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Proverbs and the wisdom of literature: The Proverbs of Alfred and Chaucer's Tale of Melibee

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 24; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360903471862

1470-1308

Christopher Cannon,

Medieval Literature and History

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgement I owe particular thanks to Mary Carruthers, and the anonymous readers for Textual Practice for their incisive readings of earlier drafts of this essay. I am also grateful to audiences at Yale University, New York University, the University of Geneva, and Bristol University for their suggestions and helpful reactions to the paper in which I first began to explore this subject. Notes Kenneth Burke, ‘Literature as Equipment for Living’ in his The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action (Louisiana: State University Press, 1941), p. 296. Kenneth Burke, ‘Literature as Equipment for Living’, p. 297 (‘strategy’) and p. 298 (‘highly alembicated’). Kenneth Burke, ‘Literature as Equipment for Living’, p. 293 (‘medicine’) and p. 300 (‘naming … a situation’, ‘adopt an attitude’). Jacques Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’ in Derek Attridge (ed.), Acts of Literature (New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 414–33. For Derrida's definition of the ‘aphorism’ see also his ‘Fifty-Two Aphorisms for a Foreward’ in Andreas Papdakis, Catherine Cook, and Andrew Benjamin (ed.), Deconstruction: Omnibus Volume (London: Academy Editions, 1989), pp. 67–76, esp. p. 69. Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, p. 420. Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, p. 433. There is a vast modern literature on the proverb, and a modern journal (Proverbium: Yearbook of International Proverb Scholarship [1984–]) entirely devoted to its study. A comprehensive survey of definitions of the form since antiquity is provided in B. J. Whiting, ‘The Nature of the Proverb’, Harvard Studies and Notes in Philology and Literature, 14 (1932), pp. 273–307. This material is summarized in the introduction to Whiting's magisterial catalogue of proverbs in Old and Middle English writings, Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500, Bartlett Jere Whiting (ed.), with Helen Wescott Whiting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. x–xvii. Since my claim in all that follows is that an understanding of the medieval proverb is only as accurate as the rigour of its historicism, I have found almost all modern definitions unhelpful in my own study (even, as I note below, Whiting's own), whether they be ‘social’ (‘proverbs [are] the strategic social use of metaphor’, Peter Seitel, ‘Proverbs: A Social Use of Metaphor’, Genre, 2 [1969], p. 143), ‘formal’ (‘the most important characteristic of a traditional saying is the symmetrical structure of its form and content’, G. B. Milner, ‘What Is a Proverb’, New Society, 332 [1969], p. 200), ‘ethical’ (‘proverbs … are pithy, memorable phrases and sentences that encapsulate guidance for behaviour in ethical situations’, Cameron Louis, ‘Authority in Middle English Proverb Literature’, Florilegium, 15 [1998], p. 85), or ‘political’ (‘proverbs are a kind of linguistic instrument … by which people attempt to get other members of their culture and society to see the world and behave in a common way’, Cameron Louis, ‘Proverbs and the Politics of Language’, Proverbium, 17 [2000], p. 177). The Melibee is usually understood as a political text, a work of ‘counsel’ or a ‘mirror for princes’. See, for example, Lee Patterson, ‘“What Man Artow?”: Authorial Self-Definition in The Tale of Sir Thopas and The Tale of Melibee’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer 11 (1989), pp. 117–176, (esp. pp. 135–160), and Judith Ferster, Fictions of Advice: The Literature and Politics of Counsel in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), pp. 89–107. This is also the presumption in Donald Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), p. 309 and Richard Firth Green, Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), p. 143. For more specific historicist arguments which see the Melibee as an attempt to intervene in particular moments, or in particular issues, of late fourteenth century politics, see Gardiner Stillwell, ‘The Political Meaning of Chaucer's Tale of Melibee’, Speculum, 19 (1944), pp. 433–444; William Askins, ‘The Tale of Melibee and the Crisis at Westminster, November, 1387’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Proceedings, 2 (1986), pp. 103–112; V. J. Scattergood, ‘Chaucer and the French War: Sir Thompas and Melibee’ in Glyn S. Burgess, with A. D. Deyermond, W. H. Jackson, A. D. Mills, and P. T. Ricketts (ed.), Court and Poet: