 Ovid, Metamorphoses, I: 1–75; Curtius, European Literature, 106–13. For Chaucer’s knowledge of the Metamorphoses, see the ‘Man of Law’s Tale’ (II: 93) and Hoffman, ‘Influence of the Classics’, 188. 74


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Without this rein, ‘All things now held by mutual love/At once would fall to warring with each other’, thereby wrecking the beautiful order of creation.78 Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia also expounds this view of the cosmos, one based on the assumption that everything in the universe had been allotted its own proper place: the order of the universe requires that ‘mutually repellent forces’ be yoked together in ‘peace and trust’ with ‘bonds of a reconciling concord’. Just as the soul and the flesh, though of ‘unlike natures’, are united within the human body by a ‘single bond of love’, so the four incompatible and warring elements which make up the world are brought to ‘love and compatibility’ by being constrained within ‘unbreakable bonds’.79 This outlook is also set out at length in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature. Here the nature of man is said to have been formed ‘according to the exemplar and likeness of the structure of the universe’, so that just as the four elements which make up the world are characterised by ‘concord in discord, unity in plurality, harmony in disharmony, agreement in disagreement’, so too ‘the same elements that come between the elements as intermediaries establish lasting peace between the four humours’ within the human body which, like the structure of the ‘royal place of the universe’, is characterised by ‘similarity in dissimilarity, equality in inequality, like in unlike, identity in diversity’. Although God had ‘assigned various species of things to the palace of the Universe’, things ‘separated by the strife between differing classes’, He also regulated them ‘by agreement from law and order; He imposed law on them, He bound them by sanctions’ and so ‘leagued together’ things ‘whose position placed them on opposite sides’. In this way, all things were ‘harmonised by the fine chain of an invisible connection, in a peaceable union’, so that ‘plurality made its way back to unity, diversity to identity, discord to concord’. Nature, as the agent of God, is the ‘bond of the universe and its stable link’ which united ‘all things in a stable and harmonious bond and wed heaven to earth in a union

78 Boethius, Consolation, II, m. VIII: 1–21; III, m. IX: 1–17; IV, m. VI: 16–24; Chadwick, Boethius, 232–7. See also Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, III: 1751–57. The ‘chain of love’, in the sense of the force which harmoniously binds the elements, should be distinguished from the famous ‘chain of being’, meaning the scale of ‘perfection’ and ‘privation’ which connects God, who lacks nothing and is totally sufficient, with, as Macrobius puts it, ‘the bottommost dregs of the universe’ (Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, I, xiv: 15 (p. 145); Lovejoy, Great Chain, 50–9, 63–4, 69, 79). 79 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 2 (pp. 71–3); I: 4 (p. 88); II: 2 (p. 93); II: 3 (p. 94); II: 4 (p. 97); II: 8 (p. 109); II: 11 (pp. 116–7); II: 12 (p. 118); II: 13 (p. 119).

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of peace’.80 As Brunetto Latini said, ‘it is the function of nature to harmonize discordant matters and to make unequal things equal in such a way that all diversity returns to unity’.81 A very similar view was put into the mouth of Nature in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Romance of the Rose (1269–78), a text which drew heavily on The Plaint of Nature.82 The Romance of the Rose was a work which, like Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Chaucer thought important enough to want to make it available in English.83 In it, Nature explains that ‘however hostile’ the four elements and their contrary qualities of heat and coldness, moistness and dryness may be, God has ordained that the elements should be bound ‘into a reasonably and justly proportioned combination’ by a ‘fair golden chain’ (‘la bele chaene doree’) which creates harmony among them.84 Jean Gerson, although he was no admirer of the Romance of the Rose, adopted the same outlook in his sermon ‘Vivat Rex’, a work whose synthesis of cosmography, politics and ethics, even though it postdates the ‘Knight’s Tale’, reveals much about the modes of thought which underlie Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech. Gerson invoked Boethius and Pseudo-Dionysius (whom he equated with St Denis, ‘apostre de France’) to show that nothing in the universe can last without unity. Things comprised of diverse elements needed to be properly ordered so that each part occupied its own proper place within the divinely-ordained hierarchy. Like Theseus, Gerson concluded this train of thought by quoting Boethius who had shown that this hierarchical order could only be maintained when its parts were bound by a ‘chain of love’ (‘le loyen d’amour’), such love and unity being as necessary in the realm of politics as it was in the universe at large.85

80 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (pp. 118–9); m. 4 (p. 128); pr. 4 (pp. 144–5). Alan also described Generosity as linked to Nature by ‘a golden chain of love’ (Ibid., pr. 9 (p. 214). Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius followed Alan in depicting the world as a ‘union of discordant parts’ in which the ‘conflict of the elements’ is turned into peace and stability (VIII: 327–9). 81 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 60. 82 Fleming, Roman de la Rose, 190. 83 Of the three fragments which make up the Middle English rendering of the Rose, only the first, which contains less than a quarter of the incomplete Middle English translation, is likely to be by Chaucer (Riverside Chaucer, pp. 686, 1103–4). 84 Romance of the Rose, 259, 262; Roman de La Rose, 16755–7, 16925–44. 85 Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1149. For Gerson on de Meun, see BrownGrant, Christine de Pizan, 33–9.


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iv. The ‘First Mover’ and the Inevitability of Death Although God has bound the universe as a whole with a fair chain of love, medieval thinkers could hardly ignore the fact that the terrestrial world is nonetheless a realm marked by death and decay. As Theseus says, the ‘First Mover’ has ‘stablissed in this wrecched world adoun/ Certeyne dayes and duracioun/To al that which is engendered in this place’, so that each man ‘in youthe or elles age’ must die (I: 2994–3034). Once more, this idea was a commonplace of medieval thought, one which can be traced back to Aristotle. For the Philosopher, the four elements as a whole were incorruptible and indestructible but individually, within the sublunary world, they are, unlike the matter which makes up the unchanging heavens, ‘always changing into one another’. Although goodness is an ‘all-pervading order’ within the world, all things ‘must one day be dissolved into their elements’ (AM: 351).86 Here, as cosmographers such as Bernardus Silvestris and poets such as Jean de Meun argued, the contrary qualities (or ‘passions’) of the four elements (earth, air, fire and water) and the influence of the heavens on material bodies cause the change and corruption which are not found in the heavens themselves. For Bernardus, the ‘true affinity’ of Endelechia, the power by which the possibility of matter is realized, is with the firmament and the stars, the region where her power is ‘undiminished’, whereas ‘at the lower levels of existence’ her power declines.87 As Macrobius said, quoting Cicero, ‘above the Moon, all things are eternal’ whereas ‘below the Moon, all is mortal and transitory’, apart from the human soul. For instance, the alternation of heat and moisture leads to fire and flooding and so to the destruction of entire civilizations which are ‘born again when temperate conditions return’.88 As a result, while medieval thinkers, including Giles, rejected an astrological determinism in which the heavens controlled man’s soul and moral choices, they were prepared to accept that the movement of the heavens could affect our material bodies, as when Saturn causes cooling or the Moon produces humidification (G: 28, 211, 280). As St Bonaventure argued, because ‘the order of the universe is that the

86

Grant, Planets, 191–2. Grant, Planets, 191, 195–7, 207–8; Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, II: 3 (p. 96); II: 4 (p. 74); II: 5 (p. 104); Romance of the Rose, 262, 270, 276–7, 292; Roman de la Rose, 16925–60, 17473–84, 17889–970, 18901–36. 88 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, I, xvii: 4; II: x: 7–15. 87

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more powerful and superior should influence the less powerful and inferior, it is appropriate that the celestial luminaries should influence the elements and elemental bodies’. Just as the unmoving God causes the motion of the heavens so, in turn, the incorruptible heavens generate corruption and decay on Earth.89 As Bernardus Silvestris put it, ‘whatever exists in the dimension of time enjoys annual, secular, or perpetual or eternal existence’, the annual being dissolved by old age’, by disease and death, ‘the secular by the end of time itself ’.90 As John Trevisa’s translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Proprietatibus Rerum explained, by the movement of the seven planets through the twelve houses of the zodiac, ‘all thing that is bredde and corrupt in this nethir worlde is varied and disposid’.91 Thus, although it may now seem paradoxical, Duke Theseus’s teaching that a benevolent and perfect First Mover has produced a terrestrial world characterised by the inevitability of death actually constituted the orthodoxy of medieval thought. It was a claim which the middle ages had inherited from Plato’s Timaeus, with its recognition that the changing nature of the four elements in this world meant that the human body itself was subject to ‘the flow of growth and decay’, and which had been expounded by Christian theologians from Augustine through Boethius to Aquinas and beyond.92 As the wise Solomon had said, in a passage referred to by both Chaucer’s Friar (III: 1475) and Clerk (IV: 6), ‘all things have their season’ so that there is ‘a time to be born and a time to die’, with the death of man and that of beasts being one: ‘the condition of them both is equal: and as man dieth, so they also die’ (Ecclesiastes 3: 1, 19). Similarly, On the Universe ascribes to Aristotle the claim which Theseus was to repeat in his ‘First Mover’ speech that whilst ‘particular things’ come into being in obedience to God’s commands, and then decay, nature as a whole remains permanent and unimpaired.93 Far from being preposterous by medieval standards, Theseus’s argument that it is God’s ‘wise purveiaunce’ which

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Grant, Planets, 191, 569–70, 575, 579, 589–91; Aquinas, Ethics, 241. Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 4 (pp. 88–9); I: 9 (p. 112). 91 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, I, VIII: 11 (p. 474); Dante, Convivio, III, xv: 7 92 Timaeus: 43 (p. 59); Augustine, City of God, XII: 4 (pp. 475–6); XIII: 1–15 (pp. 510–24); XIV: 25 (p. 589); XIX: 12–13 (pp. 869–70); XXI, 14 (pp. 991–2); XXII: 22 (p. 1066); XXII: 24 (p. 1071); Boethius, Consolation, IV, m. VI: 32–3; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 417. 93 On the Universe, 397b, 400a, 401a. 90


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has ordained that all things must die echoes the words of thinkers such as John of Salisbury for whom God, from all eternity, had arranged all things ‘according to a prearranged order from the birth which brought them into being, even to the corruption which, as it were, severed the thread of existence and thrust them back into non-being’.94 Since human mortality was part of the divine scheme, it was a fate which could not be avoided although, as we have seen, those individuals who chained themselves to the Wheel of Fortune by submitting to their own passions and lower natures could put themselves at the risk of premature death (see above, 108). Giles of Rome himself was also able to combine a belief in God’s omnipotence and goodness with an awareness that death, which as Aristotle said was ‘the most terrible of all ends’ (NE: III, vi, 6) and which is feared by all men, was the unavoidable fate of everyone (G: 174, 337, 401, 413; OEG: 15 367–9, 391).95 Similarly, Bernardus Silvestris’s Cosmographia describes God, whose nature is supremely benevolent and generous and whose whole will ‘consists in goodness’, as the ‘cause’ and ‘author’ of death, as both ‘the creator and the destroyer of all things’, and so, like Alan of Lille, presents human death as part of the divine plan for the universe.96 Likewise, Jean Gerson was able to couple a belief in an all-powerful, merciful God with a view of life on earth as one of anguish, tribulation, suffering, sadness and sickness which inevitably ended in death.97 For The Book of Vices and Virtues, a fourteenth-century Middle English translation of the Somme le Roi (1279), life is ‘nought elles but deth’: ‘For whan thou bygynnyst to lyue, thou bigynnist to dye’.98 Seen in this context, there is no reason why Theseus’s argument that death is an instance of divine beneficence should be read as inherently problematic or as being at odds with Boethius’s own argument.99 Indeed, the philosopher-duke’s words are actually taken directly from Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, which

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John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 21 (p. 104); II: 27 (p. 42). See also Bonet, Tree of Battles, 122; Gower, Vox Clamantis, VI: 17 (p. 246); Oresme, Livre de Ethiques, 205. Aristotle’s words are repeated in The Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge (or Ars Moriendi), f. 125. 96 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 1 (p. 67); I: 2 (p. 73); I: 4 (p. 87); II: 8 (p. 110); II: 11 (p. 115); Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 4 (p. 145). 97 Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1162. See also Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, VIII: 1 (p. 446). 98 Book of Vices and Virtues, 68–9. 99 Schweitzer, ‘Fate’, 38–45. 95

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explicitly cites as evidence for the divinely-inspired ‘concord’ which rules the universe for the best the fact that the same Love, which brings forth all living things, also engulfs them in their final death: ‘thilke same attempraunce ravysschynge, hideth and bynymeth, and drencheth undir the laste deth, alle thinges iborn’.100 Here, the earthly mutability which critics have seen as undermining Theseus’s claims about the nature of the universe is actually understood ‘as a part of the larger stability that is imposed on the world by God’. As Boethius said in his Consolation of Philosophy, ‘The generation of all things, and the whole development of changeable natures and whatever moves in any manner, are given their causes, order and forms from the stability of the divine mind’.101 It would seem then that Theseus’s ‘astonishing certainty’ that the First Mover has ordained all things for the best was actually the conventional wisdom of medieval philosophy.102 This coupling of an awareness of the horror of death with a belief that all things end in accordance with God’s will characterises not only the ‘Knight’s Tale’ but was also to be found in many other late medieval literary texts.103 For instance, in Gower’s Confessio Amantis, a natural human dread of death is combined with the wisdom that God has ordained that each of us, even kings, must die ‘be law of kynde’ for which there is no amendment.104 A very similar outlook is to be found in Nature’s ‘Confession’ in Jean de Meun’s continuation of the Romance of the Rose. Here, God is said to have created the order of the universe out of undifferentiated chaos. Through the laws which He has ordained to maintain this order, the influence of the incorruptible heavens changes ‘the accidents and substance of things beneath the moon’. God and Nature have ordained that these elements should be bound together in peace yet, ‘however good the peace’, it still does not prevent the eventual imbalance by which heat sucks up moisture so that they arrive at the unavoidable death which is ‘their due’, a death which is prescribed for them as ‘their due’ by Nature, who is the vicar of the generous and courteous, all-powerful, fair, mild, all-good and all-knowing God; death has been ordained by the power which is the 100 Chaucer, Boece, IV, pr. 6: 19–39; IV, m. 6; Boethius, Consolation, IV, pr. VI: 21–7, 90–3; IV, m. VI: 16–48; Chadwick, Boethius, 231, 243. 101 North, Chaucer’s Universe, 10; Boethius, Consolation, IV, pr. VI: 21–7. 102 Ferster, Chaucer, 44. 103 Van Gelder, ‘ “Allthynge Hath Ende” ’, 149–50. 104 Gower, Confessio Amantis, I: 2227–53, IV: 2239–54. See also Latini, Book of the Treasure, 47.


