In her 1990 review of scholarship on the Clerk's Tale, Charlotte Morse summarizes the text's problematic characteristics in unequivocal fashion: 'the story of Griselda, beguiling and horrific, acts like a tar-baby: whatever way critics stick to the story, they leave themselves exposed, their own attitudes revealed in what often seem to me embarrassing ways'.(FN1) The difficulty of stabilizing even one's own individual response to the tale is, it seems, a central facet of its workings, and one that pre-dates Chaucer's own rendering.(FN2) With the Clerk's Tale, as Elizabeth Salter so influentially argued in 1962,(FN3) Chaucer only heightens the internal contradictions and multiplies the framing devices of the story, leaving the reader in a state of unhappy -- or, as some critics have argued, happy -- confusion. I would like to suggest that this embarrassment of interpretation, as it were, illuminates an aspect of the tale, and of the character of Griselda, which deserves further attention.
    It seems worthwhile to begin with a brief comparison between two of Chaucer's clerical pilgrims: the Clerk and the Pardoner. This pairing could no doubt be pursued in any number of ways, but here I seek to draw attention to the contrast between their hermeneutic ideologies.(FN4) The Clerk is presented as the supreme reader, not only as a part of his stock persona, both self-adopted and imposed upon him by the other pilgrims and the reader, but also in the interpretative trickery with which he follows his tale, offering rapid changes of tone and meaning:

This world is nat so strong, it is no nay,
As it hath been in olde tymes yoore,
And herkneth what this auctor seith therfoore.
  This storie is seyd nat for that wyves sholde
Folwen Grisilde as in humylitee,
For it were inportable, though they wolde,
But for that every wight, in his degree,
Sholde be constant in adversitee
As was Grisilde [...]
  But o word, lordynges, herkneth er I go:
It were ful hard to fynde now-a-dayes
In al a toun Grisildis thre or two;
For if that they were put to swiche assayes,
The gold of hem hath now so badde alayes
With bras, that thogh the coyne be fair at ye,
It wolde rather breste a-two than plye.
  For which heere, for the Wyves love of Bathe--
Whos lyf and al hire secte God mayntene
In heigh maistrie, and elles were it scathe --
I wol with lusty herte, fressh and grene,
Seyn yow a song to glade yow, I wene;
And lat us stynte of ernestful matere.(FN5)

    Above all, it seems to me that he must be regarded as a reader, for the simple reason that he tells such an ambiguous and difficult tale, and then airily explains it for us: first, following his own clerkly model, as an allegory of the soul, only then to offer further, progressively more flippant, readings. This game-playing has been multiply interpreted -- as an exposure of the emptiness of his exemplary Griselda,(FN6) and as an indictment of the comic awfulness of her reverse which retrospectively valorizes her;(FN7) as a display of hermeneutic openness,(FN8) and as a cunning enforcement of control over interpretation.(FN9) The only thing I am certain it asserts is the vitality of reading. Implicitly, he is saying, a tale may not stand alone. A tale is opaque and incomplete without its being actively deciphered; that is to say, it must be given meaning by the participation of its interpreter. In this sense, then, the morality of a tale is a measure of the morality of its reader: a point to which I shall return.
    In sharp contrast, the Pardoner asserts that a tale does possess a currency of its own:
    For though myself be a ful vicious man, A moral tale yet I yow telle kan, Which I am wont to preche for to wynne.(FN10)
    However, as the Pardoner's motivation for the telling so rapidly reveals, it is arguably impossible to tell a moral tale; a text acquires a moral only in the process of reading and interpretation. For the Pardoner himself, the coin is worthless; the Pardoner will never be saved by his own tale because he refuses to 'read' it; he supplies no morality to it, as Carolyn Dinshaw notes: 'His hermeneutic is motivated in fact by a fundamental refusal to know.'(FN11)
    This blankness of the Pardoner's inner life, which is driven by a rejection of knowledge, illustrates by a negative example the extent to which reading must always engage the moral faculties of the reader.
    Properly to read is always allegorically to read: the material is transmuted into other stuff in order to be understood, stuff made up of the reader's own experiences, and selfhood. As such, properly to read is a transformative act, an act which takes the material of the story and forms it into a part of oneself. It is for this reason that reading feels like experience, and that experience, as recorded by memory, is itself a form of reading. But the hermeneutic process, which derives patterns and universals from particularities, necessarily both elicits and draws upon an ethical understanding: the interpretation of a text is a process of induction which produces a code of reference relevant to other situations, which is to say, a morality. Importantly, the foolish people who 'read' the Pardoner's tales, deduce their meaning, and donate money to him out of a sense of piety and charity, do benefit spiritually; his attempt to deal with his narratives as valueless, the false coin which he exchanges for true, is drastically compromised by the ability of the listener to invest them with value. It is apparent that the reading is all, and that in this context, actions are the same as texts: one may act from a moral or immoral motive, but one's actions possess an existence of their own into which another may read morality, if that is in their nature.
