ABSTRACT
Charles Muscatine’s plea forattention to Chaucer’s tale has been answered in an outpouring of critical works minutely examining the Clerk’s Tale and finding a wide range of meanings: marital, allegorical, exemplary, religious, social, psychological, political. Chaucer’s Clerk had the uncertainties that Petrarch’s copyists had about whether the story had an abstract spiritual moral or whether it was a mirror for wives. The meaning of the Griselda story has always been unstable, and the appropriate response from its audience uncertain. Boccaccio and Chaucer seemed to have recognized this, for both writers inserted in their works reactions to the tale from their fictional audiences; they even made the reactions gender-specific. Writers and artists have taken on the story as well, and like critics, they have seen many meanings in it. Through the Griselda story, writers and artists have explored issues like class prejudice, marital sovereignty, psychological abuse, the value of patience, political stability, saintliness in a secular setting, and mother-child relationships.
