Sources and Analogues of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work

Sources andAnalogues ofChaucer's Canterbury Tales: Reviewing the Work Helen Cooper University College, Oxford s"'"'andAnal,ga" ,fChau,,,', Canwbucy Tales, edited by W. F. Bryan and Germaine Dempster, has been a staple resource ofChaucerian scholars for over half a century. It is, however, showing its age: few of its chapters any longer represent the current state of scholarship; and the first chapter in particular, on the literary framework ofthe tales (that is, sources and analogues for Chaucer's whole conception ofthe work) is no longer tenable at all. A full revision ofSources andAnalogues-a new book to provide an au­ thoritative replacement of Bryan and Dempster's-is now under way under the general editorship of Robert M. Correale, with Mary Hamel as his coeditor. By the invitation of the editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, and with the encouragement ofthe New Chaucer Society Board of Trustees, the new first chapter, on the work as a whole, is published here in advance of the rest, to indicate how far our knowledge of Chaucer's sources and literary context has come since the original vol­ ume appeared. Introduction The Canterbury Tales is a framed story-collection, a form that originated in the East, was adopted with enthusiasm in the medieval West, and reached its peak of popularity in European literature in the fourteenth century. In the Tales, the frame takes the form of a pilgrimage with the pilgrims as storytellers, and the tales are told in competition with each other; both these elements have sources and analogues oftheir own that are independent of the generic nature of the whole work as a collection oftales. In addition, the relationships established between the stories as 183 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER they pick up related themes and motifs from each other-sometimes from adjacent tales, sometimes from more distant ones-is a process that interlocks with the frame of the work but that also has much in common with debate, itself a widespread literary form but also one found much more widely in medieval culture. This survey of sources and analogues will attempt to cover all four of these areas-story-collections and how they organize their constituent tales; debate; poetic contests; storytelling pilgrims-to give some idea of the origins of the large structures of the whole work. The problems attendant on such a survey are rather different from those for the indi­ vidual tales. There are works that we know from other evidence that Chaucer read, and that may have set him thinking-as the articulation of the stories within Ovid's Metamorphoses, for instance, may have done­ but that do not offer models for the solutions he himself adopted; there are others that offer closer parallels to Chaucer's solutions but where the clinching evidence that would prove direct debt has been in dispute, Boccaccio's Decameron being the most striking instance. Specific topics of debate, such as pro- and antifeminism, can be thoroughly documented as they occur in sections of the Tales, such as The Wife ofBath's Prologue; but Chaucer's informing principle of structuring his story-collection by analogy with a series of dialectical debating positions derives from more general conventions of debate literature, and from the wider usages of disputation in medieval culture, in the law courts, the schools, Parliament, and so on, where specific source texts are beside the point. Some of the evidence for pilgrims' habits of storytelling and for poetic contests is historical rather than literary, so surviving written sources can only poorly represent what may have been Chaucer's direct inspiration. If any one work can stake a primary claim to being Chaucer's model for the Tales, it is the Decameron. The possibility of Chaucer's knowledge of the work has been much debated, and the arguments are outlined below. It was rejected as a source by R. A. Pratt and Karl Young in their contribution to Bryan and Dempster's Sources and Analogues ofChaucer's Canterbury Tales on the grounds that "its basic conception is that of a succession of aristocratic garden scenes rather than of a moving pil­ grimage of diverse and discordant personalities," and they...