Rhetorical Circumstances and the Canterbury Storytelling

Rhetorical Circumstances and the Canterbury Storytelling Glending Olson ClevelandState University At the end of th, Deromeron, Bocc,ccio defends his collection of stories against some possible objections from members of his audience. The charge he discusses at greatest length is that he has written with too much license, said things improper for virtuous women to hear or speak. To this criticism he responds with the same reporter's gambit that Chaucer uses in his apologies in The Canterbury Tales: he must faithfully reproduce what was said. Further, within this conceit, he defends the stories on the basis of the dramatic context in which they occur. The tales were not told in church, nor in schools, "nor in any place where either churchmen or philosophers were present. They were told in gardens, in a place (luogo) designed for pleasure, among people (persone) who, though young in years, were nonetheless fully mature and not to be led astray by stories, at a time (tempo) when even the most respectable people saw nothing un­ seemly in wearing their breeches over their heads if they thought their lives might thereby be preserved."1 Here, in one sentence, Boccaccio appeals to three of the several circum­ stances which in medieval thinking affect the ethical status of any human act. To those who would judge the stories morally suspect, Boccaccio replies by specifying a set of circumstances in which they become less open to censure. Who did the telling? Young (but mature and responsible) secular folk, not clergy or elderly people, for whom more pious speech would be appropriate. Where was the telling done? In a place designed for recreation, not in a place designed for worship or study. When was it done? During the plague, a time when everyone exceeded the bounds of pro­ priety in the interest of self-preservation. Boccaccio stresses as well the 1 Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Baltimore, Md.: Pen­ guin Books, 1975), p. 830. 211 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER circumstances in which the reading ofthe Decameron becomes appropri­ ate: everything in the world may be used properly or improperly, he says; these stories will be beneficial rather than harmful "ifthey are read at the proper time by the people for whom they were written"2 -again, a narrow­ ing ofthe circumstances who and when in order to defend through proper delimitation the value ofhis literary effort. This is neither the time nor the place to debate the vexed question of Chaucer's knowledge of the Decameron. I believe that he at least knew of it, and ifhe had seen it, even briefly, he probably would have done what Petrarch in a letter to Boccaccio says he did: "I explored the beginning and the end somewhat more attentively than the rest ofthe book" (Seniles 17.3). If Chaucer did look at Boccaccio's conclusion, he would have recognized how very precisely the author specifies the circumstances in which his stories can be justified. He would have thought, I believe, that such a tidy, external summary (however sophisticated and playful) was just too neat, that it begged some of the most interesting and troubling questions ofthe ways in which stories function. And he would have been moved to create in his own tale collection a structure in which questions of circumstance become embedded in the frame rather than appended as an explanation. But my argument does not hinge on Chaucer's having read Boccaccio, for the idea ofcircumstances as a factor in the understanding of human action was so familiar in the Middle Ages that Chaucer naturally would have come to draw on it. I want to look briefly at that idea and to suggest in part how Chaucer works with it in The Canterbury Tales. For a definition ofcircumstance we may tum to Aquinas: "Any condi­ tions which lie outside the substance of a human act yet which border on this in some way are called its circumstances."3 In the Middle Ages the idea ofcircumstances is perhaps best known in regard to confession: in 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council decreed that confessors should inquire into the circumstances ofboth the sinner and the sin to understand them fully and...