Chaucer's 'Clerk's Tale' as Political Paradox

Author / Editor
Grudin, Michaela Paasche.

Title
Chaucer's 'Clerk's Tale' as Political Paradox

Published
Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989): 63-92.

Description
Dante's advocacy of absolute rule as necessary for a peaceful state ("De monarchia") was opposed by other fourteenth-century Italian political theorists who saw such a state as tyrannical. Boccaccio's treatment of Griselda in "Decameron" implicitly examines absolutism; Petrarch's "De insigni obedientia et fide uxoris" extends the political dimension of the tale. ClT dramatizes without resolving this political controversy.

Chaucer Subjects
Clerk and His Tale.
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.