Spring 2007

Shaffern, Robert W. “The pardoner's promises: preaching and policing indulgences in the fourteenth-century English church.” The Historian 68.1 (2006): 17 pgs. 14 February 2007.  

            Robert Shaffern examines the historical evidence behind historians’ and poets’ claims that indulgence sellers were all little more than Vatican-endorsed con artists working to line the Church’s coffers. He starts by delineating a couple obvious examples supporting this viewpoint, namely, Chaucer’s shiftless con artist and William Langland’s shameless fleecer of the peasantry. Langland, Chaucer’s contemporary, used the prologue to Piers Plowman to accuse indulgence salesmen of “of impoverishing simple folk and usurping the position of priest.” Indeed, Shaffern argues, canon law of the Middle Ages “enumerated and condemned” pardoners for acting in a manner unbecoming of men associated with the Church, even if pardoners were laymen, by and large.

            The author, however, offers a counterargument that he feels proves not all pardoners were money-grubbing con artists. He cites Medieval church critic G.R. Owst, who still “presented evidence which suggested that the pardoners' ministrations were generally licit and recognized to be a great benefit to hospitals and churches,” namely, that the pardoners give their sermons to crowds on Sundays and “preach that they have many weak and impotent inmates, and display large Indulgences, and many things are given them--in truth, rightly enough” (qtd. in Shaffern). Shaffern points out that, in their time, pardoners benefited both the Church and its followers. They gave the Church the money it needed to fund its hospitals, and they gave peasants the belief that they would be absolved of spending more time in Purgatory as penalty for sin.

            Shaffern concludes that pardoners could not be as shiftless in selling their wares, as bishops of the time made sure that any preachers in their dioceses were licensed. Those hawking salvation without such a license were “under pain of excommunication.” He argues that Chaucer’s Pardoner, therefore, had to work extremely hard at his confidence game if for no other reason than wanting to avoid a run-in with the local authorities.

            The author’s research opens a fascinating new perspective on both Chaucer’s time period as well as at what, if anything, Chaucer was poking fun. Historically, the article points out that the faithful need not lose hope—perhaps the Catholic Church of a bygone era was not, as so many history textbooks feel, a looming force of corruption. Perhaps indulgences did, indeed, function as good-faith initiatives, contributing to services that would ultimately aid the meekest.

            From a literary perspective, the article also sheds light on Chaucer. Though certainly a man ahead of his time, the Canterbury Pardoner’s creator was not, most likely, a sort of Martin Luther prototype, heartily decrying the Church and its excesses. Given the nature of his Pardoner, however, he seems to have been able to pick up on the inherent flaws of the system, satirizing both the pardoners who worked so hard at their laziness, such as the Pardoner who boasts, “I wol nat do no labour with myne handes” (Chaucer 431), and attacking as well an institution that might hire the men in good faith but lose to avarice.

            That pardoners may not have been as bad as Chaucer makes them out to be indicates that he had a modern satirist’s talent for finding the worst-case scenario of an otherwise upright-seeming institution and making literary hay with it. As with the Knight’s Tale, where readers have no obvious indication for whether the tale really is supposed to be epic or whether it is a satire of an epic poem, the Pardoner could be Chaucer’s honest interpretation of what noble poetry should be. Shaffern’s research and the overall humorous overtones in The Canterbury Tales, however, suggest that Chaucer merely intended to poke fun at those elements of society which received more than their fair share of estimation.  –Bree Katz, 2/14/07

Farrell, Thomas J.  “The Style of the Clerk’s Tale and the Functions of Its Glosses.”  Studies in Philology 86.3 (1989):  286-309.  Academic Search Premier.  EBSCOhost.  Julia Rogers Library, Baltimore, MD.  15 Feb. 2007 <http://search.epnet.com>

            First and foremost, I learned some new words.  One of them is philology.  Maybe I’ve heard it before now, but I certainly didn’t know what it meant.  You mentioned “glosses” during the last class and I knew what you were talking about, but I wasn’t familiar with that term either.  This article seemed like a good opportunity to find out more about them, especially why they are there.

