ADVICE ON MARRIAGE

I. Eustache Deschamps, Le Miroir de Mariage 489 (ed. Gaston Raynaud)

II. St Jerome, Epistola adversus Jovinianum 499 (ed J.-P. Migne)

III. Albertano of Brescia, Liber consolationis et consilii 499 (ed. Thor Sundby)

IV. Marriage Ceremony, The Sarum Manual 501 (ed. A. Jefferies Collins)

DESCRIPTION OF AGED HUSBAND AND YOUNG WIFE

V. Giovanni Boccaccio, La comedia delle ninfe fiorentine 503 (ed. Antonio E. Quaglio)

VI. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron II, 10 509 (ed. Vittore Branca)

NARRATIVES OF THE PEAR TREE

VII. Il Novellino 519 (ed. Guido Biagi)

VIII. Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron VII, 9 521 (ed. Vittore Branca)

IX. “The xii fable of a blynd man and of his wyf” 534 (trans. William Caxton)

The Merchant’s Tale is a well-known type in medieval narrative, but an exact source is difficult to pinpoint. Nineteenth-century research uncovered several ancient Oriental tales illustrating the wiles of women that show some similarity, but the husband is sighted and the wife’s trickery performed on the ground with the husband in the tree (as in Decameron VII, 9). Transmission of such tales, many in framed collections typified by the Thousand and One Nights, would have occurred in contact with the Muslim world in and around the Mediterranean from Mozarabic Spain to the Levant. Later Latin versions suggest that the story of a blind husband cuckolded by his wife in a pear tree had become current across Europe by the fifteenth century, most probably translated for a clerical or goliardic audience from the vernacular. In this type, a classical god sees what is going on and decides to restore the husband’s sight, while another god (or goddess) gives the wife a prompt reply to get her out of her predicament. The wife’s excuse is that she understood such an act would restore her husband’s sight. These analogues, printed in earlier collections of Chaucer’s sources and analogues, These analogues, printed in earlier collections of Chaucer’s sources and analogues, are too distant in time and geography for the aims of this edition, but the type is conveniently found in a fifteenth-century French translation put into English by William Caxton, in an appendix to his collection of Aesopian fables: The book of the subtyl historyes and fables of Esope (1484).