Fallible Authors. Alastair Minnis
encouraging: even a prominent anti-Lollard polemicist could suffer the same treatment as his opponents. In 1458 or 1459 Thomas Bourgchier, Archbishop of Canterbury, instructed rectors and preachers in the province of Canterbury to hand over any of the bishop’s books in vulgari Anglico compositos which they might possess.159
Little wonder, then, that there is no fifteenth-century commentary on Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls of the type produced by Evrart de Conty, even though the mythography in that English poem merited exegesis every bit as much as that presented by the Eschez amoureux. In the prologue(s) to his Legend of Good Women Chaucer has the God of Love complain that the Roman de la Rose is a heresy against his law—in other words, it supposedly functions as a remedium amoris rather than as an ars amatoria. Here is the key argument which Jean de Meun’s supporters were to deploy in the querelle de la Rose. But, Thomas Hoccleve’s translation of Christine de Pizan’s Epistre au dieu d’Amours apart,160 that controversy found no English campus duelli.161 Furthermore, we have no response to Chaucer’s Wife and Bath and Pardoner (neither commendation nor condemnation) to parallel those written during the querelle about Jean de Meun’s La Vielle and Amant, and no-one questioned Chaucer’s moral probity because of his creation of dubious personae in the way in which Jean was taken to task by Jean Gerson and Christine de Pizan. When the Wife of Bath is mentioned by fifteenth-century writers, she is placed firmly within the limiting, normalizing bounds of antifeminist satire from which Chaucer had done so much to free her, her subversive elements being (perhaps deliberately) omitted from the recollection. Clearly Hoccleve felt more comfortable with Alisoun as a mock-authority (or “auctrice,” as he patronizingly calls her)162 within the typically feminine territory of love and marriage rather than as a “lewed calate” who “wold argumentes make in holy writ,” just like those Lollard women whose gender-defying disputation was the butt of invective in his poem against that latter-day Lollard Knight, Sir John Oldcastle (as quoted above). Then again, there is no evidence whatever of a querelle de Criseyde, despite Chaucer’s attempt to provoke one by questioning his own construction of a faithless woman (cf. Troilus and Criseyde,V.1772–85; Legend of Good Women, F Prol. 332–40, substantively expanded in G Prol. 264–316). And when that extraordinary instance of Italian self-commentary and self-promotion, Dante’s Convivio, impacted on Middle English literature it was as the source for quite traditional teaching on true nobility (Chaucer could just as well have drawn on Boethius), as featured in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, rather than as the model for autoexegesis by Chaucer or any of his English contemporaries or successors. (The significance of Chaucer’s assignment of this prestigious material to a virtuous vetula will be discussed in Chapter 4.) As part of the same pattern, when crucial implications of the interaction of authority and fallibility show themselves in Chaucer’s work, they do not appear within an apologia for some auctour newe in the vernacular, of the kind which had been devised by Dante, Evrart de Conty, and Jean de Meun’s supporters in the querelle de la Rose. Rather they feature in relation to two extraordinary “fallible authors”—one who has appropriated the auctoritas and the methodology characteristic of the preacher’s role (the Pardoner), and one who has appropriated the auctoritas and the methodology characteristic of the lecturer/disputant’s role (the Wife of Bath).
The “English Heresy,” then, served to set England apart, in respect of vernacular hermeneutics.163 Chaucer’s French contemporaries spoke a very different language. Nicole Oresme stated that “matters which are weighty and of great authority are delightful and agreeable to people when written in the language of their country.”164 Christine de Pizan, commending Charles V’s translation program, declared that “it was a noble and perfect action” to have such works “translated from Latin into French to attract the hearts of the French people to high morals by good example.”165 She then develops the translatio studii theme, to make the point that France has now taken possession of a heritage which in days of yore had passed from Greece to Rome. But in Lancastrian England, the English language could hardly function in the same way within orthodox promotion of a transfer of learning and power as expressed in works written in the vernacular. The translatio studii topos had been tainted by the Lollards, a fact of far greater cultural weight than the celebratory comments which John Trevisa166 and Geoffrey Chaucer had made concerning the transference of learning from Greek into Latin and from Latin into English. “God woot that in alle these langages and in many moo” the scientific conclusions transmitted in his Treatise on the Astrolabe have been “suffisantly lerned and taught,” asserts Chaucer, adding that “diverse pathes leden diverse folk the righte way to Rome.”167 However, subsequent political events in England were inimical to the promotion of such a positive view of the relationship between learning and linguistic diversity. There seemed to be one straight and narrow road to Rome, and anyone who wandered by the way could be at risk. The fate of Reginald Pecock did not bode well for any ambitious attempt to reclaim the vernacular for orthodoxy. It is not surprising, then, that there is no affirmation of the translatio auctoritatis from Latin into English of the type which, most memorably, Dante had been able to make for his own “illustrious vernacular.”168
In France and Italy, discourses concerning the intersections of authority and fallibility sometimes Wgured within sophisticated discussions of the ethical credentials of vernacular authors and their texts. In England they manifested themselves in a particularly dangerous way, within a dialectic that (in its most extreme form) questioned the efficacy of the teaching and sacramental actions of a man of great authority if his life did not accord with his official status, and countenanced the possibility of women claiming some of the prerogatives of the doctor, praedicator, and lector. These crucial differences may be seen as both causes and effects of the very different textual cultures of England and of continental Europe. The following book’s identification of the peculiarities and problems of the English scene will, I hope, throw light on the ideological conflicts which underpin Chaucer’s two most problematic authority-figures, the Pardoner and Wife of Bath.
CHAPTER 1
De officio praedicatoris
Of Preaching, Pardons, and Power
“Three things are necessary for the one exercising an act of preaching,” claims the English cleric Robert of Basevorn in his Forma praedicandi of 1322.1 And they are: appropriate authority, sufficient knowledge, and fitting attributes or conditiones—including an impeccable moral character and fine reputation. These categories offer an appropriate framework of analysis for many features of the Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale, and we shall be recuperating them in the following chapter. Chaucer displays an interest in all three, though for him the most important category concerns the conditiones of the preacher. Does the moral fallibility of the man corrupt his moral message? If the speaker cannot be trusted, can his words? The poet’s confrontation of these issues constitutes one of his most elaborate and sustained investigations of problems which were at the cutting edge of late-medieval theory of textual authority.
Basevorn’s tria necessaria are, however, the product of a long process of scholastic disputation and discussion, which bears the hallmark of the thirteenth-century University of Paris, wherein the role and function of the preacher enjoyed much scholarly attention. This is hardly surprising, given that Paris was then the preeminent center of theological learning. Many of the most substantial analyses of the officium praedicatoris issued from that intellectual milieu, to spread across late-medieval Europe.2 It is important that those intellectual origins be acknowledged, particularly since it was in Paris that the broader theology of priestly authority and fallibility received a remarkably full elaboration, thus establishing the parameters within which the specific magisterium of preacher supposedly functioned or operated in parallel. A fundamental premise of the present study is that medieval discourses of authority, far from occupying autonomous ideological and sociopolitical spheres of operation, implicated each other and were crucially interrelated. Late-medieval ideologies of priestly office in general and the office of preacher in particular amply bear out and support this principle— as does the third major ideology discussed