What's the Pope Got to Do with It?: Forgery, Didacticism, and Desire in the Clerk's Tale

Author / Editor
Scanlon, Larry.

Title
What's the Pope Got to Do with It?: Forgery, Didacticism, and Desire in the Clerk's Tale

Published
New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 129-65

Description
Scanlon reads ClT against a historical tension between aristocratic arranged marriage and canonist marriage of consent, focusing on the espousal scene, the papal letter forged by Walter, and the conclusion and Envoy of the Tale.
Didactic or exemplary, rather than allegorical, ClT is less ideological or ironic than it is expressive of a desire to celebrate--despite its costliness--a feminine spirituality located in the domestic sphere. The unhistorical nature of the papal dispensation signals the desire.

Chaucer Subjects
Clerk and His Tale.