THE GENTIL EXAMPLE: THEMATIC PARALLELS IN FROISSART’S CHRONIQUES AND CHAUCER’S FRANKLIN’S TALE A Thesis submitted to the College of Graduate Studies and Research in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in the Department of English University of Saskatchewan Saskatoon By Maureen Therese Mulligan ©Copyright Maureen Therese Mulligan, September 2007. All rights reserved. PERMISSION TO USE In presenting this thesis in partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Postgraduate degree from the University of Saskatchewan, I agree that the Libraries of this University may make it freely available for inspection. I further agree that permission for copying of this thesis in any manner, in whole or in part, for scholarly purposes may be granted by the professor or professors who supervised my thesis work or, in their absence, by the Head of the Department or the Dean of the College in which my thesis work was done.
It is understood that any copying or publication or use of this thesis or parts thereof for financial gain shall not be allowed without my written permission. It is also understood that due recognition shall be given to me and to the University of Saskatchewan in any scholarly use which may be made of any material in my thesis. Requests for permission to copy or to make other use of material in this thesis in whole or part should be addressed to: Head of the Department of English University of Saskatchewan 320 Arts Tower 9 Campus Drive Saskatoon, Saskatchewan S7N 5A5 i ABSTRACT My project is founded on an inter-genre, comparative approach between Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale from the Canterbury collection, and Jean Froissart’s Chroniques, the innovative and epic account of French history in the thirteenth century. I have adopted a method of thematic comparison between the two in an effort to illuminate parallels of example and authorial intent in the works of these almost exactly contemporaneous authors.
My thesis therefore becomes a selective examination of the ethical functions of their literature. Twentieth century scholarship focusing on the similarities between Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Froissart has left little doubt that the two shared numerous sources and analogues in selections of their poetry, were at least aware of each other personally, and were born into similar social backgrounds. What remains to be done, and what has received little critical attention in the decades since serious work began on the similarities between them, is a study of the ideological values that Chaucer and Froissart shared, specifically evidenced in their writing. The ideas they wanted to promote, the contemporary moral and social debates they engaged in, are equally as fascinating as the similarities in their love poetry.
I intend to go beyond the biographical and source study that has dominated discussion on Chaucer and Froissart and embark on a project of tracing thematic parallels in two of their works, specifically focusing on the issue that I find most obvious between them: the desire to create and record literary discussions of ethical behaviour. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The supervision of Dr. David Parkinson is the rock on which my thesis was built. His brilliance and guidance have enabled me to grow academically in ways too numerous to mention.
My thesis committee offered comments that revealed an attention to detail and a drive for precision that was amazingly thorough and enlightening. Thank you to Drs. Yin Liu, Wendy Roy and Beth Bilson for taking time to read my thesis in August and for their care and attention in crafting commentary that delivered an enormously valuable learning experience. Lisa Vargo, who chaired my oral defence, was wonderfully professional and efficient Dr.
Ray Stephanson, who chaired my thesis committee, and Nik Thomson in the Department of English have gone the extra mile to keep my head above the waters of administrative requirements and project management. I owe them an enormous debt of gratitude for their time and patience. I also gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Saskatchewan in providing funding during my Master’s degree and while working on this project. Finally, thanks to my mother, Judy Mulligan, and to Vinnie, for providing everything else I needed to complete this project.
iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Permission to Use…………….iii Table of Contents………….1 Chapter One: Historical Overview……………………………………………8 Chapter Two: Introduction to the Texts…………………………………….21 Chapter Three: The Advisors to Princes………………………………….30 Chapter Four: Gentilesse and the Culture of Chivalry………………………53 Chapter Five: The Figure of Authority…………………………………….77 Chapter Six: The Model of Marriage……………………………………….114 iv Introduction Twentieth century scholarship focusing on the similarities between Geoffrey Chaucer and Jean Froissart has left little doubt that the two shared numerous sources and analogues in selections of their poetry, were at least aware of each other personally, and were born into similar social backgrounds. Studies of their dream poetry, specifically by Haldeen Braddy, have produced rich comparisons between the two, and sparked subsequent discussions such as whether the literary influence was mutual, and which poetic influences the two had in common. So much is clear. What remains to be done, and what has received little critical attention in the decades since serious work began on the similarities between them, is a study of the ideological values that Chaucer and Froissart shared, specifically evidenced in their writing.
The ideas they wanted to promote, the contemporary moral and social debates they engaged in, are equally as fascinating as the similarities in their love poetry. I intend to go beyond the biographical and source study that has dominated discussion on Chaucer and Froissart and embark on a project of tracing thematic parallels in two of their works, specifically focusing on the issue that I find most obvious between them: the desire to create and record literary discussions of ethical behaviour. My thesis therefore becomes a selective examination of the ethical functions of their literature. In short, I believe that adopting a thematic treatment of comparison between Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale and Froissart’s Chroniques can illustrate, in a concise and manageable framework, some of their authors’ under-investigated commonalities.
