Abstract
This chapter addresses adolescence, here described as ages fourteen through twenty-one, and includes Nicholas and Alisoun of the Miller’s Tale, Malyne, John, and Aleyn of the Reeve’s Tale, Palamon and Arcite of the Knight’s Tale, May and Damian of the Merchant’s Tale, the youngest reveler of the Pardoner’s Tale, the Squire, the Canon’s Yeoman, and the Cook’s apprentice. In narratives in which little is spoken by some of these characters, the gaps in their stories are filled in by their peers (e.g., the Canon’s Yeoman completes what it left unsaid in the Cook’s Tale). In keeping with the flexibility of the Ages of Man theories and Chaucer’s propensity for disrupting social conventions, this chapter also considers Troilus and Criseyde to be children subjected to a political system over which they have no control.
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Notes
- 1.
Warren Ginsberg, ed. Wynnere and Wastoure and The Parlement of the Thre Ages (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992).
- 2.
The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. and trans. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 1403.
- 3.
H. Marshall Leicester, Jr. answers that question in “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Difference “It” Makes: Gender and Desire in the Miller’s Tale” ELH 61 (1994): 473–499. “And just what does Alison do here, and what does Abolson kiss…. It does not in fact sound like he has kissed an ass, but a cunt” (487). In other words, the beard is pubic and represents pubescence in my reading. Ibid.
- 4.
Konrad Eisenbichler, ed. The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 4. See also Barbara A. Hanawalt, “Historical Descriptions and Prescriptions for Adolescence,” Journal of Family History 17.4 (1992): 341–351; James A. Schultz, “Medieval Adolescence: The Claims of History and the Silence of German Narrative,” Speculum 66.3 (1991): 519–539.
- 5.
Edward III married Philippa of Hainault when he was sixteen, she fourteen; Richard II married Anne of Bohemia, when he was fifteen, she sixteen; and then again Richard marries the six-year-old Isabella after Anne’s death. Chaucer married Philippa Roet when he was about twenty-two; she was approximately the same age. According to Paul Strohm, “a popular impression, abetted by Romeo and Juliet, is that matches were always arranged and that medieval people married extremely young. These points hold true for dynastic marriages, when thrones or substantial properties were at stake, but not for most others” in Chaucer’s Tale: 1386 and the Road to Canterbury (New York: Viking, 2014), 18.
- 6.
Kathryn Ann Taglia, “Marriage’s Original Purpose and First Good: Placing Children with the Medieval Church’s Views on Marriage,” Essays on Medieval Childhood: Responses to Recent Debates, ed. Joel T. Rosenthal (Donington, UK: Shaun Tyas, 2007), 151–173.
- 7.
The Governance of Kings and Princes: John of Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler, Charles F. Briggs, and Paul G. Remley (New York: Garland, 1997), 196. See Michael Goodich, From Birth to Old Age: The Human Life Cycle in Medieval Thought, 1250–1350 (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1989): “Giles, on the other hand, argued that, ideally, males should marry at thirty-six, females at eighteen, the ages of perfection” (121).
- 8.
Deborah Youngs, The Life Cycle in Western Europe, c. 1300–1500, 114.
- 9.
Augustine, Confessions, Books I-VIII, trans. William Watts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1912; reprint 1996), 65–67.
- 10.
Ibid., 73. The salient Latin phrase is “vidit pubescentem et inquieta indutum adulescentia.” There is variation in the spelling of adulescentia in Latin.
- 11.
Watts, 441. The Latin reads: “da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli modo.”
- 12.
Fiona Harris Stoertz, “Sex and the Medieval Adolescent,” in Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society, 1150–1650 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2002), 225–243.
- 13.
John of Trevisa, On the Properties of Things, 291–292.
- 14.
See Daniel T. Kline, “Female Childhoods,” in The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Women’s Writing, ed. Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 13–20.
- 15.
Konrad Eisenbichler, The Premodern Teenager, 13.
- 16.
See the famous flow chart and its graphic illustration of this matter in James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe, 162.
- 17.
James A. Brundage, “Playing by the Rules: Sexual Behaviour and Legal Norms in Medieval Europe,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler and Jacqueline Murray, 2nd edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 23–41 (23). For the Parson, all forms of sin are classified as sexual, the complexity of which must be defined by place, time, habit, consent, and so on, before accurate judgment can be applied.