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‘fountain-head of all life’. Just as Theseus claims that no-one can extend the time which God has ordained for him to live, ‘Al mowe they yet tho dayes wel abregge’ (I: 2998–9), so Nature argues that while no individual can prolong his or her life, ‘it is easy for anyone to shorten it’, particularly by ‘wild excesses’ in which they ‘conduct their affairs so foolishly that some misfortune destroys them’.105 In the ‘Knight’s Tale’ itself, of course, Palamon and Arcite do their best to shorten each other’s life through their own wild excesses. It is hardly surprising therefore that when the three ‘riotoures’ in Chaucer’s ‘Pardoner’s Tale’ presumptuously set out to find and kill ‘Death’, who has cruelly afflicted the land with pestilence (VI: 661–700), their inevitable fate is that they themselves find death at each other’s hands. Yet, if the sublunary world is marked by death and decay, Theseus does manage to find consolation in the idea that the First Mover has ordained that ‘speces of thynges’ and natural processes (‘progressiouns’) ‘shullen enduren’. Even though individual creatures may be mortal, the various ‘speces’ as a whole do live on ‘by successiouns’ (I: 3011–3014). Again, this was a stock idea of medieval cosmography, one which was to be found in the Pseudo-Aristotelian Oeconomica (AO: i, iii: 4).106 As Boethius said, divine providence ‘moves the heaven and the stars, it mingles the elements with one another in proportion and transforms them by changing one with another; it renews all things that are born and die through the growth of their young and their seedlings in their likeness’.107 Alan of Lille was also in agreement that God has willed ‘a mutually related circle of birth and death’ by which ‘transitory things should be given stability by instability, endlessness by endings, eternity by temporariness’, so that ‘the series of things should ever be knit by successive renewals of birth’, like being produced from like by the lawful propagation which is overseen by Venus. The desire involved in the propagation of the species is not dishonourable provided that ‘it restrains itself within the bridle of moderation’ and so avoids unnatural and ‘excessive passion’.108

105 Romance of the Rose, 259, 262–3, 265; Roman de la Rose, 16699–735, 16752, 16925–17008, 17105–08. 106 Oresme, Livre de Yconomique, 814. 107 Boethius, Consolation, IV, pr. VI: 82–6. 108 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (p. 122), pr. 5, pr. 4 (pp. 145–7), pr. 5 (pp. 154–7, 162–5), m. 8 (pp. 194–5), pr. 8 (pp. 205–7).

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Bernardus Silvestris also expounded this outlook at length. As he said, although individual creatures may die, ‘the totality of creatures, the universe, is never to be subjected to the infirmity of old age or sundered by ultimate destruction’, so that there is ‘continual revolution’ as decay and death are balanced by regeneration and rebirth. If the influence of Saturn brings death and ‘the passing away of these things whose substance corruption destroys’, the largesse of Venus gives life to plants and ‘inspires the renewal of all creatures by her generative impulses’, drawing forth things by generation ‘to substantial existence’. As material beings, humans share in these natural processes and so are subject to the decay and death but also to the birth and regeneration which prevent death from being victorious.109 For Brunetto Latini too, ‘just as the tempering which harmonizes the diversity of the elements causes the body to be engendered and born and to live, so too this tempering corrupts it’ and leads it to its end, so that there is a natural cycle of death and rebirth. 110 Bartholomaeus Anglicus equated this cycle with the circularity of the heavens themselves: ‘thilke that semeth destroyed by corrupcion cometh eft agein by generacioun’, as shown by the continual ebb and flow of the tides or by the trees, which by their fruit and seeds, ‘cometh euerich of other and torneth into hemsilf agein’.111 Once more, far from being implausible by medieval standards, the philosophical teaching of Chaucer’s Theseus simply rehearses the orthodoxy of the day. v. The ‘Knight’s Tale’: from Cosmography to Theodicy Finally, the question of how the inevitability of death can be reconciled with the existence of a benevolent First Mover is only one aspect of the more general problem of theodicy, namely, why does an all-loving and omnipotent deity allow the existence of suffering and evil? As Palamon says, bewailing his fate as he remains in Theseus’s prison after the release of Arcite, ‘What governance is in this presience,/That gilteless tormenteth innocence?’, that is, what justice is there in a providential

109 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 4 (p. 87); II: 5 (pp. 99–100, 103); I: 11 (pp. 116–7); II: 14 (p. 126); McAlindon, ‘Cosmology’, 50. See also Romance of the Rose, 270, 298; Roman de la Rose, 17485–90, 19351–62. 110 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 60, 63–4, 84–5. 111 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, XIX: 27 (pp. 1368–9).


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foreknowledge which seemingly torments the innocent (I: 1313–4)? Does not such apparent injustice mean that the gods who govern this world are actually ‘cruel’, preparing men for their inevitable slaughter like sheep in a fold (I: 1303–33)?112 Naturally, medieval theologians had various answers to this question. One was Boethius’s rather surprising argument that since power is a desirable thing, since desirable things are essentially good, and since the ability to commit evil cannot be related to the good, this means that ‘the ability to do evil is not a power’. As a result, despite the ability of the wicked to perform what pleases them, ‘the quite undoubted weakness of evil men is plain’. As Lady Philosophy argues, although the evil seem to be able to ‘do things’, their ability to do evil things actually means ‘that they can really do nothing’.113 A second alternative was to argue, as Gower does in the Confessio Amantis, that suffering, disorder and even the entry of death itself into the world were caused by Mankind itself. It was the disobedience of the microcosm which had brought disorder to the macrocosm: ‘man is the cause of alle wo’.114 A third alternative was to resort to the Platonic doctrine of ‘plenitude’, one which was repeated in Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, in which the completeness and perfection which God had given to the world actually required the existence of mortal creatures, because perfection itself required that the world contained ‘every kind of living creature’.115 As Abelard put it, ‘God could not in any wise have made a better world than he has made’. If it was God who had ordained all things for the best, it followed that even evils must be part of the divine plan, so that ‘evils would not be, unless it were good that there should be evils’.116 As Augustine had said, just as ‘a picture may be beautiful when it has touches of black in appropriate places’, so the universe as a whole is beautiful, ‘even with its sinners, though their ugliness is disgusting when they are viewed in themselves’.117 Likewise, Aquinas argued that ‘the completeness of the 112 For this question elsewhere in Chaucer, see Troilus and Criseyde, III: 1016–19; Legend of Good Women, 2228–37; ‘Man of Law’s Tale (II: 813–16); ‘Franklin’s Tale’ (V: 865–94). 113 Boethius, Consolation, IV, pr. II: 107–20, 131–47. 114 Gower, Confessio Amantis, Pro. 905–66, VI: 5–7; Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius, IX: 211–41; Latini, Book of the Treasure, 9. 115 Plato, Timaeus, 30 (p. 43), 41 (p. 57); Boethius, Consolation, III, m 9: 1–9. 116 Lovejoy, Great Chain, 61–73; Peter Abelard, Epitome Thelogiae Christianae, 1726–7. 117 Augustine, City of God, II: 21 (pp. 72–3); XI: 23 (pp. 455–6); XVI: 4 (p. 657); XVII: 14 (p. 744); XVII: 16 (p. 747); XIX: 11 (p. 865); XIX: 18 (p. 878).

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universe requires perishable as well as imperishable things; and thus things which can sometimes go bad’ so that ‘the universe as a whole is better and more complete for including some things which can and, unless God prevents it, do fall short of goodness’. The goodness of God’s plan for the universe necessarily ‘involves things that can decay and sometimes will’.118 In a similar vein, Brunetto Latini argued that the reason why God allows bad things to happen may be ‘so that the goodness of good nature should be known by its opposite’.119 The problem with all these forms of ‘reasoning’ is that none of them really provide a satisfactory answer to the complaints of those who are on the receiving end of injustice and cruelty. After all, Boethius’s claim that the ability of the tyrannous Creon to act as he pleased was not really a form of power at all would not have provided much consolation to the Argive widows whose husbands’ unburied bodies had been left to be eaten by dogs through the tyrant’s ‘ire and iniquitee’ (I: 938–47). Similarly, while the guilt of humanity invoked by Gower provided an explanation of the origin of suffering in general, it did nothing, once more, to comfort those such as the Argive widows, who, whilst doubtless themselves sharing in the collective hereditary guilt of original sin, were the victims of a particular act of inhuman sadism. Likewise, the doctrine of plenitude could have rather paradoxical results when applied to the realm of ethics. After all, as Bernard of Clairvaux pointed out, if God’s beneficence means that everything that happens, including evil, ‘does so in the best possible manner’, this would seem to imply that God (and, indeed, humans) ‘ought not to prevent evil’, a doctrine which would have rendered Duke Theseus totally passive in response to the widows’ pleas for justice against Creon.120 As a result, rather than grappling with the metaphysical origins of pain and tragedy in this life, moralists tended to take such suffering for granted, and instead shifted their attention towards the ethical response which such suffering should call forth on the part of humanity. This was an approach inherited by medieval Christian theology from the Stoic writers of pagan antiquity. Seneca, for instance, had taught that what was important was not the ‘sad and dreadful’ things that happen to us but rather our response to this Saturnine disorder and our ability to 118

Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 91–4. Latini, Book of the Treasure, 9. 120 Lovejoy, Great Chain, 73; Bernard of Clairvaux, Incipiunt Capitula Haeresum Petri Abelardi, 1052. 119


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overcome them by cultivating our fortitude and self-sufficiency.121 As Boethius said, ‘nothing is miserable unless you think it so’, an opinion repeated by Chaucer in his short poem ‘Fortune’: ‘No man is wrecched but himself it wene’.122 In line with this Stoic outlook, The Book of Tribulation (c. 1400) explicitly argues that it is against all reason to believe that God is malicious or foolish in sending suffering to us and, like the Fasciculus Morum, follows Boethius in presenting the adversity sent by God as actually being more useful to us than prosperity. We should therefore ‘make good chere’ towards tribulation rather than setting ourselves against God’s ordinance through our ‘froward and rebel wille’.123 Hoccleve’s Complaint (1421–2) was not, therefore, being ironic when it claimed that ‘Almighty God, as liketh his goodnesse,/ Visiteth folk alday, as men may see,/With loss of good and bodily sicknesse’ (36–8, 108–12).124 Both John of Salisbury and the Gawain-Poet realized that the suffering of this world could suggest that, far from having bound the world in a chain of love, God was indifferent or even malicious in His attitude to his creation. They admitted that God’s supposed mildness and kind purposes can appear as an unpleasant evil or ‘malyce’ to those who actually experience them on earth, as when He permits malicious spirits ‘to torment men’. Their conclusion, however, is that man must show a calm and patience in both pain and joy, because impatiently bearing sorrow only generates more sorrow.125 As God asks in Julian of Norwich’s Revelations, ‘What shuld it agrevyn the to suffre awhile, seeing it is my will and my worshippe’.126 It is this Stoic wisdom in the face of death which Theseus displays in his ‘First Mover’ speech as the duke too shifts his attention away from offering a cosmological explanation of death, focusing instead on the human response to it. Just as Giles of Rome claimed that the good

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Seneca, On Providence, 27–45. Boethius, Consolation, II, pr. IV: 62–4; Chaucer, Boece, II, pr. 4: 110–20; Chaucer, ‘Fortune’, l. 25. Chaucer was described by his contemporary, Eustache Deschamps, as a Seneca in his morality (Deschamps, Great Ovid, 40–1; Lampe, ‘Courtly Rhetoric’, 70–80). 123 Book of Tribulation, 38, 41, 48, 130; Fasciculus Morum, 136–8, 140. 124 Hoccleve, Complaint and Dialogue, 36–8, 108–12. See also Langland, Piers Plowman, XX: 80–113; Simonie, 341–2; Gesta Henrici Quinti, 10–11, 44–5. 125 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, VIII: 18 (p. 3510; John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 3 (p. 60); Patience, ll. 521–31; Putter, Introduction, 107, 113–5, 143–5; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 189–90. See also Wimbledon, Redde Rationem Villicationis Tue, 635–6, 644–719; Sullivan, ‘Justice’, 131. 126 Julian of Norwich, Revelation of Divine Love, chapters 64, 65. 122

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ruler will seek to moderate the sorrow of others, as this can be a hindrance to their attainment of virtue, so Theseus offers a consolatio for the death of Arcite, offering the sympathetic reassurance which Giles saw as one of the means of countering excessive sorrow. Similarly, in reminding his audience that all things must die, he acts in line with Giles’s advice that to think on the truth of things is also a remedy for grief (G: 130–2). It is in this sense that Egeus’s teaching that ‘This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo’ can be said to ‘gladen’ Theseus after the death of Arcite, a response which otherwise seems deeply inappropriate (I: 2837–52).127 Certainly, Egeus’s and Theseus’s reminder that all humans, young or old, rich or poor (I: 2843–6, 3027–34) must eventually share the same fate was a familiar topos in both classical and medieval writing, functioning as a standard consolatio for the death of the individual. Like the prudent, pagan King Adrastus in Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, who seeks to console Lycurgus and his wife for the death of their child, Theseus argues that as no man can avoid death, we should not mourn excessively but should instead endure patiently what the gods send. Just as Adrastus claims that at least those who die young have been saved from a life full of sorrow, so Theseus, in order to provide a solacia for Arcite’s death, resorts to the paradoxical wisdom of the opportunitas mortis by which death is actually presented as an advantage for the deceased (I: 3041–3066).128 More generally, the attainment of such Stoic patience was regarded as only being possible through the exercise of human free will which, in turn, was seen as an expression of the capacity to reason and so to exercise virtue which for medieval commentators, including Giles of Rome, distinguished humans from other creatures (G: 35–6, 190, 370–1). The problem was that free will created the possibility that humans would choose to sin. As Bernardus Silvestris put it, although man is made in ‘God’s true likeness’, he was also created from the ‘dregs’ of the elements, a raw material which still bore the stain of ‘Silva’ the chaotic matter from which creation was given its form, and which, despite its potential for good and evil, nonetheless tends towards evil, and whose

127

Brooks and Fowler, ‘Meaning’, 140. Curtius, European Literature, 80–2; Lydgate, Siege of Thebes, I: 3411–3444. For Seneca’s recommendation against excessive mourning for the death of one’s child, see Seneca, On Providence, 37. This advice is repeated in Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibee’ (VII: 984–5). 128


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repressed potential for disorder always threatens to return.129 As Nature complains in Alan of Lille’s Plaint of Nature and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, God had ordained that all of creation should be bound by Nature’s ‘fair golden chain’, obeying her rules through all eternity, and all things are obedient as they should be ‘except for one single creature’: Man. Such disobedience does not make man free but rather turns him into ‘the slave of every vice’.130 As Alan of Lille said, within man, there is a ‘continual hostility’ between reason, which springs from a ‘heavenly origin’ and which seeks to rise ‘back again to the heavens’, having the ‘power to transform man into a god’, and sensuality, which ‘draws man’s mind down to the destruction of vice’ and ‘changes him into a beast’.131 The task facing man was therefore, as Bernardus Silvestris argued, to raise his head to the stars so that it can ‘employ the laws of the spheres and their unalterable courses as a pattern for his own life’.132 For Giles of Rome too, the order of the universe itself requires that ‘the lowest be led back to the highest through the intermediate’ (OEG: 19). As Boethius had concluded in the passage on which Theseus draws in his words about the ‘fair chain of love’, humanity will achieve happiness ‘If the love that rules the stars/ May also rule your hearts’.133 This use of the harmony of the heavens as a pattern for human life recommended by Boethius can be seen in the practical conclusions drawn by Duke Theseus from the cosmographical premises that he sets out in his ‘First Mover’ speech. Here, the duke seeks to replicate the order and unity of the heavens in all three of the areas of human activity in which Boethius calls for ‘love’: the friendship between ‘faithful comrades’, the ‘knot of holy matrimony/That binds chaste lovers’ and the unity between ‘peoples’.134 Firstly, Theseus attempts to turn the deadly enmity between Palamon and Arcite (I: 1587) into the ritualised combat of the tournament (I: 2541). However, through

129 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 1 (pp. 67–8); I: 2 (pp. 89–70); II: 12 (p. 117); II: 13 (pp. 119–20). 130 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, m. 4 (pp. 12809); pr. 4 (pp. 131–3); Romance of the Rose, 259–60, 293–4, 296; Roman de la Rose, 16755–70, 18991–19024, 19161–74, 19206. 131 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (p. 119); m. 6 (pp. 167–8). 132 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, II: 13 (p. 113). 133 Boethius, Consolation, II, m. VIII: 28–30. 134 Boethius, Consolation, II, m. VIII: 22–7; Hieatt, Chaucer, 43–4. See also Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, III: 1744–57.

