Literary Nominalism and Anti-Allegory in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale

ABSTRACT Critics have used Chaucer’s literary nominalism to read the Clerk’s Tale allegorically by either interpreting Walter as the nominalist God or by reframing Walter’s testing as the nominalist epistemological mode of knowing Griselda. To develop these critical analyses further, this article focuses on realist and nominalist allegorical personifications in the tale. It argues that Chaucer’s Walter acts like a nominalist and insists on interpreting Griselda, the Neoplatonic personification, as if she were a nominalist personification constantly in the making. Controversies surrounding this kind of interpretative violence of nominalism arose in fourteenth-century intellectual circles, when the principle of Ockham’s razor—“not multiplying entities beyond necessity”—was under attack by realists. By contrasting and merging these two metaphysical systems in the Clerk’s Tale, Chaucer creates a nominalist anti-allegory and stirs affective imagination from Walter’s nominalist impulses to remove the relational entities.