    I would like to propose a comparison of Griselda with the Clerk, aligned against the Pardoner, and use this sense of reading as transformative in order to make a suggestion. It seems to me that the alignment of the Clerk -- who rides, the Host prods him, 'as coy and stille as dooth a mayde | Were new spoused, sittynge at the bord; | This day I ne herde of youre tonge a word' (11. 2-4)-- this Griselda-ness of the Clerk, which is pursued to good effect by Dinshaw (p. 135), could be taken in quite an opposite direction. Dinshaw suggests that the Clerk's femininity allows him to see the partiality and masculinity of his interpretative task, and that this task itself excludes the female:
    In the narrative representation of the Clerk's Tale, translation -- interpretation, all figuration itself -- is a turning away from female experience [...] the very basis of literary activity [...] excludes woman's experience from its purview. (p. 148)
    However, it seems to me that Griselda is herself engaged in interpretation, in a powerful hermeneutic of goodness. It is this interpretation which informs the story's progression, and which brings about its resolution.
    It has been noted before, and not least by Dinshaw, that Griselda reads herself allegorically; for the feminist critic, this exposes the cost to the female of patriarchal signification:
    Griselda reads herself as allegorical image and thereby 'authorizes' us to read her allegorically, but at the same time she gives us a sense of what it feels like to be made into a figure of speech, what is left out. (Dinshaw, p. 147)(FN12)
    None the less, whatever the damage to her character assumed by the critic, it seems to me that this reading undertaken by Griselda is a virtuous reading, which entails a continual absorption of her exterior significance into her internal self -- because to read something is to make it part of oneself. As such, it could be seen as the source of her integrity and wholeness.
    But I would like to argue that Griselda is a much more important reader than this alone would imply. J. D. Burnley has compared Griselda to the figure of the philosopher, in terms of her steadfastness in the face of fortune's changes.(FN13) I would seek to go further, and to argue that against all expectation, she shows something we might call virtuous 'clerkliness' in her reading, her interpretation, of Walter's behaviour. It is surely apparent that she is reading his choices by some unexpected interpretative schema; otherwise how could they be acceptable to her? That they are acceptable to her -- and that the ending of the tale is happy -- is the irreducible and infuriating fact of the narrative. This allegorical reading, then, is an act of specific power. To read allegorically, to find a means of understanding, is to transform into one's own self. Griselda's reading of Walter reinterprets his 'tortures' as acceptable components of her own will, as she promised him would be the case. More importantly, it is a reading which ultimately transforms him into the same image of 'benignitee' by which she had always 'read' him.
    It should be noted that this reading of Walter, which I suggest Griselda undertakes, is an example of an entirely uncontroversial interpretative schema favoured by medieval writers and readers. In his 1971 book The Friar as Critic Judson Boyce Allen states simply that 'an interpretation is deemed correct if it accords with the doctrine of charity; critics were not really concerned about whether or not the interpretation accorded in any rigorous methodological way with the work being interpreted'; and furthermore that 'the book is independent of its author [...] and may quite properly have meanings, under God, which the author never intended'.(FN14) This mode of reading, so essential to both pagan texts and Scripture, and hence to all writing, is ultimately derived from Augustine's Be doctrina Christiana, where he states that the aim of reading is to engender caritas:
    Quisquis igitur scripturas divinas vel quamlibet earum partem intellexisse sibi videtur, ita ut eo intellectu non aedificet istam geminam caritatem dei et proximi, nondum intellexit. Quisquis vero talem inde sententiam duxerit, ut huic aedificandae caritati sit utilis, nee tamen hoc dixerit quod ille quern legit eo loco sensisse probabitur, non perniciose fallitur nee omnino mentitur. So anyone who thinks that he has understood the divine scriptures or any part of them, but cannot by his understanding build up this double love of God and neighbour, has not yet succeeded in understanding them. Anyone who derives from them an idea which is useful for supporting this love, but fails to say what the writer demonstrably meant in the passage, does not commit any pernicious error and is not entirely speaking false.(FN15)
    It is here that the importance of the morality of the reader, of the reader's right intention in making a properly charitable reading, becomes clear. To return to the Clerk's Tale, Griselda pursues her own charitable reading of her husband, and finds sense and justification in any and all of Walter's actions:

'My child and I, with hertely obeisaunce,
Been youres al, and ye mowe save or spille
Youre owene thyng [...]'