            The author points out that they remain for a reason.  He says that they would have been omitted by now if they simply marked places Chaucer meant to revise or if he meant to return to them to make sure he had correctly translated the material he borrowed (287).  He explores the potential roles of the glosses.  He says the glosses “highlight important thematic material…and they focus attention on the style of the Clerk’s Tale…in contrast to that of its source” (290).  The examples he uses to demonstrate this seem logical and convincing.  He discusses the idea that the glosses draw attention to Chaucer’s individual style or meaning when he changes the words of Petrarch slightly or adds to them, which is interesting.  I feel like the article became less focused and convincing during the second half.   I also feel like I would have to know Latin to completely understand some of the author’s points. Shelly Haugrud, 2/15/07

Bowers, John M. "Three Readings of The Knight's Tale: Sir John Clanvowe, Geoffrey Chaucer, and James I of Scotland." Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 34.2 (2004): 287-291. MLA International Bibliography. 15 February 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com.

            In Bowers’ examination of Chaucer’s version of the Knight’s Tale he explores the alterations that Chaucer made to Love of Palamon and Arcite.  He describes how the persona of the Knight telling the tale obscures “much of the homosocial content of the original free-standing version” (288).  Bowers claims that Chaucer downplays the friendship between Arcite and Palamon which Terry Jones claims was the central love relationship in Boccaccio’s version.

            Bowers suggests that the downplaying of homosocial loyalty in favor of a personal loyalty to the throne may reflect the changing political climate of England under Richard II.  His “political program after 1388-1389 meant accelerating this process of dispossessing the traditional warrior class and replacing it with a ‘courtier nobility’ located largely in his household with direct personal allegiance to the king” (289).              Bowers uses quotations from John Burrow and Eve Sedgwick to structure the concept that “The Knight’s Tale” helps reinforce gender stereotypes by relegating women to the realm of prizes or commodities; objects outside the realm of masculine society.  The paradigm of this patriarchal society is embodied in the figure of the Knight and, his son, the Squire, who create a line of succession; never mind that the Knight’s wife is completely absent.

            The social and political intrigue that Bowers discovers in the Knight’s Tale is quite fascinating.  The patriarchal themes in Chaucer’s version of the tale are blatant and unabashed.  Instead of being a tale about homosocial love forged in the bonds of war, Chaucer makes the story into a romantic quest for a mate to help perpetuate the soldiers’ familial lines.  This author’s reading of Chaucer is well supported by critical and historical evidence.  He deftly skirts the issue of presuming authorial intent, while hinting at possible explanations for some of Chaucer’s decisions.—Jacob Grover, 2/15/07

Bisson, Lillian M. “The Church In Turmoil: The Hierarchy and Heresy.” Chaucer and the Late Medieval World. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. 49-71. 

In this chapter, Bisson writes about the Church and its hierarchy during the fourteenth century.  The chapter begins by explaining that Chaucer was writing during a time when the plague epidemic was causing much of the laity to question the intermediary power of the Church against an enigmatic God.  In the history she details, Bisson highlights some of the tension and corruption within the Church as an institution.  When describing the roles of various clerics and their interaction with the laity, she also explains how officials, of both higher and lower order (the secular clergy), frequently abused their power.  The obvious corruption in the Church and of its clerics, Bisson says, contributed to a growing sense of anticlericalism.  However, people still maintained strong religious beliefs.  They distrusted the power of the clergy, not God, and, therefore, began to seek out ways to communicate with God directly. 

It was around this time, she explains, that the first anticlerical movement began in England, spearheaded by John Wyclif and his Lollard followers.  This movement specifically critiqued the Church’s wealth, the shortcomings of its representatives (the clergy), and its role in governmental affairs (50).  Wyclif also upheld the bible as the soul Christian authority, playing an important role in translating the bible into English, in turn, decreasing the laity’s dependence on the clergy by making the ‘source of Christian authority’ accessible to more people (58).  Bisson points out that many of the failings of Chaucer’s clerical characters in the Canterbury Tales are those that the Lollards were protesting.  She acknowledges that there is no hard evidence to support a connection between Chaucer and Wyclif, but does suggest that Chaucer’s treatment of his clerical pilgrims may have been an expression of his internal dialogue with this heretical movement.  Bisson also points out that many writers at the time took a satirical approach towards the clergy.

