Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale: Teaching Through the Sources [1]. Rose, Christine M.

Through my work with Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles--Chaucer's most likely direct source for the tale--in its Middle English translation, and, when there is time, by looking at Gower's Confessio Amantis, Boccaccio's Decameron, and II Filostrato, among other sources (which I note later in this essay), I demonstrate to students that when Chaucer uses an old story and changes it--here in the tale of the Man of Law he alters Trevet's form and content-- those modifications provide one likely focus of our critical attention. That is, I try to display to them that changes Chaucer rings on his sources are not gratuitous, but configure part of his own complex "entente" for the tale. Thus, a focus on the source's transformation provides a way to explore interpreting Custance, to examine the Man of Law's performance of his tale, and to indicate one of the many ways of reading the tale.

When I incorporate this tale into my Canterbury Tales course, it comes at about the mid-point in the Tales, since I start with the Manciple, the Second Nun, the Friar, the General Prologue, then turn to Fragment I and the Ellesmere ordering to do several more tales. [4] In the "MedievalWomen" class, the tale is positioned in the syllabus after students have read some feminist theory, saints' lives, mystical literature by women, a volume of misogynist literature (Blamires 1992), and the Wife of Bath's "Prologue." They go on later to Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, and Julian of Norwich, or Margery Kempe, among my usual choices. It is obvious that the context of the readings in each class fuels most of the discussion, but both groups are attuned to reading the woman "hero" as often an important oxymoron. Each group has experience with generic expectations of saints' lives and romances into which they try to fit the MLT, but the character of Custance and what Chaucer was "up to" often seem elusive to them. When, however, I explore with them Chaucer's rewriting of his source(s), they begin to focus upon issues of gender and power, of Christian patriarchal hegemony, the expansion of empire, and the passivity of the ideal Christian, which I suggest that Chaucer encodes in his tale.

Before they read this tale, I tell my students--and they find this provocative, but most are downright skeptical--that to my mind this is the most characteristic "medieval" literary work. "It's got it all," I say. That is, I tell them they don't have to read much else to discover a great deal about the concerns of the English Middle Ages and concerns of medieval authors writing and readers reading. And the tale has a great deal to say about women and their vexed and often contradictory position in medieval literature. Hence, their initial consternation when the tale at first seems to them unreadable.

Approaching the tale through the sources thus focuses the discussion and generally improves the appreciation of Chaucer as a redactor of old stories (since the Chaucer class has seen him at work on Ovid in the Manciple's Tale). In The Man of Law's Tale, I ask students to consider the import of subtle changes Chaucer makes to his original, especially in his redrawing of the character of Custance/Constaunce, because a critical reading of a medieval text without regard for the sources might stand in danger of impoverishing the reading of the work. In the case of The Man of Law's Tale, failure to examine the sources could diminish the poignancy of the new author's exploration of the feminine voice or character from his sources. For Chaucer's works especially, whose sources are often accessible or even well-known, an examination of what he borrowed and what he deleted or redid can enlight en us as to the function of women in many of his works. The methods he employed in recasting his female characters from the sources can perhaps suggest to us a way to read the work which takes into account a feminist perspective, as well as help us to historicize Chaucer's compositions. In his remaking of old stories, to what purposes does Chaucer employ women when he changes their nature, their roles, and their words from the source text? I try to suggest to my students that this might be an approach to The Man of Law's Tale. This approach is worth our special attention, because since the tale is about a heroic Christian woman, one might expect some exploration of that woman's character, and some definition of what womanhood, heroism, and Christianity consist of in terms of the tale.

The primary source of The Man of Law's Tale is a long universal history, the English Dominican Nicholas Trevet's Anglo-Norman Les Cronicles, completed by Trevet sometime around 1334. [5] Trevet's chronicle also occurs in a later Middle English translation probably made early in the fifteenth century and preserved in a unique manuscript dating from the mid-to-late fifteenth century at Harvard's Houghton Library, fMS Eng 938. This Middle English text is the one to which I refer my students in their explorations of Chaucer's utilization of sources, since because it is in Middle English and quite close to the French in the sections with which I am concerned here, it is the most direct access to Trevet for them, and, I suggest, for anyone interested in this issue of source-study as a way to access poetic invention. 6 At the center of Trevet's chronicle is the longest anecdote in his history, the tale of Constaunce. Trevet's Constaunce is literate, learned, quick-witted, resourceful, and even physically strong. She is the future mother of the Roman emperor Maurice, and connected inevitably in Trevet's chronicle with the English throne. And, Trevet ostensibly wrote his chronicle for an English princess, Mary of Woodstock--sister of Edward II and a nun at Amesbury--possibly to honor his patrons, her family. Trevet's tale, as it stands in Les Cronicles, is the centerpiece of the long vernacular chronicle dedicated, in a number of the extant manuscripts, to Princess Mary. [7] Praise of Mary and her family of noble women is a feature of the chronicle's later pages. Some of the Anglo-Norman manuscripts are illustrated with genealogical diagrams of the family of Edward II. Hence it is perhaps no accident that the tale of a virtuous woman, strong in faith, who converts the heathen and represents a force for political consolidation of the world under Christianity, provides the physical and moral center of a book written for the entertainment and edification of a worldly royal nun.

Chaucer may have seen some prior copy of this Middle English chronicle (scribal errors show that the Houghton manuscript was copied from an earlier exemplar), or may have consulted the Anglo-Norman source, and certainly he knew his contemporary John Gower's work on Constance from the disquisition on envy in Gower's Confessio Amantis, Book II (Gower 1957, 146-173). There is a detailed critical argument about what or whether Chaucer borrowed from Gower, who may have also taken material for his own tale of Constance in the Confessio from Trevet's chronicle. [8] A string of venerable scholarly articles have traced some of the borrowings from Trevet by Chaucer in his reworking of the tale, but critics have thus far failed to read the tale coherently in terms of the borrowings or emendations to Trevet which Chaucer makes, especially when one reads the female characters. [9] Part of the way I begin to teach the tale of the Man of Law is by highlighting passages from Trevet's chronicle to reveal that Chaucer has systematically disempowered his heroine "Custance" and made her more "feminized" (here read "passive") and more reliant upon the power of God for her authority and her worldly fortune.

