Some Disputed Chaucerian Terminology

CHAUCER'S language may be obscure to us for various reasons. There are, in the first place, words like viritoot in the Miller's Tale (3770)1 that are etymologically obscure, so that aside from the evidence of the context and conjecture we lack any means of making a preliminary assessment of their meanings. Others are subject to occasional doubts, often unexpressed. For example, it has always seemed to me that embosed in The Book of the Duchess (353) would make more sense as a word based on OF bos "wood," meaning that the hart "so moche embosed" was protected by a retreat into a thick wood rather than that he was "flecked with foam," but this is not a point that I wish to argue at length. Again, the etymologies usually offered for Eclympasteyr in the same poem (167) strike me as being weak. The word looks a little like a corruption of a French nonce-word, enclyn-posteir "that slep and did noon other werk," but again I do not wish to make any formal defense of this conjecture. Both instances, as I have said, simply indicate an uneasiness of a kind that most Chaucerians probably feel about scattered words in the text. In these instances, a new edition of the poem currently in preparation may settle the questions in one way or another. Words of this kind are fortunately not very numerous, so that they give less trouble than more ordinary words that are obscure because of gaps in our knowledge of fourteenth-century life and thought. At times their obscurity is concealed either because they seem obvious at first glance or because simple explanations for them appear in dictionaries, or in the notes and glosses that accompany our texts. The connotations of curteisie, for example, have recently been discussed once more,2 and in Chaucer's work this word, like many others, is made confusing by its ironic use. Thus the Knight loved "curteisie," but that this "courtesy" is the same as that of the Squire "curteis he was, lowely, and servysable" or that of the Friar "curteis he was and lowely of servyse" -