Through her discussion of the various roles of the clergy, Bisson draws attention to Chaucer’s characters that held positions under the Church, namely the Pardoner, Summoner, and Parson.  Citing other scholars in her argument, she explains how Chaucer’s depiction of the Pardoner and Summoner is rather satirical, pointing out their failings that are so obviously in opposition to what they should represent as Church officials.  This, she says, reflects Lollardy ideas.  However, the Parson, she explains, is cast in a surprisingly favorable light, he is devoid of the corruption so common to parsons at the time; this prevents one from making any definite associations between Chaucer and the Lollards.  Distancing Chaucer even further from Wyclif, Bisson notes that Lollards would be unlikely to make a pilgrimage such as the one Chaucer writes about. 

In this chapter Bisson makes only simple points and generalizations about some of the characters in The Canterbury Tales.  She often quots other scholars’ opinions, never really making an argument for one idea over the other, and she does not deal with any one tale in depth.  This chapter simply gives an overview students may find useful when seeking to understand the context in which Chaucer was writing and what influence that may have had on his work.  Students may come away with a better idea of how the clergy were supposed to act versus how they generally behaved. 

Bisson’s work may also help students understand why the characters in Canterbury Tales were going on a pilgrimage, (rather than seeking out a clergy member for spiritual guidance).  In a time when many people were doubtful of the efficacy of the clergy as intermediaries to God, it is not surprising that people took matters into their own hands by going on pilgrimages.  Such journeys gave them time for study and personal reflection, and they could appeal to God directly once they reached the site, rather than using a clergy member as an intermediary.  (While a Lollard may not make such a journey, ordinary lay people frequently did.)  Bisson never makes any strong claims about Chaucer and his relationship to the Lollards, although it does leave room for one to consider and question the descriptions of the clerical characters in The Canterbury Tales more closely. The entire chapter, however, feels more like an introduction to another scholarly work than an actual stand-alone argument.  It is useful only as a stepping-stone to create a foundation of understanding and as a starting point for doing more in depth research.—Leah Hoffman, 2/15/07

Donaldson, E. Talbot.  “Love, War, and the Cost of Winning: The Knight’s Tale and The Two Noble Kinsmen.”  The Swan at the Well: Shakespeare Reading Chaucer.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. 

This chapter examines Chaucer’s The Knight’s Tale as the primary source for Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (written in collaboration with John Fletcher, though Donaldson chooses to avoid as much as possible the scenes believed to be written by Fletcher).  As the prologue to The Two Noble Kinsmen asserts, the play is fundamentally a retelling in Elizabethan drama of The Knight’s Tale.  That their stories are same with no major differences is not under debate; it is the difference in details that provides the interest.

As Donaldson describes, Shakespeare sacrifices even the little character development that Chaucer provides for the male characters in favor of character development for Emilia and, more importantly, “a clear picture of the egotism of love destroying friendship” (58).  Donaldson points out that in Chaucer the two men are given somewhat different personalities, Palamon as the more rash and excitable and Arcite as the more contemplative.  In Shakespeare, even those slight differences are eliminated, and Palamon and Arcite become basically interchangeable.  Theseus, too, is a flatter character in The Two Noble Kinsmen: Shakespeare eliminates the thoughtful and just aspects of the ruler Chaucer portrays, and makes him a tyrant whose hand is only stayed by the pleading of a woman to whom he has promised anything she wants.

Emilia, on the other hand, is much stronger in Shakespeare than in Chaucer.  She is given scenes alone with her sister Hippolyta as well as among the other characters.  She expresses strong opinions about love and worries greatly about the loser of the contest, who must die, though she does not wish to marry the winner either.  In The Knight’s Tale, she is little more than an ideal figure, a plot device to provide the split between Palamon and Arcite.  Donaldson theorizes that Chaucer’s Knight, a man of war, understands women very little, and this is why the female characters are not given much treatment in the tale.

Examining another text with the same story as one of Chaucer’s tales certainly brings fresh insights.  It is interesting to note the ways in which Shakespeare chose to change Chaucer and, if one is focused on Chaucer’s end rather than Shakespeare’s, to question why Chaucer did not make those same choices and whether he would even have thought to do so.  It is obvious even with no basis for comparison that Chaucer’s Emelye is barely given consideration as a character; did Chaucer simply not see her as a real person within the story?  Did the Knight?  It is clear from the other tales that Chaucer has no bias against women or belief that they are less than complete human beings.  Or perhaps this is to show, in an even different way from Shakespeare, the way love destroys friendship—with the beloved as a mere plot device rather than an actual character.