Trevet presents his Constaunce as politically powerful, smart, and a fitting gene pool for an emperor, despite her bad fortune in the story he narrates. Where Chaucer has stripped these stalwart, erudite and bold qualities from his heroine, we find him emphasizing and encoding her utter powerlessness, her femaleness, and accentuating her difference from her two "mannyssh" mothers-in-law, too. Chaucer has also repressed other kinds of material from Trevet's story of his brave and able Constaunce--but this is fodder for further analysis of the poet's invention, and farther afield than I want to stray in this essay about preliminary pedagogical forays into interpreting the tale along feminist lines; I urge my students to investigate these other redactions more fully on their own. [10]

In construing this tale in classroom lecture and discussion, I attempt to convince my students of what I am convinced--that the major changes Chaucer makes in Trevet's tale and his character of Constaunce/Custance are gender-and power-related, calling attention to female gender stereotypes, and which Chaucer manipulates to create a nexus of images in the tale connecting a woman to passive acceptance of God's will. Furthermore, this passive and feminine acceptance, coupled with aloneness, exile, and calumny, is typified in the tale as the Christian condition. The images of passiveness, once established, are then extended by Chaucer in the end of the tale to the male characters who have taken on Christianity, especially Alla the Saxon king, and who become, through the example of Custance, ideal Christians constant in faith and virtue--passively accepting and assenting--and hence, I would argue, "feminized" in the way Custance is rendered passive and deprived of her boldness from the source. Alla, for example, in learning of the monster-child his mother has tricked him into believing that his wife Custance has borne, says with complete assent to the will of God:

Welcome the sonde of Crist for everemore

To me that am now lerned in his loore!

Lord, welcome be thy lust and thy plesaunce;

My lust I putte al in thyn ordinaunce. (11. 760-63) [11]

In direct opposition to the aggressiveness of the wicked and virago-like mothers-in-law, Chaucer presents a paradigm of Christianity which is aligned with passive acceptance, and emphasizes the hostility of the pagan "laws" under which the evil and pro-active mothers-in-law operate to the law of the Christian God Custance espouses.

Custance seems triumphant at the end of the tale as she finds her husband Alla and is restored to her kingdom and to her father's household as well. But it is a hollow, patriarchal triumph. Just as Griselde of The Clerk's Tale is finally ensconced in the bosom of her family and supposed to be happy, after having been cruelly tried by Walter her husband, so is Custance--who during the tale looks somewhat like a romance hero on a quest, having adventures, being sorely tried by bad fortune, conquering those who would do her evil (such as a murderer who falsely accuses her and a potential rapist). But, in fact, in terms of the story, her triumph is essentially to have kept the faith and given birth to the next Holy Roman Emperor. God and men hold all the real power in this tale. Custance seems the perfect patriarchal heroine: sexless, desire-less, and completely in thrall to the men who have authority over her: her father who sends her into "hethennesse" to marry her first husband, a sultan, in order to effect an alliance, and her second husband Alla, who is given power in the story over her fate, a power which is perverted and seized by his mother for evil ends.

Through the uncovering of how Chaucer has transformed his source, the class discusses gender and power in the Christian woman in the tale, and maps out Chaucer's loading of his rhyme royal poem (versus Trevet's prose chronicle, Gower's couplets) with agendas other than those which seem to arise from Trevet's work or which first appear to students as they read. I do not claim here to decode the tale in any kind of complete way, but only to provide a means for students to discuss poetic invention, gender, and interpretation along the lines I suggest, leaving them room to investigate on their own other hermeneutical strategies for understanding the tale. [12]

Before proceeding with my argument about the importance of the differences between the Trevet chronicle to Chaucer's tale, especially in a gendered reading of the character Custance, I provide below further pedagogically useful sources (and some analogs) for the tale. Since they can be used in conjunction with the Trevet material I present, such contexts provide enhanced opportunities for students to watch the poet at work, especially in graduate classes, where I regularly assign them for scrutiny.

The "Magnificat" of the Virgin's acceptance of her role as the mother of God (Luke 1, 46-55), and its echoes in The Man of Law's Tale (as well as The Clerk's Tale). I often show slides of the Annunciation and the Visitation from Books of Hours to suggest the association of Custance with the humility of the Blessed Virgin who has power through her submission to the will of God. Students find much evidence in the tale for a Custance/Blessed Virgin comparison, and often produce thoughtful essays on Chaucer's use of this secular tale and this sacred motif, and what it might mean for the Virgin to be suggested in the tale.

Gower's Tale of Constance from the Confessio Amantis as an exemplum against envy (Book II.87-1598), versus Chaucer's rewriting of her story. For example, Chaucer's rhetorically complex and loquacious narrator contrasts with Gower's streamlined and straightforward rendition of the same events, and it becomes clear to students that Chaucer's agenda is not as simple as providing an illustration of envy, but they must deal with his narrator's interruptions and interpretations of the tale and its women.

The equally potent disempowering of Criseyde from the source in II Filostrato, which renders her with some of the same passive characteristics as Custance. [13]

Boccaccio's analog in the Decameron (Day 5, story 2), the romance of Gostanza, with its similar contours, but highly secular nature.

