This tale begins by describing rich merchants and how they can afford to make mistakes and lose money. Unlike the rest of us, when the rich lose money, they're still rich.
But the main theme of this tale seems to be that God will take care of those who persevere and keep their faith. What I don't get is why some random person, like Constance in this case, has to go through such horrendous testing to prove it. Jesus refused to be tested by the devil, but God put lots of people through tests throughout the Old Testament. People and loved ones were killed, exiled, or tortured, but in the end someone or another was saved because of his or her faith. I imagine Judaism and Islam, sharing roots with Christianity, have similar stories (maybe even the same stories).
The Greeks had similar stories, too. Their gods toyed with mortals, giving them certain gifts or besetting them with various challenges. It was a kind of game to them as they worked through various alliances and rivalries among themselves, but it was a lot of suffering and hardship for the mortals caught up in their games.
In the same way, rich people and nobles play with common people. In this tale, Constance was sent off to marry the Sultan of Syria, irregardless of her own feelings, but mainly to improve political ties for Rome and the Vatican.
Note: You'd think Constance, the Emperor's daughter, would be a noble, too, but as in the "Knight's Tale", women here are given lower status, so she was more like a subject than a noble.The powers that be might win or lose in their games, but in the end they're hardly affected. Their subjects, however, go through all kinds of hardships and suffering--often unbeknownst to the superiors that put them through it all.
I'm reminded of the movie Trading Places--all the troubles and life-changing events the characters went through were caused by just a simple bet between a couple of old rich guys for their amusement.
And I'm reminded of George W. Bush arguing to privatize Social Security. Part of his argument was that people need to be allowed to make risks in their investments so they can outperform Social Security. One problem, though, is that most people can't afford risks! When a rich person makes a bad investment, he can still be rich. But when a poor person makes a bad investment, he can lose everything.
Another problem, of course, is the mathematical impossibility of everybody outperforming everybody else!
When people lose their money, it's not as if it vanished. Someone else got it. Public schools don't teach economics--so the public is set up to fail. We cannot allow privatization of Social Security until public schools teach 12 years of economics and finance. Otherwise an influential minority (the rich) is going to outperform the under-educated majority (the public) and take all the money for themselves.
So what's so amazing about The Canterbury Tales is, even though they rode horses back then and didn't have electricity or the printing press or just about everything we depend upon everyday, they still faced the same human issues we face today. People still endure hardships and manipulation ... and life still goes on. "The Man of Law's Tale" is just as relevant today as it was 600 years ago.
References:
Geoffrey Chaucer. The Canterbury Tales. ca. 1390. Trans. Burton Raffel. Modern Library. 2008.
Trading Places. Dir. John Landis. Perf. Dan Ackroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Jamie Lee Curtis. Paramount, 1983. Film.
