“Into a Litel Oxes Stalle”: Grace and Fortune in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale

Abstract: Scholars have long agreed that Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale has a significant religious dimension. The theological character of this dimension, and the extent to which the poem may be considered allegorical, remain contentious. An influential strand of scholarship argues for the Clerk’s Tale as nominalist allegory: to these critics, the suffering of patient Griselda and the arbitrary tests of her husband Walter symbolize (or otherwise inscribe) controversial ideas that were circulating within thirteenth- and fourteenth-century scholasticism. These include Stepsis’s notion of Walter as representing God de potentia absoluta (the speculative concept of God’s absolutely boundless will) and Steinmetz’s argument that Griselda’s supreme endurance invokes the voluntarist facere quod in se est model (in which sanctifying grace is infused only in those who, by their own free will, make an unaided effort to do good). This essay argues against nominalist readings, suggesting a theological subtext for the Clerk’s Tale that is more consonant with the Augustinian mainstream of Chaucer’s contemporary religious culture, and with the ideas about free will, grace, and Fortune represented in his own writings. Griselda’s superhuman sufferance, associated throughout with divine grace, reflects the doctrine of gratia cooperans —the cooperation of divine and human agency in the cultivation of virtue—whereas Walter represents not God de potentia absoluta , but rather the medieval conception of Fortune, the contingency of the world as experienced by created beings, exemplifying how humanity may increase the instability of their own lives by declining to cooperate with grace, and yielding to concupiscent appetites.