Chaucer's Canterbury Tales - Biblical Reference in The Clerk's Tale

Biblical Reference in The Clerk's Tale

In 1921, Vance Palmer, the famous Australian author and poet, noted, in his essay titled "On Boundaries", that "it is the business of thought to define things, to find the boundaries; thought, indeed, is a ceaseless process of definition" (Palmer 134). As Palmer noted, humans, by their very nature, attempt to define all things. But, more than that, we attempt to redefine subjects and ideas that have already been defined so that we can better understand what they mean, where we came from, and, perhaps most importantly of all, who we are. Writers, from the beginning of the written word through the present, have, almost in their entirety, strived to cast a new light on subjects that were previously thought to have been completely understood. George Orwell's Animal Farm, Charles Dickens' Bleak House, and William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing are only a few examples of the thousands of books where authors have strived to redefine the defined. Just like these authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, succeeded in redefining an idea that, even into the present but most certainly in Chaucer's era, was thought to be completely understood. More specifically, using dozens of biblical references in The Clerk's Tale, Chaucer redefined the relationship between humanity and the Christian God and between woman and man.

Much of the academic criticism of The Clerk's Tale seems to have focused on the idea of Griselda representing either the Virgin Mary or Job, and Walter representing God. James Wimsatt, in his essay titled "The Blessed Virgin and the Two Coronations of Griselda", perhaps stated this type of criticism best when he wrote:

The C...

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...ury Tales: Nine Tales and the General Prologue. Ed. V.A. Kolve.

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989. 136-168.

Condren, Edward. "The Clerk's Tale of Man Tempting God." Criticism 26.2 (1984): 99-114.

Fichte, Joerg. "The Clerk's Tale: An Obituary to Gentilesse." New Views on Chaucer: Essays in Generative Criticism.

Ed. William Johnson. Denver: Society for New Language Study, 1973. 9-16.

Levy, Bernard. "The Meanings of the Clerk's Tale." Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction. Ed. Leigh Arrathoon.

Rochester, MI: Solaris, 1986. 385-403.

"Palmer, Vance." The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations. CD-ROM. New York: Columbia UP, 1998.

The NIV Study Bible. Rev. New International Version. Ed. Kenneth Barker. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985.

Wimsatt, James. "The Blessed Virgin and the Two Coronations of Griselda." Mediaevalia 6.1 (1980): 187-207.