Selected Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society (Liverpool 1980) (Liverpool: Francis Cairns, 1981), pp. 287–296; and Lynn Staley Johnson, ‘Inverse Counsel: Contexts for the Melibee’, Studies in Philology, 87 (1990), pp. 137–155. David Wallace sees the Melibee as a work of ‘counsel’ but for ‘he or she who must speak to powerful men’, rather than for princes (Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy [Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997], p. 221). David Aers finds a more quiet politics in the Melibee's embrace of forgiveness and repentance ‘without any mention of the Church in which the Catholic Christian was taught to fulfil the sacrament of penance’, an absence that seems very carefully to avoid ‘traditions under pressure from Wycliffites’. See his ‘Chaucer's Tale of Melibee: Whose Virtues?’ in David Aers (ed.), Medieval Literature and Historical Inquiry: Essays in Honour of Derek Pearsall (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2000), p. 81 (for the phrases I have quoted). One important exception to these categorizations is Mann, who identifies the Melibee as an instance of wisdom literature in the head note to her commentary on the tale in Mann (ed.), The Canterbury Tales (pp. 1000–1001). Another important exception is Betsy Bowden, ‘Ubiquitous Format? What Ubiquitous Format? Chaucer's Tale of Melibee as a Proverb Collection’, Oral Tradition, 17 (2002), pp. 169–207, although the wide-ranging concerns of this article in no way anticipate my own (‘the analysis will contribute towards a fuller understanding of everybody's favorite Canterbury pilgrim, the Wife of Bath’, p. 170). For a survey of this literature in Middle English literature, see Cameron Louis, ‘Proverbs, Precepts, and Monitory Pieces’ in gen. Albert E. Hartung (ed.), A Manual of the Writings in Middle English (New Haven, CT: Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1993–). Vol. 9. pp. 2957–3048. On the genre in the Bible, see W. Baumgartner, ‘The Wisdom Literature’ in H. H. Rowley (ed.), The Old Testament and Modern Study: A Generation of Discovery and Research (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951), pp. 210–237. On the kinds of ancient wisdom on which these texts draw, see E. W. Heaton, The School Tradition of the Old Testament (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). For a detailed account of the particular texts on which the Book of Proverbs draws, see R. N. Whybray, The Composition of the Book of Proverbs (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994) and R. N. Whybray, The Book of Proverbs: A Survey of Modern Study (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), esp. pp. 1–28. See Heaton, School Tradition of the Old Testament, esp. pp. 24–64. See Nicholas Orme, Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 41–42, 97–98, 100–101; Jo Ann Hoeppner Moran, The Growth of English Schooling: Learning and Literacy and Laicization in Pre-Reformation York Diocese (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 27–28. Collections of school texts in which the Distichs plays a foundational role are described in Tony Hunt, Teaching and Learning Latin in Thirteenth-Century England (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 3 vols. Vol. 1. pp. 59–79. The foundational role of the Distichs for Middle English writers is well described in Jill Mann, ‘“He Knew Nat Catoun”: Medieval School-Texts and Middle English Literature’ in Jill Mann and Maura Nolan (ed.), The Text in the Community: Essays on Medieval Works, Manuscripts, Authors, and Readers (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006), pp. 41–74. ΠAPOIMIOΓPAΦIA. PROVERBS, OR, OLD SAYED SAVVES & ADAGES, IN English (or the Saxon Toung) Italian, French and Spanish whereunto the British, for their great Antiquity, and weight are added (J. G., 1659), A, 1v., as cited in Whiting, ‘The Nature of the Proverb’, p. 294. John Heywood, ‘The First Hundred Epigrams’ in Burton A. Milligan (ed.), John Heywood's Works and Miscellaneous Short Poems, Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 41 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1956), pp. 103–139, 104. John Heywood, ‘A Dialogue Containing Proverbs’ in Milligan (ed.), Heywood's Works, pp. 17–101. Adagiorum Chilias Prima, ed. M. L. van Poll-van de Lisdonk, M. Mann Phillips, Chr. Robinson, Ordo 2, Vol. 1 in Desiderius Erasmus, Opera Omnia (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1969–) and Adages, trans. Margaret Mann Phillips, annotated R. A. B Mynors, Vol. 31 in Collected Works of Erasmus (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1974–). Erasmus generally refers to the texts he is collecting as paroemia, rather than adagium (a term he actually uses rather sparingly), but he frequently cites definitions of the