[...]
  'Ye been oure lord; dooth with youre owene thyng
Right as yow list.'

    (11. 502-04. 652-53)
    Griselda's understanding of the world is, at a fundamental level, a religious one, because it is based upon the notion that life, despite all superficial evidence to the contrary, may be read and interpreted as meaningful and just, and therefore that it has a sense, a design, behind it. We might note that she is correct in this assumption, both within her story and at a higher level; Walter has a plan behind his cruelty, and her responses bring it to its fruition; simultaneously, Griselda exists as part of a story for the illumination of others; design and immanent justice are necessary corollaries. Furthermore, Griselda's manner of reading is precisely Christian, not to say Augustinian: she reads always with that 'right intention'; she seeks in her reading to pursue her love, what Augustine calls 'the double love of God and neighbour'. She discards all readings which would lead her away from that perfect love, as Augustine advises the reader of Scripture to do. Thus it is that she discards all readings of Walter as cruel or unfair, and pursues those of his justice and rightfulness. Is this a misreading? It is made not to be, because of the effects of the process of her reading. Such a reading is transformative of the material with which it works; it redounds to her own soul's grace, and ultimately to his as well, as his will is transformed in her image of him. As Pearsall notes, Griselda's expressions of obedience have 'the formal affirmative quality of a creed, and strong religious overtones':(FN16)
    She seyde, 'Lord, al lyth in youre plesaunce. [...] Ther may no thyng, God so my soule save, Liken to yow that may displese me; Ne I desire no thyng for to have, Ne drede for to leese, save oonly yee. This wyl is in myn herte, and ay shal be; No lengthe of tyme or deeth may this deface, Ne chaunge my corage to another place.'
    (11. 501,505-11)
    Griselda's creed is in Walter's goodness; and the strength of her faith is such that it creates that goodness. Thus it is that Walter is induced to a 'change of heart' (Pearsall, p. 276). Jill Mann asserts that 'if Walter is bound to his own will, he is liberated from it by Griselda's patience'.(FN17) In her later book, Mann expands upon this idea: 'Through pity, suffering realizes itself as power. Griselda's patience [...] constitutes an unrelenting pressure on Walter. [...] It is the pressure of Griselda's sameness that eventually issues in Walter's change.'(FN18) This explanation is accurate, but incomplete. It remains to be seen what it is about her sameness -- what the nature of that constancy is -- that is capable of bringing about a change in someone else. Sameness alone cannot be the cause, because it is not a thing, but a quantity of a thing. As Mann notes, 'the gulf between cruelty and benignity cannot be bridged by explanation; it can only be bridged by faith'.(FN19) The faith in question is Griselda's, enacted in her charitable reading; the change is Walter's, brought about by her reading.
    So how does this transformation come about? At the outset, what she says is that his will will be hers: 'as ye wol youreselfe, right so wol I' (1. 361). What she does not say outright -- but what is implied in her promise, as becomes apparent -- is that therefore this will will be good to her, that it will in effect be good. It is difficult to encompass the force of her promise in paraphrase, but its effects are so complete as to become invisible: she swears not merely that she will conform herself to obey his will, but that she will want, actively desire, as he does. We might observe that this is in fact a definition of love: its nature is obscured from us by our sense of injustice that it is not mirrored in Walter's response, and so it seems not to function. However, the assertion of the text is that mutuality may in fact be created by one party alone; Griselda's reading of her relationship with Walter is such that it forms a functioning and logical definition of love despite Walter's conduct. The key to Griselda's active interpretation of their relationship is revealed in the moment of her most extreme statement:

'Al youre plesance ferme and stable I holde;
For wiste I that my deeth wolde do yow ese,
Right gladly wolde I dyen, yow to plese.'
  'Deth may noght make no comparisoun
Unto youre love.'

    (11. 663-67)
    What is important here is her unexpected assumption -- that he does love her -- and the concomitant reversal of the expected form of her assertion: she does not say that she would die for Walter because she loves him so much, but rather that his love of her is worth so much that her death could not match its value. The point is that her assumption of his love is absolute, and unchanged by any action he might take, not excluding demanding her death; as such, every action is justified by its being rooted in his love of her. This is a product of Griselda's wilful use of logic, her clerkliness, to which I shall return; here it suffices to note that she is, in effect, playing with definitions. The definition of absolute love is that she would die for him; therefore, if he himself should demand her death, it is no more than the neatest exposition of that principle.