Hildegard of Bingen's Scivias, and her vision of the Synagogue as the Mother-in-Law of the Church (Book I, vision 5) leads to some apprehension of the possible medieval symbolic and iconographic significance of the two mothers-in-law in the tale as the opposed orientalized Jewish Other, if custance is read as the conquering figure of Ecclesia, with the matriarchy represented as the Muslim East and the Synagogue quashed by the Roman Empire and Christianity. [14] I have a collection of slides of Synagoga and Ecclesia in opposition, from various medieval artistic mediums and from various eras, which I use to illustrate this pervasive medieval iconographic clash. This figuring of Custance as Ecclesia (and as the BlessedVirgin), triumphant over the Orientalized Female Other is a powerful tool to suggest Custance's alignment with Western Christian patriarchy, and the appropriation of the female, in the person of the Virgin, in a sanitized version for the Church's prosetelyzing efforts.

Emare, an analog of the Custance story. [15]

The King of Tars, uses similar folk-motifs of the Christian/pagan monster child as appears in The Man of Law's Tale. [16]

Bernadus Silvestris's Cosmographia, for the importance of the astrological references (1973, 1978).

Innocent III's De Miseria Humanae Conditionis as it may have influenced the Man of Law's Prologue and Tale. [17]

Passages

A comparison of some passages from Chaucer's tale and Trevet's chronicle, to which I now turn, valorizes the reading I propose--looking at the disempowering of Custance--as one way for students to read The Man of Law's Tale, and open it up to interpretation and discussion. Of course, early on in the discussion, the contrast between the forms chosen by each author, prose and poetry, needs to be addressed. We focus on the poetic complexities of rhyme royal, since the rigid rhyme-scheme is just one of the many inexorable laws operating in this poem which the Man of Law employs as his vehicle for his discussion of Custance's faith in the law of God--like the law of the stars, and the laws of the pagan mothers-in-law, the laws of patriarchy, the Old Law replaced by the New Law of Christianity, and law as the obvious preoccupation and profession of the Man of Law. Trevet's prose is a vehicle more suited for medieval writers such as he to write about historical events, devotional and moral treatises, and books of instruction, which are, of course, "laws" in their own ways.

Constance, as first presented by Trevet, is a woman of intellect. The only child of an emperor, she is educated, and Trevet describes her education as rather like a typical clerk's preparation in the trivium and quadrivium:

I.

And for that cause that he had non other chylde with full grete diligence made her to be taught the Cristen feythe by wyse masteres knowyng the vij sciences, the whyche beth logyke naturel moral astronomy, geometry, musique, perspective, whyche bethe the Philosophies seculiers ynamed and cleped. And made her to be taught in diverse langages. (fol. 53v) [18]

Chaucer's version, on the other hand, focuses on Custance's reputation for goodness, beauty, humility and generosity, but not on her education:

Sojourned han thise merchantz in that toun

A certein tyme, as fi1 to hire plesance.

And so bifel that th' excellent renoun

Of the Emperoures doghter, dame Custance,

Reported was, with every circumstance,

Unto thise Surryen marchantz in swich wyse,

Fro day to day, as I shal yow devyse.

This was the commune voys of every man:

'Oure Emperoure of Rome--God hym see!-

A doghter hath that, sym the world began,

To rekene as wel hir goodness as beautee,

Nas nevere swich another as is shee.

I prey to God in honour hire sustene,

And wolde she were of al Europe the queene.

In hire is heigh beautee, withoute pride,

Yowthe, withoute grenehede of folye;

To all hire werkes vertu is hir gyde

Humblesse hath slayn in hire al tirannye.

She is mirour of alle curteisye;

Hir herte is verray chambre of hoolynesse,

Hir hand, ministre of fredam for almesse.' (The Man of Law's Tale 148-168)

When, in Trevet's version, Saracen merchants visit Rome and come to pay homage to her, Constaunce questions them about their faith, debates with them, preaches to them, and converts them. She is a woman of words and logic in Trevet's work, and we see her using both her preaching and her logical skills later in the story to convert other heathens and to get herself out of a jam with a potential rapist. Trevet, then, locates some of his Constaunce's power in her intellect, which Chaucer omits in his creation of Custance as a woman of faith and acceptance of God's will. Chaucer's Custance speaks nearly always only to pray. [19] The merchants' lord in Trevet's tale, the Sultan, is struck by love of the reputation of Constaunce brought to him by these merchants, and in the ensuing marriage negotiations between Constaunce and the Sultan, he converts to Christianity, and Constaunce becomes, in fact, a pledge of peace between East and West, between the Christian Roman Empire and the Saracens who occupy the Holy Land, by her marriage/treaty ensuring free trade to the Holy Land and access to Jerusalem by Christians, who until then had been barred from their most sacred spots by the pagan armies. The result of her marriage, elaborately detailed by Trevet (fol. 53v 54r, below), is that Jerusalem is ceded to Christian lordship, and Christians are allowed to preach in the Holy Land and to destroy pagan temples.

II.

Than after withyn fewe dayes the Sowdan sent ageyn the same Admirall and full solempne Messagers of the grettest and the most worthyest ofhys londe And in theyre Conduit .xij. chyldren Sarizens the sonnes vnto the grete Sarazins hostages vntoTiberie in fourme of suerte for hys daughter. And to thys he sent hys assent hygh and lowe of the ordinaunce of cristen men. And to thys Sowdon sent hys lettres full well sealed and for to haue An entier and a hoole pece amonge all cristen men. And the Sarizens and also free passage for to goo and com frely with her marchaundises and for to vysyte the holy place of the sepulture of oure lorde. And the mount of Caluary and of Bedleem and of Nazareth And the vale of Iosophat. And all other holy places withyn the marches of hys power. And he Aboundenyd the Cite of Ierusalem vn to the lordeshyp of crysten men for to enhabyte hem and to dwell yn. And also ffrauncheys to the Cristen Bysshopes And to theyre clergye to preche and to teche the pepull of that londe the ryght feythe and for to cristen and baptise and to make the churches, and morouer for to destroy the temples of the Maumettes. And opon thys the Sowdan sent hys letters to the pope and to the Clergy and to Tiberie also and to the mayden Constaunce and to all the Senat with ryche yeftes and tresores and for hys meyny full grete expenses. (ff. 53v-54r)

Chaucer's Man of Law represses all Trevet's "dilatacioun" and swiftly advances to the wedding:

What nedeth gretter dilatacioun?