- 18.
Ibid.
- 19.
James L. Matterer, A Chaucerian Cookery, http://www.godecookery.com/chaucer/chfoodp.htm Accessed 9/6/15.
- 20.
Most relevant is that the Middle English word—adolescent—means not only “a youth, a young man,” but “a colt under two years of age.” That both the Wife and Bath and the Reeve refer to their “coltes tooth” to indicate their frisky nature is probably no coincidence.
- 21.
Two of Marie de France’s lais come to mind in this regard: both Yonec and Guigemar focus on the unhappy young wife and a lover who rescues her from her jealous old husband. See The Lais of Marie de France, ed. and trans. Robert Hanning and Joan M. Ferrante (New York: Dutton, 1978).
- 22.
Edward III’s public affair with Alice Perrers and John of Gaunt’s protracted sexual liaison with Katherine Swynford were known to have caused considerable social anxiety.
- 23.
Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui, EETS 276 (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1977), 56–58. Summer is described as “a spouse full in the body and age, with hetes swellyng” in autumn the “world is like a woman of full age lakkyng clothes, [l]evyng yougth and hastyng to age” (57), and winter is described as “the worlde as an olde woman, greved and decreped in age, lakkyng clothese, neygh to deth” (58).
- 24.
See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). “Fertility, like the other normal operations of the body, required an adequately, though not perfectly, balanced mixture. Thus, sterility could arise in either sex as a result of a defective overall temperament, especially one too hot or too cold” (242).
- 25.
Samantha Katz Seal, “Pregnant Desire: Eyes and Appetites in the Merchant’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 48.3 (2014): 284–306. In modern medical parlance, pica is considered an eating disorder that involves the ingestion of non-nutritive items.
- 26.
See Alcuin Blamires, “May in January’s Tree: Genealogical Configuration in the Merchant’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 45.1 (2010): 106–117.
- 27.
The Lais of Marie de France, Robert W. Hanning and Joan M. Ferrante (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1982).
- 28.
There is an Augustinian allusion here to the stealing of pears as well as a nod to Boccaccio’s story of the enchanted pear tree in the Decameron (day 7, tale 9, the story of Lydia and Pyrrhus). Not coincidentally, the Latin pirus = pear.
- 29.
See note above for the scene in Augustine’s Confessions wherein he is affected by peer pressure to steal the fruit from the pear tree.
- 30.
Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love, trans. John Jay Perry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960).
- 31.
Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic: Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).
- 32.
Alan S. Ambrico, “It Lyth Nat in My Tonge’: Occupatio and Otherness in the Squire’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 38 (2004): 205–228 (205). See also, Michelle Karnes, “Wonder, Marvels, and Metaphor in the Squire’s Tale,” ELH 82.2 (2015): 461–490.
- 33.
Philippa Tristram, Figures of Life and Death in Medieval English Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1976), 28.
- 34.
Patricia Ingham, “Little Nothings: The Squire’s Tale and the Ambition of Gadgets,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 31 (2009): 53–80. See J. Alan Mitchell’s interesting reading of this artifact in relation to Sir Thopas in Becoming Human: The Matter of the Medieval Child in the chapter on “Childish Things.”
- 35.
The “mass” production hypothesis is predicated upon the material and the fact that the toy is made of molded lead in the way that pilgrim badges were made. See Nicholas Orme, “Childhood in Medieval England, c. 500–1500,” http://www.representingchildhood.pitt.edu/medieval_child.htm.
- 36.
Hazel Forsyth with Geoff Egan, Toys, Trifles & Trinkets: Base-Metal Miniatures from London 1200 to 1800 (London: Unicorn Press, 2005). The toy is likely to have been appealing to boys across classes: “merchants, shopkeepers and craft workers, as well as those of the nobility and gentry.” See Nicholas Orme, “Childhood in Medieval England, c. 500–1500,” http://meavilminds.com/?tag=medieval-toys-and-games.
- 37.
Ingham, 56.
- 38.
For an interesting reading, see J. Allan Mitchell’s “Toying with Sir Thopas” in Becoming Human, 108–115.
