I want to tell you of a marquis, whose actions, even though things turned out well for him in the end, were remarkable not so much for their munificence as for their senseless brutality [no casa magnifica ma una matta bestialita]. Nor do I advise anyone to follow his example, for it was a great pity that the fellow should have drawn any profit from his conduct.

Dioneo introducing the Decameron’s 100^th tale, quoted in Wallace, “’Whan She Translated Was’…”, 187.

…my object in thus rewriting your tale was not to induce the women of our time to imitate the patience of this wife, which seems almost beyond imitation, but to lead my readers to emulate the example of feminine constancy, to submit themselves to God with the same courage as did this woman to her husband. . .Therefore I would add to the list of constant men whosoever he be who suffers without murmur for his God what this rustic wife suffered for her mortal husband.

Petrarch to Boccaccio, c. 1374

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

The Clerk’s Tale of Griselda has become in modern times perhaps The Canterbury Tales' supreme test of its readers' interpretative powers. It taxes more than any other their capacities to re-enter with sympathy and informed understanding the values and ideals of an age insistently different from their own: it insists on its "otherness" from all our habits of reading, our customs of approval, and our wishes for comfort. Though critics differ widely as to which course of discipline will best enable us to enter the tale as properly informed readers, nearly all are agreed that we must give up something-some modern prejudice, or skepticism or ignorance or indifference, toward a medieval trait or habit of thought. Acts of interpretation commonly set about a dual course of instruction to take us across the chasm: to wean us away from that something which is ours and to supply us with something "medieval," information we did not know or are unable to apply, to take its place.

Anne Middleton, “The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 2 (1980): 121.

Further, it is this double perspective that constitutes that famous "Chaucerian irony": Chaucerian irony is not simply saying one thing while meaning another, but saying one thing with a clear sense of and vivid interest in what is left out of that saying (and who it is who is not saying anything). These basic and notoriously "Chaucerian" poetic strategies must be understood in their social dimensions; Chaucer's sexual poetics always engages the play between what is said and what is consequently not said, what is brought into being and what is thereby eliminated, who is talking and who is not talking, who or what is allowed to signify and who or what is not allowed to signify.

Carolyn Dinshaw, “Griselda Translated,” from Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 154-55.

What frightens the Clerk so much that he has to joke about it is, first, the power of Griselda, the silenced woman, and her inhuman, celebrated capacity to suffer. This power, within the tale, has also frightened her husband Walter, in ways I have suggested; the envoy reveals that it is, moreover, paradoxically reminiscent of the power attributed by the Clerk to women like the Wife of Bath. What Griselda and the Wife seem to have in common is their capacity, manifested in opposite ways, to escape or at least lay bare the operation of male tyranny by exceeding, in different directions, its enunciated limits. Second, I submit, the Clerk may be frightened by his own likeness to Griselda, a parallel often drawn by readers. As a youth whose manhood is openly questioned by the Host, as an unbeneficed young cleric, and as a storyteller translating a renowned author, the Clerk occupies a marginal and insecure position in the culture that wants to rule the day, the hearty manly world organized and policed both by the menacing Host of the Canterbury Tales and by the literary tradition embodied in the authority vested in Petrarch and the Latin source text. If Griselda exceeds the demands of her husband, so too the Clerk exceeds the demands of translation, and nowhere more than in the excess of endings to his tale. While the Clerk's sympathy with women may be suspect, then, his identification with the feminine position and hence his insight into the nature of a certain kind of psychic oppression is plausible, and it is as frightening to him as it is to a woman like the Wife.

Elaine Tuttle Hansen, from Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, 203-04

Yet these morals and explanations fail to satisfy, as the critical history of the tale makes clear. Readers are right to question the appropriateness of the moral, which even the narrator has difficulty applying (1142-44), and which disintegrates completely in the dazzling poetry of the parodic Envoy. It is not the tacked-on moral, nor Walter's cool account of his motives, but the experience of the narrative itself that bears the tale's meaning. Our experience of Griselda's mysterious assent, which will not yield to Walter's or to our critical avysement, forces us to confront the radical demands of faith, and our need, as fallen people, to rationalize them. The pathos urged by the tale's telling does indeed, as Salter shows, bring a divided response, both encouraging a sympathetic, nonrational joining with Griselda's suffering and triggering a rational search for the causes of such "nedelees" suffering (see 452). But as Spearing suggests, that divided response carries the tale's meaning better than any moral can, repeatedly marking the difference between our "freletee" and Griselda's faith (1160). As with other numinous religious narratives, our experience of the tale serves precisely as the Clerk says adversity does in God's scheme, "as for oure excercise" (1156), so that by our pity we may at least come to know our own frailty, our Walterity.

Linda Georgianna, “The Clerk's Tale and the Grammar of Assent,” Speculum 70: 4 (1995), 818.