Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale: Teaching Through the Sources

The tale Chaucer's Man of Law tells regularly presents students with genuine interpretive perplexities. As I teach it in my Chaucer classes and in my "Medieval Women" class (both upper division and/or graduate students), the lengthy tale of Custance, her murderous mothers-in-law, and her rudderless boat is perhaps the Chaucerian narrative that students at first like the least and understand the least. Their questions and comments after they read it on their own, before my introduction, invariably center on "What are we to make of this?" "What was Chaucer up to?" "This tale goes nowhere, what is it supposed to mean?" Some students with folklore background inevitably bring up the folk motifs that abound in the tale. Others see Custance, like Apollo's wife in the Manciple's Tale, St. Cecelia, Griselda, or the Wife of Bath as part of an ongoing Chaucerian discussion about "the women question" and female subjectivity.2 There are those students who reach for allegory as a way of reading the tale, which is a tried-and-true approach for a medieval text, but despair of finding a way through this particular tale using that hermeneutic model.3 Indeed, most of the class reacts with genuine puzzlement about both the form and content of the tale.

Through my work with Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles-Chaucer's most likely direct source for the tale-in its Middle English translation, and, when there is time, by looking at Gower's Confessio Amantis, Boccaccio's Decameron, and Il Filostrato, among other sources (which I note later in this essay), I demonstrate to students that when Chaucer uses an old story and changes it-here in the tale of the Man of Law he alters Trevet's form and content-- those modifications provide one likely focus of our critical attention.That is, I try to display to them that changes Chaucer rings on his sources are not gratuitous, but configure part of his own complex "entente" for the tale. Thus, a focus on the source's transformation provides a way to explore interpreting Custance, to examine the Man of Law's performance of his tale, and to indicate one of the many ways of reading the tale.

When I incorporate this tale into my Canterbury Tales course, it comes at about the mid-point in the Tales, since I start with the Manciple, the Second Nun, the Friar, the General Prologue, then turn to Fragment I and the Ellesmere ordering to do several more tales.4 In the "Medieval Women" class, the tale is positioned in the syllabus after students have read some feminist theory, saints' lives, mystical literature by women, a volume of misogynist literature (Blamires 1992), and the Wife of Bath's "Prologue." They go on later to Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Julian of Norwich, or Margery Kempe, among my usual choices. It is obvious that the context of the readings in each class fuels most of the discussion, but both groups are attuned to reading the woman "hero" as often an important oxymoron. Each group has experience with generic expectations of saints' lives and romances into which they try to fit the MLT, but the character of Custance and what Chaucer was "up to" often seem elusive to them. When, however, I explore with them Chaucer's rewriting of his source(s), they begin to focus upon issues of gender and power, of Christian patriarchal hegemony, the expansion of empire, and the passivity of the ideal Christian, which I suggest that Chaucer encodes in his tale.

Before they read this tale, I tell my students-and they find this provocative, but most are downright skeptical-that to my mind this is the most characteristic "medieval" literary work. "It's got it all," I say. That is, I tell them they don't have to read much else to discover a great deal about the concerns of the English Middle Ages and concerns of medieval authors writing and readers reading. And the tale has a great deal to say about women and their vexed and often contradictory position in medieval literature. Hence, their initial consternation when the tale at first seems to them unreadable.

Approaching the tale through the sources thus focuses the discussion and generally improves the appreciation of Chaucer as a redactor of old stories (since the Chaucer class has seen him at work on Ovid in the Manciple's Tale). In The Man of Law's Tale, I ask students to consider the import of subtle changes Chaucer makes to his original, especially in his redrawing of the character of Custance/Constaunce, because a critical reading of a medieval text without regard for the sources might stand in danger of impoverishing the reading of the work. In the case of The Man of Law's Tale, failure to examine the sources could diminish the poignancy of the new author's exploration of the feminine voice or character from his sources. For Chaucer's works especially, whose sources are often accessible or even well-known, an examination of what he borrowed and what he deleted or redid can enlighten us as to the function of women in many of his works. The methods he employed in recasting his female characters from the sources can perhaps suggest to us a way to read the work which takes into account a feminist perspective, as well as help us to historicize Chaucer's compositions. In his remaking of old stories, to what purposes does Chaucer employ women when he changes their nature, their roles, and their words from the source-- text? I try to suggest to my students that this might be an approach to The Man of Law's Tale. This approach is worth our special attention, because since the tale is about a heroic Christian woman, one might expect some exploration of that woman's character, and some definition of what womanhood, heroism, and Christianity consist of in terms of the tale.