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Exchequers and Balances: Anxieties of Exchange in The Tale of Beryn Jenny Adams University of Massachusetts, Amherst Games of chance, therefore, have their serious side. —Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens Scholars who have written about the fifteenth-century Tale of Beryn, an anonymous continuation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, have looked almost exclusively at the story’s Prologue, or as it has been recently renamed, The Canterbury Interlude.1 The major exception to this A version of this essay was presented at the University of Puerto Rico, San Juan, and, later the same year, at the annual meeting of the Texas Medieval Association (San Antonio, 2001). In addition to the helpful participants in these very different audiences, I would like to thank Frank Grady, Nicole Lassahn, Ed Lopez, Sharon Rowley, Jeff Sternal, Christina von Nolcken, and the anonymous readers of SAC for their comments on earlier iterations of this essay. I would also like to thank the American Council of Learned Societies for its financial support during the time I was working on this essay. 1 See The Canterbury Tales: Fifteenth-Century Continuations and Additions, ed. John M. Bowers (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992). In an essay subsequent to this edition, Bowers explains that he has coined The Canterbury Interlude because it ‘‘better acknowledges the ludic quality of the continuation and its central positioning within the Northumberland manuscript where the unique copy of the work survives.’’ See ‘‘Controversy and Criticism: Lydgate’s Thebes and the Prologue to Beryn,’’ Chaucer Yearbook 5 (1998): 92 n. 3. Bowers’s new title should be applauded as it recognizes both the material conditions of the tale and the departure this text takes from the pilgrims’ prologues in the Canterbury Tales. I have used Bowers’s edition for this essay and have noted all references to the Canterbury Interlude and the Tale of Beryn in parentheses by line number. In addition to Bowers, ‘‘Controversy and Criticism,’’ pp. 91–115, articles about the Interlude include Stephan Kohl, ‘‘Chaucer’s Pilgrims in Fifteenth-Century Literature ,’’ FCS 7 (1983): 221–36; Bradley Darjes and Thomas Rendall, ‘‘A Fabliau in the Prologue to the Tale of Beryn,’’ Mediaeval Studies 47 (1985): 416–31; John Bowers ‘‘The Tale of Beryn and The Siege of Thebes: Alternative Ideas of The Canterbury Tales,’’ SAC 7 (1985): 23–50 (this article was reprinted in Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century, ed. Daniel Pinti [New York: Garland, 1998], pp. 201– 25); Frederick B. Jonassen ‘‘Cathedral, Inn, and Pardoner in the Prologue to The Tale of Beryn,’’ FCS 18 (1991): 109–32; Peter Brown, ‘‘Journey’s End: The Prologue to The Tale of Beryn,’’ in Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Julia Boffey and Janet Cowen (London: King’s College, Centre for Late Antique and Medieval Studies, 1991), pp. 143–74; Stephen Medcalf, ‘‘Motives for Pilgrimage: The Tale of Beryn,’’ in England in PAGE 267 267 .......................... 10906$ $CH8 11-01-10 13:58:33 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER trend is Richard Firth Green, who, studying the Tale itself, has identified the target of the story’s satire as the lex mercatoria, or ‘‘merchant law,’’ of England.2 But even Green, while calling attention to the Tale, neglects to consider the ways such a satire might be anticipated by the Interlude that precedes it. In short, most recent scholarship has steadily reinforced an imagined barrier between the poem’s two parts and has also implicitly endorsed the opinion of the poem’s first modern editor, Frederick Furnivall, who praised the Interlude as ‘‘a piece of contemporary social history to be read and studied’’ yet dismissed the Tale as ‘‘long-winded.’’3 In this essay I wish to challenge both the division of the poem and the dismissal of the poem’s second ‘‘half’’ by looking at the Interlude and Tale as connected narratives that reveal anxieties surrounding acts of trade and exchange.4 Given the increasingly trade-heavy culture of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a story that dwells on the tenuous nature of exchange comes as little surprise.5 Mercantile wealth was rising across late mediethe Fourteenth Century: Proceedings of the 1991 Harlaxton Symposium, ed. Nicholas Rogers (Stamford...

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