How do the meanings of words serve as a clue to cultural perceptions in late medieval England? Methods in semantics and in literary scholarship help to give us a perspective on how lexical usage both reflects and shapes collective ideologies. This small study considers how the connotative resonance of words about social gathering indicate mixed attitudes to civic assembly and suspicions about particular groups in the late fourteenth century.

It is generally understood that words in our language acquire connotation: the affective meaning that indicates the emotive and associational aspects of a term. Connotation is conceived in opposition to denotation, the dictionary or referential sense for the word. Lexical connotations may be personal or shared by a group, and they both reflect and influence how we perceive concepts. As such, they can be a touchstone for the study of changing culture and can influence wider social ideology.

Two ancient traditions about how to respond to the suffering of the world unexpectedly intersect in fifteenth-century England. The life of Buddha is the ultimate source of Barlam and Iosaphat, a popular saint's life, which in the late fifteenth century was translated into Middle English, somewhere around London or the southern Midlands. It resembles the ascetic Christianity displayed in Sir Thomas Malory's version of the Grail quest, translated nearby at about the same time. Both texts emphasize the sorrows that spring from the unstableness of the world and humans’ wavering will. In particular, Malory suggests Launcelot's adultery is a symptom of the more fundamental problem of his unstableness. When explaining why Launcelot will not achieve the Grail, the hermit Nacien says:

Nobody much likes the Reeve, it seems. And with good reason. From the first, he is singled out from the pilgrim group not because of boisterous (but apparently affable) revelry like the Miller, or divine justice made manifest by providential election like the Knight, but because of his querulous, personal complaints. In our first real encounter with him, the Reeve objects to the Miller's declaration that he will tell a disordered tale, both because of his station (and condition) among the pilgrims and his choice of content. “Lat be thy lewed dronken harlotrye,” he cries out, before the Miller has said much at all (I.3145). The Reeve's protest might be premature, but his assumptions about the Miller's story are not exactly inaccurate. After all, the narrator also breaks in several lines later with his well-known (if possibly feigned) reluctance to repeat the “cherles tale” (I.3169). Nevertheless, the Reeve's initial exchange with the Miller is so emphatic that his objection colors how the pilgrims (or at least the Host) see him from that point on: he is a sermonizer for the narrator (I.3899) and an improper and unwelcome preacher for the Host (I.3903). First impressions matter, and the Reeve is now solidly defined by his contest with his churlish counterpart.

Poetry is rarely a first choice for linguists investigating language phenomena. The genre can certainly be indispensable in studies of sound, including metrics and phonology. But because of its highly structured and sometimes atypical diction and grammar, it is often treated as a highly marked register. In my early studies as a graduate student, a linguist once recommended to me that, if at all possible, poetry be excluded from historical studies since it presents grammatically “weird” constructions that are unlikely to reflect everyday language use. When I discussed this comment with Karla Taylor, we agreed that part of why we study medieval poetry is because it's weird – but also because it has important things to tell us about language, culture, and thought in earlier historical periods.

Melibee is framed in complex ways by its inclusion in fragment VII of the Canterbury Tales, where the formal limits of reading and storytelling are overtly thematized, even strictly policed. Showing a concern for proportion and narrative scale, Chaucer tells us to expect something suitably manageable in size, yet goes on to deliver a lengthy prose treatise, held together – just barely, some would say – by numerous proverbial sayings and quotations from the auctores. Drawn mostly from familiar classical and biblical sources, these authoritative references share the concentrated moral force and selfenclosed singularity of medieval proverbia more generally, and their function in Melibee is comparable to that of learned sayings and quotations in a wide range of compilatory texts from the period, including Chaucer's immediate source, Renaud de Louens's Livre de Melibée et de Dame Prudence, a French version of Albertanus of Brescia's Liber consolationis et consilii.

Treason seems a strange offering for a mentor's Festschrift. Allowances might be made, however, when the focus is on John Lane, a poet who, more than two hundred years after the completion of the Canterbury Tales, breathes life into a tale Chaucer left unfinished, a tale in which a royal heroine counters treason with prudence. Given Karla Taylor's own attention to “Prudence's hard-fought battle to deter Melibee from revenge on his enemies, by propounding a new vocabulary of public life,” and our stimulating conversations about law and literature, this essay hopes to qualify as a loyal tribute.

John Lane completed his continuation of Chaucer's Squire's Tale c. 1615 and revised it in 1630. Its two versions exist in the Bodleian Library in Douce MS 170 and Ashmole MS 53, respectively, and have been collated and edited by Frederick Furnivall. Lane continues Chaucer's tale by drawing on medieval discourses of prudence as put forth by the Tale of Melibee. Prudence informs the feminine governance embodied by Canace, John Lane's heroine, who reassembles a royal personhood fractured by treason and war. Through her unfailing love and prudence, Canace turns treason into an opportunity for the enthroned king to practice wise governance and consolidate his royal person.

Virgil associates Troy with loss, exile, and mourning: with Aeneas's loss of his wife Creusa and his father Anchises, and with the communal lacrimae rerum. Yet Troy survives collapse in numerous ways. Its survivors go into exile and form new communities, like Deiphobus's civic simulacrum at Buthrotum. The tears of things also power Aeneas's honorable peitas, driving his war against Turnus and marriage to Lavinia, fulfilling the civic obligation to rebuild and found an empire. Depictions of Troy survive both textually and culturally, from the painted temple at Carthage (as depicted in the Aeneid) to the New Troys of London and other western cities. Exile in these instances becomes foundational.

Criseyde's exile from Troy, by contrast, is associated with irremediable wrongdoing and betrayal. She can neither return nor lay a foundation for some new Troy. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde is not interested in Troy's potential for renewal but in her peculiarly intimate and feminine actions: her gradual loss of faith and abandonment of Troilus, and of Trojan community, in their darkest hour. Her “sliding” heart is evidence of a failure to fulfill her promise to Troilus and her broader obligation to Trojan community, so that she is inevitably marginal to any coherent narrative of Troy's triumphant rebirth. Indeed, her abandonment of Troilus has often been taken quasi-allegorically as the beginning of the end for the city itself.