“Woful Custance”: Female Sanctity and the Poetics of Pity in The Man of Law’s Tale

The question of Custance’s female sanctity has garnered much debate for decades; while some find the characterization suggestive, many have a hard time grappling with Chaucer’s portrayal of a married, child-bearing Custance vis-à-vis traditional female sainthood. This article contributes to this critical juncture by arguing that Custance’s womanhood and victimized dispositions signal a revision of Chaucer’s hagiographic poetics via emotions. Following the school of the history of emotions, I divide my discussion into four sections. First, I summarize the critical receptions of Custance’s sainthood, observing that most critics call Custance’s sainthood into question against the backdrop of early virgin martyrs. I argue that such a critical rendering of female sainthood is problematic, as female sanctity in the late Middle Ages is a highly negotiable term that goes beyond the constraints of virginity and martyrdom. With this problem in mind, in the second and third sections I embark on reconstructing a more diverse hagiographic poetics of Chaucer by examining two of his early texts, the Second Nun’s Tale and the Legend of Good Women, and argue that in addition to the virgin martyr trope, Chaucer had developed a new, secular discourse of female sanctity informed by the image of a piteous wife. Last, I demonstrate how this new form of female sanctity is orchestrated in the Man of Law’s Tale via Chaucer’s careful engineering of a “woful Custance,” the centerpiece of the poem that emphasizes an open, freestanding display of human suffering. I contend that the poem operates on the logic of pity, constantly focusing on the emotional interplay between a piteous Custance and her pitying viewers.