ABSTRACT
When Charles Muscatine argued that the heart of the Knight's Tale was an assertion of aesthetic, cosmic and metaphysical order, and that Theseus represents the underlying 'principle of order' to which Chaucer was committed, he offered what has proved to be an extremely influential interpretation. This chapter argues that the Knight's Tale involves a most illuminating scrutiny of the versions of order, styles of thought and life embodied in Theseus, rulers like him and their culture. No more than in the Clerk's Tale did Chaucer confine his imagination to fit some simple and absolutist norms attributed to the 'medieval mind' by many who write on his poetry. The tournament ordained by Theseus culminates in the grisly 'myracle' performed by the poem's gods, an eloquent image of the divine and earthly order informing this world. Saturn organizes 'a furie infernal' to inflict a fatal injury on Arcite in an episode central to the total meaning of the poem.
