In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Griselda in Siena
  • Richard Firth Green

The germ of this essay came to me as I was rereading Derek Brewer’s Symbolic Stories in preparation for a commemorative session at the 2010 Kalamazoo Congress, and I hope that it may stand here as a modest tribute to one of the founding members of our New Chaucer Society and a standard-bearer for humane Chaucerian criticism throughout the world. We all miss Derek’s genial presence, nowhere more so than here in Italy, a country he held particularly dear. Rereading Symbolic Stories,1 I found myself wondering why it was that so few Chaucerians had followed Derek in keeping faith with the study of the traditional folktale through the long years of poststructuralism and new historicism. Since actual historians (particularly the French annalistes like Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt and the British cultural materialists like E. P. Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm) had shown themselves far from indifferent to folklore, one might have thought that the historicist turn taken by Middle English studies would have fostered a similar interest. It was a historian, after all, Judith Bennett, who reprimanded delegates to the 2006 New Chaucer Society Meeting in New York for their lack of attention to popular ballads and carols.2 Be that as it may, I should like to take this opportunity to pay homage to Derek Brewer’s memory by attempting a Chaucerian reading that is both folkloric and historicist, and in deference to our charming surroundings I will take as my subject The Clerk’s Tale, a story whose origins are rooted in the folklore of the Tuscan countryside, though in actuality I will be less concerned [End Page 3] here with The Clerk’s Tale itself than with the generic story of Griselda, of which Chaucer’s tale is but one early expression.

Almost everyone seems to agree that the story of Griselda began life as a folktale, but there is very little agreement as to what kind of folktale it was.3 To my mind, genealogical debates about whether Griselda is to be traced back to a “Cupid and Psyche” archetype, or whether it is more closely related to the “Monstrous Husband” or the “Ogre Schoolmaster” subtype, are generally rather unproductive. However, I think it is rather more useful to imagine a forerunner of Boccaccio’s story being told in a fourteenth-century equivalent of the Tuscan veglia, or evening gathering around the family hearth (Fig. 1), so vividly evoked for us by the Sienese scholar Alessandro Falassi (interestingly, Falassi’s epigraphs for the chapters of his Folklore by the Fireside are taken from the Decameron).4 The veglie attended by Falassi in the countryside around Siena in the 1970s proceeded in three stages, each concentrated on a different age group (first children, then those of marriageable age, and finally the elders). Here is his description of the final stage: “When at the end of the veglia the elders took the floor again, the tone and topic changed; the emphasis shifted to maintaining the family units, rather than the formation of couples. . . . In general, the elders liked and were more interested in the ‘stories of married people,’ in which the protagonists confronted situations with which the narrators or listeners who were ‘old’ (that is, ‘adult’ with positive connotation, deriving from age and experience) had to deal regularly at that stage of their life. Consequently, toward the end of the veglia, the narrators recounted pitiful cases, the events and vicissitudes of marriage” (148). One of the stories Falassi listened to in 1974 was the tale of Pia de Tolomei, the story of a falsely accused wife with obvious similarities to Griselda’s; of course Dante alluded to Pia de Tolomei’s story (“Siena made me, Maremma undid me”),5 a fact perfectly well known to the vegliatori themselves, though there is no reason to suppose that the tale that Falassi heard had survived continuously and unchanged across more than six centuries. Nonetheless, the social dynamics of the veglia, as Falassi shows, reach deep into the traditions of the Tuscan countryside, and it is at least [End Page 4]


Click for larger view
View full resolution
Fig...

pdf

Share