Reading Chaucer in Time by Kara Gaston;

Author:Kara Gaston; [Gaston, Kara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192594327
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2020-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

3.3 Representing the Learning Process in the Clerk’s Tale

Although we cannot be certain whether Chaucer had access to the full epistle containing the Historia Griseldis, his response to it clearly concerns itself with study and adaptation. Chaucer’s Clerk is inseparable from his educational background, a training that supplies him with intellectual matter (the “twenty bookes” at the head of his bed) and treats everything else as extraneous (CT I.294). His horse is “leene,” his coat is “thredbare” and even his language is stripped down to the basics (CT I.287, 290). The Clerk uses language briefly and efficiently:

Noght o word spak he moore than was neede,

And that was seyd in forme and reverence,

And short and quyk and ful of hy sentence;

Sownynge in moral vertu was his speche,

And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.

(CT I.304–8)

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