I seye, by tretys and embassadrie,

And by the popes mediacioun,

And al the chirche, and al the chivalrie,

That in destruccioun ofmawmettrie,

And in encres of Cristes lawe deere,

They been acorded, so as ye shal heere:

How that the Sowdan and his baronage

And all his liges sholde ycristned be,

And he shal han Custance in marriage,

And certein gold, I noot what quantitee;

This same accord was sworn on eyther syde;

Now, faire Custance, almyghty God thee gyde! (The Man of Law's Tale 232 45)

I should emphasize that in the above passage from Trevet's chronicle, the Sultan sends letters confirming this alliance to the emperor Tiberius (her father), to the Pope, the Clergy, and to the literate maid Constaunce herself! She is a party to this treaty and a force for political unification of the world under Christianity. All this eminence of Constaunce is missing in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, except for the two stanzas (11. 232 ff., above), which summarize and repress much of Trevet's material, most pointedly the parts where Constaunce has any political force.

Constaunce as a reading and letter-writing woman in Trevet, however, has a counterpart in Chaucer's second wicked mother-in-law, Donegild, also in Trevet, who assaults and usurps male hegemony in her jealous political and religious (and suggestively incestuous) desire for power in her kingdom. Chaucer omits from his tale the elaborate description of Constaunce as an educated woman, one who receives letters in her own right and was known for her scholarship, but expansively describes the wickedness of Donegild (as well as that of the Sultaness, the first mother-in-law) polarizing the two kinds of women he depicts in the tale, evil and good, writing and non-writing, duplicitous and honest, Christian and pagan. Later in the tale, Donegild's reading and rewriting of the missives between the court and her son All a regarding the birth of Custance's son Maurice show her to be a sister under the skin to May of the Merchant's Tale and Criseyde in her cleverness--after all, she can read--and her letters display a disruptive and evil intent. The narrator of the Man of Law's Tale takes pains to tell us that Donegild's counterfeiting of the two letters to All a falsely informing him that his wife had been delivered of a monster child was a perversion of nature: "And countrefeted was ful subtilly / Another lettre, wroght full synfully ... " and that Donegild was, in fact, an "elf, by aventure /Ycomen, by charmes or by sorcerie, / And every wight hateth hir compaignye" (754-56). She is as isolated as Criseyde or May, other letter-writing women who disrupt male prerogative in Chaucerian narratives. [20]

Instead of her erudition and political potency, Chaucer focuses in this episode of the marriage negotiations on emotive instances, on the dread Custance experiences when she must leave her family where she has been "fostred up so softe" (275). She speaks a long plaintive farewell to her parents, lamenting the subjection of women, but it does not avail her. In interpreting her place in her society, and the status of all women, Custance complains to her parents at her farewell:

Wommen are born to thralldom and penance, And to been under mannes governance. (The Man of Law's Tale 286-87)

She is forced to go: "But for she moot, wher-so she wepe or synge" (294). Trevet reports merely that the people of Rome wept when Constance left them-we do not see her emotions at all in his story. For Chaucer'sCustance, throughout her tale power is realized through faith and powerlessness. She is "bounden under subjeccioun" (270) to her father, to her husbands, to the waves she encounters in her exile at sea, to the two wicked mothers-in-law she acquires, to two evil men who prey on her first through attempted rape and then by false accusation. She is finally subject to the coincidences of time and space--Boethian Fortune--that make up her narrative. But all of this "subjeccioun" is a figure of the larger picture Chaucer shapes: Custance is subject to the "law" of the will of God and, like the stars which play so large a part in this narrative (unlike Trevet's), this will is ultimately unknowable, unreadable, and must be accepted on faith. Control of any events in Chaucer's tale is taken from Custance and given to men, the stars, Satan, the BlessedVirgin, God--or the narrator. But Custance remains constant, a tautology, as R.A. Shoaf has so aptly noted. [21] The Man of Law tells a tale of the law of men and the other various and oppressive laws which have Custance in their thrall. As Lee Patterson has said of this tale, "it offers a feminine virtue brought into existence by male authority" (1992, 284).

Her knowledge of languages leads Constaunce to guile in Trevet's tale. When her boat is approaching the Saxon castle where she is to be rescued, she lies to Olda the constable to conceal her identity and convinces him she is a Saxon, because she can speak the Saxon language: "And she answered to hym and sayde that she was a Saxonesse and born in Saxon. And she spake redyly the tong of Saxon whyche was the language of Olda as she was full wel taught in many diverse langages as hit is abouesayde" (f.54v). Chaucer's Custance merely asks for help in "a maner Latyn corrupt" (519), probably indicating the Italian vernacular, not a learned language, [22] and makes herself barely understood to Olda.

III.

In hir langage mercy she bisoghte

The lyf out of hire body for to twynne

Hire to deliuere of wo that she was inne

A maner latyn corrupt was hir speche

But algates therby was she understonde (The Man of Law's Tale 516-20)

She refuses at this point, and elsewhere in Chaucer's tale when she is found in her boat near Rome, to reveal anything concerning her identity "for foul ne fair, thogh that she sholde deye" (524-25, and later, 971). She alleges to Olda that she was so "mazed in the sea" that she "forgot hir mynde" (526-27).This is the only instance in Chaucer's tale where Custance dissembles. Her stance usually is that of silence, not speech to mislead. But Trevet's Constaunce continues to lie about her origins and status to Olda and his people.

