The “Laurer” and the “Columbyn”: The Images of Frustrated Love in Chaucer's Merchant's Tale

«Rys up, my wyf, my love, my lady free» (1.2138) -however it has been the literary scholars who have followed old January with much greater alacrity than his «fresshe May» into the literary and rhetorical world of the wedding chamber and the garden that Chaucer lets the Merchant create for the married couple. The scholars, in turn, especially those interested in sources, metaphor, analogy, and allusion have been richly rewarded by the study of The Merchant's Tale, this «dense mosaic of references, allusions, quotations», as G. G. Sedgewick has described it. Unifying the richly structured composition of this «mosaic» is the theme of frustrated love, a concern to which many of these «ref- erences, allusions, quotations» point. One of the earlier critical concerns was to track down the analogues. It proved to be a fertile field; by now it has become a critical commonplace that one of the central motifs of Chaucer's tale—the blind man and the adulterous youth the pear-tree-cluster—is of Mid Eastern origin and can be found among the tales of the Disciplina Clericalis. This anthology of Eastern folklore—com- prising East Indian, Byzantine, Persian, Arabian, and Hebrew materials—was compiled in Latin back in the twelfth century by Petrus Alfunsus. Alfunsus, originally a Jewish scholar born in Spain, converted to Christianity, and eventu- ally emigrated to England where he became royal physician to King Henry I. He wrote the Disciplina while he resided in England. Alfonsi's collection of thirty- four tales is important as a bridge by which what is commonly called the literaty «matter of Araby» in both form and content became a tradition that supplied vernacular medieaval Europen writers.