Chaucer's tell-tale lexicon: romancing seinte cecyle - Geoffrey Chaucer

Style, Fall, 1997 by Judith A. Weise

When Mersand's theory is applied, these numbers suggest that Chaucer finished the poem by writing the second part some considerable time after the first. That is to say, this lexicon-based chronology supports Reames's opinion about the relative date of the second part of the tale: "I have long felt that Chaucer might have written the second half of the tale considerably later than the first half, given certain stylistic differences between the two" ("Recent Discovery" 347n29).

If Chaucer's Romance usage increased at a steady rate throughout his writing career, and if no other factors affected this increase, dating the writing of the parts of the Second Nun's Prologue and Tale and most of Chaucer's other works would be a straightforward mathematical procedure. However, as readers of Chaucer know, few of mortals' works are steady or constant. The frustration Mersand occasionally shows indicates he might have had to learn this lesson again and again. Throughout his book, he emphasizes factors which affect Chaucer's Romance usage such as "source, metre, period of composition, and subject matter" (138). A close look at Mersand's numbers also provides a warning to treat these percentages with caution.

The percentages of Romance usage in each of Chaucer's works from lowest to highest among the sixty titles Mersand analyzes range from 5.9 in "Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn" to 24.0 in Womanly Noblesse (153). Mersand points out that

Chaucer's poems exhibit a wide variation in this respect. We have the Book of the Duchess with a percentage of 7.14 per cent and Womanly Noblesse with 24 per cent. . . . In some cases the rime scheme will determine the percentage. Thus the excessively high percentage of 24 per cent the largest in all of Chaucer's works - in Womanly Noblesse, is occasioned by the necessity for finding thirty-one words that will rime with -ance or -esse. (82-83)

Twenty-four per cent is indeed rare, for the highest to appear in the Canterbury collection is 14.9, in the Parson's Prologue and Tale, which, as Mersand notes, "is replete with theological terms of Romance origin" (83). Only the Parson's Tale and the Clerk's Prologue and Tale, with 15.4% Romance usage in Mersand (75-77), have a higher Romance usage than my 14.9% for the second part of the Second Nun's Prologue (Pr2).

The ten titles with the lowest percentage of Romance usage are "Chaucers Wordes unto Adam, His Owne Scriveyn" at 5.9; "Proverbs" at 6.9; "A Complaint to his Lady" at 7.0; the Reeve's Tale at 7.0 (plus the Prologue at 7.5); The Book of the Duchess at 7.2; Troilus and Criseyde at 8.5; the Miller's Tale at 8.5 (plus the Prologue at 8.6); An Amorous Compleint at 8.7; the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women at 9.3; and the prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale at 10.2. This evidence contradicts the generally accepted rough chronology of Chaucer's works, as three titles on this list are almost universally accepted as some of the latest Chaucer wrote: the tales of the Reeve and Miller and the prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale. Mersand struggles unsuccessfully to explain these low percentages (82, 109-11); Benson suggests the cause of the anomaly to be an oral source (842), but Cooper's explanation seems the strongest. She concludes that "the words depend on the [Miller's] Tale's relationship to the Knight's," which is one of "marked contrast" (97-98), implying that by the time he writes the tales of the Miller and Reeve and the Wife's Prologue, Chaucer is in such firm control of his diction that he is able to modify it to characterize the speaker. He knows that no real miller would use "holiday and lady terms," nor a reeve or a west-country cloth maker highly Frenchified diction.