“Non Intellegant”: The Enigmas of the Clerk’s Tale

If the abundant critical commentary on the Clerk’s Tale has demonstrated anything, it is the falseness of Charles Muscatine’s claim that the tale “is so transparent as to seem to have nothing in it.”¹ Many critics have remarked on its interpretive difficulty,² which Lee Patterson has described with particular astuteness. Near the end of an essay struggling to understand the tale in the context of Ricardian marriage negotiations, he concedes that “the Clerk has managed to take an already difficult narrative and render it not just enigmatic but virtually uninterpretable.”³ For Patterson, the added difficulty seems to be an edifying accident: “Far from providing us with the moral teaching to which he lays claim, the Clerk inadvertently reminds us just how limited is our ability to understand the lives of others.”⁴ Patterson does not, however, explain why he thinks that the Clerk is operating “inadvertently,” nor does he clarify the relationship between the narrator’s inadvertence and the poet’s design. A close reading of the tale will show that the enigmas in Chaucer’s adaptation of his main source, Petrarch’s Epistolae Seniles XVII.3, are so extensive they are probably deliberate. Multiplying enigmas, Chaucer enhances his authority as a vernacular poet-translator.

The Clerk’s Tale is a parable, a literary form long associated with interpretive difficulty.⁵ In Chaucer’s hands and from the Clerk’s mouth, the primary function of a parable is not to communicate meaning, but to confuse the audience. If this method sounds perverse, then its perversity derives from Christ himself. In the Gospel according to Mark, he narrates the Parable of the Sower to a large crowd. Afterward, alone with his twelve companions, he claims that he speaks to outsiders in parables “ut videntes videant et non videant et audientes audiant et non intellegant nequando convertantur et dimittantur eis peccata” (4:12) [that seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand: lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them].⁶ Reprising this rhetorical strategy, Chaucer adapts the tale of Griselda, an already puzzling parable, in a way calculated to maximize confusion. This is a way for the vernacular poet to simulate the authority of ancient texts.

The most authoritative of ancient texts, the Bible, seems, as medieval theologians often acknowledged, deliberately puzzling. In De doctrina christiana, Augustine defends the intermittent obscurity of biblical style (II.6; IV.6, 8).⁷ Accepting Mark’s and Luke’s gospels as the word of God, Jerome “had no choice but to take parabolic speech as ipso facto obscure speech.”⁸ Pagan theorists of rhetoric, on the contrary, maintained that exempla, or parables, should increase clarity, not diminish it. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, for instance, describes the purpose of parable (similitudo): “[A]ut ornandi causa aut probandi aut apertius dicendi aut ante oculos ponendi” (IV.xlv.59) [This is used to embellish or prove or clarify or vivify].⁹ Stephen L. Wailes, in his study of parable theory, finds that no one in the Middle Ages (with the exception of Albert the Great) made a serious attempt to reconcile the rhetoricians’ idea of parable with Mark’s and Luke’s.¹⁰ Consequently, a communicative and an anti-communicative theory of parables coexisted.

Medieval thinkers often commented on the veiled appearance of ancient writings—not only the Bible—and here they were following Macrobius, “who explicitly defends the practice of pagan poets who veil their truths under a covering of fabulous fictions.”¹¹ Abelard discusses the pleasure and instruction afforded by the figure involucrum (“covering, wrapping”) in the works of pagan philosophers.¹² Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars versificatoria quotes a couplet from Virgil (Eclogue 3.104– 5) as an illustration of veiled language or aenigma.¹³ Matthew’s choice is fitting, since Virgil’s own representation of primordial poetry emphasizes enigma: in book 6 of the Aeneid, the Sybil sings horrific ambiguities (“horrendas canit ambages”) and wraps truth with obscurity (“obscuris uera inuoluens”) (99–100).¹⁴

Chaucer was not the first...