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no fault of Theseus’s, Arcite does still die, having been thrown from his horse which was startled by a Fury sent by Pluto at the request of Saturn (I: 2684–90). The description of Arcite’s death agony as his body is ‘shent with venym and corrupcioun’ (I: 2743–61) has been read by some critics as undermining Duke Theseus’s philosophising about the order which underlies the world whilst even Robertson, for whom Theseus was a wise and heroic figure, argued that Arcite has ‘very little dignity in death’.135 Yet in fact, in terms of the conventions by which death was commonly represented within medieval culture, Arcite dies a ‘good death’. As Olson has emphasised, rather than Arcite suffering the ‘vile and ugly’ death, the ‘ignominious and shameful’ mors repentina, which is without witness or ceremony, his end is described in terms of the public ceremony and ritual by which death was tamed and made familiar. Just as the Ars Moriendi taught that the dying man should face up to his fate, recognize his faults, be reconciled with his enemies, and commit his soul to God, so Arcite is re-united with his kinsman and former sworn brother-in-arms, whom he once more comes to see as his ‘cosyn deere’, and commends his soul to Jupiter (I: 2743–2815).136 Secondly, in line with the Boethian scheme, the duke urges Emily and Palamon to marry, a marriage in which Palamon’s irrational passion which had led him to vow to Venus to wage war on chastity (I: 2236) is replaced by ‘the bond/That highte matrimoigne’ (I: 3094–5). Finally, the marriage between Palamon and Emily is not just a matter of individual attachment but also provides a means with which to seal the peace between Athens and Thebes (I: 2974). Indeed, just as human relations should mirror the order of the cosmos, so medieval cosmographers frequently resorted to a bundle of linked metaphors drawn from human affairs in order to portray the harmony of the universe, as when Bernardus Silvestris portrayed the union of peace between the different forces and parts of the universe as a ‘marriage’.137 Alan of Lille similarly describes God as uniting all the various species of things in the universe, wedding them to one another ‘in the relationship of lawful marriage’.138 Alternatively, the unity of the parts of creation could be 135 Tasioulas, ‘Science’, 183–4; Ingham, ‘Psychoanalytic Criticism’, 472–6; Robertson, Preface, 467. 136 The Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge, ff. 131–32v; Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 1; Ariès, Hour, 6, 14–19; Ariès, Western Attitudes, 2–13; Olson, Canterbury Tales, 68–9; Binski, Medieval Death, 29–33. 137 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 2 (p. 74); I: 4 (p. 87). 138 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (p. 118); m. 4 (p. 128); pr. 4 (p. 145).


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seen in terms of an alliance, as when Bernardus refers to the elements as a ‘contentious and discordant multitude of warring factions’, which, ‘as though laying aside their arms’, are brought into a ‘condition of peaceful unity’.139 Jean de Meun also refers to the four elements, with their potentially ‘hostile’ qualities, as ‘four enemies’ between whom the heavens ‘make peace’ when they bind them ‘into a reasonably and justly proportioned combination’.140 Just as Theseus restores the friendship between Palamon and Arcite, so Alan of Lille describes God as ordering everything in the universe so that ‘strife of contrariety’ between hostile elements is changed into ‘the peace of friendship’.141 Being an expression of an idea preconceived in the mind of God, the power of love which binds the universe could also be equated with reason, without which, as Isidore of Seville put it, ‘nothing can be kept together’ and also, as Alan of Lille and Gerson said, with justice itself.142 It would thus seem that medieval writers found no real difficulty in combining a view of this world as one of unbounded suffering and misery with a belief in an omnipotent, omniscient, all-loving divinity who intervened in human affairs to achieve justice.143 Augustine’s outlook, for instance, was fully in accord with Egeus’s claim that ‘This world nys but a thurghfare ful of wo,/And we been pilgrymes, passynge to and fro’ (I: 2847–8). Augustine portrayed our present ‘life of misery’ (‘if a state full of so much grievous misery can be called a life’) as ‘a kind of hell on earth’. He supported his claim with a list of calamities that makes the influence of Chaucer’s Saturn on earthly events seem positively mild: ‘quarrels, disputes, wars, treacheries, hatreds, enmities, deceits, flattery, fraud, theft, rapine, perfidy, pride, ambition, envy, murder, parricide, cruelty, savagery, villainy, lust, promiscuity, indecency, unchastity, fornication, adultery, incest, unnatural vice in men and women (disgusting acts too filthy to be named), sacrilege, collusion, false witness, unjust judgement, violence and robbery’ and innumerable others.144 Yet, Augustine was also able to go on to find reasons for optimism. Our suffering in this world may be a divine punishment for sin, but even in our present misery God has given us ‘innumerable 139

Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 2 (p. 73); II: 13 (p. 119). Romance of the Rose, 262; Roman de La Rose, 16925–44. 141 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 4 (p. 145). 142 Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 4 (p. 144); pr. 9 (p. 213); Isidore of Seville, Etymologies, VIII.11.71; Gerson, Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1149. 143 Cooney, ‘Wonder’, 267–73. 144 Augustine, City of God, XXII: 22 (pp. 1065–68). 140

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blessings of all kinds’. For instance, humanity may constantly be beset with ‘dreaded calamities from non-human sources’, such as the perils of seafarers who face sudden accidents from bad weather, but at least a storm at sea provides us with a ‘delightful sight’, one which gives ‘added pleasure to the spectator because of the agreeable thought that he is not a sailor tossed and heaved about on it’.145 If Chaucer had put such an argument into the mouth of Duke Theseus, it would be hard to resist the temptation to interpret his words as an indication that his views were to be read ironically. Yet, even though Theseus does not match Augustine in the implausibility (by modern standards) of his logic or arrive at the wisdom (by Augustine’s own standards) that we can only escape the misery of this life ‘through the grace of Christ our Saviour’, he still provides us with grounds for combining an awareness of the horrors of this world with reasons to be hopeful about our situation.146 It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising that later on in the pilgrims’ story-telling contest, the Knight should interrupt the tale told by the Monk, which consists of a seemingly endless list of men of ‘heigh degree’ who fall into adversity and whose fate the Monk bewails ‘in manere of tragedie’. As the Knight says, while the Monk’s lesson about not trusting in ‘blynd prosperitee’ may be true, nevertheless ‘litel hevynesse/Is ryght ynough to muche folke’ who prefer the ‘joye and greet solas’ brought by ‘gladsom’ tales of those who ‘wexeth fortunat’ to stories about those whom Fortune dashes down (VII: 1991–8, 2767–79). If the Monk’s preferred genre is tragedy, in the sense of stories whose beginning may be pleasant and placid but whose ending is ‘sad’, ‘foul’ and ‘horrible’, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is a comedy in the sense adopted by Boccaccio from the works of Plautus and Terence. Although its narrative has ‘a turbulent beginning, full of uproar and discord’, as when Palamon is imprisoned without hope of release and bewails his inability to make himself known to his beloved, it ends ‘in peace and tranquillity’, in which he has achieved his freedom and been given the hand of his loved one in marriage, ‘Lyvynge in blisse, in richesse and in heele’ (I: 3111).147

145

Augustine, City of God, XX: 22 (pp. 1066–7); XX: 24 (pp. 1070–76). Augustine, City of God, XX: 22 (p. 1068). 147 Dante, Epistle to Can Grande, 461; Pietro Alighieri, Commentary on Dante’s Comedy, 480–1; Boccaccio, Short Treatise in Praise of Dante, 509; Huppé, Reading, 74; Nolan, Chaucer, 194. 146


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It is within this cosmographical framework that Theseus’s teaching that we must ‘meken vertu of necessitee/And take it wel that we may nat eschue’ and that ‘whoso gruccheth ought, he dooth folye,/And rebel is to hym that al may gye’ (I: 3041–46) should be understood. As we have seen, the duke’s claim does not imply that humans cannot resist injustice and must accept everything in the world as it is.148 On the contrary, as Giles of Rome argued, it was virtuous to feel a righteous anger about human suffering, an anger which motivates rulers to do justice to those who have suffered wrongly and to punish those who have harmed them, as Duke Theseus himself does in responding to the plea of the Argive widows against the inhuman Creon (G: 127–9; see also above, 65). Rather than simply preaching passivity per se, what Theseus teaches is that people should make a virtue of necessity when confronted with something that God has ordained, in this case the inevitability of death, not when they are faced with the wrongdoing of other humans. As Bernardus Silvestris asks, ‘who then would dare to disparage the universe and its eternal basis?’.149 Similarly, Brunetto Latini, echoing Egeus’s commonplace, argues that as ‘the life of man is a pilgrimage’ which necessarily ends in death, it is foolish to fear this inevitability. Indeed, like Theseus, he invokes the opportunitas mortis whereby death is presented as an advantage: ‘No wise man should be sorrowful over death, which is the end of evils’.150 While modern critics have often seen the role of Saturn in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as implicitly exposing the weaknesses of Duke Theseus’s explicit philosophical teachings, medieval writers themselves were perfectly capable of combining an awareness of what Macrobius called the ‘baneful’ and ‘unfavourable’ influence of Saturn in human affairs with a certain optimism about the human condition. This optimism was, as in Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech, associated with the influence of Jupiter in human affairs, Jupiter being ‘the best planet’, the one who is called The Greater Fortune, ‘Fortuna Major’. Critics have asked whether Jupiter, Saturn and the other gods should actually be seen as deities or as planets.151 In fact, as was often the case in medieval allegorical

148 Burrow, Ricardian Poetry, 129; Phillips, Introduction, 52; Aers, Chaucer, Langland, 191; Neuse, ‘Knight’, 250. 149 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, I: 4 (pp. 87–8). See also Romance of the Rose, 262–4, 292–4; Roman de la Rose, 16945–17056, 18901–19024. 150 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 230–2. 151 Mann, ‘Chance’, 89; Schewitzer, ‘Fate’, 15–16.

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literature, Jupiter, Saturn and the other gods in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ are simultaneously both gods and planets—as well as being, as we saw in Chapter Two, allegorical representations of human passions and virtues. Saturn, for instance, is presented to us as a god when he intervenes in the quarrel between his daughter Venus and Mars (I: 2443–52) but also as a planet when it is described as the one which is most distant from the Earth and whose orbit ‘hath so wyde for to turne’ (I: 2454).152 In medieval astrology, Jupiter was seen, as is explained in one of Boccaccio’s glosses to the Teseida, as a ‘benevolent planet, one which works ‘well and peacefully’.153 Macrobius followed Cicero in describing Jupiter as ‘that brilliant orb, propitious and helpful to the human race’ and ‘favourable to human life’.154 As Christine de Pizan’s Epistre Othea put it, Jupiter is a planet ‘of sweet condition, amiable and joyful’ whose influence creates ‘sweetness and friendship’ and which signifies the ‘mercy and compassion’ to which the good knight should aspire.155 For many writers, including Alan of Lille, the beneficent influence of Jupiter was seen as decreasing the negative effects of the other planets, even that of Saturn. If the ‘unwholesome’ Saturn and Mars (Infortuna Minor) ‘threaten the earth’, ‘kind’ Jupiter abates their effects: ‘Even if a star that is a herald of evil and a precursor of misfortune is joined to him, Jupiter makes friends with the unfriendly star and brings about a change in him, turning gloom to laughter, lament to applause, bitter tears to joy’. Jupiter ‘loves agreement, cultivates peace, fosters love, uproots resentment, outlaws wars, restrains rage, terminates disputes and curbs Mars’.156 As Trevisa put it in his translation of Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De Properietatibus Rerum, although Saturn is an ‘yuel-willid planete’, one linked with ‘sorowe and wo’, nevertheless, Jupiter ‘by his goodness abatith the malice of Saturnus’ when Saturn ‘cometh into

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Lewis, Discarded Image, 105; Wood, Chaucer, 70–1. Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 94; Boccaccio, Teseida, 384; Martianus Capella, Marriage of Philology and Mercury, 885 (p. 343); Fox, Medieval Sciences, 65. See also the references given above, 99–112. 154 Macrobius, Commentary on the Dream of Scipio, I: xvii: 3 (p. 155); I, xix: 19, 25–6 (pp. 166–8): Cicero, Nature of the Gods, II: 64–5. 155 Christine de Pizan, Letter of Othea, 44–5; Christine de Pizan, Epistre Othea, 211–3. 156 Firmicus, Mathesis, I, ii: 4; I, x: 14; III, iii: 1; IV, xix: 5; Scriptores Rerum Mythicarum, III: 3; Alan of Lille, Plaint of Nature, Pr. 1 (p. 83 and n. 33); Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus, II (p. 70), IV (p. 134); McAlindon, ‘Cosmology’, 52–3; Kean, Chaucer, II, 3–4, 28–9, 33–4. 153


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Iupiter his cercle’.157 John of Salisbury also regarded the ‘inimical’ effects of Saturn, the ‘harmful’ and ‘malicious’ planet, and of Mars, as being mollified by the power of the ‘benign Jupiter’.158 For Bernardus Silvestris too, the power of ‘old Saturn, barren and cold’, who is ‘savagely inclined to harsh and bloody acts of unfeeling and detestable malice’, and who hates all beauty and life, contrasts with that of Jupiter, the bounteous planet, which when ‘not tainted by some extraneous evil, brings favoring signs to fulfilment in happy events’. This planet ‘is so propitious and so well disposed that he is called in Latin “Jove” from his power to aid and there is no belief more certain than that the effects of Jove’s favor permeate every part of the universe’.159 As Gower said, Jupiter ‘causeth pes and no debat’ and its soft and sweet nature ‘Attempreth all that to him longeth’, producing meekness and patience in men and bringing felicity to the lands under its reign.160 For Jean Froissart too, Jupiter was the giver of order whilst for Dante Jupiter was a planet whose ‘good temperateness’ stood in opposition to the ‘coldness of Saturn and the heat of Mars’.161 In this context, rather than undermining Theseus’s claims about the primacy of Jupiter, the agency of Saturn, in resolving the conflict between Venus and Mars, can actually be seen as an instrument of Jupiter’s power. As Brunetto Latini said, if Saturn is ‘cruel and evil’, Jupiter is ‘mild and merciful and filled with all goodness’. Similarly, when God is angry with the world, He sends the fallen angels to ‘take vengeance’ on mankind although ‘He always restrains them from doing as much evil as they would like’.162 In turn, if Jupiter is the planet which, as Alan of Lille said, converts hostility into goodwill and turns childlike attachment into mature friendship, then, in terms of the allegorical design of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, its positive role in human affairs is equated with that of Duke Theseus himself.163

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Bartholomaeus Anglicus, On the Properties of Things, I: VIII: 12 (pp. 479–80). John of Salisbury, Frivolities, II: 19 (p. 94). 159 Bernardus Silvestris, Cosmographia, II: 5 (pp. 99–100). 160 Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 907–34. 161 Froissart, Le Joli Buisson, 1668–87; Dante, Convivio, II, xix: 12 (p. 112). This positive influence of Jupiter could even be symbolized, as it was in Pierre Bersuire’s allegorical reading, by the myth of Jupiter castrating Saturn (Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 5: 22–36). 162 Latini, Book of the Treasure, 10, 73; Kean, Chaucer, II, 28–9. See also McIlhaney, ‘Sentence’, 174, 181. 163 Alain of Lille, Plaint of Nature, Pr. 1 (p. 83 and n. 33). See also Lewis, Discarded Image, 105; Grant, Planets, 467–8; Curry, Chaucer, 127, 151; Brooks, ‘Meaning’, 125–6; 158

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It would seem, then, that although Duke Theseus’s cosmology and his justification of the ways of God to men have, understandably, seemed inherently unconvincing to many modern critics, his teachings were actually the commonplaces of Chaucer’s own day. Both his philosophical outlook and the practical lessons which he draws from it were perfectly orthodox and were to be found alongside each other, without any hint of irony, in the works of contemporary philosophers, theologians, preachers and poets. Moreover, as we have seen, the duke’s speech is not simply buttressed by the external authority of philosophers such as Aristotle, Boethius or Giles of Rome but also, ‘internally’, enjoys a privileged position as the conclusion of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. In literary terms, if the tale was to cue an ironic reading of Theseus’s cosmography then the duke’s optimistic philosophising would more effectively have been undermined by being followed by Arcite’s death-agony rather than presenting the ‘First Mover’ speech as a consolatory response to Arcite’s tragic end. It would seem then that Duke Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech embodies the clerkly learning which works such as Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum regarded as central to the moral prudence required of a virtuous ruler (G: 51–3, 155, 227, 245, 286, 297, 351). As Jacobus de Cessolis said, an unlettered or unclerkly king was like a ‘crowned ass’.164 In bringing together cosmography and morality, calling for an end to the mourning for Arcite and proposing the marriage of Palamon and Emily, Theseus is able to combine a willingness to teach virtue to others, as Giles urged rulers to do, with an ability to use his wisdom to console others in their sorrow and to arrive at a practical remedy to the situation at hand (G: 52, 131–2). Where Duke Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech could have been seen as open to criticism by medieval standards was not in what it explicitly says or in the laudable moral intentions which underlie it but rather in what it omits. Just as in his ethics the pagan Theseus was able to achieve the natural, human virtues but not the theological virtues which were held to be only available, through divine grace, to Christians, so, in his cosmography, the duke was able to use natural reason to arrive at

Kolve, Chaucer, 125; Kean, Chaucer, II, 23, 28–9; Robinson, Chaucer, 143; Gaylord, ‘Role of Saturn’, 174–5; Minnis, Chaucer, See also the references in Rigby, Chaucer, 76, n. 112. 164 Jacobus de Cessolis, Game of Chess, II: 2; Mehl, ‘Le Roi’, 155.


