Chaucer’s “Clerk’s Tale”: The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated by Judith Bronfman (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER locate representations of female spiritual love in devotional literature in the broader cultural context of medieval medical and scientific lore. Bartlett's reading strategy firmly places Margery Kempe, whose literalistic erotic spirituality undermines her status as a genuine mystic for many, in a pow­ erful devotional tradition that acknowledged the power of female sexuality. Finally, the author generously makes available her own preliminary "Descriptive List of Extant Books owned by Medieval English Nuns and Convents," an invaluable tool for scholars who now recognize that gen­ dered reading can only be constructed convincingly in a historical contin­ uum from material evidence; however intellectually exciting a highly theo­ rized discussion of a medieval text might be, the most compelling arguments for reception will acknowledge manuscript redaction and trans­ mission, book ownership, and evidence of actual reading habits, such as manuscript annotations. Bartlett's book is required reading for scholars of medieval devotional, mystical, and women's literature, but her innovative methodology for exploring the thorny problems of reading and reception in a manuscript culture should interest medievalists in a variety of disciplines. DENISE L. DESPRES University of Puget Sound JUDITH BRONFMAN. Chaucer's "Clerk's Tale": The Griselda Story Received, Rewritten, Illustrated. Garland Studies in Medieval Literature, vol. 11. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1994. Pp. xiv, 162. $28.00. Judith Bronfman's study of the Griselda srory ranges over seven centuries of retellings that reformulate Griselda in poems, plays, tracts, ballads, operas, novels, short stories, illustrations, and, mainly in this century, criti­ cism. Many readers will be surprised at the number of imaginative reinven­ tions of Griselda. Even in the twentieth century, the story has been adapted for the stage-with one sadomasochistic dramatization having Walter de­ sire a wife "strong enough to stand a good beating" (p. 75); it has been retold in black dialect, anthologized in A Selection from the World's Greatest Short Stories under the heading "The Origin of the Modern Love Story," and parodied in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in an adaptation that recasts 178 REVIEWS Walter as a "rich Midwesterner and Griselda as a New York showgirl" who murders him (p. 79). Bronfman is interested in the seemingly inexhaust­ ible interpretive potential of the Griselda story, which since Boccaccio's rendering of it in the Decameron has inspired widely different responses from both its readers and its redactors. Bronfman's book documents the diverse manifestations of the Griselda story in criticism on Chaucer's Clerk's Tale, and in adaptations and illustrations of the story itself. Readers interested in retellings of the Griselda story will find this work a valuable resource. Bronfman is an enthusiastic collector of Griselda stories and allusions; the book identifies nearly sixty dating from the Renaissance to 1985, and includes in an appendix a transcription of a sixteenth-century Griselda ballad, written in sonnet stanzas. Bronfman also clearly enjoys retelling versions that develop a new theme or a new facet in the characters or give the tale a new setting. Many readers, however, will be dissatisfied by the very limited analyses that Bronfman offers in her surveys both of criticism on Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and of retellings of the Griselda story, and by the omission of any discussion of her methodology. The book's usefulness is hampered by Bronfman's conception of her study. She sets up a twofold project in her introduction: 1) "to look at the story from a long view, starting from its sources in the fourteenth century and then moving into the recent flood of critical interpretations"; and 2) to examine rewritings as works comparable to criticism "for the views that they have taken of the tale" (p. 4). Her aim is to provide a "broader per­ spective from which to view" questions that she sees arising from conflict­ ing interpretations of The Clerk's Tale (p. 5): Is it part of a "marriage group"' Or does it belong with the other three rhyme royal tales? ... Is it about wifely behavior' Or is it a "personality clash" be­ tween the Clerk and the Wife of Bath? Is it about rulership and politics? ...Is there one interpretation that...