Fallible Authors. Alastair Minnis

was particularly attracted to such discourses, for reasons that can only be guessed at. Perhaps there is a connection here with his interest in the writer not only as auctor but also as fictor, i.e., an inventor, maker, or liar, to follow the ubiquitous medieval etymology: “the fables ( fabulae)of the poets are named from fando, because they are not true things (res factae) but only spoken fictions (loquendo fictae).”¹⁸ We may recall how, in the House of Fame, Chaucer reduced Homer—Dante’s philosopher-poet par excellence—to one who “made lyes, / Feynynge in hys poetries” (1477–78), and went on to suggest that textual fame itself may be a pack of lies, or at the very least “compouned” of “fals and soth” (1029). The written record’s apparent inability to give people what they deserve licensed Chaucer to reverse the fate commonly endured by women, as the regular victims of masculinist history. Hence in the Legend of Good Women he is ostentatiously “favorable”¹⁹ to the female sex, in Troilus and Criseyde resists producing yet another book which will “shende” (ruin, disgrace) the heroine (V, 1060), and in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue has Alisoun confront the truism that the lion is painted by the hunter, i.e., women are textually depicted by misogynistic male clerics (III(D) 688–92). Boccaccio had devoted much time in his Genealogia deorum gentilium to the argument that the poets are not liars because they do not intend to deceive;²⁰ Chaucer, I suspect, was intrigued by fiction’s power to deceive—or, at best, to offer alternatives to what, in his culture, passed for truth. This would explain his evident fascination with the moral disquisition of a character who is set up for condemnation in the strongest terms (the Pardoner), and his willingness to put words of the most profound wisdom into the mouth of a character who embodied some of the most virulent antifeminism of his time (the Wife of Bath).

      But guesswork this must remain. And, to borrow a passage from Chaucer’s friend John Gower,

      I may noght strecche up to the hevene

      Min hand, ne setten al in evene

      This world, which evere is in balance:

      It stant noght in my sufficance

      So grete thinges to compasse . . .

      Forthi the Stile of my writinges

      Fro this day forth I thenke change

      And speke of thing is noght so strange . . . (Confessio amantis,I.1–10)

      Henceforth I will investigate the discourses of authority and fallibility without which those characters could not exist, seeking insight into the forces that drive them.

      Writing around the middle of the 1390s, Chaucer had the most offensive character on his Canterbury pilgrimage present the case that an immoral man can tell a moral tale: “For though myself be a ful vicious man, / A moral tale yet I yow telle kan” (VI(C) 459–60). Many two-faced figures exist in anticlerical satire, of course; the Pardoner’s descent from Faus Semblant in the Roman de la Rose is well known. But Chaucer is, I believe, unique in the way that he pushes such duplicity to extremes: the Pardoner is an exceptionally “vicious man”; his narrative comprises an exceptionally powerful “moral tale.” A sharp distinction is being made between reliable words and unreliable speaker, between the truth of what is said and the falsity of the person saying it. Several decades earlier, in a different country and within a very different society, Francis Petrarch had made a similar distinction. Writing to his long-dead correspondent Cicero, he explains: “It was your life (vita) I criticized, not your ingenuity (ingenium) or your eloquence, for I admire the first, while the second strikes me dumb with wonder.”²¹ Cicero’s vita was marred by weakness in adversity and inconstancy, Petrarch believed. Yet the achievement of the “great founding father of Roman eloquence” was considerable. These statements by Chaucer and Petrarch belong within a sophisticated matrix of ideas concerning the relationship between authority and fallibility (ranging through various sorts of errant or “deviant” behavior). Its distinctive discourses are evident in many spheres of social, political, and ecclesiastical/theological theory and practice.

      In the first instance, Petrarch’s segregation of Cicero’s dubious vita and wonderful ingenium may be seen as a move away from some of the values of the medieval “ethical poetic,” to use the late Judson Allen’s felicitous term.²² In the accessūs or “academic prologues” to glosses on the Latin canonical texts studied in the grammar schools, the “branch of philosophy” to which those books belonged was regularly discussed, to establish their ideological credentials and justify their inclusion in a Christian curriculum.²³ In the case of a wide range of syllabus authors (Aesop, Ovid, Horace, Juvenal, Virgil, etc.) the subject-matter treated was usually identified as moral philosophy or ethics, and so those authors became regarded as authorities in the study of human behavior. By these means such texts were “authenticated” in the medieval sense of the term, their prestige and auctoritas being secured. The concomitant was that the poets had to be of good character, men—for men they invariably were—worthy of respect and belief. Hence the learning and prophetic powers of vatic Virgil, and the social outrage of satirists like Horace and Juvenal at the evils of their age, were emphasized. Ovid, the expert on sex and seduction, was a particularly difficult case, but a measure of moral conformity was imposed on his poems. The Amores and Ars amatoria remained resistant, but their damage was limited through the construction of a vita Ovidii which claimed that the poet, exiled by the Emperor Augustus on account of his scurrilous verses, had repented of what he had written and produced other texts (particularly the Remedium amoris) which asserted his change of heart.²⁴ According to this interpretive model, Ovid had left his youthful misdemeanors behind him, and attained that wisdom which age (and painful experience) brings.

      Fascinating problems arose when, in the later Middle Ages, certain vernacular writers sought to locate and empower their writings, and those of distinguished contemporaries, in relation to the systems and strategies of textual evaluation which academia had produced. Their sense of the worth of the vernacular in general and their own writing in particular impelled them irresistibly in that direction. But there was a major stumbling block; the shade of Ovid, as it were, haunted such attempts at valorization. Vernacular secular literature had human love as a major subject, and how could a poet who wrote about love, and/or expressed his own (limiting and probably demeaning) emotional experiences, be trusted as a fount of wisdom, accepted as a figure worthy of respect and belief? An auctor amans was an utter paradox, almost a contradiction in terms.

      Dante met the problem with typical vigor. His Convivio, which is ostentatiously based on the medieval genre of the commentary on an auctor, elaborately brings out the profoundly scientific subject-matter of three of his canzoni. The point is being made that Dante’s vernacular works merit the full scholarly apparatus of commentary which for generations had been reserved for Latin auctores. Moreover, given that a (would-be) auctor has to have an impeccable character, Dante is anxious to emphasize that his life is not letting down his lyrics. The reader of these canzoni may have formed the impression that he had pursued a great passion of love, Dante admits. But in fact the motivation (or “moving cause”) was virtue, as, he promises, the subsequent expositions will make clear.²⁵ Any potential threat to the authority of the text or the good character of its author is then refined out of existence by the techniques of allegorical exegesis.

      However, in his Trattatello in laude di Dante Giovanni Boccaccio chose not to adopt such a defensive strategy. Instead he flatly declares that all his life Dante suffered from licentiousness: “Amid such virtue, amid such learning as we have noted there to have been in this magnificent poet, lust (lussuria) found most ample space.”²⁶ “But who,” Boccaccio asks, “among mortals can play the just judge in condemning it? Not I.” The attractions of the female sex are very powerful, as is proved by both secular and sacred literature. No reasonable person can gainsay the testimony of holy Scripture, which offers the exempla of Eve’s persuasion of Adam, David’s adultery with Bathsheba and murder of her husband, and the story of the wise Solomon who, “to please a woman,” kneeled down and worshipped Baalim. Dante, then, may not be excused, but some comfort may be found in the fact that many other great writers experienced similar