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a metaphysical wisdom but could not attain the higher ‘truths’ which were seen as only being achieved through Christian revelation. As Alan de Lille explains in his Plaint of Nature, whilst natural reason is not opposed to the insights of faith and theology, the routes they take to knowledge are different: whilst reason allows man to understand ‘what is very small’, and even then only does so with difficulty, theology allows us to understand ‘the incomprehensible’.165 Hence, even though Theseus approaches a monotheistic outlook in his faith in the ‘First Mover’ who is prince of all things, he has arrived at this outlook only with the help of metaphysics. He contemplates God only through the use of logic and reason, rather than through Christian theology, which was ranked by Giles of Rome as the highest form of knowledge since it seeks to understand the nature of God and of the angels with the help of faith and divine revelation (G: 217, 224–5).166 Thus, if Theseus’s ‘First Mover’ speech does not reveal the duke’s wisdom as the antithesis of Christian teaching or its philosophy cast the virtue of his political rule into the doubt, his arguments are still presented as incomplete and partial. If his pagan outlook is not the opposite of Christian teaching, it is still seen as its inferior.167 As Giles of Rome argues, whilst natural and human law can help bring us to virtue, for true virtue and wisdom, we need the law of God and of the gospel (G: 218–9, 379–80). For instance, as a pagan, the duke could not be expected to share the medieval Christian conviction, as set out in works such as Giles’s Tractatus de Peccato Orginali, that human mortality was a consequence of the Fall (Genesis: 2: 17; 3: 19) since this is a belief which is not the product of the natural reason which all humans possess but can only arrived at through faith, scriptural authority and supposed supernatural revelation (G: 218–9).168 Rather, like the pagan philosophers whom St Augustine criticised for not accepting the resurrection and immortality of the flesh and for believing that all things 165

Alan de Lille, Plaint of Nature, pr. 3 (p. 125). See Dante, Convivio, II, v: 3, II, vi: 1II, ix: 6. 167 Benson, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 123; Minnis, Chaucer, 21–2, 128–31; Roney, Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, 119–20, 282–5; Finlayson, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 144–6; McCall, Chaucer, 111–56; Neuse, Chaucer’s Dante, 123; Nolan, Chaucer, 279–81; Bishop, Narrative Art, 45; Utz, ‘Philosophy’, 160–1; Gellrich, Discourse, 257–70; Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, 105–11. 168 Giles of Rome, Tractatus de Peccato Original, ff. 3–4, 8v; Henry of Ghent, Is it Rational, 267; Godfrey of Fontaines, Does a Human Being, 273. See also Augustine, Literal Meaning of Genesis, XI: 40; Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 147; Higden, Polychronicon, II, 215; Story of Genesis and Exodus, 217, 365–7, 392; Ovide Moralisé, III: 610; Gower, Confessio Amantis, VI: 5–7. 166

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must die because ‘the earth from which the earthly bodies of living creatures are derived, has to be returned to the earth’, Theseus claims that Jupiter has ordained that everything has to return to its own source in order to explain why humans must die (I: 3035–8).169 Similarly, although Theseus refers to the continued existence of Arcite’s soul after his death (I: 3065), in line with the pagan Plato’s recognition that humans combined a mortal body with an immortal soul, his speech offers no conception of judgement and salvation, whilst the Knight as narrator of the tale tells us that he will not speculate about the destination of Arcite’s soul (I: 2809–15).170 The ‘Knight’s Tale’ therefore omits the account of the ascent of Arcite’s soul to the eighth heaven and its assignment ‘to the place that Mercury had chosen for him’ which Boccaccio had provided in the Teseida and which Chaucer was to adapt for the ending of Troilus and Criseyde (V: 1807–34).171 Instead, in line with medieval Christian conceptions about the motivations of pagans, the duke offers the earthly renown that Arcite has achieved in dying at the moment when he was ‘best of name’ as a consolation for his death at an early age (I: 3047–61). As the fourteenth-century allegorist Pierre Bersuire put it, ‘the ancients performed all their lofty deeds for the sake of acquiring fame, and they longed for glory and fame as the final reward of their deeds; and this they did because they were ignorant of the true glory of heaven and the true, everlasting reward’.172 It is the earthly honour of the individual and the perpetuation of the species as a whole, not the salvation of the individual soul (I: 3013–4), which Duke Theseus offers as the consolation for death. If, at the start of the Chaucer’s pilgrimage, the Theseus of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ expounds the metaphysical learning of Athens, the reader has to wait until the end of the road to Canterbury to have the way to the heavenly Jerusalem explicitly revealed in the form of the transcendent, theological wisdom of the ‘Parson’s Tale’ (X: 49–51).

169 Augustine, City of God, XIII: 17 (p. 527). Boethius applies this argument to the human soul (Consolation, III, m. 9: 18–21). See also Romance of the Rose, 296; Roman de La Rose, 19211–18. 170 Plato, Timaeus, 43–4 (pp. 60–1); Nolan, Chaucer, 248, 280. 171 Boccaccio, Book of Theseus, 289; Boccaccio, Teseida, 316. 172 Boethius, Consolation, II, pr. 7; II, m. 7; III, pr. 6; Minnis, Chaucer, 131; Augustine, City of God, V: 12–19 (pp. 197–213); Rigby, Chaucer, 65–6.

CONCLUSION

CHAUCER: LITERATURE, HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY Literary and cultural analysis is a social science Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 287

i. The ‘Knight’s Tale’: Historical Context and Procrustean Criticism One of the noble deeds performed by the young Theseus, one familiar to Chaucer from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was his defeat of the cruel Procrustes who made his victims lie on a bed to which they were then fitted by being stretched if they were too small or by having any overhanging limbs hacked off if they were too big.1 For many readers, this book, in arguing for the moral consistency of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ when read in relation to works of political theory such as Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, may seem to be guilty of the sin of forcing Chaucer’s tale to correspond to the Procrustean bed of a preconceived interpretation, one which ignores either the specificity of this particular text or its broader nature as ‘literature’ or ‘poetry’. David Wallace, for instance, has criticised those scholars who, in interpreting medieval literature in the context of the political theory of the day, fall into the trap of ‘squeezing the life, the spontaneous intelligence from poetry’, by making it conform to a ‘construction’ of their own making: literary critics should not ‘carry political schemata to the literary text’ but should ‘read the text as if it were its own politics’.2 Certainly, rather than being read as passing on ‘truths’ which originated from outside itself, from, say, works of medieval political theory, theology or philosophy, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is often seen as working to create its own truths. As Spearing and Salter said of Theseus’s fine words about the benevolent ‘First Mover’ who supposedly rules the universe, what may seem plausible as philosophy does not always convince us ‘as poetry’

1 Ovid, Metamorphoses, VII: 438. For Oresme’s confusion of Procrustes with Phalaris, who tortured his victims by burning them alive in a bronze bull, see Livre de Ethiques, 381. 2 Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 3.

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or satisfy us when it appears in the specific narrative context of a work such as the ‘Knight’s Tale’.3 Undoubtedly, there is a danger that in reading works of literature in relation to the social, religious or political ideas of their age we come to regard them simply as ideological tracts and so neglect the ways in which their aesthetic or formal qualities are constitutive of their meaning. After all, whilst the ‘Knight’s Tale’ addresses issues of morality and politics which were central to medieval mirrors for princes, Chaucer himself chose to engage with these issues in the form of a roman antique rather than of a didactic political treatise.4 Furthermore, as we have seen, the ethics taught by medieval moralists and political theorists, for instance about the legitimacy of hunting as a form of recreation or the employment of minstrels by lords, could be very varied or even contradictory. In such cases, rather than simply reading off the meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ from some external authority, we have to decide which of the conflicting authorities on offer is most appropriate for our understanding of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ by judging them in relation to the tale’s own narrative structure, i.e. in terms of the tale’s internal coherence as well as its wider context.5 The same is true in the case of the stock symbols and images employed in medieval poetry which, as we have seen, could have a range of multiple or even opposing connotations. As a result, whilst an historical knowledge can help us by showing how, within medieval culture, Pirithous could symoblize both true friendship and false eloquence or how Venus could represent lewdness and chaste desire, it cannot provide us with a ready-made key which will unlock the meaning of these symbols in terms of their use within any individual literary work. Nevertheless, whilst we should always beware the dangers of imposing our own meanings onto Chaucer’s work and of ignoring its specificity as a work of imaginative literature, it does not follow that interpreting the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in the context of medieval political theory will necessarily lead us into these pitfalls. Indeed, in discussing the ‘Knight’s Tale’, Wallace himself persuasively shows that there was a ‘common medieval understanding’ of tyranny, one which we can use to judge Thesian Athens. Yet, if this is the case, it would seem that it is useful to 3

Salter, Chaucer, 31–6; Salter, Fourteenth-Century English Poetry, 175–80; Spearing, ‘Introduction’, 75–8. See also Sherman, ‘Politics’, 112. 4 Nolan, Chaucer, 3. 5 Skinner, ‘Meaning’, 64; Skinner, ‘Reply’, 273–8.

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ask how medieval political theorists understood kingship and tyranny and that this understanding can be brought to the text of the ‘Knight’s Tale’.6 In other words, no literary text ever just speaks for itself as ‘its own’ politics but always takes on specific political meanings when it is read in some particular context. In turn, our understanding of that context is, of necessity, a ‘construction’, one which has been produced by a process of selection and interpretation by literary scholars and historians. The real point at issue in reading the ‘Knight’ Tale’ in the context of medieval political theory is not that our understanding of that context is a construction but rather whether it is a construction which is useful in the project of reading Chaucer’s text in new—and plausible—ways. That a knowledge of contemporary political theory may provide a useful context in which to read the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is further suggested by the fact that, within the literary culture of Chaucer’s own day, poets did not necessarily see the kinds of questions addressed in works of political morality and theory as being external to the realm of imaginative literature. John Gower, for example, certainly thought it appropriate to interpolate a lengthy discussion of good kingship, one which draws on works such as the Secretum Secretorum, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum and Brunetto Latini’s Li Livres dou Tresor, within his discussion of romantic love in the Confessio Amantis, with the need for prudent self-rule and restraint being seen as equally applicable in both areas of human life.7 Thus, if we need always to remember that the Canterbury Tales is a work of literature, not a political tract, we ought also to remind ourselves that what is regarded as ‘literary’ in any particular period is itself historically specific in its nature.8 Certainly, a medieval writer such as Dante was quite capable of expressing very similar ideological views in both a prose political treatise and a fictional verse allegory: ‘poetry’ was not—and certainly was not seen by medieval poets—as necessarily being at odds with ‘philosophy’.9 As Boccaccio put it, ‘fiction is a form of discourse which under the guise of invention

6

Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 3, 107–9. Gower, Confessio Amantis, VII: 1711–5429; Porter, ‘Gower’s Ethical Microcosm’, 135–62; Simpson, Sciences, 202, 226. See also Middleton, ‘Idea’, 95–101; Bowers, ‘Pearl’, 113; Baldwin, Theme, 1–2, 81–2. 8 Balibar, ‘On Literature’, 39–42. 9 Watt, ‘Spiritual and Temporal Powers’, 411; Canning, History, 153; Dante, Paradiso, p. 268. 7

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illustrates or proves an idea’.10 Inevitably, many of the ideas expressed in medieval literature, such as the claim that a beneficent prime mover has ordained that we must all die, will now fail to convince many modern readers. But, where this is the case, the lack of persuasiveness of such ideas is not the result of their having been expressed in the form of poetry or of fiction but simply reflects the fact that such claims no longer seem plausible in the first place. As we have seen, in narrating his tale, Chaucer’s Knight seems to present Duke Theseus to us as a virtuous and heroic figure, one who through ‘his wysdom and his chivalrie’ has conquered ‘many a riche contree’ (I: 864–5) and who, from the start to the end of the tale, is explicitly described as ‘noble’ (I: 873, 2975). As a result, those readers who see the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as being critical of Theseus are obliged to argue that the morality of the duke’s actions (for instance, in conquering the Amazons or in requiring Emily to submit to his will) is actually at odds with the Knight’s narratorial praise of the duke’s virtue. This seeming inconsistency then allows the reader to realize that whilst the Knight explicitly says one thing, the text itself implicitly shows us another.11 Yet, as we have argued here, when seen in the context of ideas about ethics, ‘economics’ and politics contained in medieval mirrors for princes such as Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum, the morality of Duke Theseus’s actions, like the logic underlying his philosophy and cosmology, is actually far more consistent than has often been recognized. In this perspective, there is no discrepancy between the Knight’s judgement of Theseus as noble and wise and his description of the duke’s actual deeds which needs to be resolved in the first place. Instead, Duke Theseus embodies the virtue which political theorists demanded that a ruler should possess as an individual, as the head of a household and as a sovereign prince. An emphasis on the internal textual consistency of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ may immediately seem suspect to many readers whose working assumption when confronted by a work of literature is likely to be that the presence of multiple voices, contradictions, absences and silences within the text means that it will inevitably come to undermine its

10 Boccaccio, Genealogia Deorum Gentilium, 48. See also, Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid, pp. xii, 1, 3; Bersuire, Reductorium Morale, 1–2; Bersuire, Moral Reduction, 366–7. 11 For references, see above, 7. For discussion of this issue, see also Scala, Absent Narratives, 99.


