Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in the Clerk's Tale

Chaucer's Clerk of Oxenford remarks on two separate occasions that he learned the story of Griselda from "Petrak" (IV 31, 1147), a statement corroborated by Chaucer's subsequent close reliance on Petrarch for the body of his tale.¹ Yet the looming silence of Boccaccio's original version of this work, along with Chaucer's history of repeatedly refusing to credit Boccaccio with anything, borrowed or not, makes the poet's protestations here suspicious. Nevertheless, scholars have scoured the Clerk's Tale for signs of the presence of Decameron X.10, but with little to show for their efforts: textual evidence of Boccaccio's original story remains regarded by even the most optimistic critics as slight, and the work has largely been relegated to the status of hard analogue—albeit with a "relevance greater than any other."² Most readers agree that Petrarch's translation of Decameron X.10, Insignis obedientia et fides uxoria,³ serves as Chaucer's primary source, while some agree with J. Burke Severs's claim that Chaucer also relied on an anonymous French translation of Petrarch entitled Le Livre Griseldis.⁴ John Finlayson, Leonard Koff, and Dolores Frese are among the few scholars who discuss Boccaccio's influence on the tale; however, as they rely primarily on tenuous conceptual or textual parallels, their arguments, though suggestive, are not wholly convincing.⁵ By contrast, I propose that it is not in vague, verbal echoes that we see the ghost of Boccaccio's original work in the Clerk's Tale but in Chaucer's methodical undoing of the editorial adjustments that Petrarch first made to Decameron X.10.⁶ The Clerk's Tale is thus less of a translation than a restoration, as it brings us closer to the Boccaccian original than Petrarch ever desired to reach.

Petrarch's Insignis obedientia has typically been read either as a "moral reshaping"⁷ or a "humanist interpretation"⁸ of the final tale from the Decameron, yet few English scholars of Petrarch and Chaucer have noted the playful irony that characterizes Petrarch's attitude towards his friend and auctor, Boccaccio.⁹ In his letter to the younger poet, Seniles XVII.3, which includes his translation of Decameron X.10, Petrarch justifies the changes he makes to the tale under the smiling guise of friendship and a desire to improve what he implies is an already superb work.¹⁰ The poet assures Boccaccio that his aim in translating Decameron X.10 is only to make it noble and fully pleasing, and he insists that, even in its altered state, Boccaccio remains the sole author of the tale. The seeming innocuousness of this gesture masks the fact that the changes Petrarch makes—not least among them his translation of the story into Latin—necessarily alter the original tenor and purpose of the work. Despite its comic bent, the Decameron functions as a serious response to Dante's plea for eloquent works in the vernacular, which Dante lays out in his treatise De vulgari eloquentia and, to a lesser extent, in Il Convivio. Petrarch, feigning ignorance of the linguistic importance of the Decameron, unmoors the story of Griselda from its ideological context in the vernacular and transforms not only Boccaccio's language but also his style, audience, and ethos, so that they no longer resonate with Dante's project.

As most of the surviving manuscripts of the Insignis obedientia contain Petrarch's prefatory remarks to Boccaccio, the chances are good that Chaucer had access to them as well.¹¹ Indeed, Petrarch's seemingly friendly letter to Boccaccio sheds light on Chaucer's subsequent translation, as it exploits the subversive potential inherent in praising an auctor while simultaneously altering his work. I think that Chaucer recognized and was delighted by Petrarch's backhanded accreditation of the Insignis obedientia to Boccaccio, and that he correspondingly entered into their "community of literate play."¹² Yet it is only, as we will see, through a serial examination of all three versions of the tale within their original frameworks that we may appreciate this. In what...