Middle English Marvels by Tara Williams

Author:Tara Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

Chapter Four

Talking Magic: Chaucer’s Spectacles of Language

As secular marvels become more spectacular and affective, they also become more like miracles—a convergence that could be disquieting or invigorating. Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales offers an unusually expansive range of marvels for a literary text, cataloging the natural as well as the supernatural, the divine as well as the demonic, and the scientific as well as the saintly. This varied collection allows us to examine how the poem interacts with two different strands of influence: the relevant philosophical discourse—which stretched across the Middle Ages and underscored the problems of defining the marvelous and separating it from the miraculous—and the recent Middle English literary tradition that had established close associations among the marvelous, the visual, and the moral by this point in the fourteenth century. Over the course of the Canterbury Tales, a classification system takes shape that reflects medieval philosophers’ concerns about distinguishing miracles, yet also shares the poetic interest in the moral potential of secular marvels.1 The text winds these two threads together by representing secular marvels that are more morally engaging but less visual than its miracles.

One particularly vivid miracle comes from the Man of Law’s Tale: when the knight who has framed Constance for murder swears that she is guilty, a hand appears, smiting him “upon the nekke-boon” so that he falls down and “bothe his eyen broste out of his face / In sighte of every body in that place.”2 This dramatic demonstration of God’s power resolves any doubts about Constance’s innocence in this specific case and about her virtuous character in general. In answering readers’ questions and leaving them with a powerful image, this scene is both similar to many of the other miracles in the Canterbury Tales and markedly different from the depictions of secular marvels in that text.

Chaucer’s depictions of magic are not as intensely visual as either his miracles or the secular marvels that we have seen in earlier Middle English texts are. We might wonder what happens when a text mobilizes readers’ expectations of a climactic visual image in a narrative with pressing moral concerns only to thwart those expectations, and whether the anticipation and then absence of a visual image also have moral effects. Chaucer’s tales suggest not only that this technique can be successful, but also that it works particularly well for encouraging complex questions about and analysis of moral issues rather than providing models for ethical behavior. Ethics was a significant issue in early twentieth-century Chaucer scholarship, and critics like Elizabeth Allen, Alcuin Blamires, Mark Miller, J. Allan Mitchell, and Jessica Rosenfeld have brought new perspectives to bear on it over the last decade. Blamires’s Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender examines how Chaucer draws on moral—and especially Stoic—doctrine and how ethics are intertwined with gender in many of the same tales that this chapter will examine.3 However, less attention has generally been paid to questions of morality in the Canterbury Tales, and the ways in which magic might intersect with ethics or morality have not yet been considered in detail.

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