The comparison to The Two Noble Kinsmen also brings up the fact that, while Chaucer barely differentiates Palamon and Arcite, he does do so more than Shakespeare does.  Donaldson says that he did not realize that Chaucer did so much until he compared the two texts, and I certainly did not realize it until I read this chapter.  Theseus, too, is a rounder character in Chaucer—at first I saw him as simply a stereotype of a good leader, but as I read about the differences between Chaucer’s Theseus and Shakespeare’s Theseus, I realized that Chaucer’s is actually a fairly complex character and embodies both the “kind” and “strong” aspects of a good leader, while Shakespeare’s is merely strong.

Donaldson frequently emphasizes that Shakespeare saw a “dark side” to the Knight’s Tale, and seems to believe that the Knight tells the tale as a light-hearted, somewhat humorous story.  I would not have read The Knight’s Tale that way, but in comparison to The Two Noble Kinsmen, it does seem to take on more pleasant, cheery qualities.  However, it is hardly a happy little story, and it is troubling that Donaldson does not explore his reasoning for reading the Knight as “good-humored” (51), while he is telling this story of friends torn apart by love, including such things as the gruesome imagery in the temples, which Donaldson makes a point of describing.—Kaitlyn Miller, 2/15/07

Taylor, Paul Beekman. "The Uncourteous Knights of The Canterbury Tales." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 72.3 (1991): 209-218. MLA International Bibliography. EBSCOhost. Goucher Coll. Lib., Baltimore, MD. 14 February 2007. <http://search.ebscohost.com>.

            In his essay, Paul Taylor addresses the similarities, and differences, between all the knights of “The Canterbury Tales” and the ideal and historical realities of knights.  According to Taylor’s research, the ideal knight was serving both God, in defense of the church, and love, in defense of womanhood.  He describes Chaucer’s tale-telling knight as both secular and religious, while those throughout the tales are fighting for love ideals.  However, in those fights for love, Taylor criticizes the knights for failing at the ideals of courtesy and he implies that Chaucer does this to address the reality of knights at the time.  In the world of the ideal knight, they fought for both women and the church because women, especially as virgins, were figures of the church and thus well worth protecting; the ideal knight was a bond between spiritual and worldly love.  In addition, knights were supposed to be good, but appropriate lovers and certainly not succumb to lust.  According to Taylor, in Chaucer’s world, the knight was expected to love within his social class, but he was also allowed to lust below that, as occurs in some of the tales.  As it turns out, the real knight, is not much like the ideal at all; rape, or as Taylor puts it “violent amorous pursuits”, were common among knights. 

            Taylor goes on to detail the different crimes of each knight in the tales, beginning with The Knight’s Tale.  He explains that, although Theseus is attempting to do a good thing by creating an orderly way to decide who shall marry Emelye, in doing so he completely disregards her feelings, as we know from her prayer.  Theseus uses Emelye to recreate a greater order he sees in the universe.  In The Franklin’s Tale, Taylor argues that a knight does the opposite, disconnecting and undoing order, while also ignoring a woman’s concerns and this exemplifies the tale’s confusion of love and knighthood.  In The Physician’s Tale, another knight disregards his daughter’s feelings, and life, by killing her to supposedly save his and her honor from a knight who wants her.  Taylor summarizes that in all three of these tales, women are made to succumb to a knight’s personal view of order.  In his next grouping, Taylor includes the Man of Law, the Wife of Bath, and the Merchant as tales that talk about ways of loving women.  For the Man of Law, a woman will not return a knight’s affection, and he commits a crime, accusing her.  For the Wife of Bath, a knight rapes a woman, taking away her virginity, a crime worse than murder.  Finally, the knight for the Merchant, he marries a young woman to serve his own lust, instead of the common good (God).  In this set of tales, although men have transgressed against the bodies of women, women are able to hurt the men in turn by forcing the knights’ bodies under their own will. 

Lastly, Taylor examines Sir Thopas and the Second Nun as examples of other-worldly love.  Sir Thopas dreams of a fairy-woman are equivalent to a love of the Virgin Mary and thus of God; however, the woman he dreams of is idealized only in his head and can never really exist-so he is both a good and bad knight.  The knights of the Second Nun’s Tale are created to chastise all those who have come before.  Taylor argues that, although some women do gain control over a knight, ultimately all of the knights in the tales have made women bend to their will.  He also points out that the one flaw all of these knights share which causes their “flawed service to love” is a lack of sense.  To conclude, he outlines the three errors in service to love that the knights make: subjecting women to men for order and honor, strong pursuit of women for pride of lust, and the quest for an ideal without an actual person. 

