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  • The Griselda Game
  • Amy W. Goodwin

Criticism of Boccaccio's Griselda story, like that of Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, is rich with complementary, competing, and contradictory arguments about its author's intentions. By contrast, criticism of Petrarch's Latin Griselda story has suggested near agreement that Petrarch eliminated or suppressed the difficult interpretive issues that Boccaccio, Chaucer, and their modern readers have clearly prized in favor of a straightforward moralized exemplum.1 Reasons why this view has prevailed are not far to seek. The moral conclusion Petrarch appended to the tale and the use made of his version by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century translators and redactors support it. Yet Petrarch's elaborate epistolary frame—the four letters of Seniles XVII that surround the tale—make the work something more than simply a clearly moralized translation of Boccaccio's Griselda story. Presenting with the tale a self-conscious study of translation and narrative art and a complex portrait of Petrarch, the letters suggest that it is multi-intentioned, the quality that has made Boccaccio's Griselda story and Chaucer's Clerk's Tale so open to debate.

In her 1980 essay "The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts," Anne Middleton offered an innovative interpretation of Petrarch's Griselda story, contesting the prevailing view that Petrarch had rescued the tale from Boccaccio's ironic treatment, which had undercut its moral sentence.2 Her argument had many strands, all of which anticipated her reading of the Clerk's Tale. She broadened the context for understanding Petrarch's Latin translation to include the second, third, and fourth letters of Seniles XVII and the reception of his tale in late fourteenth-century France and in the Canterbury Tales. Building on Glending Olson's argument that Petrarch saw the Decameron as recreational rather than didactic literature, Middleton emphasized the "recreative status the act of composition had for" Petrarch, showing that this status was implied by the way he framed the tale with a critical assessment of the Decameron in Seniles XVII.3, "a general meditation on the pleasures and value of the life of the writer" in Seniles XVII.2, and a discussion of the tale's genre and the responses of Petrarch's two readers in Seniles XVII.4.3 For Middleton, Petrarch's presentation of his translation to Boccaccio "[redefined] the [End Page 41] pleasures of the text, according to Petrarch's idea of the literate man's 'pley.' "4 While she argued that the moral sentence was indeed important to Petrarch, she insisted that his real interest lay in the tale's pathos or "affective powers" and in the challenge of adapting Boccaccio's vernacular story for the recreation of elite Latin readers whose more sober values contrast with those of Boccaccio's audience.5

Middleton's essay has had a curious afterlife. Her main and compelling argument—that Petrarch took up the translation as a pleasurable activity, and that his attention in Seniles XVII to the act of composition and to his own version's effect on readers indicated that the tale's didactic value was just one aspect of its attractiveness—has not altered in a significant way subsequent approaches to Petrarch's Griselda story. Charlotte Morse's "The Exemplary Griselda" (1985) offered a substantial counterargument. Reasserting the tale's status as a moral exemplum, Morse cited evidence of Petrarch's lifelong commitment to exemplary narratives as illustrated in his letters and his treatises De viris illustribus and De remediis utriusque fortune.6 Though both essays are widely cited, often together as if they were complementary rather than contradictory, Morse exposed the weaknesses of Middleton's argument: a focus on Petrarch's stated aims and a failure to compare Boccaccio's and Petrarch's renderings to determine their differences and through them the implied values of their audiences. Many of the changes Petrarch made within the narrative actually augmented the tale's didactic content; thus Middleton's main thesis contradicted Petrarch's painstaking elaboration of political and remedial virtues within the tale. Most critics since Morse have continued to insist, justifiably, on Petrarch's interest in the tale's exemplary values.

Middleton's secondary argument linking Petrarch's Latin...

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