Redressing Griselda: Restoration through Translation in the Clerk's Tale

Abstract

Chaucer’s Clerk of Oxenford remarks on two separate occasions that he learned the story of Griselda from “Petrak” (IV 31, 1147), a statement corroborated by Chaucer’s subsequent close reliance on Petrarch for the body of his tale.1 Yet the looming silence of Boccaccio’s original version of this work, along with Chaucer’s history of repeatedly refusing to credit Boccaccio with anything, borrowed or not, makes the poet’s protestations here suspicious. Nevertheless, scholars have scoured the Clerk’s Tale for signs of the presence of Decameron X.10, but with little to show for their efforts: textual evidence of Boccaccio’s original story remains regarded by even the most optimistic critics as slight, and the work has largely been relegated to the status of hard analogue—albeit with a “relevance greater than any other.”2 Most readers agree that Petrarch’s translation of Decameron X.10, Insignis obedientia et fides uxoria,3 serves as Chaucer’s primary source, while some agree with J. Burke Severs’s claim that Chaucer also relied on an anonymous French translation

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