The narrative of the Patient Griselda is one of the most wide-spread of the stories which have come down to us from the Middle Ages. It has been annexed to the highest literature by such poets as Boccaccio, Petrarch and Chaucer, and has been brought within reach of the meanest capacities by the ballad-mongers and the writers of penny histories.
We cannot trace the story back farther than the middle of the fourteenth century, when Boccaccio incorporated it into his Decameron (day 10, novel 10); but it must have had a previous existence in Italy, for Petrarch says in his letter to Boccaccio that when he read it in the Decameron he remembered how pleased he had been with it when he heard it many years before. When his memory was thus revived in the story that charmed him so much he set to work to learn it by heart, so that he might repeat it to his friends. He then translated it into Latin for the benefit of those who did not know Italian.[[1]] That he did repeat the story to his friend we learn from the Clerk of Oxenford’s Prologue to his tale in the Canterbury Tales, where he says:—
“I wil yow telle a tale, which that I
Lerned at Padowe of a worthy clerk,
As provyd by his wordes and his werk.
He is now deed, and nayled in his chest,
Now God yive his soule wel good rest!
Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete,
Highte this clerk, whos rethorique swete
Enlumynd al Ytail of poetrie.”