I have come to the decision of using Chaucer and Froissart as the authors around whom to center my study not only because of their biographical similarities, though these are many and striking. The two also have ideological similarities that I wanted to explore; the ethical intentions 1 I saw in their texts were worthy of investigation. Also, I wanted to participate in the inter-genre body of criticism of the medieval period evident in works like Benson’s and Leyerle’s Chivalric Literature, where valuable information on the era can be learned from comparative study of genres such as history and romance. Froissart, however, was not alone in writing historical chronicles during the period, nor is it necessarily most convenient to compare an English work with one written in French.
It could be argued that Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae is at least as informative on social history and pageantry of the medieval era as Froissart’s Chroniques (though later writer William of Newburg, author of The History of English Affairs, would call Monmouth’s work too fantastical to be taken as a work of history, naming it “a laughable web of fiction” (Davenport 93). History writers such as William of Malmesbury and Henry of Huntingdon modelled their chronicles on Bede’s History of the English Church and People, and “were serious attempts to give an account of English history from the time of Bede” to the mid-twelfth century (97). Wace’s french translation of Monmouth, the Roman de Brut of 1155, became enormously important in the tradition of English history writing; Davenport states that “alongside the use of that material by the next generation and by subsequent writers of French prose romance, the tradition of writing chronicles of the whole of British history often took Wace as a base, as in the verse Chronicle of Robert Mannyng in the early fourteenth century” (104). Nor is Chaucer is not the only option in choosing a poet of the middle English period; his contemporaries are also excellent objects of study.
Burrow names Chaucer along with Gower, Langland and the Gawain-poet as the most important and influential poets of the Ricardian era (Ricardian Poetry 1) and certainly there can be much to learn from each of these in terms of inter-genre comparisons. After consideration, however, I return to Froissart and Chaucer because, first, they were both poets. I like Froissart’s Chroniques chiefly 2 because of the great innovation he brought to history writing, which may only have come of a mind capable of producing poetry: he included gripping dialogue, well-placed informants and eye-witness accounts in his history. There is an appreciable attempt at historical method observable in the Chroniques, with Froissart carefully specifying history he has witnessed versus episodes that have been reported to him.
In short, the immediacy of Froissart’s history and his talent for making his audience feel involved in his narrative links him to what I observe in Chaucer, particularly in The Franklin’s Tale, where the central decision on which character acted most generously is left to the audience. With respect to any debate over nobility and ethical behaviour, then, the most directly helpful of Chaucer’s works is The Franklin’s Tale from the Canterbury collection; it is canonical, thematically centred, and in late twentieth and early twenty-first century medieval criticism, growing in popularity among the collection of Tales. Its situation as one of the Marriage Group of tales ensures that it continues to fascinate, especially considering modern preoccupations with new definitions of the marital relationship, and Chaucer’s suggestion within the story of an equitable distribution of power within marriage remains tantalizing. It is for this reason as well that I choose The Franklin’s Tale in place of The Wife’s Tale, though the latter also provides an excellent study in the subject of gentilesse that I will treat it in my chapter concerning gentilesse and chivalry.
The marriage of Dorigen and Arveragus in The Franklin’s Tale, however, melds well with the subject of marriage as a framework in which to observe gentilesse in action, therefore it is more immediately relevant to my project than the lessons of the Wife. As well, The Franklin’s Tale is more useful for my purposes here because of its direct, personal involvement of its audience in forming and recognizing the values Chaucer wants to discuss. Selecting Froissart’s most obviously relevant text is less difficult; though he was a 3 prolific love poet, the social commentary found in Les Chroniques, the masterwork that secured his fame, is unquestionably his most helpful contribution to the discussion of ethical concerns he shares with Chaucer. Restricting myself to these works, then, I will trace significant similarities between the discussion on nobility as expounded by Chaucer’s Franklin, and instances in the Chroniques of debate over, or authorial pronouncement on, correct action.
Specifically, I will focus on the theme of gentilesse as expounded in what is regarded by many as its locus classicus in the Canterbury Tales, namely The Franklin’s Tale. Over the years several pivotal studies have addressed the prevalence of the gentilesse theme in the tale; Lindsay Mann’s 1966 article (“‘Gentilesse’ and the Franklin’s Tale”) is often cited as being foremost among these, and was influential because she tracked the movement of gentilesse from a courtly origin to a religious one, while Gerhard Joseph’s study of the same year envisioned the Christian symbolism of the tale as indicating the incumbency of Christian grace in its pagan setting.J Minnis’s essay demonstrating a “chain reaction of gentilesse” (227) comes close to my theory of the authors’ encouragement to their audiences to emulate gentil action, while Valerie Allen’s 1989 article locating the inspiration of gentilesse as heavenly, and citing the virtue itself as being attainable to all ranks of people rather than only to the nobility, will prove useful as well. To locate gentilesse in Froissart’s works, I will address his Chroniques, regarded as the definitive commemoration of knighthood since at least Johan Huizinga’s classic cultural panorama The Waning of the Middle Ages.