In his day every part of the human body was supposed to be under the domination of one of the twelve Signs or Constellations (see Chaucer's Astrology), Aries governing the head, Taurus the neck, etc. This interest of the pilgrims and Chaucer's audience in the "authority" of fictional experience becomes a principle of comic structure.Chaucer's character of his Doctor of Physic introduces us to a world of thought so different from our own that it would need many pages to offer an adequate commentary on it. The many and irreconcilable "points of view" within the tale and in the pilgrims' comments on it draw primary attention to the notion that stories advocate or "prove" ideals to their tellers and hearers. Where Livy and Jean de Meun had shown in the exemplum the deserved fall of an unjust judge, Chaucer, in added dialogue between father and daughter, and the philosophical myth of Nature as God's "vicaire general," turns the ethical focus upon Virginia as a figure of patient forbearance. The "Physician's Tale" of Appius and Virginia shows in its simplest outlines Chaucer's method and purpose in incorporating narrative exempla into the "Canterbury Tales." Its differences from its source, and its family likeness, as a tale of a secular virgin-martyr, to the "seintes legendes of Cupide" in his earlier attempt at framed narrative, reveal the basic strategy of Chaucer's other tales of virtuous wronged women-the Clerk's Tale of Griselda, the Man of Law's Tale of Constance, the Second Nun's Tale of Cecilia-and suggest how and why Chaucer developed the double-framing device of the pilgrimage story contest.
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