Taylor does a very thorough job of describing the characteristics of an ideal knight and a real knight in Chaucer’s time in an attempt to claim the poet was making some kind of commentary on the behavior of real knights.  At points, his outlines of the different tales are too lengthy, spending too much time trying to prove a simple point, while at other times, he spends very little time and does not prove his point satisfactorily, although what he says is true.  Where Taylor really fails is in proving his claim that Chaucer is writing stories about less than perfect knights as a comment on the much less than perfect knights in his reality.  This is a very interesting claim, and he actually lays out all of the pieces necessary for his argument in the essay, but he never takes the time to connect them for the reader.  Taylor presents a very interesting argument here, which could be used just to analyze the behavior of the knights in the tales, without his claim of Chaucer’s commentary.  This would also be a good piece to use for a feminist critique, without it actually being a feminist piece of work.  Anna Lehnen, 16 February 2007

Vaszily, Scott. "Fabliau Plotting Against Romance in Chaucer's Knight's Tale." Style. 31: 3 (Fall 1997) 523-42.                                                                       15 Feb. 2007. <http://lion.chadwyck.com/searchCritRef.do>.

            In brief, Vaszily uses the structural narratology of Roy Pearcy and Gérald Genette to prove the Marxist claim that Chaucer deliberately incorporates two instances of the French farce genre fabliau into �The Knight�s Tale� for the purpose of attacking the false consciousness of classism so prevalent in the courtly romance genre that fabliaux so often attack (2, 9). Vaszily credits Pearcy, who uses a grammar that Vaszily points out is highly similar to that of A.J. Gremias, with singling out �dominant� of the fabliau, the one component of the genre that governs all its other aspects (3) The fabliau�s �dominant� is that of a �duper� taking advantage of an ambiguous message in order to outwit a �dupe� who fails to understand the ambiguity. Vaszily reveals elements of this dominant to be present in two pivotal moments in �The Knight�s Tale�: Arcite�s refusal to honor his pledge to Palamon in Part One and Saturn�s intervention in Part Four. In both instances, the dupers, Arcite and Saturn, choose the overly literal interpretations of the messages they receive over the logical meanings in order to further their own interests (11, 15).

            I feel that the argument is decent, particularly in the discussion of the discrepancies between Chaucer and Boccacio  (15-17). A satirical stance would explain the presence of Theseus, whose intervention in Palamon and Arcite�s rivalry is quite ironic given his past.

            There are some holes in the paper. Jessie Dixon mentions in her annotated bibliography of the same article that the Knight places a spotlight on Theseus� nobility. Indeed, there are many instances of nobles being noble, from Ypolita and Emelye saving Palamon and Arcite from Theseus to Arcite�s dying wish to unite Emelye with Palamon (Chaucer 1748-54, 2796-97). I also think that Vaszily�s claim that the women�s cry at 2835-36 is not necessarily �as direct an expression as there is in Chaucer of the �hedonistic materialism�… so characteristic of fablieu� (10). Chaucer doesn�t give the specific class of the �wommen� who make this cry, but it does come in the passage describing how the whole of Athens falls into mourning over the death of Arcite, which means that these women could very well be of the lower socioeconomic that Vaszily claims Chaucer means to defend (Chaucer, 2829).       

             I also found myself particularly bothered by Vaszily�s need to put down the structualists whose theory he is borrowing: �Now that we are all poststructualists, perhaps we can use some structualist tools safely, without mistaking the approach for objective science� (5). I understand the need for critics to identify themselves to the branch of the literary critic community they align themselves with, but this comment still seems needless, and I feel that it damages the author�s credibility.

