Biblical Reference in The Clerk's Tale In 1921, Vance Palmer, the famous Australian author and poet, noted, in his essay entitled "On Boundaries", that "it is the business of thought to define things, to find boundaries, thinking, in fact, is an incessant process of definition" (Palmer 134). As Palmer observed, human beings, by their very nature, attempt to define all things. But most importantly, we seek to redefine topics and ideas that have already been defined so that we can better understand what they mean, where we come from, and, perhaps most importantly, who we are. Writers, from the dawn of the written word to the present day, have sought, almost as a whole, to shed new light on subjects previously thought to be completely understood. George Orwell's Animal Farm, Charles Dickens' Bleak House and William Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing are just a few examples of the thousands of books in which authors have attempted to redefine the defined. Just like these authors, Geoffrey Chaucer, in his Canterbury Tales, managed to redefine an idea that, even in the present, but certainly in Chaucer's time, was thought to be completely understood. More specifically, by using dozens of biblical references in The Clerk's Tale, Chaucer redefined the relationship between humanity and the Christian God and between woman and man. Much of the scholarly criticism of The Clerk's Tale seems to have focused on the idea of ​​Griselda representing either the Virgin Mary or Job and Walter representing God. James Wimsatt, in his essay entitled "The Blessed Virgin and the Two Coronations of Griselda", perhaps he expressed this type of criticism best when he wrote: The C...... middle of paper ......ury Tales: Nine stories and the general prologue. Ed. VA Kolve.New York: WW Norton & Company, 1989. 136-168.Condren, Edward. "The Clerk's Tale of the Man Who Tempts God." Criticism 26.2 (1984): 99-114.Fichte, Joerg. "The Clerk's Tale: An Obituary for Gentilesse." New Views on Chaucer: Essays in Generative Criticism.Ed. William Johnson. Denver: Society for New Language Study, 1973. 9-16.Levy, Bernard. "The Meanings of the Clerk's Tale." Chaucer and the art of fiction. Ed. Leigh Arrathoon.Rochester, MI: Solaris, 1986. 385-403. "Palmer, Vance." The Columbia Quotation Dictionary. CD-ROM. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. The NIV Study Bible. Rev. New international version. Ed. Kenneth Barker. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1985. Wimsatt, James. "The Blessed Virgin and the two coronations of Griselda." Medieval 6.1 (1980): 187-207.