Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Stories for an Uncertain World understands the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales to communicate a radical uncertainty haunting most human endeavors, one that challenges effective knowledge of the future, the past, or the distant present; accurate perception of both
complex, equivocal signifying systems, including language, and the intentions hidden rather than revealed by the words and deeds of others; and successful strategy in dealing with the chronic excesses and arbitrariness of power. This comparative study of Decameron novelle and Canterbury pilgrim
tales yields the insight that the key to coping with these challenges is pragmatic prudence: rational calculation issuing in an opportunistic, often amoral choice of ingenious deeds and/or eloquent words appropriate (though without guarantee) to mastering a specific crisis, and achieving the goal of
agency in the here and now, not salvation in the Hereafter. An initial chapter explores the Aristotelian antecedents, contemporaneous cultural influences, and narrative techniques that intersect to shape the radically uncertain world of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales, while succeeding
chapters pair, and compare, stories from both collections that illustrate the quest for agency-its successes and its failures--through plots often brilliantly adapted from simpler antecedents, as well as eloquence by turns satiric and insightful. This is storytelling that exposes a culture's fears,
as well as its aspirations for mastery over the circumstances that challenge its existence; reading these tales should be a labor of love and the goal of this study is to help assure that the reader's labor shall not be lost.
Author(s): Robert W. Hanning
Series: Oxford Studies in Medieval Literature and Culture
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Year: 2021
Language: English
Pages: 384
City: Oxford
Cover
Boccaccio, Chaucer, and Stories for an Uncertain World: Agency in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales
Copyright
Series Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Contents
Introduction. Having the World by the Tale: A new comparative reading of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales
A note on the text of the Canterbury Tales
1: Mapping the uncertain world Texts and contexts
The historical lineage and cultural breeding grounds of pragmatic prudence
Aristotle, Cicero, and the centrality of (moral) Prudence
The cultural parturition of an amoral prudence: three possible stimuli
Governance
Commerce
Institutional religion
Narrative antecedents
Fabulation: the triple challenge
Why tell? The function of the fabula in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales
The mimetic topography of an uncertain world
Mapping opinion
The inner vocabulary of nascent practical wisdom
The three stages of prudent agency: acting opportunistically, acting appropriately, acting decisively
Acting opportunistically: seizing the critical moment
Acting appropriately
Acting decisively
2: Fortuna, Fama, and the challenge to agency
Fortuna
Decameron
Canterbury Tales
Excursus—mythology and ecphrasis: the Knight’s descriptions of the temples
Fama
Decameron
Canterbury Tales
3: Can you trust the sign?: Uncertainty of signification, comprehension, and perception
Introduction
Language
Cosyn/cozzen
The instability of signifying systems
Decameron 3.2—destabilizing signs: “king for a night,” or, the royal rod strikes again
“The Reeve’s Tale”: what the cradle will rock (or, “who’s been sleeping in MY bed?”)
4: The uncertainty of Intention
Introduction
Decameron 3.3: the confessor as go-between
Decameron 8.7: men and women behaving badly
The Wife of Bath, apostle of uncertainty
Authorities
Sexual contradictions: parody/exposure/seeking to outrage
Timothy
Jankyn
Postlude: the Pardoner makes the scene
5: Power
Introduction
Part 1: Phallic imprudence, or, Patriarchal power and the primal fear
Decameron 4.1: tragic agency
“The Merchant’s Tale”: the scene seen yet not seen; or, Doing the marriage in many voices
Part 2: the power of desire
Decameron 2.7: the power of desire, refracted through commerce and politics
“The Miller’s Tale”: Goddes pryvetee and the nye slye
“Goddes pryvetee”: domesticating the cosmic and the prisoners of genre
When worlds collide: the clashing terrains of public and private desire in “The Miller’s Tale”
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Secondary Sources
Index