- 39.
Kelly DeVries, “Teenagers at War During the Middle Ages,” in The Premodern Teenager: Youth in Society 1150–1650, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), 207–223 (215).
- 40.
While the coming of age for knights of medieval romance was often set at fifteen, as is the case with Chaucer’s Knight, an actual knight came of age at twenty-one. Sue Walker, “Proof of Age,” 307.
- 41.
Derek Brewer, “The Ages of Troilus, Criseyde and Pandarus,” Studies in English Literature (1972): 3–13 (13). Reprinted in Tradition and Innovation in Chaucer (London: The Macmillan Press, 1982), 80–88 (88).
- 42.
Richard W. Kaeuper and Elspeth Kennedy, The Book of Chivalry of Geoffroi de Charny: Text, Context, and Translation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); “And while cowards have a great desire to live and a great fear of dying, it is quite the contrary for the men of worth who do not mind whether they live or die, provided that their life be good enough for them to die with honor” (127). Charny ranks the activities of knights, putting the art of war at the top of three categories that include jousting and participating in tournaments. His emphasis on prowess and physical strength as necessary attributes in deeds of arms lead him to say that “some feats of arms are of greater worth than others” (87).
- 43.
David Anderson, “Theban History in Chaucer’s Troilus,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 4 (1982): 109–133 (130).
- 44.
Epistle of Othea Translated from the Full Text of Christine de Pisan by Stephen Scrope, ed. Curt Buhler, EETS 264 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 97. My thanks to Misty Schieberle for suggesting this source.
- 45.
Ibid., 98.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Brewer, “Ages,” 3.
- 48.
Ibid.
- 49.
As cited in Brewer, “Troilus’s ‘Gentil’ Manhood,” 240.
- 50.
Ibid.
- 51.
The scene is an interpolation by Chaucer, a divergence from Boccaccio’s Il Filostrato wherein Troiolo leads Pandarus into a garden and sings a love song.
- 52.
Anderson, 130.
- 53.
Robert Levine, “Restraining Ambiguities in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde,” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 87 (1986): 558–564 (562).
- 54.
Priam had many wives and concubines, but his primary spouse was Hecuba who allegedly bore him nineteen of his sixty-eight children.
- 55.
Gretchen Mieszkowski, “Chaucerian Comedy: Troilus and Criseyde,” in Laughter in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times: Epistemology of a Fundamental Human Behavior, its Meaning and Consequence, ed. Albrecht Classen (Berlin: Walter DeGruyter, 2010), 457–480. Mieszkowski argues that Pandarus is the comic figure throughout; there is no discussion of Boethius. See also Carl Lindahl, Earnest Games: Folkloric Patterns in the Canterbury Tales (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989).
- 56.
David Anderson, “The two wars were considered not as literary fables nor as events from an indistinct and legendary past, but as landmarks in the history of the ancient gentile kingdoms that historians attempted to locate exactly in time by correlating them with the chronology of events in the Old Testament” (110).
- 57.
Paul Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale, 51.
- 58.
David Lorenzo Boyd, “Bodley 686 and the Politics of the Cook’s Tale,” Huntington Library Quarterly 58 (1995): 81–97. While Boyd focuses primarily on the fifteenth-century scribal interpolation of the Tale, the term applies to groups in the late fourteenth century as well. Witness Chaucer’s own Merchant.
- 59.
Helen Cooper, Oxford Guides to Chaucer: “The Canterbury Tales,” 2nd edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 48.
- 60.
Hanawalt, Growing up in London, 113.
- 61.
Craig E. Bertolet, “‘Wel bet is roten appul out of hoord’: Chaucer’s Cook, Commerce, and Civic Order,” Studies in Philology 99 (2002): 229–246 (40).
- 62.
Sylvia Thrupp, The Merchant Class of Medieval London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 169.
- 63.
Stoertz, “Sex and the Medieval Adolescent,” 225–243.
- 64.
Strohm, Chaucer’s Tale, 70.
- 65.
Ibid., 238.
- 66.
V. J. Scattergood, “Perkyn Revelour and the “Cook’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 19 (1984): 14–23.
- 67.
