Which Morality?

The variety of Chaucer's writings and the multiple ideologies current in latemedieval England – Christian, chivalric, patriarchal, Senecan, Boethian and others – make for a diverse presentation of virtue; that is one of his great strengths. Melibee, and, more briefly, the Book of the Duchess and Fortune contain moral debate; other texts, particularly Troilus and Criseyde, the Knight's Tale, the Parliament of Fowls and the Legend of Good Women, include passages of moral counsel – answers – but with only partial or guarded articulation of what moral questions they raise. Yet everywhere Chaucer's writing in complex and implicit ways incites its readers to moral questioning: about what constitutes correct action, about the criteria informing judgements and assumptions, and how discourses and literary traditions carry implicit or explicit ethical perspectives. How, for example, do courtly, Christian and Boethian moral assumptions interact in Troilus or medieval readers’ expectations abut love and hagiography in the Legend?

What constitutes morality is rarely simple, constant or uncontested in Chaucer's writings. Questions arise most obviously when a text's ostensible message offends modern ethics or where devices in the writing – structural, verbal or intertextual – militate against smooth acceptance of a single moral judgement or where it is unclear how far the ethic of a source persists in Chaucer's composition. Griselda's trials and Virginia's beheading exemplify all these. The Canterbury Tales frame story increases the impression of ethically dialogic narratives, often leaving it unclear where, or in whom, moral perspectives are located; examples are the evil Pardoner's telling of a moral tale and the question of whether the Prioress's Tale's anti-Semitism is attributable to Chaucer or his fictional construct, the Prioress. A text's morality might also reflect patrons’ attitudes: perhaps, for example, the anti- Semitism of the Prioress's Tale reflects the same Lancastrian connection we seem to find recurrently in his oeuvre: anti-Semitism was rife in Castile (see Anthony Bale's essay, p. 176): did Constance of Castile favour such attitudes?

The last century of criticism raised three large questions about Chaucer's aesthetics and ethics. First, how far does medieval Christian teaching about virtue and sin guide the presentation of character and action?