their doctrine textually, for within the frame of Chaucer’s fiction the narrations for which they demand respect remain oral, unrecorded. My point is rather that they are the bearers of authoritative materials and methodologies, and perform certain official functions (sometimes going far beyond what was deemed permissible). Here one should recall the crucial interconnection in medieval culture of the concepts “author” and “authority.” According to the common etymology, the term auctor was related to the Greek noun autentim (“authenticity,” “authority”). 11 It designated at once an agent and a person of gret auctorite, not necessarily in the realm of “literary” production. To appropriate a comment by John Guillory, “Canonical authors are not markedly different . . . from their contemporary workers in the medium of power; they have only chosen a strangely durable medium, the text.”12 My ambition is to place Chaucer, as a maker of texts, alongside his contemporary workers in the medium of power, thereby relating his discourses of authority and fallibility to the larger ideological sources and structures that gave them meaning.
A related concept which requires initial definition is that of “publication.” As a quaestor,13 Chaucer’s Pardoner collects alms for a hospital and dispenses “pardons” or indulgences (which were generally believed to relieve purgatorial punishment for sin); the “publication” of the origin and value of the indulgences was regarded as an essential part of this process. Here I use the term in the common late-medieval, and pre-print, sense of “making public” or “proclaiming” information, announcements, edicts, and the like.14 The Latin verb publicare and its Middle English cognate publishen also feature in relation to (for example) an act of preaching15 or a sinner’s public revelation of his sin.16 Such activities could involve publicacioun understood as transmitting information in and through writing—but not necessarily so, as may be illustrated with reference to Chaucer’s most famous use of the concept, when he declares the bad name of Criseyde is “publysshed so wide / That for hire gilt it oughte ynough suffise” (V, 1095–96).17 Here the poet has in mind the spreading abroad of Criseyde’s guilt in general, a process in which textualization is not deemed essential and is certainly not specified, though it may be assumed to have played some part. Both the Pardoner and Alisoun of Bath “publish” (in this broad sense of the term) their faults, failings, and limitations along with their moral lore, in ways which—I will argue below—set major medieval discourses of authority and fallibility in sharp, compelling contrast.
Chaucer was particularly attracted to such discourses, for reasons that can only be guessed at. Perhaps there is a connection here with his interest in the writer not only as auctor but also as fictor, i.e., an inventor, maker, or liar, to follow the ubiquitous medieval etymology: “the fables ( fabulae)of the poets are named from fando, because they are not true things (res factae) but only spoken fictions (loquendo fictae).”18 We may recall how, in the House of Fame, Chaucer reduced Homer—Dante’s philosopher-poet par excellence—to one who “made lyes, / Feynynge in hys poetries” (1477–78), and went on to suggest that textual fame itself may be a pack of lies, or at the very least “compouned” of “fals and soth” (1029). The written record’s apparent inability to give people what they deserve licensed Chaucer to reverse the fate commonly endured by women, as the regular victims of masculinist history. Hence in the Legend of Good Women he is ostentatiously “favorable”19 to the female sex, in Troilus and Criseyde resists producing yet another book which will “shende” (ruin, disgrace) the heroine (V, 1060), and in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue has Alisoun confront the truism that the lion is painted by the hunter, i.e., women are textually depicted by misogynistic male clerics (III(D) 688–92). Boccaccio had devoted much time in his Genealogia deorum gentilium to the argument that the poets are not liars because they do not intend to deceive;20 Chaucer, I suspect, was intrigued by fiction’s power to deceive—or, at best, to offer alternatives to what, in his culture, passed for truth. This would explain his evident fascination with the moral disquisition of a character who is set up for condemnation in the strongest terms (the Pardoner), and his willingness to put words of the most profound wisdom into the mouth of a character who embodied some of the most virulent antifeminism of his time (the Wife of Bath).
But guesswork this must remain. And, to borrow a passage from Chaucer’s friend John Gower,
I may noght strecche up to the hevene
Min hand, ne setten al in evene
This world, which evere is in balance:
It stant noght in my sufficance
So grete thinges to compasse . . .
Forthi the Stile of my writinges
Fro this day forth I thenke change
And speke of thing is noght so strange . . . (Confessio amantis,I.1–10)
Henceforth I will investigate the discourses of authority and fallibility without which those characters could not exist, seeking insight into the forces that drive them.
Writing around the middle of the 1390s, Chaucer had the most offensive character on his Canterbury pilgrimage present the case that an immoral man can tell a moral tale: “For though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle kan” (VI(C) 459–60). Many two-faced figures exist in anticlerical satire, of course; the Pardoner’s descent from Faus Semblant in the Roman de la Rose is well known. But Chaucer is, I believe, unique in the way that he pushes such duplicity to extremes: the Pardoner is an exceptionally “vicious man”; his narrative comprises an exceptionally powerful “moral tale.” A sharp distinction is being made between reliable words and unreliable speaker, between the truth of what is said and the falsity of the person saying it. Several decades earlier, in a different country and within a very different society, Francis Petrarch had made a similar distinction. Writing to his long-dead correspondent Cicero, he explains: “It was your life (vita) I criticized, not your ingenuity (ingenium) or your eloquence, for I admire the first, while the second strikes me dumb with wonder.”21 Cicero’s vita was marred by weakness in adversity and inconstancy, Petrarch believed. Yet the achievement of the “great founding father of Roman eloquence” was considerable. These statements by Chaucer and Petrarch belong within a sophisticated matrix of ideas concerning the relationship between authority and fallibility (ranging through various sorts of errant or “deviant” behavior). Its distinctive discourses are evident in many spheres of social, political, and ecclesiastical/theological theory and practice.
In the first instance, Petrarch’s segregation of Cicero’s dubious vita and wonderful ingenium may be seen as a move away from some of the values of the medieval “ethical poetic,” to use the late Judson Allen’s felicitous term.22 In the accessūs or “academic prologues” to glosses on the Latin canonical texts studied in the grammar schools, the “branch of philosophy” to which those books belonged was regularly discussed, to establish their ideological credentials and justify their inclusion in a Christian curriculum.23 In the case of a wide range of syllabus authors (Aesop, Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Virgil, etc.) the subject-matter treated was usually identified as moral philosophy or ethics, and so those authors became regarded as authorities in the study of human behavior. By these means such texts were “authenticated” in the medieval sense of the term, their prestige and auctoritas being secured. The concomitant was that the poets had to be of good character, men—for men they invariably were—worthy of respect and belief. Hence the learning and prophetic powers of vatic Virgil, and the social outrage of satirists like Horace and Juvenal at the evils of their age, were emphasized. Ovid, the expert on sex and seduction, was a particularly difficult case, but a measure of moral conformity was imposed on his poems. The Amores and Ars amatoria remained resistant, but their damage was limited through the construction of a vita Ovidii which claimed
