"Non Intellegant": The Enigmas of the "Clerk's Tale."
- Author / Editor
- Normandin, Shawn.
"Non Intellegant": The Enigmas of the "Clerk's Tale."
- Published
- Texas Studies in Literature and Language 58 (2016): 235-55.
- Description
- Reads ClT closely as a "fundamentally enigmatic parable" that, as part of the "glossing group" of the CT, focuses on interpretation and hermeneutic resistance. Chaucer alternately abbreviates and amplifies his Petrarchan source "so that interpretive authority . . . will lie dormant and enigma will thrive." Simultaneously, the Clerk seeks subtly to mandate clerkly glossing in a "passive-aggressive" response to the Wife of Bath, emphasizing Griselda's inability and/or unwillingness to interpret words and events.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Clerk and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Wife of Bath and Her Tale