Note 6 — JANUARY AND MAY:
Reading edition
Chaucer would have thought it an anomaly for a Christian knight to invoke the heathen deities. The original is,
A wife! ah! Sainte Mary, benedicite, How might a man have any adversite That hath a wife? certes I cannot say.
The requirements of the metre in this and other passages of Chaucer, show that benedicite was sometimes contracted, in the pronunciation, to ben'cite.