Of course the most problematic women in the tale are the two mothers-in-law, about whom I have written elsewhere (Rose 1998), whose double evil feminine presence puzzles students, particularly since they so obviously are the same sort of threat, and use the same punishment to facilitate Custance's decamping from their realms: they put her to sea in a rudderless boat. They are hard to differentiate, and seem part of a similar evil feminine Other out to destroy the Christian Church's onward march to possess all the known world. The description of the two mothers-in-law in Trevet provides a further interesting contrast to Chaucer's depiction of them and another avenue to pursue why his narrator castigates them so much more than does Trevet, who provides them with somewhat sympathetic portraits, and salient political and religions reasons for their dislike and distrust of Constaunce as interloper. The Sultaness, the first mother-in-law in Trevet's tale, worries about the abolishment of her "wyked lawe" because of her son's conversion in order to marry the maiden Constaunce, and she decides to feign a desire for Christian baptism in order to have an opportunity to murder the Christian entourage (except for Constaunce, whom she later puts out to sea in a rudderless boat) and quash the threat of a takeover at the marriage feast she throws:

IV.

Than hit happed full myscheuously that the Sowdon Modir the whyche that tyme leued of whoos lyfe Allas was grete pite had nat the wyll of god be. She seyng and considering that her wyked lawe was in poynt to be destroyed by cristen men the whyche were com in to Sarazaneym, she bethought herself of Cursednes and of treasone. [paragraph] And than after she had made a pryuy and a secrete aliaunce of Couenaunt with .vij C. Sarazyns the whyche abounded hemself for to lyue and to dye in that querell meued of her son. [paragraph] When she herde the commyng of that mayden and of the cristen peple, A lytell wey withyn the lond she began for to thanke god. And with her false feyntse to preyse god that she had at that tyme purpose to resceyue the lawe of cristen men. And there she swere as a false forsworen creature that full grete whyle she had be in that wyll for to haue resceyuyd the cristen lawe. (f. 54r)

In Chaucer's narrative the two mothers-in-law are vitriolically (and won derfully) berated by the Man of Law-narrator at length, with much drama and many a rhetorical flourish. For the above events, the Sultaness, who has in secret scorned the sacrament of baptism ("We shul first feyne us cristen dom to take-- / Coold water shal nat greve us but a lite! (351-52), gets multiple stanzas of invective such as:

O Sowdanesse, root of iniquitee!

Virago, thou Semyrame the secounde!

O serpent under femynynytee,

Lik to the serpent deep in helle ybounde! (358-61)

The mothers-in-law could not be more opposite on the poles of good and evil as they are from the saintly Custance in Chaucer's narrative. Here is the description of Chaucer's Donegild (mother of Alla, the second husband) who, again, is horrified that a Christian woman should bewitch her son into giving up his creed:

Bat who was woful, if I shal nat lye,

Of this weddyng but Donegild, and namo.

The kynges moder, ful of tirranye?

Hir thoughte hir cursed herte brast atwo.

She wolde noght hir sone had do so;

Hir thoughte a despit that he sholde take

So strange a creature unto his make. (694-700)

Trevet seems to give her more reasons, personal and political, for suspicion and distress. She is afraid her stranger-daughter-in-law of unknown lineage will usurp her ancestral "lawe" and that her own position in the hearts of her people will be usurped as well:

And yet at that tyme was Kyng Alles moder alyfe a lady in fayre poynt And a full feerse and cruell in corage. And the whyche hated dedly Constaunce the Quene, ffor she had full grete disdeyne and scorne that her son the kyng Alle shulde take a woman of a straunge londe. And morouer that her linage and byrthe was nat knowen to her. And also the kyng her son shulde forsake hys furst lawe, the whyche all hys Auncestirs had full entierly kept and holden. And on the oo party she had full grete enuy and sore hit hurte her at her herte that Constaunce was so wele beloued with all pepull riche and poore withoute eny comparison of her. And more worshypped and made of for her goodnesse and for her hoolynesse and her merueylous beaute. (ff. 55v & 56r; Trevet goes on to say that Domild was further annoyed that her own worship was diminished by that given to Constaunce, and that it angered her terribly that the maidens sang carols of praise for Constaunce.)

The forged letters from Domild (Chaucer's "Donegild") to her son and his steward divulge the horrible event of the alleged misbegotten child of Constaunce and Alla, and reveal her fears of the inherent possibility of danger from miscegenation with this stranger: "yef she abood styll in hys londe there shulde soone com suche werres and so grete pepull of straungeres to destroye hys londe to be enhabited with folk of straunge nacions." Constaunce's response to being sent out on her boat by Domild is mild, and politically astute, according to her nature as Trevet has told us:

Than Constaunce replenysshyd with all goodnesse and a redy to all theyre wylles to fulfyll and also full redy to obey theyre ordinaunce, sayde to hem with a meke and a full lowly spyryte, "God forbede euer that suche a dayshuld come that for me the londe shulde be destroyed. And also that for me

ye my full dere frendes shulde suffer dethe, orelles haue or suffer any disease for my sake." (f. 56v)

She steps aboard the boat without further ado. The people of the kingdom openly lament. Chaucer's Custance in the same instance, although she "taketh in good entente/ The wyl of Crist ... " (824-25), is given a lengthy pitiful prayer to the God and the Virgin Mary, and the scene's pathos is further heightened by the focus on the baby in her arms whose head she covers with her kerchief as if to keep it from seeing its imminent doom: "Over his litel eyen she it leyde,/ And in her arm she lulleth it ful faste" (838-39). Trevet ironically says the child "toke the See full yong." Custance manages during her prayer and sad farewell in Chaucer's tale to chastise her "routhelees" (without compassion) absent husband then blesses herself and steps aboard her rudderless boat for the second time. This represents the first time we see her with any backbone, as limp as it is. The only other time Chaucer allows her to complain of her situation is when she entreats her father the emperor, on returning to him at the end of the tale, not to send her away as he had earlier: "Now, goode fader, mercy I yow crye! / Sende me namoore unto noon hethenesse ..." (1111-112).

