heeding the counsel of prudence: a context for the Melibee

Abstract

Undoubtedly most frequently 'passed over' of Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's Tale ofMelibee has always seemed to modern readers more a tedious list of medieval authorities than a narrative worthy of one of great English poets. In fact, critical opinion about tale seems not to have shifted very much over this century. In 1907 Tatlock described as a collection of sayings of dead wiseacres, dull because its human element is thin and crude and its general truths are common places; and in 1974 Dolores Palomo referred to it as a pretentious and undistinguished piece of bourgeois moralizing.1 And yet, I think, most readers of tale strongly suspect that something significant is going on in it, but find themselves hard-pressed to say just what. This uneasy feeling of having missed point may arise because Chaucer's art is often subtly allusive to sign systems, social culture, and historical events that most modern readers?even Chaucerians?are only dimly aware of. In an effort to recover some of these allusions, a number of critics have sought to elucidate tale's meaning or purpose by reading it against late-fourteenth-century politics, both domestic and interna tional, tying its concern with counsel to on-going issues and particular crises during reign of Richard II, and its concern with peace to veiled, or not so veiled, references to a peace movement identified with Philippe de M?zi?res and connected to Richard II through de M?zi?res' 1395 letter to him.2 Gardiner Stillwell's 1944 Speculum arti cle, The Political Meaning of Chaucer's Tale of Melibee, recognizes three themes in tale: the importance of choosing wise counsel lors, . . . excellence of woman as counsellor, (434) and tale's apparent advocacy of pacifism, which Stillwell correlates with inter national politics of Richard II. V. J. Scattergood's Chaucer and French War: Sir Thopas and Melibee contends that two tales to gether constitute an argument for a specific point of view on

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