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own ruling logic and claims to coherence.12 Indeed, this desire to locate incoherence within a text has for some time been as much of a critical orthodoxy as the quest to find a unity guaranteed by the presence of the author once was.13 Of course, many texts, whether literary or not, do undermine themselves in these ways.14 Nevertheless, this fact can hardly be made into the basis of a universally-valid covering-law of textual interpretation. After all, if it were true that all texts sabotaged their own attempts at meaning, this truth would also necessarily apply to those texts which claimed that ‘all texts undermine their own arguments’, which would then have to be read as sabotaging their own explicit claims, most obviously by excepting themselves from their own universal generalisation. Since literary criticism is an idiographic rather than a positivist-nomological discipline, we cannot decide whether a particular text such as the ‘Knight’s Tale’ is contradictory on the basis of an a priori principle of interpretation. Rather the coherence of any specific text can only be determined by reading it in terms of its own internal narrative logic (although what constitutes narrative coherence is also historically specific in nature, as we have seen in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ where Venus, Saturn and Mars are all interpreted both in bono and in malo) and in relation to the broader ideological discourses current in its own time. ii. The ‘Knight’s Tale’ and the Pilgrims’ Story-Telling Contest In reading the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in the context of medieval political theory, we have necessarily had to focus on the tale’s meaning and coherence in isolation from the rest of the Canterbury Tales. Yet, even if, as the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women suggests, Chaucer’s book of ‘the love of Palamon and Arcite’ was originally a separate work, it is impossible to understand the full meaning of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ as we now have it without taking into account the fact that it is simply the first of many tales which are told by Chaucer’s pilgrims on the road to Canterbury.15 Certainly, even when critics have been be willing to accept 12 Eagleton, Literary Theory, 133–4; Moi, Sexual Textual Politics, 94; Gellrich, Discourse, 264–5, 270; Copeland, Rhetoric, 221, 223–4; Simpson, Reform, 310–11. 13 Connor, Charles Dickens, 89. 14 For examples of texts which do undermine themselves, see Rigby, Marxism, 65, 160; Rigby, Engels, 174–5. 15 Chaucer, Legend of Good Women, F: 420; G: 408.

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the internal consistency of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, they have still often read its seeming endorsement of the Duke Theseus’s polity and philosophy as being challenged by the stories which follow it. If the Knight seeks to establish a privileged position for the morality of his tale by buttressing it with the ‘external’ authority of the accepted truths of the official culture of his time, many critics have argued that the status of his discourse is relativised and undermined once it has been incorporated into the battle of conflicting voices and values which constitutes the Canterbury Tales. Here, rather than the Knight’s viewpoint being seen as authoritative or privileged, his voice is regarded as simply one amongst many, which means that there can be no easy equation of his outlook with that of Chaucer himself.16 For instance, if the ‘Knight’s Tale’ begins the story-telling contest by using marriage as a symbol of the harmony and rightful hierarchy which should exist at all levels of existence, this vision has been interpreted as being challenged by the tales that come after it, such as those told by the Miller and the Clerk, which have been read as problematizing marriage ‘by depicting households of varying degrees of discord’.17 Yet, far from than undermining the ideal of rightful order and hierarchy represented by Duke Theseus’s household in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, the dysfunctional households portrayed in the ‘Miller’s Tale’ and the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ can actually be read as a confirmation of it. If, as Theseus says, ‘A man moot ben a fool, or yong or oold’ (I: 1812), the ‘Miller’s Tale’ shows us both, its comedy relying on the depiction of a household where the bad ‘manners’ which Giles of Rome ascribed to the young, the old and to women are evident in the follies and vices of the lustful Nicholas and Absolon, the aged and fearful John, and of Alison, his lascivious and deceitful wife. The Miller’s quotation of Cato’s epithet that ‘Men sholde wedden after hire estaat/For youthe and elde is often at debat’ (I: 3221–30) is therefore in accord with Giles’s warning that there ‘greet vneuennesse’ in age between spouses often leads to unhappiness and infidelity (G: 188), a theme which is also taken up in the January-May marriage in the ‘Merchants’ Tale’. The cynical humour

16 For references to those critics who take this approach to the Canterbury Tales, see Rigby, Chaucer, 42–53 and above, 6–8. 17 Staley, Languages of Power, 15, 144, 326–7; Aers and Staley, Powers, 245–6, 257–8; Grudin, Chaucer, 19–20, 88–9. For the ‘Miller’s Tale’ as a critique of the Knight’s Tale’, see also the references in Rigby, Chaucer, 47–9. See also Burger, Chaucer’s Queer nation, 304, 37; Ganim, ‘Chaucerian Ritual’, 77–8.


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of the ‘Miller’s Tale’ arises from its depiction of the young and old with only the weaknesses of their ages, with none of the redeeming qualities or moral growth that they have in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, and from its portrayal of a world which lacks the sobriety and moderation which Giles identifies in the man who, like Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’, is in the prime of life. As Lacy has argued, the irreverent spirit of the fabliaux was perfectly compatible with a conservative outlook in which humour is used to mock and punish those who, like Nicholas, the would-be trickster, Absolon, with his pretentious recourse to the rhetoric of courtly love, and John, with his ambition to be the postdiluvian lord of the world (I: 3581–2), seek to rise above their allotted role or station in life.18 If the Miller’s bawdy fabliau at least has a veneer of seditiousness19 when compared with the Knight’s noble epic, the morality of the tale told by the Clerk about the capricious treatment inflicted by Walter, the marquis of Saluzzo, on his wife Griselda, is even more obviously in accord with that of the ‘Knight’s Tale’. Like the Knight, the Clerk teaches a lesson about the need for measure and self-restraint on the part of the ruler. However, whereas the ‘Knight’s Tale’ makes it point positively, by showing us, for instance, how Duke Theseus quickly succeeds in overcoming his initial fury when he discovers Palamon and Arcite fighting in the grove, the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ shows us the negative consequences of a lack of moderation, as when Walter repeatedly cruelly tests his wife’s virtue and patience by pretending to have their children killed, renouncing her, and then requiring her to prepare his household for his supposed marriage to his new wife.20 As the Clerk says, ‘yvele is it/To assaye a wyf that is no nede,/And putten hire in angwyssh and in drede’ (IV: 460–2). His tale, like that of the Knight, is perfectly in line with Giles’s teaching that a ruler should treat his wife respectfully and worshipfully, exercising a ‘politik’ rule over her, as Duke Theseus does towards Hippolyta, rather than dealing with her as though she were a slave or a servant as Walter does in his despotic treatment of Griselda (G: 174–80, 192–4, 201–6, 275). As John of Salisbury said, ‘it is not only over a people as a whole that a man can play the tyrant’: tyranny can also be exercised even in private and domestic situations, as Wal-

18 19 20

Lacy, Reading Fabliaux, 35–45; Rigby, Chaucer, 67–8. Lacy, Reading Fabliaux, 44–5. Grudin, Chaucer, 89–96.

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ter does in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’.21 Walter’s behaviour in the ‘Clerk’s Tale’ thus no more challenges the ideal of domestic governance represented by Duke Theseus in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ than the immoral tyranny of Creon’s Thebes undermines the validity of the Athenian polity; both Walter and Creon are the reverse images of Theseus’s virtue. As Gower argued, to condemn the offences of foolish husbands and bad wives does not mean that the worth of ‘good ones’ is not prized.22 For the writers of mirrors for princes, the same was true of rulers: they should not be judged on the basis of their office but rather in terms of the virtue with which they carried it out. Many of the other tales told by the pilgrims on the road to Canterbury can also be measured against the yardstick of virtue established by the ‘Knight’s Tale’. For instance, Theseus’s conquest of the ‘regne of Femenye’ is at odds with the vision of female sovereignty set out in the ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’. Similarly, the virtue of the duke’s polity presents a marked contrast with the cruelty and vainglory of the tyrants who are overthrown by Fortune in the ‘Monk’s Tale’. Key themes established in the ‘Knight’s Tale’ are also picked up on in the later tales, such as the need for counsel and forgiveness which is taught by the ‘Tale of Melibee’ and the dangers of an excessive devotion to the service of Venus against which the Nun’s Priest cautions his audience in his comic tale (VII: 3342–6). Ironically, if we are looking for a voice which can be seen as providing a critique of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ then perhaps the best candidate is not that of the drunken Miller whose tale immediately follows the Knight’s but rather that of the holy Parson which comes at the end of the pilgrimage. This is not to say that the ‘Moralitee and vertuous mateere’ (X: 38) expounded in the ‘Parson’s Tale’ is simply the opposite of that of the ‘Knight’s Tale’, as the Miller’s outlook has often been judged to be. Instead of this polarity, we are presented, as we have seen (above, 270–2), with a hierarchy in which Theseus’s virtuous but pagan philosophy is ranked below the Parson’s penitential wisdom. The varied and competing voices which make up the Canterbury Tales are framed at their start by the chivalric, political, metaphysical philosophy expounded by the Knight, the perfect representative of the bellatores whose social duty it is to bear arms and to defend the common good in this life, and, at their end, by the spiritual, theological learning set out by the Parson, the ideal

21 22

John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, VIII: 17 (pp. 282–3). Gower, Mirour de l’Omme, 17677–88.


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spokesman of the oratores whose task is to lead people to salvation in the next world. It is tempting to speculate what tale Chaucer would have assigned to the Plowman, the patient and hard-working member of the laboratores, who is the third of the traditional estate-ideals amongst the Canterbury pilgrims.23 iii. The ‘Knight’s Tale’ as Ideology Much recent literary criticism has been united in rejecting a view of literary texts from the past as addressing us across the centuries in their exploration of some timeless ‘human condition’. As a result, rather than works such as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales being read as demonstrations of how the men and women of Western civilization ‘have always behaved’, works of medieval imaginative fiction have come to be seen as ‘strategic interventions’ in the social, political and ideological conflicts of their own era, interventions in which particular power relations, such as the inequalities of estate, class and gender, are ‘negotiated, reinforced and challenged’.24 This seemingly modern emphasis on the social purpose of literary works was far from unfamiliar to the poets and intellectuals of late medieval England. After all, rather than being merely a source of entertainment, works of literature were often seen in this period as a means by which ‘to instruct, exhort and ultimately to inspire readers to criticize and eventually to reform social practice’, by which was meant the behaviour of those with power in society, in the Church and in government.25 Yet, notwithstanding their shared desire to relate literature to its social and historical context, modern scholars have been much more less agreed about the actual social functions of literary texts. In particular, literary critics and theorists have often been divided about whether literature in general—or any specific work of literature—should be seen as ‘ideological’, in the sense of seeking to legitimate and to reinforce contemporary social and political hierarchies, or as ‘utopian’, in the sense of providing a challenge to the existing order and the discourses with which it was 23 For the two tales assigned to the Plowman in the fifteenth-century, see Cooper, Canterbury Tales, 417–8. For the medieval conception of society as composed of three orders, see Rigby, English Society, 182–93, 245, 307–8. 24 Donaldson, Speaking, 149; Putter, ‘Introduction’, 22. 25 Middleton, ‘Idea’; Coleman, English Literature, 16; Barnes, Counsel, 10–11; Scattergood, Politics, 14.

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justified.26 In practice, however, the default position of many critics has been to work from the premise that, rather than simply duplicating the established outlook of their day, works of imaginative literature will tend to contest, subvert or transcend the ‘dominant’ ideology of their own time.27 This emphasis on the utopian potential of art to liberate us from prevailing orthodoxies has an extremely long history behind it. From I. A. Richards to Louis Althusser, critics from otherwise very different theoretical traditions have been united in regarding literature and art (or, as Althusser put it, ‘authentic’ art) as providing a challenge to ‘stock ideas and attitudes’ about the world or as distancing themselves from ideology, breaking free from the orthodoxies of the age and making visible the process by which ideology attempts to pass itself off as natural or obvious.28 More recently, post-structuralist theorists have argued that ‘Artworks involve forms of experience that show the limits of established ways of understanding and of valuing environments and experiences’, for instance by demonstrating how ‘meaning is always excessive and resistant to final patterns or methods of interpretation’.29 As Stanley Fish and John Beverley have said, literary critics now often conceive of the purpose of imaginative fiction as that of disturbing the ‘settled surface of commonly received truths’ so that works of literature are understood as providing a ‘sanctioned space for the expression of social dissidence’.30

26 The terms ‘utopia’ and ‘ideology’ can, of course, have many other senses apart from those used here (see, for instance, below, 288). The key point is the idea being expressed, not the choice of a particular vocabulary to express it. On ‘ideological’ and ‘utopian’ thought in the sense used here, see Abercrombie, Class, 39–40 and Mannheim, Ideology, 173–7. For this approach to ideology, see also Weber, Economy and Society, II, 491–2, Rigby, Marxism, 287–8, and Rigby, Engels, 77–81. On medieval ideology, see Rigby, English Society, 303–23; Rigby, ‘Medieval England’, 158–9; Rigby ‘Historical Materialism’, 490–3, 498–9. For medieval literature as ideology, see Rigby, ‘England: Literature and Society’; Rigby, ‘Ideology and Utopia’. 27 The term ‘dominant ideology’ refers here simply to those ideas which sought to legitimate the social hierarchies of the day. Its use does not imply that such ideas were dominant in the sense of having been internalised by the bulk of the population (Rigby, English Society, 322–3). 28 Richards, Practical Criticism, 254; Bennett, Formalism, 121; Althusser, Lenin, 203–5. For the ‘logic’ underlying Althusser’s claims, see Flew, Thinking, 47–56 on the ‘No True Scotsman’ argument. For applications of the distinction between, on the one hand, doctrine and didactic propaganda and, on the other, ‘true’ art and poetry, see Clein, Concepts, 138–9; Spearing, Gawain-Poet, 196–7. 29 Williams, Understanding Poststructuralism, 18. 30 Fish, Political Correctness, 28–9; Beverley, Against Literature, 25. For an example, see Ryan, Shakespeare.