proverbium (e.g. Adagia, Prolegomena, i. [p. 45, ll. 10 and 12], Adages, Introduction, i. [p. 3, ll. 6 and 8]), entitles one section of his introduction ‘Commendatio proverbiorum a dignitate’ [Proverbs are to be respected for their value] (Adagia Prolegomena, v. [p. 52, l. 77]), and refers, for example, interchangeably, to proverbia and paroemia in a section called ‘Ad persuadendum conducere’ [(Proverbs) as a means to persuasion] (Adagia, Prolegomena, vii. [pp. 62–64, ll. 319, 330, 331, 350, 354, 358, 367 [‘proverbia’ and its declined forms], ll. 333, 346, 372 [‘paroemia’ and its declined forms]; for this section in the translation, see Adages, pp. 15–17). Paroemia is also the common term for the proverb in rhetorical treatises, see, for example, Quintilian, Donald Russell (ed.), Institutio Oratoria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5 vols, V.11.21, VIII.6,58. ‘Adages’, p. 13. Adagia, Prolegomena, i (p. 46, ll. 39–40); Adages, Introduction, i (p. 4, ll. 37–39). Adagia, Proglemona, i (p. 46, ll. 44–46); Adages, Introduction i (p. 4, ll. 43–44). Natalie Zeemon Davis discusses this shift in ‘Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors’ in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London: Duckworth, 1975), pp. 227–267, esp. pp. 230–236. Her historical distinctions are slightly confounded by her sense that ‘vernacular proverbs attributed to peasants or common people’ (p. 230) was an important medieval genre, but, as I shall try to show in this essay, vernacularity in no way diminished the medieval proverb's authority or dignity. Whiting, ‘Nature of the Proverb’, p. 294. Whiting, ‘Nature of the Proverb’, p. 302. Emphasis mine. Davis, ‘Proverbial Wisdom and Popular Errors’, p. 243. Emphasis mine. Maxims I in T. A. Shippey (ed.), Poems of Wisdom and Learning in Old English (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1976), pp. 64–75, A.45 (‘lef mon’) and B.51–2 (‘Ræd biþ’). Dicta Catonis in J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff, Minor Latin Poets (ed. and trans.) (London: William Heinemann, 1961), pp. 583–639, II.1. Emphasis mine. Dicta Catonis, I.11 (I have altered Duff and Duff's translation here). Dicta Catonis, II.1. Publilius Syrus 1–111 in J. Wight Duff and Arnold M. Duff (ed. and trans.) Minor Latin Poets (London: William Heinemann, 1961), ll. 162–163. Helen Cooper, The Structure of the Cantebury Tales (London: Duckworth, 1983), p. 180. For an account of the beast fable and the Nun's Priest's Tale as ‘wisdom literature’, see Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘The Wisdom of the Nun's Priest's Tale’ in Edward Vasta and Zacharias P. Thundy (ed.), Chaucerian Problems and Perspectives: Essays Presented to Paul E. Beichner (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1979), pp. 70–82. Geoffrey Chaucer, Jill Mann (ed.), The Canterbury Tales (London: Penguin, 2005), VII.3431–3432. Subsequent citations from The Canterbury Tales will be taken from this edition and cited by fragment and line number in the text. The four texts are British Library, MS Cotton Galba A. XIX [C]]; Kent, Maidstone Museum MS A.13 [M]; Cambridge, Trinity College MS B.14.38 [T]; and Oxford, Jesus College MS 29 [J]. Only three leaves of C survive, but there are also three extant transcripts of other portions of the manuscript made before it was all but destroyed in the fire of 1731 that consumed much of the Cotton library. None of these texts is believed to be descended from any of the others, although C and M may be descended from a common source. Such a stemma implies that there were at least two further manuscripts of the text in addition to the archetype. For the history and description of these four manuscripts and an account of their relationship, see The Proverbs of Alfred, O. Arngart (ed.) (Lund: C. W. K Gleerup, 1955), pp. 11–49. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent quotations from the Proverbs of Alfred will be taken from text ‘J’ in this edition, and cited by line number in the text. There is a dearth of criticism on this text, but it has been edited with surprising frequency: The Proverbs of Alfred, Walter W. Skeat (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), Helen Pennock South, The Proverbs of Alfred: Studied in the Light of the Recently Discovered Maidstone Manuscript (New York: New York University Press, 1931), Selections from Early Middle English, 1130–1250, Joseph Hall (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1920), pp. 18–28 and Old and Middle English: An Anthology, Elaine Treharne (ed.) (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 358–368. Proverbs of Alfred, Arngart (ed.), pp. 1, 6. I am counting the stanzas in J here; T has 34 stanzas in all and C, although there are a few lacunae in the transcriptions, seems to have had 