"In Hir Tellyng Difference": Gender, Authority, and Interpretation in the Tale of Melibee

Abstract

"In Hir Tellyng Difference":Gender, Authority, and Interpretation in the Tale of Melibee Amanda Walling The Tale of Melibee has long occupied a place both marginal and highly contested within the Canterbury Tales. Although its inclusion in the Chaucer canon has brought it readers and critical attention, the tale itself resists canonization by proclaiming its own debts to other authors. The second tale offered by Chaucer's pilgrim persona is a translation of Renaud de Louens's Livre de Mellibee et Prudence, itself an abridged translation of Albertanus of Brescia's Liber de consolationis et consilii, and is mostly comprised of a dense catalogue of citations from scriptural, classical, and patristic authorities, loosely bound by an allegorical narrative. Even as it insists on its own secondariness, however, the tale explores the rhetorical and gendered contexts that shape the transmission of authoritative texts. As Melibee debates the relative merits of peace and war with his sententious wife, Prudence, their use of these texts raises many of the same gender issues that trouble the rest of the Canterbury Tales. Melibee initially rejects Prudence's counsel on antifeminist grounds, and, in her attempts to justify herself, gender emerges as a key interpretive principle in the handling of authoritative texts. Charting the ramifications of textual and gender difference, the tale invites us to reconsider both the forms of difference that define its own place in the canon and the place of such "tellyng difference" (VII 948)1 in Chaucer's constructions of authority and authorship. Although the question of gender emerges in Melibee in the familiar terms of antifeminist attack, its implications reach far beyond Melibee's broad generalizations about the character of women. In Melibee, as elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, debates about gender, typically rooted in authoritative texts, are also debates about the function and meaning of those texts. Although Prudence's interpretations of her authorities are identified as feminine in various ways throughout the tale, her readings are not gendered simply because she herself is. Melibee is concerned with the ways in which gender is refracted in language, and with how texts [End Page 163] and their reiterations make visible both the gendered conditions of their production and the gendered social structures that shape how those texts are used. For an author like Chaucer, approaching a tradition that identifies itself as masculine (and does so partly through the mechanism of antifeminist discourse), the feminine has the potential to signify the differences of context and purpose that set his own work apart from its models. The inflections of gender in Prudence's handling of her texts remind us that citation and translation never passively adopt borrowed authority. In thematizing the difference that emerges in citation, the Tale of Melibee illustrates how Chaucer uses tropes of gender to construct and interrogate his own authorship. We can therefore read Chaucer's authorship of Melibee not only in his alterations to his source material, but in the tale's own insistence on the permeability of authority and meaning. Rather than asserting his own direct authority over the text, Chaucer presents a tale that challenges the ability of texts to sustain authority and that bypasses the familiar tropes of self-aggrandizement and false humility in favor of the many forms of difference that constitute authorship. Compilation and the Agency of Prudence As Prudence uses her texts to dissuade Melibee from his warmongering, the tale examines how past authority can be brought to bear on the concrete problems of individual lives through the agency of prudence. Indeed, the agency of Prudence herself is very much at stake in the tale, since prudence is the virtue capable of arranging worldly affairs and turning principle into action.2 Readers often overlook this agency when they conflate Prudence with her citations, taking her only as a compilation and not as a compiler. In fact, she is both: although her character is in many ways the sum of her texts, the tale also suggests a distinct agency for her that is rhetorical, interpretive, and closely attuned to gender. Although, as A. J. Minnis has noted, compilatio offers medieval writers a means of deflecting attention from or even disavowing responsibility for the...

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