    Griselda's understanding of Walter's love as entirely unconstrained by circumstance, and unaffected by his actions, provides a circularity of logic which makes love the only possible explanation for his actions. In allowing that he has perfect justice and freedom to love her or not, to give or to take away any gift -- that, indeed, each minute that he gives more than nothing at all is itself a gift -- she transforms their marriage, which, we recall, was imposed upon Walter, into one of absolutely freely willed love. This is encapsulated in her response to his declaration that their marriage is at an end:
    'That ye so longe of youre benignitee Han holden me in honour and nobleye Where as I was noght worthy for to bee, That thonke I God and yow.'
    (11. 827-30)
    As Conor McCarthy has discussed in regard to the Clerk's Tale, marriage could not be subject to dissolution as the result of the infringement of a condition (and of course she has not, in any case, broken their agreement); Walter's imposition of terms and insistence on his will is unlawful.(FN20) However, because Griselda acts as if the marriage can be so dissolved, as if each moment is freely and spontaneously chosen, she creates circumstances whereby the only relevant criterion of their continued marriage is that of love. Walter does not need to restore her children, or her status; he chooses, freely, to do so. His choice is free because she makes it so; thus she makes it a choice of love. This is in tune with the understanding that love cannot be constrained, by which Andreas Capellanus had declared that love cannot exist within marriage. Griselda, however, by reading Walter's will as entirely free, reinterprets his testing as an exercise of the freedom which proves his love of her. That is, the performance of the tests is construed as evidence of his absolutely unconstrained power; the fact that he then chooses to be with her, and ultimately to restore her and her children, is then solely construable as evidence of love. An exercise of one's own freedom is not, by definition, a crime. Correspondingly, love is the only reason she gives for her behaviour, and there is simply no other word for the active unification of her own will with that of Walter: her behaviour is itself a definition of love.
    It will be apparent that I find unconvincing those readings which posit Griselda's subversion of and resistance to Walter's tests.(FN21) The idea that her statements of absolute obedience must be in some sense ironic, her silence accusatory, as several scholars have argued, is one brought to the text by the critic, as Linda Georgianna observes: 'For Hansen as for many critics, the term "silence" refers to the fact that the character does not say what the critic wants to hear.'(FN22) The notion that she holds herself apart from his desires is definitively compromised by her parting words to her infant daughter, that 'this night shal-tow dyen for my sake' (1. 560). Griselda has fully absorbed Walter's apparent intentions; she accepts responsibility for them. I think it important in the terms of the story both that the dissolution of the marriage is obviously understood as a worse punishment and that the children are taken as infants; they lack separate existences; we are to understand them not as separate individuals, but as component parts of Walter's gift to Griselda. This is how she understands them, and this is the reading which permits her acceptance of his withdrawal of the gift.
    Nevertheless, the passage of Walter's apparently compulsive disorder renders Griselda's task a supremely testing one; perhaps a true martyr's test. As has often been observed, Chaucer heightens the difficulties of his inherited narrative, rendering Walter more vicious and Griselda more pitiable than in Petrarch's version. Many critics have discussed the problematic conflict between the 'human' and the 'tropological' Walter,(FN23) a gap which seems to embody the problem of the tale's meaning; its allegory is compromised by Walter's unsuitability as a figure of God; its reality is compromised by Griselda's impossible figure of steadfastness. But it is possible to regard this gap as being closed by Griselda herself, in the mechanism of her patient reading. A principle strongly enough held creates its own reality. Walter cannot be a figure of God in himself -- he is too changeable, too unstable, too meretricious -- but Griselda is free to read him as one; indeed, her reading of him as such is a deeply impressive exercise of her own free will. And the effect is that he comes to subject his own will to this image of himself, so relentlessly construed. Griselda's martyrdom is not a passive suffering, but that active hermeneutic which resignifies suffering as salvation. The martyr overcomes pain not because he does not feel it, but because he reads it as something other than itself. So it is with Griselda's assent.
