. . Whan that the month of May
Is comen, and that I hear the foules singe,
And that the flowers 'ginnen for to spring
Farwel my book...."[1]
[1] Legend of Good Women, prol. 30ff.
Section III
By the end of the fourteenth century we find signs
that books more often formed a part of well-to-do households,
and that the formal reading and reciting entertainments
were giving place gradually to the informal and
personal use of books. Among many pieces of evidence
that this was so, Chaucer himself furnishes us with two of
the best, one in the Wife of Bath's Tale, and the other in
his Troilus and Criseide. The Wife took for her fifth
husband, "God his soule blesse," a clerk of Oxenford--
"He was, I trowe, a twenty winter old,
And I was fourty, if I shal seye sooth."
Joly Jankin, as the clerk was called,
"Hadde a book that gladly, night and day,
For his desport he wolde rede alway.
He cleped [called] it Valerie and Theofraste,[1]
At whiche book he lough alwey ful faste.
And every night and day was his custume,
. . . . . . . . .
When he had leyser and vacacioun
From other worldly occupacioun,
To reden on this book of wikked wyves.
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