THE impact of continual and steadily increasing interaction between East and West that occurred during the Middle Ages through travel – whether it be to pilgrimage sites, to the battlefields of Crusades, or to centers of trade – is reflected in the romance literature of the time. This chapter examines Chaucer's treatment of the legend of Constance, as told in the Canterbury Tales by the Man of Law, and its analogues in Gower and Boccaccio. Though told as a pious romance by the lawyer-narrator, characters and setting combine frequently to produce curious intersections of mercantilism and faith which reflect the historical reality of the Eastern Mediterranean of the Middle Ages, a factor as well in Chaucer's analogues, but a less pervasive one. My focus on the mercantile dimension of the three narratives, a subject that has received only slight attention, allows a consideration of the differing responses to and representations of the Eastern Islamic world by their three authors. The recent consideration of the Man of Law's tale and merchants by David Wallace in chapter 7 of his magisterial study, Chaucerian Polity, is concerned with merchants in fourteenth-century England; I am interested in the merchants of the Eastern Mediterranean depicted in Chaucer's tale (Wallace, 187–90). An unexpected by-product of my examination is the discovery of a greater intertextual connection between Chaucer's romance and Boccaccio's tale than has been previously recognized.

The tale of Constance, told by both Chaucer and Gower, and its distant analogue about Gostanza, in Boccaccio's Decameron 5, 2, belong to that large group of hagiographical romances about female piety and suffering that emphasize the virtues of patience and fortitude.