Neil Cartlidge, “Wayward Sons and Failing Fathers: Chaucer’s Moralistic Paternalism—And a Possible Source for The Cook’s Tale,” The Chaucer Review 47 (2012): 134–160. Cartlidge’s discussion of these two interpolations is much more protracted, his thesis, as his title suggests, emphasizing the surrogate father-son relation implicit in the tale.
- 68.
Both quotations are from the Bodleian Library. I’ve modernized the orthography for U/V and thorns. Bodleian 686 also contains the image of the poet as a very young man, discussed in Chap. 2.
- 69.
Cartlidge, 137.
- 70.
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Form in England and Italy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Wallace notes that the Cook’s hometown of Ware, thirty or so miles outside the city, experienced riots in 1351 in response to the Statute of Laborers (167).
- 71.
Cartlidge, 140.
- 72.
Ibid., 140–141.
- 73.
Ibid., 141.
- 74.
Youngs, 116.
- 75.
Nicholas Orme, “Chaucer and Education” 40n3.
- 76.
Secretum Secretorum: Nine English Versions, EETS 276, ed. M. A. Manzalaoui (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
- 77.
Karma Lochrie, Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 117.
- 78.
Lee Patterson, “The Place of the Modern in the Late Middle Ages,” in The Challenge of Periodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (New York: Garland, 1996), 51–66.
- 79.
Susanna Greer Fein, “‘Lat the Children Pleye’: The Game Betwixt the Ages in the Reeve’s Tale,” in Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales, ed. Susanna Greer Fein, et al. (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 73–104.
- 80.
Nicholas Orme, “Chaucer and Education,” 42.
- 81.
Secretum Secretorum, 105.
- 82.
For an interesting discussion of physiognomy, see Julie Orlemanski, “Physiognomy and Otiose Practicality,” Exemplaria 23 (2011): 194–218.
- 83.
Tamarah Kohanski, “In Search of Malyne,” The Chaucer Review 27 (1993): 228–238 (230).
- 84.
Secretum Secretorum, 56–57.
- 85.
Piers Plowman quotation: Y have no more meryt in masse ne in houres,/Than Malkyn of hure maidenhod wham no man desireth” (PP, C ii, 180–181), followed by the Man of Law’s comment. Chaucer uses the name only once in the Reeve’s Tale but it also appears in the Man of Law’s Tale: “It wol nat come agayn, …/Namoore than wol Malkyns maydenhede” (B 30) and in the fox chase in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale: “Ran Colle oure dogge … and Malkyn with a distaff in her hand” (B. 4574).
- 86.
Exempla include Johannes Malekin, Richard Malkyn, Walterus Malkyn, Willemus Malkyns, and Walt Malkynesone but the name is also associated with terms such as “male,” “makin,” and “malin.”
- 87.
See Norman D. Hinton, “Two Names in The Reeve’s Tale,” Names: A Journal of Onomastics 9.2 (1961): 117–120. Their names derive from Old French verbs, alignier and malignier, which “mean just about the same as their English cognates align and malign.”
- 88.
Timothy J. O’Keefe, “Meanings of ‘Malyne’ in The Reeve’s Tale,” ANQ 12 (1973): 5–7.
- 89.
Ibid., 6.
- 90.
Barbara Newman, Medieval Crossover: Reading the Secular Against the Sacred (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013).
- 91.
Miri Rubin, Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 343.
- 92.
As Brundage notes, “The courts dealt with sexual assaults on lower-class women as relatively trivial crimes,” these same courts “treated sexual attacks upon women of the upper classes as a social peril that required savage reprisal” (530).
- 93.
Kim M. Phillips, “Reading Rape from the Twelfth to the Fifteenth Centuries,” in Medieval Women and the Law, ed. Noel James Menuge (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2000), 125–144 (125).
- 94.
As quoted in John Marshall Carter, Rape in Medieval England: An Historical and Sociological Study (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985), 94.
- 95.
Rodney Delasanta, “The Mill in Chaucer’s ‘Reeve’s Tale’,” The Chaucer Review (2002): 270–276.
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Salisbury, E. (2017). Adolescentia: “For Youthe and Elde is Often at Debaat”. In: Chaucer and the Child. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-43637-5_5
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