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More specifically, this view of literature as a forum within which oppositional or utopian views can be expressed and society’s official ideology challenged or unmasked has been an extremely popular approach by which to make sense of medieval literature. Ferster, for instance, typifies this approach when she invokes J. C. Scott’s pioneering work on social conflict to argue that art can provide a means by which portions of the ‘hidden transcript’ of the social resistance which is to be found in all societies can be smuggled, ‘suitably veiled, onto the public stage’.31 Above all, this view of medieval literature as having the potential to escape the orthodoxies of its time has been most popular amongst Chaucerian scholars. Critics from a wide variety of theoretical positions, whether humanist or post-structuralist, feminist, Bakhtinian, New Historicist, postcolonialist or Marxist, have at least managed to find some common ground in the view that whereas the poetry of lesser authors, such as Gower and Lydgate, was characterised by a conservative didacticism, the works of Chaucer did not simply pass on the received ideological wisdom of their time.32 As George Orwell pointed out, it is often difficult to see much literary merit in an author whose views are at odds with our own moral and political values.33 As a result, since critics are, understandably, not inclined to question the assumption that Chaucer’s work has literary merit, he has come to be seen as a poet who is worthy of study because he is a writer of ambivalence and scepticism, one who prefers questions to answers and whose use of multiple voices and shifting perspectives calls stable hierarchical orders into question in favour of an egalitarian vision which reveals the shared humanity of both noble and peasant. Rather than Chaucer’s poetry being the vehicle for some externally-derived authority, his meaning emerges organically from his narrative thereby allowing him to transcend the orthodox pieties of his contemporaries and to problematize ideas which were usually taken as givens.34 As Scanlon puts it, for such critics ‘the complexity of the tex31

Ferster, Fictions, 6–7. See also Patterson, Negotiating, 74; Spearing, Gawain-Poet, 231–6. As we shall see below, the concepts employed by these theoretical approaches can also be used to portray Chaucer’s work in very different ways. Whilst specific literary theories ask particular questions about literary texts (for instance, about their relation to the human condition, the doctrine of charity, social conflict, contemporary political theory, gender ideology etc.) and provide us with specific vocabularies with which to answer them, these theories do not require us to read any individual text in some particular way. 33 Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, 554. See also Booth, Rhetoric, 140. 34 Staley, Languages, 331, 337; Pearsall, John Lydgate, 128–9; Donaldson, Speaking, 134, 149, 172–3; Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, 186–94; Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 115–26; Strohm, ‘Form’, 17–40; Clifford, ‘A Man’, 164; Rhodes, Poetry, 169–72; Ganim, 32

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tual’ comes to subvert or transcend the ‘simplicity of authority’.35 Hence Chaucer’s work is frequently praised for its defiance of the ‘official’ truths of his time, for its sceptical subversion of the ‘hegemony of a “top down” social structure and the authority that justified it’ and for its exposure of Theseus’s philosophy of benign conquest and cosmic order as a political myth or ‘polemical fiction’.36 Even the view of the Canterbury Tales as a dialogic work which gives its readers the responsibility for choosing between its competing conservative and oppositional voices has, in practice, tended to be associated with the claim that Chaucer’s poetry in some way challenged the dominant ideology of his time.37 After all, like many modern sociologists, medieval thinkers themselves often presented ideological consensus as the basis of social harmony and order.38 This view was familiar to them from Cicero’s definition of a state, as discussed by Augustine, as the commonwealth of a people ‘united by a common agreement on the objects of their love’.39 As John of Salisbury’s Policraticus put it, ‘there can be no faithful and firm cohesion where there is not an enduring union of wills’ or, as Robert Rypon said, in the early fifteenth century, ‘the unity of the state exists in the agreement of its minds’.40 Given that the dominant ideology tended to present itself as natural and obvious, the very process of dialogically pitting other views against it, as Chaucer’s poetry has been seen as doing, means that his work can be read as calling the established orthodoxy into question. Once more, Chaucer seem to problematise the received ideas of its time, ideas which attempted to depict themselves as self-evident ‘common sense’ but which Chaucer’s poetry, with its multiple, competing viewpoints, exposes as partial, constructed and inadequate.41 Indeed,

‘Chaucerian Ritual’, 77–8; Miller, Philosophical Chaucer, 6–8, 144, 150; Wetherbee, ‘Latin Structure’, 9–11, 31’ Tinkle, Medieval Venuses, 29–30, 113, 127–9; Hamaguchi, Non-European Women, 135–8. On Chaucer as ‘open-ended’, see also the references in the notes to Rigby, Chaucer, 42–53, 95–9, 137–41 and above, 000. 35 Scanlon, Narrative, 3. 36 Aers, Chaucer, 24; Ferster, Fictions, 35, 104–5. For a popularisation of this approach, see Bisson, Chaucer, 71, 142, 163, 213. 37 Brown, Chaucer and the Making of Optical Space, 210, 231–3; Knapp, Chaucer, 23, 43. 38 Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, Dominant Ideology Thesis, chapters 1 and 2. See also note 46, below. 39 Augustine, City of God, XIX:24 (p. 890). 40 John of Salisbury, Statesman’s Book, V, 7 (p. 95); Fletcher, ‘Unity’. Jean Gerson also argued that true religious faith keeps subject obedient to their rulers (Pour la Réforme du Royaume, 1172); see also Giles’s De Ecclesiastica Potestate (OEG: 197). 41 O’Brien, ‘Blood’, 157, 162, 165; Kempton, ‘Chaucer’s Knight’, 241–2, 251–2.


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the assumption that Chaucer’s main moral purpose was to ‘destabilise categorical morality’ has become so well entrenched that it is readings which argue the opposite (such as that offered here) which now seem to require justification.42 Naturally, many works of literature do seek to expose the dominant ideologies of their day and all readers will readily be able to think of their own favourite examples of novels and poems which achieve this effect. Yet, once more, this truth does not nomologically entail that all works of literature must necessarily perform this function or that we can syllogistically deduce that for something to be judged as an instance of ‘authentic art’ or ‘great literature’, it must, by definition, subvert the orthodoxy of its time. Whilst challenging the accepted truths of its time is one of the many potential functions of imaginative literature, this does not mean that the ability to do so constitutes its essence. On the contrary, as we have argued here, in idealising Duke Theseus, Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ not only teaches a specific moral lesson about the nature of political virtue but also reaffirms, in allegorical form, a more general vision of order and hierarchy, one in which the higher elements (rulers, masters, husbands, fathers, those of mature age) seek to constrain the lower (subjects, servants, wives, children, the young), and the lower come to see that this is for their own good. Far from constituting a utopian subversion of the official social and political outlook of its time, the ‘Knight’s Tale’ seeks to offer a confirmation of the ‘dominant’ ideology of late medieval England. Of course, if we so wish, we can then judge that the conservatism of the ‘Knight’s Tale’ (or of the work of a Gower or a Lydgate) means that it has to be excluded from the ranks of works of ‘authentic art’ but to do so tells us nothing at all about Chaucer’s meaning. As Northrop Frye said, ‘when a critic interprets, he is talking about his poet; when he evaluates, he is talking about himself ’.43 The claim that works of medieval literature such as the ‘Knight’s Tale’ formed part of the ideological orthodoxy of their time is not, of course, a new one. On the contrary, a wide range of theoretical approaches, from patristic criticism to Marxist, Bakhtinian and feminist literary theory, have previously been put to work to portray Chaucer as a poet whose work offers a monologic defence of the social hierarchies of his time.44 42

Blamires, ‘Chaucer’, 253; Blamires, Chaucer, 4–5. Frye, Stubborn Structure, 68, 78–80. 44 See, for instance, Huppé, Reading; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’; Rigby, Chaucer; Hansen, Chaucer. 43

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However, those who have adopted this approach have often tended to characterise literature as ideological in the sense that it functions as a means of social subordination by which society’s lower orders come to internalise a set of beliefs and values which help to legitimate and perpetuate contemporary inequalities of wealth, power and status. Literature then becomes one of a number of mechanisms of social control which work to contain popular unrest by creating general ‘consent to the dominance structured throughout a particular society’.45 Ironically, this approach to explaining social reproduction as the result of a cultural or ideological consensus not only characterises traditional functionalist sociology but also much modern Marxism, which has stressed the role of ideological hegemony, rather than political repression, in maintaining the rule of a particular class or in the reproduction of a specific social order.46 Indeed, this view is even capable of being given a Foucauldian inflection, as when the discourses which are said to have constituted pre-industrial society are seen as having created a situation where individuals ‘appeared fixed’ in their differential social positions.47 This stress on the hegemonic social functions of ideological consensus can be traced as far as Augustine’s account of the effects of the promulgation of paganism by the rulers of ancient Rome on their subjects: ‘By this means they bound them [i.e., the general population] tighter, as it were, to the citizen community, so that they might bring them under control and keep them there by the same technique’.48 Undoubtedly, much medieval thought, along with the actual social practices in which it was inscribed, did seek to provide what Engels called a ‘halo of sanctity’ and Weber described as a ‘theodicy of privilege’ for the social inequalities of the period. From sermons, which showed how the division of society into rich and poor was part of God’s plan for the world, and the practice of individual confession, in which priests were required to quiz their parishioners about whether they had ‘failed in reverence to their lords’, to Corpus Christi processions and urban religious dramacycles, which symbolized the ideal of community and amity between social

45

Knight, ‘Social Function’, 101. Parsons, Essays, 56, 69–70, 232, 325–9; Althusser, Lenin, 139–41. See also the references in Rigby, English Society, 304–7, 320; Rigby, ‘Approaches’, 8–12; Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, Dominant Ideology Thesis, chapters 1 and 2. For a powerful critique of the view that social order depends on ideological subordination, see ibid., chapter 6. 47 Cabrera, Postsocial History, 56. For a critique, see Rigby, ‘History’, 120. 48 Augustine, City of God, IV:32 (p. 176). See also AM: 357; Christine de Pizan, Book of the Body Politic, 71; Christine de Pizan, Livre du Corps du Policie, 70. 46


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classes, the contemporary social order was regularly presented as natural, morally legitimate and as divinely-ordained.49 Yet, even if much medieval culture did emphasise the need for deference to their superiors by those of lower social rank, works of literature such as Chaucer’s ‘Knight’s Tale’ were hardly the most effective vehicles with which to achieve ideological consensus within medieval society as a whole. Indeed, given the limited access to education and the restricted circulation of manuscript texts which characterised the period, works of ideology, particularly those in literary form, rather than being intended for the mass of the population, were often aimed at a rather narrow audience, one which tended to be already convinced of the virtues of the existing social order.50 John Gower, for instance, was presumably preaching to the converted when he dedicated a copy of his Latin Vox Clamantis, with its fierce denunciation of the murder of Archbishop Simon Sudbury by the rebels of 1381, to Thomas Arundel, who was one of Sudbury’s successors as archbishop of Canterbury.51 Quite apart from the literacy needed to read a text such as the Vox Clamantis or the ‘Knight’s Tale’, understanding such works also assumed a broader familiarity with their underlying philosophical and cosmological discourses. Given this relationship between author and audience, the task facing medieval poets was not that of persuading their readers that, say, reason should control the irascible and concupiscible appetites or that the intemperate passions of youth should be moderated by the wisdom of maturity or of old age. The real challenge was how to present these platitudes afresh, how to defamiliarise them and to make them memorable—for instance by means of the emblematic symbolism and formal symmetry which Chaucer uses in the ‘Knight’s Tale’—for the sake of readers who were more than conversant with such commonplaces. In this sense, if the purpose of poetry was presented as an ethical one, it was not that of leading readers to some radical new conclusion. Rather, as in the Consolation of Philosophy, it was that of reminding them of something which they were (rhetorically) held to have forgotten but which, like the

49 Owst, Literature, pp. 550–44, 560–2, 573–4, 587; Devlin, ‘Bishop Thomas Brunton’, 342–3; Coulton, Social Life, 341–2; Tentler, ‘The Summa’, 109–10; James ‘Ritual Drama’, 20–9; Goldberg, ‘Craft Guilds’, 142; Rigby, Engels, 80; Rigby, English Society, 306–10, 320–2; Weber, Economy and Society, II, 491–2. This is not, of course, to say that such ideological mechanisms were necessarily successful. See, Rigby, English Society, 315–6; Rigby, ‘Urban “Oligarchy” ’, 63–70, 81. 50 Bullough, ‘Games’, 99–101; Watts, ‘Looking for the State’, 267. 51 Gower, Vox Clamantis, pp. 47–8.

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conclusion

‘Knight’s Tale’ itself, was ‘worthy for to drawen to memorie’ (I: 3111). Readers here were not just required to accept the morality of the text in a passive fashion but rather were expected to respond to the text actively so as to arrive at its lesson by their own efforts—which is not to say that all lessons were regarded as equally valid or all readings seen as equally legitimate.52 Significantly, whilst Ferster invoked the work of J. C. Scott to support a view of art as a means of social resistance, Scott himself actually argued that it was ‘folk or popular culture’ which performed this function, not the elite culture which he saw as functioning as a marker which helped to distinguish those at the top of the social hierarchy from those beneath them.53 Thus, if we read the ‘Knight’s Tale’ in Scott’s terms it would seem to have more relation to the emphasis within pre-industrial society on creating ‘the appearance of unanimity among the ruling groups’ than it does for the project of securing ‘the appearance of consent among subordinates’.54 As Jameson says, even ‘hegemonic or ruling class culture and ideology are Utopian’ in the sense that they too offer those who share in them an idealised vision of ‘collective solidarity’.55 It is this idealised and imaginary vision of ruling class solidarity and of chivalric order as symbolic of the rightful ordering of society as a whole, one in which the wise Duke Theseus abates the conflict between the hot-headed Palamon and Arcite, treats his noble guests courteously to ensure concord between them and seeks the reconciliation of Athens and Thebes through marriage, that is offered to us in the ‘Knight’s Tale’.56 We need not assume that the ‘quiet hierarchies’ beloved of medieval works of ideology such as the ‘Knight’s Tale’ were actually the reflection of a harmonious social reality or the expression of some uniform ‘medieval mind’ in which the social order was accepted as divinely-approved, ‘natural’ and ‘rational’.57 But rejecting a view of late medieval English society as being characterised by social deference and cultural uniform-

52 Boethius, Consolation, I, pr. VI; Carruthers, Book of Memory, 69–71, 156; Thompson, Chaucer, 51–2, 82. 53 Ferster, Fictions, 6–7; Scott, Domination, 157–8. See also Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, Dominant Ideology Thesis, 75–6. 54 Scott, Domination, 55–6. On unanimity, see also Rigby, ‘England: Literature and Society’, 508; Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, Dominant Ideology Thesis, 70, 157. 55 Jameson, Political Unconscious, 281. 56 Muscatine, Chaucer, 181–5; Knapp, Chaucer, 18–23; Clogan, ‘Knight’s Tale’, 138; Howard, Idea, 234–7; Halverson, ‘Aspects’, 612–5; McAlindon, ‘Cosmology’, 45. 57 Robertson, Preface, 51, 265.


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ity in favour of one stressing conflict and diversity does not mean that we then have to assume that the social and political conflicts of the time would immediately be reflected in contemporary works of literature. Rather, a ‘conflict sociology’ approach would argue that it was precisely because the reality of late medieval society was one of conflict, mounted both from above and below, that the dominant ideology of the day valued ‘quiet hierarchies’ and the literature of the period sought to provide an imaginary vision of social harmony.58 Works of medieval literature such as Chaucer’s ‘Knight’ Tale’ were not simply sites of social contestation; rather, in offering mythical resolutions to real conflicts and tensions, they were weapons in the social contest itself.

58 For ‘conflict sociology’, see Collins, Four Sociological Traditions, chapter 1; Parkin, Marxism; Murphy, Social Closure; Rigby, ‘Approaches’; for this approach applied to late medieval English society, see Rigby, English Society.