    This is not to say that Griselda's reading does not cost her something. There is division inscribed between Griselda's will and her emotion. Importantly, this is not a gap between what she says and what she thinks, but rather between what she wills (which is what she says and thinks) and what she feels. It is this gap which permits pathos, which allows us to see her sorrow for her child, and her concern for Walter's supposed future wife,(FN24) and which culminates in her fainting at the reunion with her children. This pathos is the essential ingredient of martyrdom: the martyr must feel the pain, must undergo the suffering, which he nevertheless reads, interprets, as the route to the highest good; that is, suffering is itself good. This is the practice of reading the world with right intention.
    Ultimately, Griselda's reading of Walter is powerful enough to become his salvation. I have not been able to find, in my research, any critical discussion of how much he risks in his testing of Griselda: what would he have done had she failed? Would he then have been forced to kill his children? Or, had she failed at the last moment, to marry his own daughter? It seems to me that if Griselda had read him as a monster he would have become one, in a revenge which would have destroyed himself; thus their fates are bound, and her instinct that this is so is fundamentally correct. Instead, however, she reads him as beneficent and just: and so he is saved from himself, transformed into the 'benyngne fader' of Griselda's grateful words.
    Perhaps such a reading pushes the edges of the critic's sense of what is hermeneutically possible. But while we may read Walter, or Griselda herself, differently, it is necessary to credit the effects of Griselda's reading within the terms of her tale. We need not discard the tale's openly stated principle of togetherness, of one will, for that of maistrye on one side or the other:

                            of hem two
Ther nas but o wyl, for as Walter leste,
The same lust was hire plesaunce also.
And, God be thanked, al fil for the beste.

    (11. 715-18)
    We are to understand that she achieves happiness and concord with Walter at the end of her trials: 'Ful many a yeer in heigh prosperitee | Lyven thise two in concord and in reste' (11. 1128-29); and this happiness must be seen as the triumph of clerkliness, of interpretation.
    The clerk's spirit (with a small c -- I might have said the academic's spirit) is present in more than the supreme strength, constancy, and indeed unlikelihood of Griselda's reading of Walter. That is an assertion of the potential of interpretation, to find good where no good was intended: such was the argument of Augustine, discussing the worthwhile words of pagan philosophers. But much more important is the effect of this interpretation: to plant good where no good was intended. What in fact happens is that Griselda transforms Walter into her reading; ultimately, his will comes to conform with hers. In the end, Walter chooses to turn his heart towards her:
    This sturdy markys gan his herte dresse
    To rewen upon hire wyfly stedfastnesse.
    (11. 1049-50)
    He says that he kept the children secretly 'Til I thy purpos knewe and al thy wille'. Now he knows her will: it is his own, as she had promised him at the very beginning. And so at last he knows himself, in the image which she created of him: the 'benyngne fader' that 'kept' his children safe from harm. In the end, we hear,
    Walter hire dooth so feithfully plesaunce
    That it was deyntee for to seen the cheere
    Bitwixe hem two, now they been met yfeere.
    (11. 1111-13)
    Griselda's identification with the Clerk is, I would argue, a good one, thoroughly pursued. She too is engaged in 'some sophism', and its terms might be construed as follows:
    His will is my will. My will is formed out of love. Therefore his will is formed out of love.
    This is indeed sophistry, and the broken terms of her logic have troubled readers ever since. Yet it works; it brings about her ultimate happiness. Anne Middleton has called the Clerk's Tale 'the Canterbury Tales's supreme test of its readers' interpretive powers';(FN25) more than this, it is the supreme demonstration of the moral power and importance of interpretation itself. This is, above all, a Clerk's Tale.
ADDED MATERIAL
    LAURA ASHE GONVILLE & CAIUS COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE

FOOTNOTES
1 Charlotte C. Morse, 'Critical Approaches to the Clerk's Tale', in Chaucer's Religious Tales, ed. by C. David Benson and Elizabeth Robertson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1990), pp. 71-83 (p. 71).
2 For an account of Petrarch's reaction to Boccaccio's version, and the response of Petrarch's readers to his own, see Mary J. Carruthers, 'The Lady, the Swineherd, and Chaucer's Clerk', Chaucer Review, 17 (1983), 221-34 (PP. 221-22).
3 Elizabeth Salter, Chaucer; The Knight's Tale and the Clerk's Tale, Studies in English Literature, 5 (London: Arnold, 1962).
4 John M. Ganim suggests 'an incongruous resemblance' between the pair's manner of telling their tales, in 'Carnival Voices and the Envoy to the Clerk's Tale', Chaucer Review, 22 (1987), 112-27 (p.115).
5 The Clerk's Prologue and Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd edn, ed. by Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), II. 1139-75-Further citations in the text.
