'Knowledge of the Files': Subverting Bureaucratic Legibility in the Franklin's Tale

Author / Editor
Hersh, Cara.

Title
'Knowledge of the Files': Subverting Bureaucratic Legibility in the Franklin's Tale

Published
Chaucer Review 43 (2009): 428-54.

Description
As knight, sheriff, and "contour" (I.359), the Franklin is the quintessential late medieval county "bureaucrat," whose duties provided incentives both to disclose and to hide the financial information to which he was privy. From its "dramatic irony" to its frequent use of the "highly equivocal" adjective "certein," FranT dramatizes an administrator's skill—perhaps Chaucer's own—with finding a strategic balance between textual transparency and ambiguity.

Chaucer Subjects
Franklin and His Tale
Chaucer's Life