The Clerk’s tale of Griselda has become in modern times perhaps The Canterbury Tales’ supreme test of its readers' interpretative powers. It taxes more than any other their capacities to re-enter with sympathy and informed understanding the values and ideals of an age insistently different from their own: it insists on its "otherness" from all our habits of reading, our customs of approval, and our wishes for comfort. Though critics differ widely as to which course of discipline will best enable us to enter the tale as properly informed readers, nearly all are agreed that we must give up something--some modern prejudice, or skepticism or ignorance or indifference, toward a medieval trait or habit of thought. Acts of interpretation commonly set about a dual course of instruction to take us across the chasm: to wean us away from that something which is ours, and to supply us with something "medieval," information we did not know or are unable to apply, to take its place.

We are, most of us, willing to undertake this discipline because the tale is plainly worth it: it fascinates and strangely delights even those who, freighted with that needless burden of modernity, are at the same time distressed by it. That same delight and fascination, and the same urgent critical discussion about what the tale asks of us, and what it asks us to renounce, has, however, been an inextricable part of the literary history of the tale since the fourteenth century. Every reader from Petrarch on has been forced by it to confront some "modernity" in himself--the habits or values he holds as a reader--that must be explained. For many of these readers, the value and pleasure of the tale lies precisely in that difference or distance from us: the effort required to close that distance, though variously described, seems to reveal the moral beauty and the emotional benefit of the fable.

Anne Middleton, “The Clerk and His Tale: Some Literary Contexts,” SAC 2 (1980) 121-50.

"My object in thus rewriting your tale was not to induce the women of our time to imitate the patience of this wife, which seems almost beyond imitation, but to lead my readers to emulate the example of feminine constancy, to submit themselves to God with the same courage as did this woman to her husband. . .Therefore I would add to the list of constant men whosoever he be who suffers without murmur for his God what this rustic wife suffered for her mortal husband."

(Petrarch to Boccaccio, describing his translation into Latin of Decameron X.10)

“I want to tell you of a marquis, whose actions, even though things turned out well for him in the end, were remarkable not so much for their munificence as for their senseless brutality. Nor do I advise anyone to follow his example, for it was a great pity that the fellow should have drawn any profit from his conduct.”

(Dioneo, introducing the last story in the Decameron, the tale of Griselda)