Abstract
Referring to Giles of Rome’s cardinal political virtues, it is argued that Chaucer’s tale reveals that the subject’s suffering is caused by a moral flaw in the sovereign. What is unusual about Chaucer’s critique is that this lack is found in all legitimate sovereigns, not only in tyrants as medieval theory posits, thus suggesting that the subject’s suffering is a normative, not exceptional, consequence of her relation to the sovereign. The book’s final point is that while Chaucer’s tale depicts dramatically the extreme suffering of the exemplary subject, he suggests that there is no other alternative; that is, the subject can only exist in relation to the sovereign. It is perhaps Chaucer’s most despairing vision of political relations.
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Notes
- 1.
See Wisdom and Chivalry (Rigby 2009), where Stephen H. Rigby makes this point in a section of his introduction, “Chaucer, Giles of Rome and Medieval Political Theory,” 10–27, 19. See also Charles F. Briggs, Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum: Reading and Writing and Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c.1525 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 91–107 (Briggs 1999), who argues for its popularity in the universities where it was used as a text for moral theory.
- 2.
The Governance of Kings and Princes, 49. (Trevisa 1997)
- 3.
Ibid., 54, 57. (Trevisa 1997)
- 4.
Ibid., 65. (Trevisa 1997)
- 5.
Ibid., 70, 68. (Trevisa 1997)
Works Cited
Briggs, Charles F. 1999. Giles of Rome’s De Regimine Principum: Reading and Writing Politics at Court and University, c. 1275–c.1525. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rigby, Stephen H. 2009. Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale and Medieval Political Theory. Leiden: Brill.
Trevisa, John. 1997. The Governance of Kings and Princes: John Trevisa’s Middle English Translation of the De Regimine Principum of Aegidius Romanus, ed. David C. Fowler et al. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc.
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McClellan, W. (2016). Interpretation: Critique of Sovereign and the Exemplarity of the Suffering Subject. In: Reading Chaucer After Auschwitz. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54879-5_6
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