            Also see in this bibliography, Dixon, Jessie.  Annotation of Scott Vaszily, " Fabliau Plotting Against Romance in Chaucer�s Knight�s Tale."  Goucher College Chaucer Seminars Annotated  Bibliography of Chaucer Criticism: 1994, 1996, 1999, 2001, 2003.  2/12/99.  Available online at http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng330/annotated chaucer bibliographies.htm –Yvonne Rogers, 2/16/07

Rock, Catherine A. “Forsworn and Fordone: Arcite as Oath-Breaker in the Knight’s Tale.”  The   Chaucer Review 40.4 (2006): 416-432.       Project MUSE.  13 February 2007.    <http://muse.jhu.edu/search/search.pl>

            Rock’s primary thesis rests upon the supposition that readers view the conclusion of Knight’s Tale, more specifically Arcite’s grisly death and the eventual marriage between Palamon and Emelye, as “arbitrary.”  She argues that the pilgrim Knight, as the narrator, deliberately introduces Arcite and Palamon as indistinguishable characters to later contrast their underscoring differences in “issues of brotherhood, trouthe, and loyalty.”  The foundation of her thesis is that Arcite’s multiple lapses in these core medieval values account for his fate.       

            The crux of the romance, Emelye, presents the first marked individuality between the two sworn brothers.  Rock consults multiple sources to corroborate the gravity and legality of this oath of brotherhood, and it is essential to recognize that it is entirely absent from Boccaccio’s Teseida.  The oath would be recognizable and resonate with Chaucer’s medieval audience, but we must consider it a “significant” inclusion and examine its implications.  When Palamon first encounters Emelye, he reinforces this sacred oath by praying that Venus either help them both escape from their prison or take pity on them both.  In contrast, when Palamon directs Arcite’s attention to Emelye, Arcite is concerned only with his own desire.  Maurice Keen views this as his first transgression of his brotherly oath, which extended from physical protection of a brother to “all that affected his honour, his fortune, and his emotional entanglements.”

            One of Rock’s more compelling, though less developed, arguments follows as she illuminates Arcite’s defense that love is above the law in terms of positive and natural law.  Positive law is that which is “formally agreed to, imposed, legislated, made known, [or] written down,” which would include the bonds of knighthood and sworn brotherhood; natural law, however is driven by love and need.  Palamon is still operating under the subsets of positive law, in which Arcite is making the choice to defy their relationship.  However, natural law motivates Arcite because he thinks he cannot exist without her.  The power of this natural law recurs when the queen and her ladies convince the King that because the knights’ quarrel is one of love rather than war it is not apt to punish them with death.

            Aside from his failure to uphold his honor as a knight and sworn brother, Rock also argues that Arcite’s pride contrasted with Palamon’s relative humility in the face of their respective gods merits his horrific death.  Arcite, again aligning himself with Mars after the bout with lovesickness in Thebes, disrespects the god by attempting to win his favor by reminding him of his own flaws concerning his adulterous affair with Vulcan’s wife.  While Palamon and Emelye give their Venus and Diana, to whom they have been unremittingly faithful, two choices for the outcome of the battle, Palamon only prays for “victory.”  While she claims most scholars believe Arcite’s death is undeserved, Rock argues that it is a deep sense of faithlessness—exhibited by both his failure to uphold oaths and his vacillating allegiances throughout the tale that is responsible for his fate.  I agree that it is significant that Arcite must suffer to his death because it illustrates the irony of a once noble knight dying due to a seemingly chance encounter with Saturn, his folly in not praying for a merciful defeat as did Palamon, and it provides him with the possibility of redemption.  Since Arcite redeems himself to Palamon, does this imply that sworn brotherhood is still “indestructible,” yet innately human and flawed?     

            Rock’s attempt to provide a continuous lens with which to examine the characters of Arcite and Palamon is intriguing, particularly because it addresses and expands Chaucer’s earlier textual challenge to the reader to determine which knight is handed the worse fate.  While the central argument is convincing, the article however, falls somewhat short of expectations because the thesis is thematically and critically broad.  Thus, Rock often slips into unnecessarily detailed plot summarizations with a lack of development and organization in regards to the critical points that she seems to briefly illuminate and promptly abandon.  Though not a particularly compact argument, I would suggest this article to fellow Chaucer novices because, if read carefully, it will also catalyze wider critical arguments concerning the Knight’s Tale.

