The Tale of Melibee
The Tale of Melibee is part of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
Summary
Enemies enter Melibee's house, beat his wife Prudence and wound their daughter Sophie. Enraged, Melibee seeks advice and initially favours retaliation. Prudence challenges how he chooses advisers and weighs their counsel.
Through a long discussion, she leads him towards negotiation and reconciliation. When the attackers submit, Melibee finally grants them full pardon.
The work is a prose discussion of counsel, anger, judgement and mercy. Its central movement is from a desire to answer injury with injury towards a reconsideration of what should follow. The characters' arguments, rather than a sequence of physical adventures, carry that change.
Source
Harvard's Geoffrey Chaucer Website: synopsis, context and link to the text.
Enclosure and the work of counsel
The opening places Prudence and Sophie inside a house with its doors closed, but the attackers enter by ladders and windows. The physical boundary does not prevent the injury. This detail can be checked in Harvard's modern English translation, the opening passage beginning at the bracketed reference 967. That page also links to the Middle English text with an interlinear gloss.
For a reading exercise, separate the initial breach of the house from the later disagreement about how to respond. The movement towards reconciliation takes place through argument and changing decisions.
- Houses, Rooms and Hidden Spaces and Obstructions help compare a closed entrance with an effective restriction.
- Metaphor, Context and Speaker Meaning supports attention to who offers counsel and how it is received.
- Compare the release of obligations in The Franklin's Tale, while keeping the circumstances of the two stories distinct.