The last example of a radical change Chaucer made to Trevet's narrative which speaks to the emphasis on the feminine passivity with which he has fashioned his character portrays Constaunce, in Trevet's chronicle, using guile and physical force. Chaucer has rewritten his source in this crucial episode to stress the power of God and the Blessed Virgin Mary; not the resourcefulness of his heroine, but rather the potency of her faith. Both Chaucer's and Trevet's versions of the scenario involve a recreant knight seeking to take advantage of a woman once again alone on the sea with her small child. On her second journey of exile, the knight boards Constaunce's rudderless boat and attempts to rape her. Trevet's wily Constaunce sexily deludes and then upends the rapist into the sea. Yet, when Chaucer retells the story, Custance weeps rather than plots; her child cries. The Virgin Mary hears Custance's prayers and the man tumbles overboard during the struggle of the attempted rape, in a kind of accident:

V.

The lordes styward--God yeve hym meschance!

A theef, that hadde reneyed oure creaunce,

Cam into ship allone, and seyde he sholde

Her lemman be, wher-so she wolde or nolde.

Wo was this wrecched womman to bigon;

Hir child cride, and she cride pitously.

But blisful Marie heelp hire right anon;

For with hir struglyng wel and myghtily

The theef fil over bord al sodeynly,

And in the see he dreynte for vengeance;

And thus hath Crist unwemmed kept Custance. (914-24)

This is Trevet's narration of the incident:

And whan thys Thelous had be with thys Quene Constaunce a lytell whyle he began to knowlache vn to her hys grete erroure spekyng to her full deu outely and menyng vndernethe full falsely. And insomuche as that he was sometyme a cristen man and that he was ageyne god a treytoure Renegate, And for drede and [23] with her that he myght be sett ageyne in to the han des of god, and that he myght torne ageyn to cristen feythe be her good prayeres towarde god and for to be nombred amonge cristen men. And than pryuyly by thys Thelous helpe the shyp wente fer from londe vn to they come to the grete See. And than the gostely enemy the fende the whyche enforseth hym euer to do euell meued that Thelous the knyght Renegate to greuous temptacion. And for to entyse that good blessed lady to bodyly syn. But oure lorde god to whome she had geuen all her herte to of you the wolde nat suffer her to assente neyther to consent to such a wyked dede. Than whan thys wycked Thelous by harde manasses and hys grete strengh the had wyll to afforce her, than she restreynyd hys gret foly by thys reason, ffor cause that her Chylde Moryce the whyche was of the age of.ij. yere all full syth the tyme that she and he were exyled oute of Engelonde myght wele vnderstonde and to hoolde in mynde yef they .ij. dede suche an horrible dede in Morice presence. And thys was her coloure to defende her and for to preserue her from synne. Than she prayed thys Thelous that he shulde loke as ferre as he myght, and auyse hym opon all partes, yef that he myght see any londe. And whan they myght come to londe in couen abel place, she wolde fulfyll hys desyre. And than Thelous was hasty for thys promes. And than he wente in to the formest party of the shyp and auysed hym al aboute yef he myght see any londe. And then when he was moost busyest, Constaunce in sauyng of her chastite pryuyly come behynde hys backe and tumbeled hym doune into the see. (fol. 57r)

Trevet's Constaunce, far from passive, receives her help from her God by being wily, verbally deceptive, and physically strong. She tricks the rapist and saves herself.

The discrepancies between the two renderings of Custance's story, then, provide abundant irony and interpretive clues for students and pedagogical rewards for the teacher searching for a method for a class to access the rich ness of the tale. One of the ways the tale of the Man of Law can be taught is as one of Chaucer's Christian dramas, and thus in such a reading happiness in Christian terms is constancy in the acceptance of the will of God. At the close of the tale, the reunited Custance and Alla do not live happily ever after. They live happily for a short time; then they die--which is the best a Christian can ask for. Accordingly, they have woe after joy (the earthly drama), and joy after woe (in heaven), illustrating one of Chaucer's principal Boethian themes. The tale has shown, far beyond Trevet's interesting political/historical/Christian aims--and this is not to discount the real power of Trevet's tale in its chronicle context; his aim is different from Chaucer's--that the lowly homeless woman, subject to the laws of man, calumny, the caprices of nature, Satan, and the will of God, can have power, but must find her home only in faith in God's law.

Chaucer reshapes his source material and "feminizes" his Custance to connect inextricably the story of the ideal Christian life with that of a woman, for it is only those qualities associated with the feminine in the tale--prayer, faith, helplessness in the face of events one cannot control, passivity, submission--which can for the purposes of the tale depict Christian piety. The drama, the pathos Chaucer has added, the overall focus on the character of the meek and pitiable Custance--not Trevet's learned and capable woman--all serve him in the working out of the Man of Law's complex and perhaps disingenuous performance of how unfair the world can seem, how much evil lurks, but how clinging to faith and pleasing God with a woman's weak and helpless acquiescence is a way to grace. It is no accident that multiple references to the Virgin Mary appear in Chaucer's poem. Behind the tale, the passive acceptance of the Annunciation demonstrated in the Magnificat shimmers with the power it ultimately represented for a woman. Real power in the tale is the power of God, but it radiates from the helplessness of a woman.

It does not set me at ease to end on this note of glory, however, since the performative aspects of the Man of Law's voice are so vexed, so highly rhetorical, so intrusive, so judgmental of how we are to read the characters- especially the evil mothers-in-law--and the tale's status as a religious one is tinged as well with ideological problems and the language of commerce. Custance is nevertheless that perfect patriarchal heroine, returning to the "governance" and "thralldom" of her father and her fatherland at the end of the tale, absolved of agency. The establishment of the Roman emperor's genealogy and paternal line linking him to England is, of course, one of Trevet's objects in his chronicle; the displacement of the old law by the new, of the East by the West, is embedded in his narrative. But Chaucer's tale re creates, and I would argue accentuates, this patriarchal account by the absorption of any resourcefulness in the source-tale's heroine and by the era sure (and in fact murder) of the Saracen/pagan law embodied in the pagan women, the two mothers-in-law. Through the emphasis on the rule of so many laws, the tale underlines the triumph and establishment of the new law-over the old one. Matriarchy has no place in this world of Christian hegemony established at the end of the tale, with Custance back at her father's house under his rule, having engendered the scion of the Roman Emperor. Investigating the sources of Chaucer's tale does not in any way solve the enigmas of the piece, but it does give students some points of reference, starting points for a discussion of the interpretive intricacies of Chaucer's creation, his reading of his sources, and a line on some of his complicated explorations of gender and power.