6 See e.g. N. S. Thompson, 'Man's Flesh and Woman's Spirit in the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales', in The Body and the Soul in Medieval Literature: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Tenth Series, Perugia, 1998, ed. by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: Brewer, 1999), pp. 17-29 (esp. pp. 28-29).
7 See e.g. Barry A. Windeatt, 'Literary Structures in Chaucer', in The Cambridge Chaucer Companion, ed. by Piero Boitani and Jill Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), pp. 195-212 (p. 202).
8 See e.g. Howell Chickering, 'Formand Interpretation in the Envoy to the Clerk's Tale', Chaucer Review, 29 (1995), 352-72; Michaela Paasche Grudin, 'Discourse and the Problem of Closure in the Canterbury Tales', PMLA, 107 (1992), 1157-67; William McClellan, 'The Consequences of "Treuth": Reading Two Versions of the Clerk's Tale', Genre, 25 (1992). 153-78.
9 See e.g. Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), p. 154; Ganim, 'Carnival Voices and the Envoy to the Clerk's Tale', pp. 121-23; Thomas J. Farrell, 'The "Envoy de Chaucer" and the Clerk's Tale', Chaucer Review, 24 (1990), 329-36 (esp. p. 334).
10 The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, in The Riverside Chaucer, 11. 459-61.
11 Dinshaw, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, p. 159.
12 See also Gail Ashton, 'Patient Mimesis: Griselda and the Clerk's Tale', Chancer Review, 32 (1998), 232-38, for whom the scene of reunion with her children 'reveals both Griselda's psychological dislocation and the emotional cost to the female of playing by the rules of a patriarchal game [...] For one brief moment she discloses her self before, once again, donning her protective mimesis' (pp. 236-37).
13 J. D. Burnley, Chaucer's Language and the Philosophers' Tradition (Cambridge: Brewer, 1979). pp. 86-89.
14 Judson Boyce Allen, The Friar as Critic: Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1971). PP. 58-61.
15 Augustine, De doctrina Christiana, ed. and trans. by R. P. H. Green (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 1. 36.40. 86 (pp. 48-49, translation modified).
16 Derek Pearsall, The Canterbury Tales (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), p. 269.
17 Jill Mann, 'Parents and Children in the "Canterbury Tales"', in Literature in Fourteenth-Century England: The J. A. W. Bennett Memorial Lectures, Perugia 1981-1982, ed. by Piero Boitani and Anna Torti (Cambridge: Brewer, 1983), pp. 165-83 (p. 179).
18 Jill Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), P. 153-Cf. Linda Georgianna, 'The Clerk's Tale and the Grammar of Assent', Speculum, 70 (1995), 793-821: 'Griselda's absolute sympathy is strong enough first to attract, then steady Walter's will so it can join with hers' (p. 817).
19 Mann, Geoffrey Chaucer, p. 156.
20 Conor McCarthy, 'Love, Marriage and Law: Three Canterbury Tales', English Studies, 83 (2002), 504-18.
21 See e.g. Ashton, 'Patient Mimesis'; Elaine Tuttle Hansen, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), p. 190; Lars Engle, 'Chaucer, Bakhtin, and Griselda', Exemplaria, 1 (1989), 429-59 (esp. p. 449); and M. Keith Booker, ' "Nothing that is so is so": Dialogic Discourse and the Voice of the Woman in the Clerk's Tale and Twelfth Night', Exemplaria, 3 (1991), 519-37 (esp. p. 527).
22 Georgianna, 'The Clerk's Tale and the Grammar of Assent', p. 807 n. 34.
23 Terms employed by Kathryn L. Lynch, 'Despoiling Griselda: Chaucer's Walter and the Problem of Knowledge in The Clerk's Tale', Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 10 (1988), 41-70 (p. 43), following the debate founded in Elizabeth Salter's book (see above, n. 3).
24 Bernard S. Levy accurately describes Griselda's interjection at this point in 'The Meanings of the Clerk's Tale', in Chaucer and the Craft of Fiction, ed. by Leigh A. Arrathoon (Rochester, MI: Solaris, 1986), pp. 385-409: 'Griselda's "warning" [to Walter to treat his new wife better] is thus an admonition designed to help assure the marquis that he will have a successful marriage. It is in fact an expression of her concern for Walter's future welfare, an aspect of her love' (p. 391).
25 Anne Middleton, 'The Clerk and his Tale: Some Literary Contexts', Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2 (1980), 121-50 (p. 121).