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INDEX ‘Giles of Rome’, ‘Knight’s Tale’ and ‘Theseus’ have only been given brief entries in this index as they appear on virtually every page of the book. Abelard, 259 abomination, 90–1, 95 Achilles, 134 Actaeon, 152-3, 154 active life, 168 Adam, 139, 145, 161 Adam of Usk, 49, 156 Adrastus, 262 Aegidius Romanus, see Giles of Rome Aers, D., 172 affability, 33, 47, 66–7, 95 ages of man, 45, 90, 116–26; see also middle age, old age, youth Agnello, Giovanni dell, Doge of Pisa, 198 Alan of Lille, 71, 103, 158, 160, 237, 239, 246, 251, 252, 255, 257, 263, 264, 264, 265, 268, 269, 271 Albertus Magnus, 231 Alexander the Great 44, 55, 108, 134, 135, 172–3, 175, 195, 201, 211 allegory, 98–101, 105, 139; see also psychomachia Alliterative Morte Arthure, 61, 203 alterity, of middle ages, 11–12 Althusser, Louis, 282 Amazons, 4, 62, 71, 79, 101, 131–9, 141, 144–5, 150, 153, 157, 185, 189, 198, 212, 276, 280 Ambrose, Saint, 196, 245 amphitheatre, Theseus’s, 54, 58, 237–8; see also Diana, Mars, Venus, temples of anger, see hatred and wrath Anne of Bohemia, 142, 143, 156, 157 Antiochus, 46, 162 Apius, 45 Apollo, 153 Aquinas, Thomas, 13, 14, 32, 34, 42, 45, 53, 55, 57, 67, 69, 85, 91, 93, 96, 97, 109, 118, 124, 127, 145, 151, 152, 153, 155, 159, 168, 175, 176, 178, 182, 183, 186, 187–8, 196, 206, 207, 224, 225, 236, 242, 249, 254, 257, 259–60

Arcite, 2, 4, 6, 9, 29, 36–41, 43, 45, 48, 54–6, 65, 67, 73, 78–9, 89, 97, 99, 103, 105–9, 112–13, 115–16, 118, 121–3, 125, 127, 132, 136, 140–2, 144, 146–51, 153–55, 158, 161, 164–5, 167–8, 191–3, 195, 198, 200, 206–10, 226, 233, 235, 238, 258, 262–5, 270, 272, 279, 288 Argive widows, 4, 43, 62–3, 65, 111, 189–91, 198, 201, 217, 260, 267 Ariadne, 38, 68, 140–1 aristocracy, 176–7 Aristotle and Aristotelianism, 13, 14, 15, 16, 19–20, 32, 33, 34, 41, 42, 48, 51, 53, 55, 58, 67, 69, 74, 81–7, 93, 97, 105, 118, 119, 120, 122, 127, 133, 138, 151, 152, 165, 174, 175–6, 177–8, 183, 187–8, 196, 203, 206, 207, 211, 220, 224, 231, 237, 240, 241, 245, 246–9, 254, 255, 270; see also Oeconomica; On the Universe; Secretum Secretorum Ars Moriendi, see Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge Arthur, King, 33, 40, 47, 61, 69, 142, 163, 187, 197 Arundel, Thomas, archbishop of Canterbury, 287 ascending concept of power, 27–8, 178 Astell, A. W., 21 astrology, 105, 253 Atalanta, 152, 153 Athens, 4, 38, 65, 71, 101, 111, 112, 114–15, 137, 139, 140, 144, 158, 163, 164, 171, 189, 192, 194, 197–8, 212, 213, 217, 220, 226, 264, 272, 280, 288 Augustine, of Hippo, 15, 16, 31, 55, 85, 91, 95–6, 97, 168, 172– 6, 186, 187, 191, 196, 219, 221, 222, 239, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245, 247, 254, 259, 265–6, 271–2, 284, 286 Bacchus, 113 Bacon, Francis, 100 Baker, Geoffrey, 187

322

index

Bakhtinan criticism, 7–8, 283–5 banners, 68, 110, 213–15 Barr, H., 182 Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 17, 109, 134, 224, 238, 254, 258, 268 Bartolus of Sassoferrato, 215 Baxandall, M., 10 bees, 224–5 bellum hostile, 214 Belshazzar, 49, 201 Berkeley, Lord, see Thomas Bernard, Saint, of Clairvaux, 85, 260 Bernardus Silvestris, 71, 109, 116, 160, 234, 239, 247–8, 251, 253, 254, 255, 258, 262–3, 264, 264, 269 Bersuire, Pierre, 72, 109, 269 Beverley, John, 282 bigamy, 149–50 Black Book of Edward IV, 51 Black Prince, 47, 52, 61, 182, 186, 187, 202, 216, 218 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 1, 2, 3–4, 19–22, 29, 37, 38, 68, 71–2, 81–3, 86–7, 89–90, 97, 100–8, 111–14, 116–17, 119, 121, 124, 131, 134–5, 137, 140, 144–8, 152, 159, 162, 166, 171, 183, 190–4, 202, 208, 212, 218, 231, 236–7, 237, 247, 266, 268, 272, 275–6 Boethius, 12, 15, 17, 31, 32, 73, 83, 85, 107–8, 124, 157, 158, 160, 193, 209, 234, 239, 240, 245–6, 250–2, 254–7, 259, 261, 263, 264, 270, 272, 287–8 Bohun, Eleanor de, 19 Boke of the Crafte of Dyinge, 193, 264 Bolingbroke, Henry, 18, 35, 75, 181, 182, 219 Bonaventure, Saint, 253–4 Bonet, Honoré, 1, 12, 19, 42, 66, 125, 166, 186, 188, 206, 207–8, 218 Boniface VIII, 14, 223, 226 Book of Tribulation, 261 Book of Vices and Virtues, 127, 128, 255 Bourdieu, Pierre, 185 Bouvet, Honoré, see Bonet Bracton, Henry, 15, 86, 179, 181, 196, 200 Briggs, C. F., 19 Brinton, Thomas, bishop of Rochester, 196 Britton, 179 Bromyard, John, 165 Brooks, D., 76, 118 brothers-in-arms, 73, 124 burial, right of, 190; see also funeral

Buridan, Jean, 15, 85 Burley, Simon, 19, 76, 142 Burley, Walter, 15 Burnley, J. D., 81 Burrow, J. A., 20, 54, 69, 118, 209 Cadmus, 113 Caesar, Julius, 55, 203 Caligula, 46 Callisto, 152–3 cardinal virtues, 32–3, 34, 45, 81, 108, 127, 270; see also individual virtues Castor, 140 Cato, 278 Caxton, William, 77, 144, 186, 199, 200 Cecelia, Saint, 150, 154 Cessolis, Jacobus de, 12, 17, 61, 144, 175, 194, 195, 200, 206, 270 chain of love, 157–9, 232, 236, 250–2, 263 Chalcidius, 240 Chance, J., 72 Chandos Herald, 47, 52, 181–2 charity, 32 Charles IV, Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, of France, 16, 17 Charles VI, of France, 156 Chartres, 68 chastity, 103, 109, 146, 152, 153, 155, 161; see also Diana, virginity Chaucer, Geoffrey, Anelida and Arcite, 2, 98, 137 Boece, 12, 138 Book of the Duchess, 78, 79 Canterbury Tales, 1, 2, 3, 8, 148, 275, 277–81 ‘Clerk’s Prologue’, 254 ‘Clerk’s Tale’, 8, 78, 125, 154, 278–9 ‘Friar’s Tale’, 254 The Knight, 6, 7, 123, 187, 213, 214, 266, 278 ‘Knight’s Tale’, date of, 2–3; for other references, see individual characters and themes ‘Manciple’s Tale’, 171, 172, 219 ‘Man of Law’s Prologue’, 46 ‘Merchant’s Tale’, 278 ‘Miller’s Tale’, 8, 278–80 The Monk, 77 ‘Monk’s Tale’, 49, 201, 202, 204, 266, 280 ‘Nun’s Priest’s Prologue’, 266 ‘Nun’s Priests’s Tale’, 98, 280 ‘Pardoner’s Tale’, 257

index ‘Parson’s Prologue’, 231 ‘Parson’s Tale’, 11, 33, 44, 64, 65, 138, 139, 145, 150, 159, 169, 185, 195, 245–6, 272, 280–1 ‘Physician’s Tale’, 45, 148 The Plowman, 281 ‘Second Nun’s Prologue’, 142 ‘Second Nun’s Tale’, 150, 154, 222 The Squire, 123 ‘Squire’s Tale’, 166 ‘Tale of Melibee’, 93, 106, 154, 195, 280 Wife of Bath, 40 ‘Wife of Bath’s Prologue’, 161 ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’, 19, 142 Complaint of Chaucer to his Purse, 219 Fortune, 107, 261 House of Fame, 140, 245 Legend of Good Women, 2, 20, 27, 140, 142, 277 Parliament of Fowls, 81, 102, 103, 152, 155, 161, 250 Romaunt of the Rose, 246, 252 Treatise on the Astrolabe, 111 Troilus and Criseyde, 75, 127, 137, 231, 238, 272 children, see parents, youth chivalry, see war Christ, see Jesus Cicero, and Ciceronianism, 15, 20, 30, 34, 41, 70, 81–7, 96, 172, 174, 183, 187, 196, 206, 213, 221, 253, 268, 284 circle, perfection of, 237–8, 258 Cithaeron, Mount, 113 city, as political community, 175 Clanvowe, John, 18 Clarke, M. V., 76 Clemency, Temple of, 62, 115, 190 Clogan, P. M., 98 Codex Theodosianus, 241 Colonna, Egidio, see Giles of Rome Colonna, family, 13 comedy, 266 common good/profit, 55, 161, 174–7, 180, 181, 183, 188, 211, 224–6 Commynes, Philippe de, 35 concupiscible power, 93–7, 101–3, 108–9, 115–16, 118, 120, 151, 211, 287 conflict sociology, 289 Conquest, 105, 110, 219 consolatio mortis, 121–2, 158–9, 193, 233, 257, 262, 267, 272

323

Constance, queen of Louis VII, 143 contemplative life, 168 coronation, 53 cosmology, 24, 86–7, 150, 157–61, chapter 5 passim counsel, 27–8, 35–6, 38, 58, 126, 178, 183, 193–5, 219–20 courtesy, 66–7, 95, 199 cremation, see funeral Crécy, Battle of, 215 Creon, 4, 5, 43, 62, 63, 65, 99, 111, 112, 113, 171, 185–6, 188–91, 193, 198, 201, 204, 208, 209, 212, 213, 216, 217, 219, 220, 260, 267, 280 Cyrus, king of the Persians, 44 Dante, 19, 29, 33, 67, 85–6, 97, 106, 110, 116–17, 119, 150, 269, 275 Daphne, 153 David, 52, 71 death, see good death death, inevitability of, 192–3, 233, 235, 236, 253–60, 267 death, premature, 108, 255, 257 De Duodecim Abusivis Saeculi, 15, 165, 194 delectation, 90, 92, 95, 126, 151 democracy, 177 De Quadripartita Regis Specie, 12, 16 descending concept of power, 27, 178 Deschamps, Eustache, 81, 261 desire, passion of, 90, 92, 95 despair, 90, 95, 126 Despenser, Henry, bishop of Norwich, 3 destiny, 78–80 Diana, 55, 79, 99, 103, 146, 150, 152–3, 154, 155, 159 Diana, temple of, 54, 55, 58, 98, 147, 149, 152, 159 Diomedes, the pirate, 172–3, 175 Dionigi da Borgo, 19 Dionysius of Sicily, 55, 224 dispositions of the soul, 33 diversity, of creation, 241–2 Dives and Pauper, 105 Dunbabin., 27 Dymmok, Roger, 51 economics, 23, chapter 3 passim, 150, 153–5, 211, 227 Edward I, 111, 156, 222 Edward II, 22, 156 Edward III, 16, 75, 143, 167, 184, 186, 202, 211, 216

324

index

Edward, Prince of Wales, see Black Prince Edward, duke of York, 76, 77 Egeus, 38, 99, 109, 111–12, 118–19, 121–3, 195, 262, 265, 267 elements, the four, 232, 249, 250–4 Elizabeth, countess of Ulster, 167 Emaré, 166 Emetreus, 56 Emily, 4, 6, 9, 38, 39, 46, 55, 66, 73, 79, 99, 103, 108, 109, 116, 118, 123, 125, 132, 136, 138, 144–63, 167, 192, 193, 198, 210, 226, 232, 233, 236, 264, 270, 276 Engelbert of Admont, 183 Engels, Friedrich, 286 envy, 91–2 epic, 98, 155 Epicureanism, 84 Equitan, 154 equity, 206–7 Esther, 143 Eteocles, 113 ethics, 23, chapter 1 passim; 150, 211, see also individual virtues and virtue as a mean Eurydice, 124 eutrapelia, see proper amusement Eve, 139, 145, 161 Exeter, bishop of, 177 experiencia, as a form of prudence, 36, 37–8, 210 fabliau, 278–9 faith, 32 Fasciculus Morum, 31, 261 fear, 41–2, 90, 92, 95, 126 ‘Femenye’, see Amazons feminine qualities, 139, 141 feminist criticism, 283, 285 Ferster, J., 283, 288 First Mover, 157, 232–3, 237, 246–8, 253, 256, 271; see also God, Jupiter Fish, Stanley, 282 Fleta, 111, 179 foresight, 35, 36–7 Fortescue, Sir John, 164, 178 fortitude, 32, 33, 34, 41–4, 59, 92, 95, 108–9, 115, 123, 126 fortune, 79, 82–3, 107–8, 148–9, 186, 201–2, 209, 255, 266, 280 Fowler, A., 76, 118 France, Marie de, 154 friendship, 69–73, 84, 124, 263–5

Foucauldianism, 286 Foulechat, Denis, 16 Frederick II, 166 Froissart, Jean, 143, 217, 269 Frye, Northrop, 285 Fulgentius, 33, 98, 117, 139; see also Super Thebaiden functionalist sociology, 286 funeral, 4, 43, 54, 97 Furies, 71, 106, 264 furnishings, of household, 164 Gaius, Emperor, 199, 201 Gauchy, Henri de, 16, 18, 182 Gawain-Poet, 261 Gellrich, J. M., 220 Genet, J-P., 17 Gerald of Wales, 1 Gerson, Jean, 13, 86, 115, 174, 231, 232, 242, 252, 255, 265, 284 Giles of Rome, life and works of, 13–15; influence of, 17–20, 22 Giovanni del Virgilio, 141, 171 girls, 147–8 Glanvill, Ralph, 206 God, nature of, 237–8, 248, 254 Godfrey of Fontaines, 85 god-like, ruler as, 199–201 gods, allegorical reading of, 105–7, 268; see also individual gods God Save the King and Keep the Crown, 200 Golein, Jean, 16 good death, 264 Gower, John, 17, 18, 19, 22, 27, 28, 29, 31, 32, 35, 45, 46, 47, 52–3, 55, 61, 62, 63, 67, 103, 107–8, 131, 140–1, 161, 172, 180, 189–188, 195, 204, 205, 207, 209, 213, 218–19, 256, 259–60, 269, 275, 280, 283, 285, 287 graciousness, 90–1 Gratian, 181, 182, 186, 224 Green, R. F., 167 Gregory, Saint, 168, 190 guerre couverte, 214 guerre mortelle, 208, 214, 216 Guinevere, 142 hardiness, 90, 95, 126 Haller, R. S., 101 Hamaguchi, K., 144 hate, 90–2, 95; see also see wrath Hauvilla, Johannes de, 113, 160, 205, 252

index heavens, 248–9 Helen, 140 Henry III, 156 Henry IV, see Bolingbroke Henry V, 52, 217, 218 Henry of Ghent, 85 Hercules, 44, 70, 72, 134, 141 hierarchy, as rightful order, 31, 34, 115, 131, 134–5, 139, 146–7, 169, 197, 223, 224–5, 236–7, 239, 240–5, 248–51, 278, 285, 288–9 Higden, Ralph, 17 Hilton, Walter, 169 Hippodamus, 189 Hippolyta, 4, 9, 46, 71, 79, 125, 131–2, 133–7, 142, 144–5, 148, 163, 218, 279 Hippolytus, 202 Hoccleve, Thomas, 17, 18, 19, 31, 48, 50, 61, 86, 157, 196, 200, 245, 261 Holcot, Robert, 68 Homer, 16, 196 honour, as motive to virtue, 59–63, 68, 90, 110, 272; see also magnanimity hope, 32, 90, 95, 126 household, see economics, furnishings, marriage, masters, palace, parents Hugh of St Victor, 93 humanist criticism, 281–3 humility, 49, 50, 60, 92, 99 Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, 158 hunting, 74–80, 126–7, 152, 154–5, 274

