The Clerk's Tale

Grisilde
The Clerk retells an old story of a poor girl who marries a lord and promises to obey him unconditionally. To see if she will keep her promise he pretends to have their two children murdered and then to be abandoning her in favor of a young noble woman. In reality he has sent for their children and the family is reunited and Griselde honored for her patience and steadfastness.
The Clerk's benediction is probably the best part of the whole thing. He begins it with advising husbands not to test their wives so severely because they will certainly fail and then offers wives his advice:

O noble wyves, ful of heigh prudence,
Lat noon humilitee your tonge naille,
Ne lat no clerk have cause or diligence
To wryte of yow a storie of swifh mervaille
As of Grisildis, pacient and kinde,
Lest Chichevache yow swelve in hire entraille!

He follows with a list of techniques for women to use to have their way and gain influence and favor.
The clerk himself comes off as a guy you can't help but like, studious and good humored and quite to the point. He hasn't said a word all through the Miller's unflattering story about a lecherous scholar and in his counter story to the Wife of Bath's he is gentle and polite while he makes a case for good wives being beloved.
There is a volume written by a wealthy man in Paris for his young bride in the 1390's which tells the story of Grisilde as well. After the tale is a personal note from the husband which of course reassures the lady that he has no plans to test her cruelly or at all and reflects that all mortals should take it as a lesson to endure God's will without complaint in hope of closer union with Him. He closes with a short paragraph which is of interest because of the strikingly modern attitude he takes.

"I apologize if this story deals with too great cruelty--cruelty, in my view, beyond reason. Do not credit it as having really happened; but the story has it so, and I ought not to change it nor invent another, since someone wiser than I composed it and set it down. Because other people have seen it, I want you to see it too, so that you may be able to talk about everything just as they do."
--Le Menagier de Paris (trans. Glen Olson and V. A. Klove)

The pilgrims themselves and the writer of the last section are interesting not only in their comments on gender but on societal values. The blind obedience of Grisilde was, no doubt, much admired by the first teller of the story and, I would guess by his audience. Today we would never say that she had handled the situation wisely. In fact she would have been up for child endangerment, at the least, when the villagers report the first murder to the police. That even 600 years ago such a value was already disputed, if not widely rejected, is interesting. One could argue that much of western thought is based on the autonomy of the individual and it should not surprise anyone to see that reflected here. I would have to reflect that governments far more recently have attempted to control their citizens' beliefs and actions as if individual thought was of little merit. It seems a curious thing that we should so value our autonomy yet often resent it in others. Perhaps it has never been thought unimportant. Maybe it is so powerful that it is the single biggest threat to any system of power or stratification of society that has ever existed.