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The Book-Burning Episode in the Wife Of Bath's Prologue: Some Additional Analogues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

John M. Steadman
John M. Steadman*
Affiliation:
Atlanta, Georgia
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Extract

Though scholars have long recognized the influence of the antifeminist tradition on the Wife of Bath's Prologue, they have overlooked its possible impact on the fate of Jankyn's “book of wikked wyves.” Fansler noted “a rather curious literary precedent” in Marie de France's “Li Lais de Gugemar,” which described a painting of Venus committing Ovid's Remédia Amoris to the flames. A closer parallel to the scene in which Dame Alisoun “made him brenne his book anon right tho” exists, however, in several of the “Eastern” versions of the legend of the Seven Sages, or Books of Sindibad.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 74 , Issue 5 , December 1959 , pp. 521 - 525
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1959

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References

1 Bartlett J. Whiting, “The Wife of Bath's Prologue,” Sources and Analogues of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (Chicago, 1951), pp. 207–222; Robert Dudley French, A Chaucer Handbook, 2nd ed. (New York, 1947), p. 277; Francis Lee Utley, The Crooked Rib (Columbus, Ohio, 1944).

2 W. A. Clouston, The Book of Sindibad (Glasgow, 1884), pp. lv-lvi, cited Jankyn's “book comprising tales of the wickedness of wives” as evidence that “collections of ‘proverbs’ against women were common in England in the days of Chaucer.” He overlooked, however, the analogy between the fate of Jankyn's volume and the destruction of the similar collection in the Oriental story.

3 Dean S. Fansler, Chaucer and the Roman de la Rose (New York, 1914), p. 173; F. N. Robinson, ed., The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd ed. (London, 1957), p. 702.

4 For a bibliography of Sindibad, see Victor Chauvin, Bibliographie des Ouvrages Arabes, VIII (Liège et Leipzig, 1904), 1–219. For an account of the origin and diffusion of this story-collection, see Alessandro d'Ancona, ed., II libro dei Sette Savj (Paris, 1864) and Hermann Brockhaus' study in the same volume; Domenico Comparetti, Researches Respecting the Book of Sindibad (London, 1882); Clouston; Adolfo Bonilla y San Martin, eds., Libro de los enganos & los asayamientos de las mugeres (Barcelona y Madrid, 1904); Killis Campbell, A Study of the Romance of the Seven Sages with Special Reference to the Middle English Versions (Baltimore, 1898); Alexander Haggerty Krappe, “Studies on the Seven Sages of Rome,” Archivum Romanicum, viii (1924), 386–407; ix (1925), 345–365; xi (1927), 163–176; xvi (1932), 271–282; xix (1935), 213–226; Angel Gonzalez Palencia, ed., Versiones castellanas del “Sendebar” (Madrid y Granada, 1946); John Esten Keller, ed., El Libro de los Enganos, Univ. of North Carolina Studies in the Rom. Langs, and Lits., XX (1953); The Book of the Wiles of Women, Univ. of North Carolina Studies in the Rom. Langs, and Lits., xxvii (1956). The following studies are also useful, though largely out of date: A. Loiseleur Deslongchamps, Essai sur les fables indiennes et sur leur introduction en Europe (Paris, 1838); Heinrich Adelbert Keller, Li Romans des Sept Sages nach der Pariser Bandschrifl (Tubingen, 1836); Dyocletianus Leben von Hans von Buhel (Quedlinburg und Leipzig, 1841). For an English translation of The Seven Vazirs, see Clouston.

5 Hermann Brockhaus, “Zur Geschichte der Sieben weisen Meister,” Blatter fur literarische Unterhallung, Nos. 242–243 (Aug. 30–31, 1843). Cf. H. A. Keller, Li Romans, p. clxxxvi, Dyocletianus, pp. 34, 54.

6 Comparetti, pp. 19, 24–26, 29, 31, 34. Clouston (p. 83) entitles this tale “Story of the Man who Compiled a Book on the Wiles of Women.” D'Ancona (p. xviii) calls it “La rac-colta delle astuzie femminili.” E. Teza's translation of Brock-haus's essay, “I Sette Savj nel Tuti Namah di Nakhshabi” (d'Ancona, p. Ix), entitles it “Studii sulle astuzie femminili.” The story is also known as “Les ruses des femmes” (Loiseleur Deslongchamps, p. 185), “Le livre des ruses des femmes” (Chauvin, viii, 69, 177), “Enxemplo del mançebo que non queria casar fasta que sopiese las maldades de las mugeres” (Gonzalez Palencia, p. 46), “El libro de las astucias de las mujeres” (Gonzalez Palencia, p. xxv), and Tàs (Jo. Fr. Boissonade, ed., , De Syntipa et Cyri An-dreopuli Narratio, Paris, 1828, 88). Alfons Hilka, ed., His-toria septem sapientum, i (Heidelberg, 1912), xxiv, refers to this story as “Ingénia.”

7 Comparative tables showing the occurrence of this and other tales of the Sindibad group can be found in Gonzalez Palencia, xxiii-xxvii; Comparetti, p. 25; Paul Cassel, ed., Mischle Sindbai, Secundus Syntipas (Berlin, 1888), p. 362; Hilka, pp. xxiv-xxv.