This approach to examining the sources, while leaving so much about the tale unexplored due to the constraints of classroom time, is a crucial one, highlighting the intertextuality of so much of Chaucer's work. It highlights as well his generic experimentation, but more so his portrait of the tale's ideal Christian woman. In fact, the ideal Christian possesses in terms of the tale those characteristics most often considered "feminine:" humility, passivity, assent, silence, even swooning. While there may be other ways in which to understand and other springboards for interpretation of this tale of the Man of Law, a study of the sources allows students to see a very medieval methodology-the making "new" of an old story--in this most medieval of tales.

Rose is professor of English at Portland State University. She has published on Chaucer and medieval manuscripts and co-edited a volume of essays with Elizabeth Robertson, Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature (2001).

Notes

(1.) A version of this essay was first presented at the 1996 New Chaucer Society meeting in Los Angeles, in a session entitled "Teaching the Man of Law's Tale," organized by Elizabeth Robertson. My thanks to Professor Robertson for inviting me to participate, and to the other members of the panel--David Raybin, Richard Glejzer, Maura Nolan and James Rhodes-for their thought-provoking presentations.

(2.) Elaine Tuttle Hansen provides a provocative and nuanced discussion of Chaucer's engagement with the late-medieval debate about "the nature and meaning of sexual difference, 'men' versus 'women'..." (1992, 93) and is a valuable feminist scholarly resource to which I often refer when teaching Chaucer's works. Students also read chapters from Carolyn Dinshaw, particularly "Reading Like a Man: The Critics, the Narrator, Troilus, and Pandarus" (1989, 28-64).

(3.) Especially in graduate classes, students have been reading various critical approaches to reading, some medieval literary theory, and have been discussing D.W. Robertson Jr. (1962) and his hermeneutical approach as one model of reading, so they are schooled in imagining levels of meaning and allegorical readings and do find the allegorical impulse hard to resist in a tale such as this one. In each class I teach, the minimum amount of medieval literary theory which students read and discuss is found in Robert Miller (1977, 39-91) and D.W. Robertson (1970, 263-97).

(4.) The quarter system, with only ten weeks in which to perform this feat, presents time constraints in teaching Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The present essay is not the place to put forward my pedagogical reason for teaching the tales in this particular order (and I do change the order occasionally, but the Manciple always leads off, but the order is both heuristically intended to get students on their feet in Middle English early, and to expose as many of Chaucer's ongoing themes in the Canterbury Tales as early as I can, and then to return to the procession of the tales the Ellesmere audience was witness to in order to see how those themes--of the poet in society, of truth-telling, of the slipperiness of language, the woman-question, Christianity and the "letter of the law vs. the spirit," generic expectations, etc.--get discussed among the Tales as the collection gathers momentum.

(5.) The section of Trevet's Les Cronicles pertaining to the tale of the woman he names "Constaunce" found in British Library MS Arundel 56 and collated with a MS in the Royal Library of Stockholm [Kungliga Bibl. D.1311a (III), pp. 1-276], is printed in Brock (1887, 1-53). No direct source for Trevet's tale has yet been ascertained. The Constaunce selection from Oxford Magdalen 45 is available in Schlauch (1958, 165-81). Ruth J. Dean's studies of Trevet's work and milieu are invaluable (1962, 1976). Robert Correale is currently preparing an edition of Trevet's French Les Cronicles, based on a study of all nine extant Anglo-Norman manuscripts, for the Chaucer Library project. His "Chaucer's Manuscripts of Nicholas Trevet's Les Cronicles" (1991) previews some of his findings about Chaucer's source manuscript, and concludes it was probably one related to Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale, franc. 9687, fols. [1.sup.va]-[114.sup.va] (c.1340-50).

(6.) All passages quoted from Trevet are from my edition of the c. 1440 Middle English version of Trevet's Anglo-Norman chronicle, Trevet's Englished Chronicle: Houghton Library fMS Eng 938 (forthcoming), cited by manuscript folio numbers in parentheses. Scribal breviographs have been expanded and italicized. The Middle English chronicle appears on fols. [9.sup.ra] -[91.sup.rb] of this interesting household miscellany of English provenance. The Middle English translator follows the Anglo-Norman fairly closely in the section which contains the tale of Constaunce. See also Rose (1992/93, 38-55). The Middle English chronicle is a copy of an earlier exemplar, now lost, conceivably made during Chaucer's lifetime. The Furnivall volume Originals and Analogues (see n.5) prints the Constaunce extract from the Acland-Hood manuscript (now Harvard Houghton fMS Eng 938) (221-50), although that extract from the Middle English chronicle, prepared by Edmund Brock and Alfred J. Horwood contains a number of transcription errors. William V.Whitehead also edited the Trevet section of this codex as his 1961 Harvard University dissertation, unpublished.

(7.) Ruth J. Dean's work (1962,1976) describes the manuscript witnesses and their dedicatory phrases to Princess Mary, plus the attribution of the work to Trevet. Princess Mary was born in 1279, entered the convent as a young child, and seems to have led a rather unascetic convent life, with rumors of gaming debts and lovers tainting her biography. See M. A. Green (1849, 404-22) and Eileen Power (1922, 346-60).