            For instance, Rock touches on the subtle and yet crucial inclusions that Chaucer made when adapting Boccaccio’s Teseida, but this issue potentially has greater implications for our reading of the Knight’s Tale.  While reading this article I also became interested in the possible mythological or literary predecessors to Arcite’s argument that because he was first to love Emelye as a woman rather than a goddess like Palamon, he reserves the right to pursue her in reality.  Rock’s closing arguments also have feminist implications about how Emelye is treated in the entire tale.  Arcite, by recommending marriage and listing Palamon’s worthy traits, directly to Emelye, is empowering her in a way that has been absent throughout the entire tale.  However, she also argues that Theseus undermines this potential power by first offering her as a tournament prize and later resolving she marry Palamon as a means for political harmony.  Though Rock introduces the possibility of a feminist reading, I am concerned that this viewpoint, if not carefully monitored, could be too anachronistic to medieval romance to yield appreciable results.—Jen Madera, 2/16/07

Blamires, Alcuin. “Chaucer the Reactionary: Ideology and the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.” The Review of English Studies 51.204 (2000) 523-539. JSTOR. Julia Rogers Library, Baltimore MD. 15 Feb. 2007 <http://jstor.org> 

            Blamires’ article attacks the idea that Chaucer’s “moral vision”is synomomous with democracy (523). Blamires aims to disprove the research of critics who believe that Chaucer was critiquing and ultimately disapproving of the politics of his time. The author writes that Chaucer was devoted to the “dominant” politics of his time, and attempted to shift the blame of the 1381 Rising from the aristocracy to the oppressed. The main characters addressed in the article are the Knight, Franklin, Plowman, Miller, and Reeve. Blamires believes that Chaucer created the Knight and Franklin as characters that ultimately glorify the upper class. He finds that the Plowman, Miller, and Reeve are scapegoats that caused any political uprising due to their greed and unethical behavior. The Reeve is the most highlighted character and the character that Blamires believes truly represents Chaucer’s political ideologies.

            Blamires dissects each of the above mentioned characters and provides Chaucer’s own political experience in relation to all five of those characters. The evidence he uses is almost entirely from the General Prologue. Blamires mentions the archetype of the overbearing man of power, and the moral upright plebeian, and claims that Chaucer ultimately swapped the two. The characters of the aristocracy( the Knight and the Franklin) are portrayed as upstanding citizens, while the Plowman, Miller, and especially the Reeve( men of much less power and stature) are portrayed as corrupt and power obsessed. Blamires concludes his article by stating this character portrayal is intentional, due to the investments that Chaucer had to the aristocracy of his time.

            I found this article to be quite useful in providing historical background for Chaucer and his works. It was interesting to me to read about the 1381 Rising, and the effects that it had on Chaucer, and in turn how it was represented in the General Prologue. The article also  provides an in depth analysis of characters that are not often mentioned in most criticism. I personally spent a long time trying to find a recent article that discussed the Franklin and his role in the entire work. This article provided me with about two pages of information on the duties of a franklin, and highlighted what Chaucer and a franklin had in common. While I did find the article do be useful, I am still some what skeptical of Blamires’ argument. I’m not that quick to believe that Chaucer wanted to oppress the lower class, and I still feel as if he critiqued all classes somewhat fairly. Either way , while there are some holes in Blamires’ argument, the article still contains a lot of useful information. –Kelly Rankin, 2/16/07

Jordan, Tracey. "Fairy Tale and Fabliau: Chaucer’s The Miller’s Tale." Studies in Short Fiction 21.2 (1984): 87. Academic Search Premier. Goucher College Library, Baltimore, MD. 14 February 2007. <http://search.ebscohost.com>. 

          While examining the Biblical references and utilization of a creation or “birthing” theme in The Miller’s Tale, Tracey Jordan establishes the tale’s main characters as sexually ambivalent.  Jordan claims this sexual ambivalence enables comparison of The Miller’s Tale to some forms of fairy tales.  The Miller’s Tale (by nature a fabliau) Jordan informs, can be likened to “animal groom cycle”-type fairy tales (87).  In these types of fairy tales, there is a transformation from “abhorred…to adored…made possible through some violent (sexual) act” (87).  In Jordan’s estimation, The Miller’s Tale exhibits an inverse form of this transformation, found in Absolon’s adoration of Alisoun that turns to hate after she tricks him into kissing her bare bum.  Thus concludes the first two paragraphs of Jordan’s article.  The balance of the seven pages is spent in discussion of the sexual ambivalence of the tale-telling Miller, John the Carpenter, his young wife Alisoun, her young Oxford-ian lover Nicholas, and Absolon, the feminine and well-dressed clerk harboring a deep affection for Alisoun. 

