William Ian Miller has written that for the modern reader revenge “has been removed from the center of our practical lives and has been relocated to the fantastic marches.” Indeed, the marches, or borderlands, provide an apt metaphor for thinking about vengeance. In the late fourteenth century, vengeance remains a kind of shadowy borderland poised between law and self-help, between religious sanction and disapproval. Vengeance functions as legal punishment as well as rough justice outside the law, it can be condemned as the result of anger (per iram ad vindictam), or it can be the will of God.

There is also a close connection between retribution and exemplarity. Vengeance provides a convenient way to provide closure to a narrative, and if punishment is a form of vengeance, then the legal lesson of Gower's exempla is always in question. Although Gower tells many vengeance stories, it is particularly in the Tale of Orestes that he tries to reconcile the demands of the hard case with the desire for narrative closure. The solution he comes up with will likely be unsatisfactory to many a modern reader, but the end result should not obscure the fact that Gower examines nearly every possible reason for justifying vengeance. The Tale of Orestes thus forms the focal point of this chapter, but is bracketed by a general discussion of vengeance in Gower and his contemporaries and by a close reading of Gower's Cronica Tripertita as a story of vengeance. This wider perspective reveals the ways in which vengeance tests the limits of both law and literature.