GRISELDA, grl-zelithl, or GRISELDIS, gr1 761'dis. The heroine of a celebrated medirvai tale, which probably had its rise in Italy. A poor girl, a chareoal-burner, is raised to be the wife of the Marquis of Saluzzo, who puts her humility and obedience to the severest, tests. She, however, passes through them all trium phantly. and a reconciliation takes place. In this legend the endurance and self-renunciation of the loving woman are represented as carried to the highest pitch. We find the tradition first worked up into a tale, said to be founded on fact, in Boccaccio's Decameron (the Tenth Novel of the Tenth Day). Petrarch, who owed the story to Boccaccio, translated it into Latin in 1373, under the title De Obedientia et Fide Uxoria; and in the fourteenth century the story was well known throughout Europe. In the year 1393 it was in Paris elaborated into a 'mystery' play, Le mys tere de Griseldis, Marquise de Saluces, and to about the same time belong several French prose versions, such as Le menagier de Paris and others. In England the story was told by Chaucer in his Clerke's Tale, where the great English poet adopts the version given by Petrarch; there is a reference to Patient Griselda by Lydgate in his Temple of Glass; there are indications of ballads and stories about Pacyent Gressell during the sixteenth century, and some ballads of a later date, and still preserved, also deal with the sub ject; and finally, two plays, one (now lost) of the early sixteenth and one of the early seventeenth century (printed by the Shakespeare Society), treat the same matter. A play on the same sub
ject, by Hans Sachs, appeared in Germany in 1546. Versions of the story are also found in the literatures of Holland, Bohemia, Sweden, Iceland, etc. The old German book entitled Markgraf Walther has lately been reproduced with more or less fidelity in Schwab's Buch der schonsten Geschichten and Sagen, Marbach's and Simrock's Deutsche Volksbiicher. Consult: Westenholz, Die Griseldissage in der Litteratur geschichte (Heidelberg, 1888) ; Originals and Analogues of Chaucer, part ii. (London, 1875), Chaucer Society; Child, English and Scottish, Ballads, vol. iv. (Boston, 1882) ; Warton, His tory of English Poetry, edited by Hazlitt, vol. iv. (London, 1870).