Abstract

Near the conclusion of the so-called marriage group in the Canterbury Tales sits Chaucer's Squire's Tale, a strange, hybrid narrative of love and betrayal located in the Mongol empire. Surprisingly, however, none of the many modern readers of the tale has made a study of how the Squire's Tale's setting in the East is connected to its view of the subject that dominates Fragments IV and V of the Canterbury Tales: love, power, and the negotiation of a settlement in the prolonged war between the sexes. The omission is especially perplexing when the Squire's Tale is read in combination with its companion narrative, the Franklin's Tale. Indeed, the relation of Squire to Franklin is normally seen as old money to new, aristocrat to parvenu without reference either to the question of female power or to the geographical and cultural oppositions upon which the stories also insist. When the Squire is understood as making a contribution to the conversation initiated by the Wife of Bath and carried on at least through the Franklin's Tale, it is generally on the subject of true nobility, chivalry, or gentillesse—not on the “gentle sex.” Donald Baker even goes so far as to rechristen G. L. Kittredge's marriage group a “gentillesse group” in order to include the Squire in its discussion