Griselda has always challenged the status of the human, even though critics have long sought to elucidate prized human characteristics through her behavior as wife, mother, and political subject. Despite these efforts, our moral investments in Griselda - quite literally, the ways we have sought to associate her with a host of social and moral prescriptions concerning subjectivity, femininity, maternity, and sovereignty - are confounded by her unyielding submission. Griselda is unfeeling, but she gains a horrible autonomy that critiques patriarchal tyranny. Griselda affirms women’s material investment in the household, but to do so she sacrifices all ethical bonds outside those mandated by her pre-marital pact with Walter. Griselda is transcendent, but she is alienated from a common humanity, much less Christianity. This chapter argues that Griselda is not an inhuman monster; rather, through The Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer imagines a different view of humanity, one engendered according to modes of virtue typically associated with women, including patience, pity, humility, steadfastness, and submission.

Chapter 1 argues that the Clerk’s performance, like Chaucer’s earlier House of Fame, presents an array of different and even contradictory conceptions of literary value in order to give Chaucer’s fiction the distinctive meta-value of standing above any one commitment to literary value, playfully and provocatively assessing competing options, and thereby positioning the implied author as a master of the literary game. For the House of Fame this sort of meta-value serves the purpose of imagining the social identity of customs controller as a legitimate and distinctive locus for poetic composition. In the Clerk’s performance Chaucer imagines the university student as a normative masculine occupation for which meta-axiology is an end in itself, and thereby gives his earlier position a more authoritative and traditional institutional home. To pursue this argument, the chapter considers the House of Fame; select features of the Clerk’s prologue, tale, and epilogue, for the tale focusing on specific wording in light of its Petrarchan source; and the Clerk’s portrait, placing it against the backdrop of what we know about the normative function of the university in Chaucer’s day.

After presenting book’s justification, the introduction articulates its central argument: that the four-tale sequence of Clerk, Merchant, Squire, and Franklin enacts a dynamically unfolding, conflicted meditation on how literary value may be construed in a way that justifies the time, energy, and expense devoted to the writing of fiction - a justification made in respect to other activities pertaining to other values, especially to economic value in the sense of making a living. The introduction then considers the metacritical stakes and implications of this argument along the methodological dimension of the bearing of manuscript evidence on the principles of Chaucer interpretation and the conceptual dimension of the problem literary value. The former consideration reviews the manuscript basis for the book’s claim about the four-tale sequence; the latter consideration indicates theoretical debts (to, e.g., Bruno Latour and Georg Simmel) and introduces several key terms used throughout the book (the most important: literary axiology, axiological person, and axiological logic), explaining the relation of these terms to more traditional ones of Chaucer criticism.