32. For an analysis of this metre see Proverbs of Alfred, Arngart (ed.), pp. 225–232. Chaucer cites this proverb in the Nun's Priest's Tale, ‘Wommens conseils ben ful ofte colde’ (VII.3256), where it is also as inert as any proverb could be, since it is cited at the moment that Chauntecleer has just heeded his wife's counsel (ignoring the import of his dream) although he pretends otherwise, and is just about to discover that that counsel is false (since it turns out that the dream he has not heeded was, indeed, as prophetic as he had argued it was). For a comprehensive sifting of the evidence, see Proverbs of Alfred, pp. 4–6. See also R. M. Wilson, Early Middle English Literature (London: Methuen, 1939), pp. 189–190. Derek Pearsall, Old English and Middle English Poetry (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 77. See Minor Latin Poets, Duff and Duff (ed.), pp. 585–586. The Book of Proverbs describes itself as ‘the parables of Solomon, the son of David’ [parabolae Salamonis, filii David] (1: 1); Ecclesiastes consists of ‘the words of Ecclesiastes, the son of David, king of Jerusalem’ [verba Ecclesiastes filii David Regis Hierusalem] (1:1); in its prologue Ecclesiasticus is said to have been written by Jesus (ben Sirach) who, ‘had a mind … to write something himself pertaining to doctrine and wisdom’ [volui et ipse scribere aliquod horum quae ad doctrinam et sapientiam pertinent], and this wisdom is addressed, throughout the book, to a pupil: ‘Son, when thou comest to the service of God, stand in justice and in fear’ [fili accedens servituti Dei sta in iustitia et timore] [2:1]); although it does not so identify itself in the Vulgate, the book of Wisdom is traditionally called the ‘Book of the Wisdom of Salomon’ [Liber Sapientiae Salamonis]. For these quotations from the Vulgate see Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem, Bonifatio Fischer, Jean Gribomont, H. F. D. Sparks, W. Thiele, Robert Weber (ed.) (Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 1983; first published 1969), 3rd ed. Whybray, Composition of the Book of Proverbs, 7. On these first nine chapters, see this volume, pp. 11–61. A very rich account of the various theories about the composite nature of this book can be found in R. N. Whybray, The Book of Proverbs: A Survey of Modern Study (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), pp. 34–84. Book of Proverbs, 9, pp. 1–2 Book of Proverbs, 1, pp. 20–21. Dicta Catonis, Prologue (unlineated). The exercises are described in Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric in Greco-Roman Education (New York: Columbia University Press, 1957), pp. 179–212 and James J. Murphy, ‘Roman Writing Instruction as Described by Quintilian’ in James J. Murphy (ed.) A Short History of Writing Instruction: From Ancient Greece to Twentieth-Century America (Davis, California: Hermagoras Press, 1990), pp. 19–76, 53–61. For a less detailed account, see also Ernst Robert Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask, Bollingen Series 36 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 442. See Der Neue Pauly Enzykopädie der Antike, Hubert Cancik and Helmuth Schneider (ed.) (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 2001), s. vv. ‘Hermogenes’ and ‘Priscianus’. A translation of Hermogenes is printed in Charles Sears Baldwin, Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic (New York: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 23–39. For the original, see Hermogenis Opera, H. Rabe (ed.), Rhetorica Graeci 6 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1913), pp. 1–27. I quote the Latin translations here from Priscian, Praeexercitamina in Carol Halm (ed.), Rhetores Latini Minores (Leipzig: Teubner, 1863), pp. 551–560. Priscian, Praeexercitamina, c. 7 (p. 556). Priscian, Praeexercitamina, c. 4 (p. 554). For a variety of descriptions of this exercise (including the relevant passages from Hermogenes and Priscian), see Ronald F. Hock and Edward N. O'Neill, The Chreia in Ancient Rhetoric, Vol. 1: The Progymnasmata (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1986). A series of texts showing the use to which this exercise was put in letter writing and more advanced writing are collected in The Chreia and Ancient Rhetoric: Classroom Exercises, Ronald F. Hock and Edward N. O'Neil (trans. and ed.) (Leiden: Brill, 2002). Prisician, Praeexercitamina, c. 2 (p. 552). Quintilian, The Orator's Education [Institutiones oratoriae] Donald A. Russell (ed. and trans.) (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 5 vols., I.9 (1: 210–211). Isidore of Seville, Etymologiarum sive originum libri XX, W. M. Lindsay (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1911), II, xi. A Greek-English Lexicon, Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott (ed.), rev. Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940; first published 1843), s. v. ‘χρεíα’, III, 1–2. ‘At about this time I too was summoned by the king form the remote, westernmost parts of Wales, and I came to the Saxon land … I arrived in the territory of the right-hand Saxons, which in English is called Sussex. There I saw him for the first time at the royal estate which is called Dean’ [His temporibus ego quoque a rege advocatus de occiduis et ultimis Britanniae finibus ad Saxoniam adveni … usque ad regionem Dexteralium Saxonum, quae Saxonice Suth-Seaxum appelatur … perveni … Ibique illum in villa regia, quae dicitur Dene, primitus vidi], Asser's Life of King Alfred in Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, trans. Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 65–110, §79 (p. 93); Asser's Life of King Alfred, William Henry Stevenson (ed.) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959), §79 (pp. 63–64). ‘Dean’ is less than six miles from ‘Seaford’ – the putative location of the Proverbs of Alfred – in Sussex. For the phrase ‘Senec seyth’ (or its equivalent) see VII.984, 991, 1071, 1127, 1147, 1185, 1226, 1320, 1324, 1437, 1448, 1450, 1455, 1488, 1531, 1775, 1859, 1866. For the phrase ‘Salomon seyth’ (or its equivalent) see VII.997, 1003, 1047, 1057, 1060, 1076, 1078, 1087, 1113, 1158, 1167, 1171, 1173, 1178, 1186, 1194, 1317, 1416, 1485, 1512, 1514, 1539, 1542, 1550, 1571, 1571, 1572, 1578, 1589, 1590, 1628, 1638, 1639, 1653, 1664, 1671, 1696, 1704, 1707, 1709, 1719, 1739, 1754. For the phrase ‘Tullius seyth’ (or its equivalent) see VII.1165, 1176, 1180, 1192, 1201, 1339, 1344, 1347, 1355, 1359, 1360, 1381, 1387, 1390, 1393, 1585, 1621, 1860. ‘Where there is no hearing, pour not out words’ [ubi auditus est non effundas sermonem], Ecclesiasticus 32, 6; ‘Counsel is always most lacking when it is most necessary’ [Semper consilium tunc deest cum opus est maxime], Publilius Syrus, l. 653. As cited in The Canterbury Tales, Mann (ed.), p. 1003. Patterson, ‘“What Man Artow”’, p. 157. Seneca, On Mercy in Moral Essays, John W. Basore (ed. and trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994; first published 1928), Vol. 1, pp. 356–449, I.xxiv.I (‘Remissius imperanti melius paretur’); Publilius Syrus, l. 77 (‘Bis vincit qui se vincit in victoria’); Cicero, De Officiis, Walter Miller (ed. and trans.) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997; first published 1913), I.xxv.88 (‘Nihil enim laudabilius, nihil magno et praeclaro viro dignius placabilitate atque clementia’); and Publilius Syrus, l. 407 (‘Male vincit is quem paenitet victoriae’). These attributions are carefully sourced in The Canterbury Tales, ed. Mann (see p. 1015). See Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The New Ellesmere Chaucer Monochromatic Facsimile (of Huntington Library MS EL 26 C 9), Daniel Woodward and Martin Stevens (ed.) (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1997), f. 168r. Mann finds such additions at VII.1054 and 1325–1326 but notes that ‘even here we cannot be certain that the proverbs were not additions already present in the manuscript of the French text he was using’, The Canterbury Tales, p. 1001. Cooper, Structure of the Cantebury Tales, pp. 173–176. For similar views see also Dolores Palomo, ‘What Chaucer Really Did to Le Livre de Mellibee’, Philological Quarterly, 53 (1974), pp. 49–55 and Ralph W. V. Elliott, Chaucer's English (London: André Deutsch, 1974), pp. 173–174. John S. P. Tatlock, The Development and Chronology of Chaucer's Works, Chaucer Society, 2nd series 37 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1907), p. 189. Tatlock was specifically countering the view that the Melibee was Chaucer's revenge on the Host for interrupting his Tale of Sir Thopas. For this view, see The Prologue from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Frank Jewett Mather (ed.) (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), p. xxxi and Robert M. Lumiansky, Of Sondry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1955), p. 94. More recently, Derek Pearsall echoed Tatlock when he suggested that ‘[the Middle Ages] must also have enjoyed the remorseless good sense of this kind of schematised anthology of moral commonplaces’ (The Canterbury Tales [London: G. Unwin and Allen, 1985], p. 287) and Talbot Donaldson also observed that the Melibee was ‘a very popular story in the Middle Ages when readers did not entirely distinguish between pleasure in literature and pleasure in being edified’ (Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modern Reader, Talbot Donaldson (ed.) [New York: Ronald Press, 1975], p. 1101). Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988), p. 5. Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 2. Derrida, ‘Aphorism Countertime’, p. 433.