Geoffrey Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Late Medieval Voluntarism

In this paper, I shall argue that Geoffrey Chaucer, in one of his most problematic tales, The Clerk’s Tale, affirms the radical power of the will in terms consonant with the urgent debates about the nature of the will taking place among late medieval philosophers known as voluntarists. The tale’s heroine, Griselda, I argue, embodies that aspect of voluntarist thought that affirms the will as the source of freedom, the locus of moral responsibility, and the origin of autonomous personhood. When we acknowledge the role the voluntarist affirmation of the primacy of the will plays in Griselda’s behavior, we can see that the power in the tale resides not with the domestic tyrant, Walter, but rather with Griselda, a peasant, who, like the Virgin Mary with whom she is compared, repeatedly manifests the efficacious, though ineffable, power of her adherence to her own will. Drawing on voluntarist ideas about the will, Chaucer transforms the apparently pitiable and victimized heroine of his Petrarchan source from a Christian heroine who demonstrates exemplary patience into a fully discerning subject, that is, in Paul Smith’s understanding of the word discernment, a resistant subject who has the power to unravel tyranny in the secular sphere. Considering the tale within a voluntarist context, I suggest, can help correct a major critical misapprehension of Griselda as admirably enduring though powerless and morally suspect, showing her instead to be an influential, discerning moral agent.

 - This event is 

, but 

.