(8.) Gower (1957, 2:587-1598). A lengthy debate among scholars continues over whose version of the Constance story was earlier, Gower's or Chaucer's, and which poet's work may therefore be dependent upon the other, and to what extent either used Trevet's chronicle. The current consensus is that Gower's version was first and that Chaucer may have borrowed from or been influenced by Gower's treatment of the tale. Peter Nicholson makes an eloquent case for Gower's version being Chaucer's most immediate source, suggesting "that Gower's version rather than Trevet's might be a more appropriate point of comparison in assessing Chaucer's achievement in the tale." He argues "it was Gower's tale rather than Trevet's that Chaucer chose to retell" (1991, 171). But no one can categorically judge this matter. My sense is that Chaucer worked from both Gower and Trevet, although he may have been responding to the sharply-focussed and pointed work of Gower with a problematic and slippery tale of his own, filled with rhetorical flourishing and narratorial bloviating, where Gower's is streamlined and direct. Since it cannot be disproved that Chaucer knew the Anglo-Norman Trevet work, whose manuscripts may have been accessible to him in London, I assume his knowledge of both sources: Trevet and Gower. The changes Chaucer makes to Trevet highlighted in this essay as sites of feminist inquiry about how the poet writes about a Christian woman overcoming a pagan world are not in Gower's work. It is clear from a study of the three versions that Gower eliminates more from Trevet than Chaucer does, to focus on the exemplum against the vice of envy, represented by the mothers-in-law.

(9.) See Block (1953), Pratt (1969), Brock's (1887, vi-x), and Nicholson (1991).

(10.) Nevertheless, I cannot resist mentioning here that the first medieval instance of "mooning" (Larry D. Benson has verified this assertion), which occurs in Trevet's version is repressed in Chaucer's. In the narrative, after the marriage of Constance and Alla, the latter goes off to war. In his absence, Constance is delivered of a male child, and through the machinations and forged letters of his wicked and jealous mother, he is fooled into seeming to agree that Constance and the child be exiled, once more put into a rudderless boat on the sea. In Trevet's tale the people of the realm are outraged at their beloved queens being mistreated by her husband their king in that manner, and show him their outrage as he travels home from the wars, giving him a most undignified reception:

Than after withyn a lytell wyle kyng Alle had expleted the victory in scotlonde of the picteus hys enemyes. And then with a ful grete desyre and muche heuyness for cause of hys quene Constaunce hasted hym in all haste in to ynglonde ffor cause why hit was tolde hym of folke that come betwene howe that thys blessed lady Constaunce was by hys commaundement exyled oute of hys londe with her fayre son Morys. [paragraph] And as the kyng wente and come by day by the hygh weyes by Cytees and by tounes in ynglonde there come men wemen and Chyldren and oolde folke crying and reuylyng the kyng and caste foule harlotrye opon hym with grete stones ayenst hys breste. And men wemen and chylderen despoyled hemself naked for despyte and shewed to hym her pryuytees behynde. And the kyng had so sore persecucion ofhys pepull, that he must nedes take hys iorneys by nyght and nat by day. (fMS Eng 938 f. 58r, my edition. Italics represent expanded scribal breviographs)

Chaucer shows no evidence of using such greetings to Alla in his rewriting of this episode: "Alla the kyng comth hoom soone after this / Unto his castel ..." (876-66). Chaucer's Alla is entirely more respected by his people. In both printed Anglo-Norman witnesses, MS Arundel 56 and Magdalen 45, only the women and children present "lour derer" (Brock 1887, 37).

(11.) All references to the works of Geoffrey Chaucer (1987) will be indicated by line nos. parenthetically in the text.

(12.) In recent years there has been a steady stream of fine publications about the Man of Law's problematic tale. To name only the ones (aside from those pieces cited in these notes) most useful in my own reading of the tale: Delany (1974), Kolve (1984), Wetherbee (1989), Dinshaw (1989), Raybin (1990),and Schibanoff (1996). While Hansen's work (see n.2) does not engage the Man of Law's Tale extensively, her ideas on the feminized male in some of Chaucer's other works have refined my own vision of that aspect of the tale.

(13.) Windeatt (1992, 54-71) provides an important reference source for students interested in discovering just how Chaucer used II Filostrato. As Windeatt says, "In Troilus, its Italian source has in important ways been taken over and held within the English poem" (50).An accessible translation of Boccaccio's work is Havely (1980).

(14.) See on this topic Rose (1998).

(15.) This analogue, along with Gower's version of the tale of Constance is now resident on Harvard's wonderful Chaucer webpage, making it easier for students to dip into such source-study: http://icg.harvard.edu/[sim]chaucer. For further development of student interest in source-study, see Archibald (1986) on incest and, of course, Bryan and Dempster (1958) and Schlauch (1969).

(16.) See Hornstein (1949) on this topic.

(17.) Lewis (1966) is a helpful place to start such a discussion.

(18.) My edition, see n.6.

(19.) See Astell (1991) for an interesting discussion of Custance's discursive practices set against the narrator's, which Astell argues leads to satire.

(20.) For a similar point made in a different context, a discussion of May's reading and writing in the Merchant's Tale, see Rose (1997, 68-70). Stanbury (1994) furnishes an insightful discussion of the spatial dimension of Chaucer's descriptions of letter-writing women.

(21.) Shoaf sees Custance as "always and everywhere 'unwemmed': unchanged, unmarked, unaltered, proper:' her movement always checked and predictable, because the narrator-Man of Law is constructed to be "afraid of poetry, its flows and its flaws" (1990, 297).

(22.) See Burrow (1961) for some evidence on the identity of this language and Rothwell (1994) for the possibility that Custance was speaking in a kind of Latinoid patois necessitated by the commerce between nations in the Middle Ages.

(23.) The Middle English MS seems faulty here: Anglo-Norman version in MS Arundel 56 reads "lui pria qil se peut ou lui mettre en la meyn dieu pur retourner ascun lieu a sa foy' (Brock 1887, 35).

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