1.
All quotations from The Canterbury Tales are from The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd
ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987).
2.
Children are briefly mentioned in The Knight's Tale: the woman in labor at Diana's feet,
"for hir child so longe was unborn" (I.2084) and in Mars' temple, "The sowe freten the child right
in the cradel" (I.2019). The Parson refers to children in his tale. Many of his references have to
do with injury to children. In his discussion of penance we learn that "Thilke penance that is
solempne is in two maneres; as to be put out of hooly chirche in Lente for slaughtre of children,
and swich maner thyng" (X.102). Regarding the sin of Ire, we learn it is a deadly sin if "a
womman by necligence overlyeth hire child in hir slepyng" (X.574); equally, it is a deadly sin if a
man or woman prevents conception, causes an abortion, or commits infanticide (X.575-7). Under
the sin of Lechery, we learn that some men put their own children out to prostitution (X.885).
Other references can be found at X.121-22, X.220-21, and X.669-72.
3.
M. Teresa Tavormina, "Explanatory Notes to the Merchant's Prologue and Tale," The
Riverside Chaucer, p. 889.
4.The Squire's Tale does present us with a family: King Cambyuskan; his wife, Elpheta; two
sons, Algarsyf and Cambalo; and his daughter, Canacee. However, the tale focuses, if it can be
said to focus on anything, on Canacee as a romance heroine rather than as a daughter. The rest of
the family and, indeed, the rest of the tale itself are abandoned with the Franklin's interruption.
5.
Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed.
Larry D. Benson (Boston, 1987).
6.
Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London, 1985), p. 211.
7.
Of the children in The Reeve's Tale we might note that by medieval standards, the miller's
daughter is not a child but a woman, who, following her seduction, connives with her seducer
against her father, and that the infant is a cipher whose cradle is used only to advance the plot.
However, it is true that the crudity of the tale is enhanced by the fact that the students revenge
themselves on the miller through his daughter (and his wife). Paradoxically, the crudity
demonstrates my point that the presence of children in fabliaux complicates the genre by injecting
moral considerations.
8.
An extended discussion of literary genre might be somewhat digressive for a paper of this length.
However, it is important to note that such genre distinctions were rather fluid in the Middle Ages.
For some general distinctions about romance and fabliaux as they appear in The Canterbury
Tales, we might rely on the definitions of Derek Pearsall: "The general character of the
medieval romance is that it is, first, a narrative of the life of an idealized warrior aristocracy, in
which prowess in feats of arms and dedication to the service of women are the principal subjects. .
. . What is essential is the function of such narratives as demonstrations of an ideal code of
conduct in operation. The demonstration may be in the form of a quest, a battle, a love-affair, but
what it will always contain is a test and proof of the code" (The Canterbury Tales, p.115).
The necessities of such a genre leave little room for the depiction of children, focused as the genre
is on the testing and proof of the worth of individual adults. Outside The Canterbury
Tales, children do appear in a few romances like King Horn or Sir Degar
where we see the hero develop from childhood, but, in general, children do not appear in
romances as active adjuncts to the adults who must single-mindedly pursue their allotted
quests.
Pearsall defines the fabliau as "a comic tale of lower bourgeois life, involving trickery,
often obscene, with a coarse sexual motive," and, more broadly, speaking of the comic tales in
general, he stresses what I have called their essential amorality: "The common understanding of
author and reader is that there are no values, secular or religious, more important than survival
and the satisfaction of appetite" (The Canterbury Tales, pp. 166, 167). Moreover, the
fabliaux in The Canterbury Tales rely on one plot: the older husband is duped by his
younger or more sexual wife and her younger lover. The humor (and/or crudity) lies in how this
is achieved. The injection of children as significant characters into such a plot would alter the
formal structure and would complicate the amoral compact Pearsall describes as having been
made between author and reader. Significantly, Chaucer seems to think children appropriate to
tales which are highly moral and which investigate and affirm Christian values.
9.
