Renaissance Retrospections: Tudor Views of the Middle Ages

Introduction: The Body and the Book in Early Modern Readings of the Medieval English Past

Like Hollywood screenwriters who create movies based on television shows, comic books, and video games, writers in the premodern and early modern periods mined antecedent texts for narrative models. For medieval and Renaissance authors, writing very frequently meant rewriting. Some adaptations and revisions obscure their own origins, but some openly reveal their intertextual affiliations. In the most explicitly bookish of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s oxford Clerk invokes “Fraunceys Petrak, the lauriate poete” as the source of his rhyme royal tale, lamenting that Petrarch “is now deed and nayled in his cheste.”1 The image of Petrarch’s physical body is supplanted immediately in the Clerk’s retelling of the Griselda story by what the Clerk calls “the body of his tale” (CT Iv.42). The Clerk’s phrasing here makes explicit an analogy buried in the initial reference to Petrarch. Corpses, after all, were not the only things to be enclosed in a “cheste”: an oxford clerk likely stored his own books in an armarium, a chest. For the Clerk, the body of the poet and the body of the tale are not dead artifacts to be left in the past. both could better be described as “undead”: simultaneously absent and present, expired and enabling. Through both his presence and his absence, Petrarch (figured both textually and corporeally) enables the Clerk’s tale of Griselda, herself a character quite explicitly and repeatedly embodied within the tale. Like Chaucer’s Clerk, early modern writers self-consciously used antecedent texts to enable their own work, but then struggled (not always successfully) to keep earlier social, religious, literary, legal, and political systems “nayled in [their] cheste.” The ghost of the Middle Ages continued to haunt the early modern period because neither the tomb nor the text could wholly contain its occupants. A major plot element within the Clerk’s tale is the return of Griselda’s children, seemingly from the grave, an event that shocks Griselda herself into a pseudo-death: Introduction:The Body and the Book in Early Modern Readings of the Medieval English Past Sarah A. Kelen 1 Whan she this herde, aswowne doun she falleth For pitous joye, and after hir swownynge She bothe hir yonge children unto hir calleth, And in hir armes pitously wepynge embraceth hem, and tendrely kissynge Ful lyk a mooder, with hir salte teeres She bathed bothe hir visage and hir heeres. o, which a pitous thyng it was to se Hir swownyng, and hir humble voys to heere! (CT Iv.1079–87). The repeated reference to Griselda’s swoon, three times in nine lines, emphasizes the drama of Griselda overcome with emotion at having her children returned to her from their seeming grave. Griselda swoons “[f]or . . . joye,” but the reiterated image of her lying unconscious on the floor raises the possibility that Walter may finally have tormented Griselda to death. Griselda is joyful, but the Clerk is rather more ambivalent about the emotions associated with this happy reunion.2 Just as Griselda’s swoon is referred to three times within nine lines, so too is the Clerk’s claim that her joy is “pitous.” It is not Griselda who feels pity but the Clerk. He even inserts himself bodily into the scene, casting himself as both spectator and auditor by reporting how pitiable it was “to se / Hir swownyng and hir humble voys to heere” (lines 1086–87). The Clerk himself has not seen or heard Griselda, however. He has read about her in Petrarch’s book.And while he demonstrates his desire to resuscitate Griselda from her “pitous”swoon, in the envoi to the Clerk’s tale he (or Chaucer, or the pilgrimnarrator ) unceremoniously kills her off: “Grisilde is deed, and eek hir pacience” (line 1177).3 The Clerk’s narrative of Griselda’s life and death animates her imaginatively for the Clerk’s audience of fellow pilgrims, and it brings her into the Chaucerian present from the Petrarchan past. In his tale the Clerk alternately animates and kills off his protagonist, just as his prologue first invokes Petrarch then consigns him to his grave.The Clerk’s reference to his poetic predecessor as both a textual authority and a corpse manifests (if in unusually explicit terms) a bloomian anxiety of influence also visible elsewhere in Chaucer’s negotiations with an inherited literary tradition.4 Interestingly, that literary tradition is almost entirely Continental. Chaucer’s source texts are predominantly non-english, and where he does refer to the native english literary...