ABSTRACT
The Clerk’s tale of Griselda has become in modern times perhaps The Canterbury Tales’ supreme test of its readers’ interpretative powers. It taxes more than any other their capacities to re-enter with sympathy and informed understanding the values and ideals of an age insistently different from their own: it insists on its “otherness” from all our habits of reading, our customs of approval, and our wishes for comfort. Chaucer’s sources for The Clerk’s Tale have long been known: he used both Petrarch’s Latin prose version of Boccaccio’s final tale in the Decameron, and at least one French adaptation of the Petrarch text, in composing the story. The history of the Griselda story offers a neat paradigm of an important general development in late medieval narrative. From folk-tale origins it springs into another order of narrative existence in the Decameron.