Robert Worth Frank, Jr., "The Canterbury Tales III: Pathos," in The Cambridge
Chaucer Companion, ed. Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge, 1986), 143-158, at p. 149.
10.
C. David Benson's note to VI.207-53 in The Riverside Chaucer, p. 903, points out that
Chaucer changes Virginia's death from its depiction in his sources. Originally Virginia is beheaded
publicly under extreme pressure, while Chaucer makes the beheading private and deliberate.
11.
As Brian S. Lee points out in "The Position and Purpose of The Physician's Tale,"
Chaucer Review 22 (1987), 141-160, readers of The Physician's Tale have had
difficulty with "the appalling facility with which Virginius decapitates his daughter sooner than
allow her to forfeit her chastity" (p. 142), but he argues that Chaucer's intention is to make the
reader face an "intellectual dilemma" (p. 157), the choice between chastity and death.
12.
Jill Mann, "Parents and Children in The Canterbury Tales," in Literature in Fourteenth
Century England, ed. Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Tbingen, 1983), pp. 165-83.
13.
Mann, "Parents and Children," p. 165.
14.
Francis Lee Utley, "Five Genres in The Clerk's Tale," Chaucer Review 6 (1972),
198-228, at p. 224.
15.
Sister Rose Marie, "Chaucer and His Mayde Bright," The Commonweal 33 (1940),
225-27.
16.
James I. Wimsatt, "The Blessed Virgin and the Two Coronations of Griselda,"
Mediaevalia 6 (1980), 187-207, at p. 192.
17.
Mann, "Parents and Children," p. 177.
18.
See also Sherman Hawkins, "Chaucer's Prioress and the Sacrifice of Praise," Journal of
English and German Philology 63 (1964), 599-624; Summer Ferris, "The Mariology of the
Prioress's Tale," Benedictine Review 32 (1981), 232-254; and Beverly Boyce,
"Our
Lady According to Geoffrey Chaucer: Translation and Collage," Florilegium 9 (1987),
147-54.
19.
Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, p. 248; Frank, "Canterbury Tales III," p. 154.
20.
Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales, p. 248.
21. Wilhelm Schneemelcher and Edgar Hennecke, eds., New Testament
Apocrypha, trans. R. McL. Wilson, 2 vols. (Philadelphia, 1959), pp. 404-8.
22. According to Montagu Rhodes James, in his edition The Apocryphal New
Testament (Oxford, 1969), the infancy gospel Pseudo-Matthew was "the principal
vehicle by which . . . [the infancy stories] were known to the Middle Ages and the principle
source of inspiration to the artists and poets of the centuries from the twelfth to the fifteenth"
(79). Many of the stories regarding Jesus as a child have to do with miracles He performs,
sometimes cruel ones, to demonstrate His power and His special status and to indicate to His
parents that the usual parent/child relationship is, in their case, reversed. For example, in Chapter
XVIII Joseph, Mary and Jesus come to a cave inhabited by dragons. Jesus subdues the dragons
and informs His astonished parents, "Fear not, neither conceive that I am a child, for I always was
and am a perfect man, and it is necessary that all the beasts of the forest should grow tame before
me" (75). 23. All quotations from the lyrics are from Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical
Anthology, ed. R. T. Davies (Evanston, 1963). "The Mother and her Son on the Cross," p.
86.
24. "Mary Suffers with her Son," Medieval English Lyrics, p.119.
25. "The Mother and her Son on the Cross," Medieval English Lyrics, p. 87.
26. "Mary Complains to Other Mothers," Medieval English Lyrics, p. 211.
27. All quotations from the drama are from Medieval Drama, ed. David
Bevington (Atlanta, 1975).
28.Herod the Great, in Medieval Drama, pp. 448, 449.
29.Christ's Death and Buria l, in Medieval Drama, p. 585.
30.Passion Play I, in Medieval Drama, p. 519.
31.The Scourging, in Medieval Drama, p. 564.
