Fallible Authors. Alastair Minnis

public position and his or her private peccadilloes—indeed between transgressions perpetrated within “public business” which affect whole nations as opposed to those committed within the “quotidian” space occupied by a few individuals whose feelings have no wider consequence—would have been familiar to the medieval poet Geoffrey Chaucer. But of course we must be attentive to the considerable cultural differences which determined their specific meanings in time and history. I have attempted to pay such attention in focusing on the apparent division—sometimes it looks like a wide gulf—between the two facets which, following medieval culture’s dualistic categorization, came to constitute an “authority.” On the one hand, the authority was a figure worthy of respect, belief, and obedience; on the other, the authority was a mere mortal who was capable of much stupidity and sin. This crucial binary was constructed through late-medieval discourses of office versus man (and, in special circumstances, woman), of public versus private, and of the ways in which these twains met. Or failed to meet.

      My interest, then, is in the array of “official” requirements and restrictions which the embodiment of authority entailed, and the ways in which mere fallible mortals were presented as failing to live up to those de-mands—whether because they committed high (or low) crimes and misdemeanors, or failed (whether openly or secretly) to practice what they preached. The problem is perennial: how can authority be invested in a corporeal being that is so resistant to rule, to the bridling of its desires? In Chaucer’s day the matter was further complicated by the ubiquitous belief in the inferiority of women. Half of the human race was deemed fallible because its members lived in the wrong kind of material body, the inferior female rather than the superior male form. Despite the constant medieval elevation of spirit over flesh, biological sex was a crucial factor in determining whether a person could hold public office or exercise authority over others.

      Such fallibilities could be seen as deficiency, whether due to some lack on an individual’s part or to a general condition which affected an entire sex, as in Aristotle’s claim (frequently reaffirmed during the later Middle Ages) that a woman was a “deformed male.”⁵ Or they could be taken as an affront to culturally sanctioned codes of behavior—perhaps judged a failing with specifically religious implications, identified as sin which demanded punishment in this life and/or in the next. Or, indeed, condemned as deviancy. That last term needs careful definition, given the use of “deviancy” in contemporary parlance to designate specifically sexual behavior. Such a use pervades recent literary criticism of Chaucer’s Pardoner in particular, his (allegedly) homosexual preferences being presented as a challenge to the heteronormative principles endemic in late-medieval culture. The matter of whether the Pardoner’s body and behavior are “deviant” in this way— or in some other (can he be seen as some sort of “eunuch,” for instance?)— is certainly important, and so I have treated it at some length. But it does not fill all the available ethical space; there are other kinds of sin in question, and on public display. The broader moral purchase of the term “deviancy” will therefore be reclaimed below, in light of the standard meaning of the medieval Latin verb devio: “to turn from the straight road, to go aside, to deviate.”⁶

      That is the sense present in Boethius’s De consolatione philosophiae, Book III, met. viii, when Dame Philosophy laments how ignorance leads wretched men astray on a devious path:

      Eheu quae miseros tramite devios

      Abducit ignorancia! (1–2)⁷

      More specifically, a person who fell into heresy was deemed to have deviated from true Christian doctrine, as may be illustrated by a passage from the first of Simon of Cremona’s Disputationes de indulgentiis (c. 1380), a work to be discussed in Chapter 1 below. Anyone who advocates an “indiscreet indulgence” is a heretic, Simon declares, for heresy involves two things, an error in reasoning and a stubbornness of will, blatant deviation from the truth (a veritate deviare). Moving on to examples in Middle English, Thomas Usk’s Testament of Love (c. 1385) describes the period from the beginning of the world to the advent of Christ as the time of “deviacion, that is to say, goyng out of trewe way.”⁸ And in the A-fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose the lover tells Dame Resoun that he is “so devyaunt” from her “scole” that he has not been helped at all by her doctrine (4787–91).

      Chaucer translates the abovementioned passage from De consolatione philosophiae as follows, in his Boece: “Allas! Whiche folie and whiche ignorance mysledeth wandrynge wrecchis fro the path of verray good!”⁹ This idea of “wandrynge” reappears in Chaucer’s initial description of the Wife of Bath, who has been to Jerusalem three times—“She hadde passed many a straunge strem”—and also visited Rome, Boulogne, Compostella, and Cologne. The narrator concludes that “She koude muchel of wandrynge by the weye” (I(A) 464–67); presumably Chaucer was influenced here by the common understanding of deuius as “extra viam ire.” Apparently Alisoun’s enthusiasm for pilgrimage has not kept her on the straight and narrow path of Christian morality. The same could be said of her sparring partner the Pardoner, also a keen pilgrim. We may recall that he embarked on the Canterbury pilgrimage shortly after returning from Rome, and has the veronica badge—along with a “walet . . . / Bretful of pardoun”—to prove it (I(A) 685–67).¹⁰ And little good has it done him: he is, quite shockingly and scandalously, not a “man of character.” In the Wife of Bath’s case, her moral lapses are exacerbated by the fact that she was born into an inferior, female body—of which she seems belligerently proud, while struggling to cope with the fact that it is now past its physical prime.

      These complexly “deviant” and mobile characters, the most blatantly fallible of Chaucer’s “authors” in the Canterbury Tales, are my chosen subject. Of course, the Pardoner and Wife of Bath are not “authors” in the sense that they have inscribed their doctrine textually, for within the frame of Chaucer’s fiction the narrations for which they demand respect remain oral, unrecorded. My point is rather that they are the bearers of authoritative materials and methodologies, and perform certain official functions (sometimes going far beyond what was deemed permissible). Here one should recall the crucial interconnection in medieval culture of the concepts “author” and “authority.” According to the common etymology, the term auctor was related to the Greek noun autentim (“authenticity,” “authority”). ¹¹ It designated at once an agent and a person of gret auctorite, not necessarily in the realm of “literary” production. To appropriate a comment by John Guillory, “Canonical authors are not markedly different . . . from their contemporary workers in the medium of power; they have only chosen a strangely durable medium, the text.”¹² My ambition is to place Chaucer, as a maker of texts, alongside his contemporary workers in the medium of power, thereby relating his discourses of authority and fallibility to the larger ideological sources and structures that gave them meaning.

      A related concept which requires initial definition is that of “publication.” As a quaestor,¹³ Chaucer’s Pardoner collects alms for a hospital and dispenses “pardons” or indulgences (which were generally believed to relieve purgatorial punishment for sin); the “publication” of the origin and value of the indulgences was regarded as an essential part of this process. Here I use the term in the common late-medieval, and pre-print, sense of “making public” or “proclaiming” information, announcements, edicts, and the like.¹⁴ The Latin verb publicare and its Middle English cognate publishen also feature in relation to (for example) an act of preaching¹⁵ or a sinner’s public revelation of his sin.¹⁶ Such activities could involve publicacioun understood as transmitting information in and through writing—but not necessarily so, as may be illustrated with reference to Chaucer’s most famous use of the concept, when he declares the bad name of Criseyde is “publysshed so wide / That for hire gilt it oughte ynough suffise” (V, 1095–96).¹⁷ Here the poet has in mind the spreading abroad of Criseyde’s guilt in general, a process in which textualization is not deemed essential and is certainly not specified, though it may be assumed to have played some part. Both the Pardoner and Alisoun of Bath “publish” (in this broad sense of the term) their faults, failings, and limitations along with their moral lore, in ways which—I will argue below—set major