The tale of Patient Griselda inspires translatio by virtue of the fact that the ideal it ostensibly represents stands in complete opposition to contemporary sensibilities. Her alterity provokes critical revision, perhaps even misprision. Griselda is translated both within her tale, from peasant to noblewoman, and outside of it, from one linguistic and hermeneutic modality to another. Yet misprision has always accompanied Griselda, and, as the Clerk's Tale makes clear, this account of a wife's remarkable obedience and faithfulness (‘Insignis obedientia et fides uxoria’, Sen. XVII. 3. 49–50) was no less defamiliarizing to its fourteenth-century audience than it is to its twenty-firstcentury equivalent. As Anne Middleton has argued, ‘[e]very reader from Petrarch on has been forced by it to confront some “modernity” in himself – the habits or values he holds as a reader – that must be explained’. Indeed the number of articles and studies that have been written in recent years on the Clerk's Tale and on its sources not only bears witness to the story's unwillingness to provide us with a clear definition of its ‘significaunce’, but also serves as a testament to Griselda's textuality.

And Griselda is text, according to critics such as Carolyn Dinshaw and David Wallace, both of whom have argued that in the ‘literary history of the Griselda tale we see that once again woman is associated with a text to be read and interpreted by men’. This view is borne out by the language of the various versions of the tale, and of their frameworks. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Boccaccio describes how Gualtieri had been pleased for a long time by Griselda's costumi, and how, after their marriage, it appeared as if she had changed her soul and manners along with her vestments (‘parve che co’ vestimenti insieme l’animo e’ costumi mutasse’, Dec. X. 10. 24). Similarly Petrarch, referring to this scene in the letter which accompanied his translation, asks Boccaccio to judge if he has embellished or disfigured the tale by changing its ‘dress’ from the vernacular to Latin.

This conception of the tale as being concerned with hermeneutics and translation did not escape Chaucer, as Laura Ashe has recently argued: ‘[the Clerk] must be regarded as a reader […] Implicitly, he is saying, a tale may not stand alone.