The Physician's Tale as Hagioclasm

Adroit scholarly interpretation of the Physician’s Taleover the last half century has sought to rehabilitate what is perceived as one of Chaucer’s least satisfactory tales. Arguments have focused on the correlation of teller and tale; Chaucer’s manipulation of his sources; and the foregrounding of various key aspects of the tale, such as governance, virginity or the legal system. In seeking to round off the Tale, to give it cohesion and moral purpose, for example, Kirk L. Smith concludes his discussion about the judicial and medical elements with the opinion that “The tale offers this moral cure: abjuring the exploitation in which self-absorbed Apius indulges, the worthy practitioner would earn the public’s esteem by pledging disinterested service.” Similarly, in Jerome Mandel’s view, the careful structure of the Tale and its emphasis on death can be paralleled with The Pardoner’s Tale, with which it is paired in Fragment VI. Crafton’s recent judicious appraisal focuses on shared concerns between the Parson’s Tale and the Physician’s created by the use of preaching motifs, the Summa virtutem remediis animeand the theme of “false virginity.” Other critics have highlighted the use of hagiographic topoi in the Tale. In Lee Patterson’s clever and insightful Chaucer and the Subject of History, he judges the Tale as aspiring to “hagiographical authority,” as a “quasi hagiography” in which the heroine, Virginia, is a “helpless victim,” subordinated to her persecutors’ narrative domi-nance. “In short,” states Patterson, the Physician’s Tale “is a fraudulent or ‘counterfeit’ hagiography . . . unable to trans-cend its own fallen historicity.