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

Mersand finds that fourteen of the tales and the General Prologue have a Romance usage between eleven and twelve percent, and he calls these tales "typical of Chaucer at this point in his literary career" (83); he also finds a range of about ten per cent in the tales of the. Nun's Priest, the Franklin, the Canon's Yeoman and the Manciple (83). The last two are of special interest because the Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale shares Fragment VIII (G) with the Second Nun's Tale, and the Manciple's Tale undoubtedly follows in the next fragment. According to Mersand, the Canon's Yeoman uses a 10.8 percentage of Romance words, while the whole of the Second Nun's Prologue and Tale uses 11.1, and the Manciple 10.4 (77). Mersand's figure for the entire Second Nun's Prologue and Tale is a little higher than those of its adjacent tales, but my figure for the second part of the Second Nun's Tale, 11.4 per cent, is almost identical to the those of the tales of the Canon's Yeoman and the Manciple, other works at the very end of the Canterbury collection.

The striking similarity of the Romance percentage of the second part of the Second Nun's Tale to that of the The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale, 11.4 and 10.8 respectively, indicates that the two works were probably written at very nearly the same time and perhaps as companion pieces. In fact, this similarity challenges Mersand's insistence that the language of the sources affects the Romance percentages. The source of the tale told by the Canon's Yeoman, in Benson's opinion, most probably is personal experience, derived from Chaucer's work in 1390 at the King's Chapel at Windsor where a canon was reputed to be a teacher of alchemy (947-48). Both the Yeoman's tale and the second part of the Nun's tale were written at the very end of Chaucer's career, when, as Fisher suggests, he was far less likely to be influenced by the language of his sources and far more likely to use diction appropriate to his speakers.

This rough dating of the parts of the tale may explain why Chaucer uses two sources. The evidence indicates that very late in his career, in the mid-1390's, Chaucer found another source to complete the lyf which he had started translating many years before, in the early 1380s, about the time when he was released from charges of rape by Cecilia of Chaumpaigne. In addition, a recently discovered document related to Cecilia's release reveals an attempt by Chaucer to hide evidence about the specific charge against him that appeared in the frequently consulted coram rege rolls (Cannon 89-94), an endeavor typical of Chaucer's avoidance strategy. I propose that Chaucer began translating the lyf in the wake of Cecilia's release to deflect negative reactions by his family, among his fellow civil servants, and at court, and then, in the 1390s, he finished the poem and put it in the mouth of a nun to provide counterpoint to the Canon's Yeoman's Tale in the Canterbury collection.

Chaucer's familiarity with avoidance strategies to deflect negative reactions is evident in the fictitious cause given for the fictitious poet's writing of The Legend of Good Women, a work already connected to both the Cecilia poem and Troilus and Criseyde. In the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, the God of Love charges Chaucer with heresy against the law of Love in his telling of the story of how Criseyde forsook Troilus (Prologue G 264-6). Chaucer avoids the God of Love's initial harsh sentence through the intervention of Alceste, who convinces the God to agree to a reduced penalty, a writing project of the legends of good women. Through this penalty, Troilus and Criseyde is linked to the Legend as the cause of its writing, and, in the Legend, Alceste mentions Cecile's lyf Both Troilus and the lyf of Cecile thus must precede the Legend, and perhaps closely.