325

Jesus Christ, 48, 71, 72, 102, 182, 199, 201, 266 Jocasta, 113 John of Garland, 71, 106, 141, 217 John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster, 2, 18, 185 John of Legano, 199 John of Naples, 188 John of Paris, 183, 226 John of Salisbury, 15, 16, 19, 31, 32, 45, 50–1, 60, 66, 74–5, 76, 80, 85, 86, 111, 112, 114, 116, 122, 172, 185, 193, 194, 200, 206, 225, 237, 250, 255, 261, 269, 279, 284 John of Wales, 12, 174, 200, 203, 225 Jonas of Orleans, 15 Jonathan, 71 Jones, T., 198 Joseph, G., 107 Jove, see Jupiter Julian of Norwich, 261 Juno, 114, 153 Jupiter, 99, 109–10, 113, 140, 152, 153, 200, 221, 226, 232, 233, 234, 247, 264, 267–9, 272; see also First Mover justice, 32, 34, 39–41, 81, 91, 95, 109–10, 196–7, 204–10, 220, 221, 226, 265 justicia commutatiua, 40 justicia distribitiua, 40–1, 196–7 justicia legalis, 39–40 just war, 186–9, 192, 213–19 Knapp, P., 8

ideology, 22, 53, 181, 197, 220, 236, 281–9 incest, 45, 46, 162 insensibility, 151–3 intellect, as part of the rational soul, 94, 95, 109, 112, 115 intercession, of women, 141–5, 148 irascible power, 93–7, 101, 103–6, 108, 110–11, 115–16, 118, 120, 151, 153, 211, 287 Isabel, queen of Richard II, 156–7 Isidore of Seville, 33, 34, 45, 112, 114, 181, 196, 213–4, 265 Jacob’s Well, 77 Jacqueline, of Hainault, 158 James of Viterbo, 174, 179, 226, 242 Jameson, Fredric, 273, 288 jealousy, 90 Jerome, Saint, 95, 245 Jerusalem, heavenly, 201, 272

Lactantius Placidus, 3, 15, 43, 245 Lacy, N. J., 279 La Farge, C., 49–50 Langland, William, 223 Latini, Brunetto, 12, 14, 17, 34, 41, 67, 71, 85, 110, 168, 184, 190, 196, 199, 203, 205–6, 210, 251, 258, 267, 269, 275 Lavinia, 36 Learn to Say Well, Little or Nothing, 166 Leda, 140 Libelle of Englyshe Polycye, 52 liberality, 31, 33, 47–8, 54, 58, 59, 95, 119, 121, 166 Liber Custumarum, 14 Liber Judiciorum, 16 Liber Regalis, 53 Lindley, A., 21 lion, in bono and in malo, 102 Lionel, duke of Clarence, 167

326

index

London, 143–4, 201 love, passion of, 90–2, 95 Lucina, 159 Lull, Ramon, 77, 199 Lycurgus, 56, 76 Lydgate, John, 38, 44, 69, 112–31, 114, 136, 158, 171, 189, 191, 192, 197–8, 199, 202, 212, 262, 283, 285 Machaut, Guillaume de, 77 Macrobius, 15, 95, 111, 239, 246, 249, 251, 253, 267, 268 macrocosm and microcosm, 238–9 magnanimity, 33, 47, 54, 58–63, 83, 90, 92, 95, 110, 119, 120, 190, 203, 208; see also honour magnificence, 33, 47–58, 60, 90, 95, 120, 199, 202 man, as a political and social animal, 66, 83, 128, 132, 133, 175 Mann, J., 136 Mannynge, Robert, 77 mansuetude, 33, 47, 64–6, 90, 92, 95, 126, 210, 226 Map, Walter, 143 marriage, 11, 45, 109, 133–8, 145, 155–63, 169, 244, 263–4, 278–80 Mars, 55, 99, 100, 101, 103–5, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 113, 115, 126, 150, 151, 152, 153, 214, 215, 235, 268, 269, 277 Mars, temple of, 54–7, 101, 103–5, 124, 152, 153, 172, 213 Marxism, 283, 285, 286 Mary, Virgin, 142 Master of the Game, see Edward, duke of York; Phoebus, Gaston masters and servants, 133, 163, 164–8, 169, 244 maturity, see middle age McCall, J. P., 20, 151 Medea, 171 Mehl, J-M., 22 Meleager, 153 memory, as a form of prudence, 34–5, 36, 93, 287–8 mercy, 64–6, 79, 91, 115, 120, 141–5, 200, 202, 204–10, 220, 226–7; see also Clemency mercy, corporal acts of, 191 Meun, Jean de, 72, 102, 160–1, 246, 252, 253, 256, 263, 265 Mézières, Philippe de, 16, 17, 77, 156, 169, 187, 225, 231 microcosm, see macrocosm

middle age, virtue of, 45, 118, 121, 123, 124–5, 127, 139–40, 141, 279 mimicry, 9–10, 144–5 Minerva, 111, 114–15 Minnis, A. J., 20, 54 Minotaur, 38, 68–9, 102, 121, 140, 192, 217 minstrels, 165–7, 274 ‘mixed’ government, 178 monarchy, 176–8, 180–1, 183, 220, 224, 236–7 monastica, 23 Moon, 253; see also Lucina mortal battle, 66–7, 164, 200; see also guerre mortelle Mowbray, Thomas, earl of Nottingham, 41 Mundus, 55 Muscatine, C., 7 natural law, 224–6 Nebuchadnezzar, 49, 194, 201 necessity, making a virtue of, 63, 184–93, 232, 267 Neckham, Alexander, 95, 111 ‘nemesis’, 90–2 Nero, 45, 46, 49, 194, 202, 204 New Historicism, 283 Nimrod, 30, 74, 75 Nolan, B., 20, 30, 80–1, 84, 85, 97 obedience, as a virtue, 115, 184, 195–8, 211, 236 Oeconomica, 133, 158, 161, 257 Oedipus, 113 old age, vices and virtues of, 120–3, 278, 287 oligarchy, 176 Olson, P. A., 264 On the Universe (De Mundo), 247, 249, 254 Oresme, Nicholas, 15, 16, 32, 85, 94, 95, 96–7, 118, 133, 138, 145, 161–2, 174, 177, 179, 183, 216, 225, 248–9, 273 Origen, 15 Orléans, Lorens d’, Somme le Roi, 127, 255 Orpheus, 124 Orwell, George, 283 ostentation, 49–50, 60 Oustervant, count of, 57 Ovid, 70, 140, 192, 202, 250, 274 Ovide Moralisé, 71, 72, 154, 192

index pagans and paganism, 55–6, 97–8, 127–8, 158, 169, 173, 174, 188, 190–1, 193, 199, 201, 203, 208, 220–7, 246–7, 270–2, 280 palaces, 163–4 Palamon, 2, 4, 6, 9, 29, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 43, 45, 48, 55, 56, 65, 66, 73, 78, 79, 89, 97, 99, 103, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 113, 115–16, 118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 132, 136, 138, 140, 141, 142, 143, 144, 146, 147, 148, 149, 150, 151, 153, 154, 155, 157, 158, 159, 161, 164, 165, 168, 172, 192, 193, 195, 198, 200, 206, 207–10, 226, 232, 233, 235, 236, 238, 257, 258, 263, 264, 265, 266, 270, 279, 288 Pallas Athene, see Minerva parents and children, 133, 145–7, 161–2, 169, 244 Paris and Vienne, 149, 162 Parlement of the Thre Ages, 122 parliament, 155, 193–5 partridge, 182 passions, chapter 2 passim, 151; see also individual passions; concupiscible and irascible powers Patience, 261 patristic criticism, 100, 285; see also Robertson, D. W. Paul, Saint, 107 Paulina, 55 peace, 187, 197, 218, 263–5 Peasants’ Revolt, 22, 142, Pecham, John, archbishop of Canterbury, 228 Pedro, king of Castile, 181–2 Penus, 153 period eye, 10–12, 80 Perspehone, 70–2, 140 Phaedra, 140, 202 Phalaris, 273 Philip IV, 13, 14, 16, 223, 226 Philippa, queen of Edward III, 143 Phoebus Apollo, 159 Phoebus, Gaston, 76, 79 Pirithous, 21, 70–3, 140, 153, 208, 274 Pizan, Christine de, 11, 12, 19, 50, 62, 72, 82, 111, 112, 125, 135, 138–9, 150, 154, 161, 168, 186, 188, 203, 217, 225, 231, 268 Plato and Platonism, 81, 95–6, 127, 237, 239–40, 241, 244, 246, 247, 249–50, 254, 259, 272 Plautus, 266

327

plenitude, 259–60 plunder, 213–6, 218 Plutarch, 225 Pluto, 70, 72, 106, 159, 264 ‘policia’, 176–7 ‘political’ rule, 146, 178, 183, 279 politics, 23, 150, 155–7, chapter 4 passim Polynices, 113 Pollux, 140 Pompey, 209 Porter, E., 213 postcolonialism, 283 post-structuralism, 282 Premierfait, Laurent de, 69, 114, 171, 189, 191, 202 Presles, Raoul de, 16 pride, sin of, see vainglory primogeniture, 177 prisoners, 207–10 procreation, legitimacy of, 158–61, 233, 257–8, 272 Procrustes, 273 prodigality, 47, 49 proper ambition, 33, 47, 58, 95 proper amusement, 33, 47, 66, 73–80 proper place, 240–2, 245 Prose Life of Alexander, 44, 50, 119, 157, 201 Prosperina, 159 prudence, 12, 16–17, 23, 27–8, 32, 33, 34–8, 94, 95, 109, 111–12, 114, 115, 123, 194, 211, 270 Prudentius, 99, 100 Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, 242–3, 252 psychomachia, 89–90, 99, 100, 108–9, 115, 116, 142 Ptolemy of Lucca, 14, 177, 180, 183, 222 ransom, 207–8, 212, 214, 215 rational soul, 93, 94, 118, 239 ‘real’ rule, see regal rule reason, 35, 84, 96, 106, 239, 262, 271; see also rational soul regal rule, 146, 178, 183 Remigio dei Girolami, 85 Richard II, 2, 16–17, 22, 27–8, 40, 49, 50, 51, 52, 57, 75, 119, 120, 142, 156–7, 166, 177, 179–82, 186, 194–5, 199, 201, 202, 205, 206, 209, 218, 219 Richards, I. A., 282 Richard the Redeless, 182, 195 Robert of Anjou, 19

328

index

Robert of Basevorn, 196 Robertson, D. W., 22, 264 Roboam, 195 roman antique, 97–8, 274 romance, 155; see also epic; roman antique Romance of the Rose, see Jean de Meun Roman de Thèbes, 3, 71, 113, 217 ‘royal’ rule, see regal rule Rypon, Robert, 55, 284 St Erkenwald, 223 Salter, E., 271 Sardanapalus, 224 Saturn, 99, 106, 111–12, 118, 122, 126, 234, 235, 253, 258, 260, 264, 265, 267–9, 277 Scanlon, L., 283–4 ‘schamefastenesse’, 91, 119 Scipio, 221 Scott, J. C., 283, 288 Scythia, see Amazons Secretum Secretorum, 13, 15, 17, 52, 61, 66, 199–200, 275 Seneca, 15, 81, 84, 85, 86, 87, 190, 193, 205, 206, 245, 260, 261 senses, ‘inward’ and bodily, 93, 94 sensitive appetites, 93, 95, 100; see also concupsicible and irascible powers sensitive soul, 93, 94, 100 servants, see masters Shakespeare, William, 185 Sheba, Queen of, 51 siege, 216–7 sin, as a form of disorder, 31, 139 Sinis, 192 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 40, 69 Smithfield tournament, 41, 43, 57 Socrates, 34 Solomon, 17, 34, 36, 48, 51, 124, 169, 254 Somme le Roi, see Book of Virtues and Vices, Orléans sorrow, 90, 92, 95, 126, 193, 262 soul, parts of, 92–7, 118; see also dispotitions, concupiscible power, irascible power, rational soul, senses, sensitive appetite, sensitive soul, vegetative soul Soul and its Powers, 93 Spearing, A. C., 1, 271 Spenser, Edmund, 117 Statius, 2, 3, 68, 69, 70, 72, 98–9, 110, 112, 113, 135, 137, 189–90, 191, 192, 201

Stoicism, 20, 30, 58, 63, 81–7, 91, 107, 112, 193, 220, 224, 239, 244–5, 246, 260–2 Sudbury, Simon, Archbishop of Canterbury, 287 Summa Virtutum de Remediis Anime, 128, 250 Super Thebaiden, 98, 99, 201 temperance, 32, 34, 41, 44–6, 95, 108–9, 115, 151–2 temples, 53–4; see also Diana, Mars, Venus Terence, 266 Tertullian, 245 Thebaid, see Statius Thebes, 4, 38, 65, 68, 99, 101, 112–15, 139, 144, 147, 153, 157, 158, 163, 185, 188–9, 194, 197, 198, 216–17, 226, 236, 264, 280, 288 theodicy, 232, 258–69 Theodosius, 222–1 theological virtues, 32–3, 127, 270; see also individual virtues theology, 168, 271–2, 280 Theseus, interpreted positively by modern critics, 4–6, 7, 80–1, 131, 146–7, 171, 233–4; interpreted negatively by modern critics, 6–8, 29–30, 37, 49–50, 60, 62, 71–2, 75, 80, 115, 125, 131–2, 135, 144, 147, 171–2, 184–5, 192, 195–6, 198, 204, 207, 212–13, 234–6, 256, 264, 267, 276, 278 Thomas, duke of Gloucester, 2, 17, 19, 181 Thomas, Lord Berkeley, 18, 52, 75, 181 Thorp, John de, 17 Tiberius, 55 tournaments, Church’s attitude to, 57–8 tragedy, 266 Trajan, 190, 223, 225 Trevisa, John, 17, 18, 52, 75, 109, 181, 182, 254, 268 triumph, 62–3, 79, 137 truce, 214 truthfulness, 33, 47, 66, 67–73, 95 Turnus, 36, 124 tyrants and tyranny, 44–5, 89, 91, 172, 176, 178–95, 198–9, 201–7, 212–3, 219, 224 Ubaldis, Baldis de, 188 understanding, as a form of prudence, 35, 38

index Usk, Thomas, 18 utopian outlook, 281–9 vainglory, see 49, 60–1, 99, 198–204 Vale, M., 50, 215 Vatican Mythographers, 106, 114 vegetative soul, 93, 94 Vegetius, 17, 104, 211 Venus, 44, 55, 78–9, 99, 100, 101–3, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113, 114, 115, 126, 150, 151, 152, 153, 160, 161, 235, 257–8, 264, 268, 269, 274, 277, 280 Venus, temple of, 36, 54, 55–7, 101–3, 124, 152, 153 Virgil, 33, 36, 98, 101, 116–17, 139, 245 Virginia, 45, 148 virginity, 146, 148, 149–54, 159, 161 virtue, as a mean, 32, 41–2, 82, 91–2, 123, 145, 151–2, 241; see also individual virtues Wace, Roman de Brut, 33, 166, 197 Wallace, D., 132, 195, 208–9, 223, 273–5 Walter of Milemete, 15, 16, 34, 77, 166, 179, 202, 206, 211 Walsingham, Thomas, 157, 180 war, conduct of ruler in, 171–2, 210–19, 227; see also just war

329

Watts, J., 18 Wauqelin, Jehan, 182 Weber, Max, 286 Wenzel, king of Bohemia, 156 Westminster Chronicle, 156 Wetherbee, W., 213, 245 widows, defence of, 189–90, 197; see also Argive widows will, as part of the rational soul, 94, 95, 109, 112 William, Lord Thorp, 19 William of Auvergne, 112 William of Ockham, 222 Wilton Diptych, 119 Wimbledon, Thomas, 246 wisdom, and the intellectual virtues, 94; see also prudence women, 79, 134, 138, 139, 141–5, 147, 153–5, 211, 244, 278; see also Amazons, Emily, girls, Hippolyta, wrath, 64–5, 90, 92, 95, 104, 109, 110–1, 112, 126, 210, 267 youth, vices and virtues of, 59, 118, 119–21, 123–4, 138, 139, 141, 146, 151, 154, 278, 287 Zeno, 85

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