8 Comparetti, p. 5.

9 Two Greek versions of Syntipas (each based on three different codices) have been edited by Victor Jernstedt and published with a preface by Peter Nikitin; see Mich. Andre-opuli Liber Syntipas, (Mémoiresdel'Académie Impériale des Sciences de St. Pélersbourg, VHIe Série), Vol. xi, No. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1912). In Nikitin's opinion, version “II” is the better text, and the version published by Boissonade and Alfred Eberhard is actually a retractatio or metaphrasis of this recensio prototypa. Nevertheless, except for minor differences in phraseology, the account of the book-burning episode is essentially the same in both texts. See Clouston, pp. 258–263, for a partial translation of “The Wiles of Women” into English.

10 Frédéric Macler, tr., Contes Syriaques, Histoire de Sind-ban (Paris, 1903), pp. 60–61). Macler inserted this translation (based on the retractatio of Syntipas) in his French version of the Syriac text edited by Baethgen; in the latter version, a lacuna occurs at the very beginning of this tale. See Friedrich Baethgen, ed., Sindbad oder die sieben weisen Meister (Leipzig, 1879), p. 33, “Es war einmal ein Mann, der hatte hoch und heilig geschworen, keine Frau zu nehmen, bevor er so weit gekommen sei, die ganze Arglist der bôsen Weiber kennen zu lernen . . . .”

11 Cf. Jernstedt, pp. 70–71. In version “II” this passage reads as follows: Cf. the retractatio: .

12 Gonzalez Palencia, pp. 1–66; J. E. Keller, ed., El Libro de los Enganos. For an English translation, see Clouston; J. E. Keller, tr., The Book of the Wiles of Women. See also George T. Artola, “Sindibad in Medieval Spanish,” MLN, Lxxi (1956), 37–42.

13 See J. E. Keller, Motif-Index of Mediaeval Spanish Exempta (Knoxville, Tenn., 1949), K. 1227.

14 Gonzalez Palencia, p. 48. Comparetti (p. 26) observed that the same ruse appears in Çukasaptali, which “puts principally in evidence the cunning behaviour of the woman towards the young man, suppressing almost entirely all that has reference to his studies of female wiles . . . .”

15 Brockhaus, No. 243. See also Wilhelm Pertsch, “Uber Nachschabi's Papagaienhuch,” Zeilschrift der deutschen mor-genlandischen Gesellschaft, xxt (1867), 505–551.

16 Ezio Levi, Poeti antichi lombardi (Milan, 1921), p. 119.

17 August Wulff, Die frauenfeindlichen Dichtungen in den romanischen Lileraluren des Mittelalters his zum Ende des XIII. Jahrhunderts (Halle a.S., 1914), pp. 146–147.

18 A. Tobler, “Proverbia quae dicuntur super natura femi-narum,” Zeitschrift fiir romanische Philologie, ix (1885), 302.

19 Syntipas; Libro de los Engafws; Nachschebi.

20 The identification of the owner or collector of the book of woman's wiles as a scholar is traditional. The Sindibad-nameh (composed in 1375 on the basis of a Persian prose narrative translated from the Arabic) describes him as a “wise man” and a “master” (Clouston, pp. 83–86; Com-paretti, p. 6). Ibn Arabshah's Fakihat al-Khulafa (a work of the fifteenth century) calls him a philosopher: see M. Car-donne, Melanges de littérature orientale, i (Paris, 1770), 23–25. H. A. Keller {Dyocletianus, p. 54) observes that “Das altdeutsche gedicht von Aristoteles erzâhlt, als demselben das weib den bekannten schimpf angethan, sei er auf eine insel geflohen . . . heiz Galiciâ:

dâ bleip er, unde machte dâ
ein michel buoch und schreib dar an
waz wunderlicher liste kan
daz schoene ungetriuwe wîp,
und wie diu leben unde lip
manigem hât verseret.“

Comparetti, p. 26, calls attention to the fact that both in Çukasaptali and in Nachschebi's story ”the man who is duped has a sacred character, being in the first a Brahmin, in the other a Dervish.“ Cf. also Inayat Allah's tale of a Brahmin who, after learning the orthodox Vedas, seeks to acquire the ”tiria bede“ (”the science or mystery of women“); see Tales Translated from the Persian of Inatulla of Delhi, i (London, 1786), 226–231.

21 See Robinson, p. 698; there he further observes that “Professor R. A. Pratt has in preparation an edition of an antifeminist compilation under the title of the Jankyn Book.”

22 In the Sindibad tradition the most imposing collection of women's ruses appears in the story in the Sindibad-nameh, where the scholar's own researches are supplemented by “a treatise on this subject” and “a commentary”—the fruit of forty years of travel; see Clouston, pp. 83–84.

23 In the Sindibad-nameh, however, the scholar's own collection is overshadowed by the compilation he receives from a stranger; see Note 22.

24 This identification of the victim of the book-burning episode as a Roman is unique. It has no parallel in the “Eastern” versions of the Seven Sages. Although a Roman setting occurs in the frame narrative of the “Western” versions, this group does not contain the story of “The Man Who Understood Female Wiles.” It is conceivable that the author of Castigabricon may have fused details derived from both traditions. For a comparative table of stories in the “Western” versions, see Campbell, p. 35.

25 Although “The Man Who Understood Female Wiles” does not occur in published versions of Mischle Sendabar (see Cassel's edition and the medieval Latin translation edited by Hilka), Professor Lillian H. Hornstein has called to my attention an additional “book-burning” analogue in each of two Hebrew manuscripts of the Seven Sages, recently transliterated, translated, and edited by Dr. Morris Epstein, in an unpublished dissertation in the New York University Library. See Adolf Neubauer, Catalogue of the Hebrew Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, i (Oxford, 1886), No. 1466; ii (Oxford, 1906), No. 2797.