Abstract
This essay examines the role of parrhesia (i.e., free, frank, or fearless speech) in three Canterbury Tales – The Second Nun’s Tale, The Tale of Melibee, and The Manciple’s Tale – in which Chaucer explores how the desire to play the parrhesiastes and anxieties about parrhesia’s dangerousness can serve as catalysts in the production of literary worlds. By way of conclusion, it argues that Chaucer’s short poem ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’ might archive a quasi-parrhesiastic utterance directed at the despotic King Richard II, and that a modern conception of Chaucer as a non-polemical ironist has prevented many critics from reading it as such.
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Notes
For a secondary discussion of Foucault on parrhesia, see Flynn (1988), 102–118.
Since Chaucer was not aware of the ancient Greek discourse on parrhesia out of which Foucault constructs his five qualifications, this essay will not devote much energy to analyzing which of his literary utterances fulfill all five. Instead, I use parrhesia rather loosely to mean something like ‘speaking truth to power.’
All citations of Chaucer refer to Chaucer (1987) and give abbreviated titles of individual works and line numbers.
Admittedly, neither Cecilia nor Prudence speaks ‘truth’ in the sense of an objective representation of reality. Instead, they speak ‘truth’ in the sense of morally virtuous conviction. Their utterances qualify as parrhesia, I think, insofar as they both clearly believe in the validity of the policy advocate.
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Acknowledgements
This research was conducted by the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (Project Number CE110001011). The author would like to thank Eileen A. Joy for her sage advice getting this essay off the ground, as well as Leila K. Norako, Lara Farina, and the anonymous readers at postmedieval for their insightful comments during the editorial process.
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Megna, P. Chaucerian Parrhesia: World-building and truth-telling in The Canterbury Tales and ‘Lak of Stedfastnesse’. Postmedieval 9, 30–43 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0066-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41280-017-0066-y