          Jordan describes sexual ambivalence as disinterest in the offerings of women.  Absolon is declared sexually ambivalent because of his natural disinterest in women; Jordan argues that Absolon’s “noble love for Alisoun” causes him to spurn all other women, and then is fueled by hatred for Alisoun to repudiate all women after his humiliation.  The pious and paranoid Carpenter in turn can be categorized as sexually ambivalent due to the fantastical nature of his love for his wife, his “ignorance of his wife’s sexual nature,” and the disinterest he shows in the overt advances Absolon makes on Alisoun right under his own window (91).  John, when he cuts his barrel free of the ceiling and falls to the ground, undergoes a “birthing” as a result of a creative plan that references Noah’s flood that Nicholas concocts to arrange a night with Alisoun.  There is an inversion of the Noah story’s moral as the “lecherous” Nicholas goes unembarrassed while the Carpenter suffers. The symbolic birthing is a result of the intellectual and creative Nicholas.

          Nicholas is not pointed out as sexually ambivalent, but rather as a sexual being.  Everything about him, from creativity to his music to his academics paint him as a sexual creature.  He gazes at the stars in trying to study God.  Alisoun is also considered a sexual creature, an exuberant physical presence that captures the interest of all three men.  However, her lack of dialogue in the tale embodies her character of more biological interest, with her ability as woman to “give birth” to the destruction of Absolon’s romantic love and John’s religious ideals, the placement of Absolon’s kiss and by sleeping with Nicholas.  In an article driven by finding the characters sexually ambivalent, Jordan’s descriptions of the sexual nature of the two lovers raise many questions as to the true focus of the article.

          Jordan’s classification of the Miller as ambivalent hinges solely, and I believe weakly, upon a belief shared with the Carpenter that man is not meant to know the ways of God and the folly of attempting to.  The Carpenter’s more intense lack of curiosity includes respecting his wife’s privacy, while the Miller does not.  Additionally, it seems improbable that a pilgrim such as the Miller, who tells a story where the sexually driven, prying scholar emerges victorious over the ignorant carpenter, could truly share in being sexually ambivalent.  Jordan’s classification of the Miller seems problematically succinct.

          The most glaring issue to be taken with this article is the complete non-presence of any discussion of The Miller’s Tale as a fabliau, and the limited comparison that Jordan’s shaky claims of sexual ambivalence allows toward a very specific type of fairy tale.  The lack of coherency between the title and the content would not be so problematic for me if something other than the desirable, animal nature of Alisoun were to be found in the discussion—the extant physical descriptions of her are suffice to classify Alisoun in such a manner.  Generally, this is Jordan’s largest problem.  Though interesting, Jordan’s main motifs seem disconnected and to not build to any conclusion; though the descriptions of birthing—in John’s fall, in Nicholas hatching a plan—are illustrated, they do not illustrate any point that reliance solely upon the religious references would not provide.  John can be compared to a reverse-Noah whether or not he’s “birthed” from a barrel, and Nicholas is clearly a sexually driven character whether or not the best verb to describe the creation of his scheme is “to birth.”  In addition to a few vague pronouns, after six pages without drawing solid connections or conclusions, the last line of the article is particularly frustrating as it seems to have zero relevance to any of the many, many tangents followed anywhere in the article.

          While structurally full of faults, Jordan’s logic is nothing if not creative.  Characterizing the players in any tale such that the tale may be compared to other genres—so long as something meaningful may be discovered—seems to have promise as an interesting method of analysis.  The article’s attention to the effeminate Absolon’s ready dismissal of all women may inspire a more historical reading of The Miller’s Tale with attention paid to gender, gender-bending, and homosexuality in both Chaucer’s life and times as well as the Canterbury Tales as a whole.  Further, the blatant sexuality and animal-like qualities of Alisoun in both the tale itself and Jordan’s characterization beg for a feminist evaluation of the text and comparison of feminist articles to Jordan.—Lisa Gulian, 2/16/07

O'Brien, Timothy.  “Troubling waters: the feminine and the Wife of Path's Performance,” Modern Language Quarterly. v. 53 n. 4(Dec1992), p. 37

            In his study of the Wife of Bath's tale Timothy O'Brien makes an association between the Wife of bath, her connection with water, and her connection to other tales from the Bible, Celtic tradition, and Ovid. He does this to encourage a more sympathetic reading of her character and to expose the patriarchial restrictions placed on women in the middle ages.

            The first thing he starts with is what Chaucer starts with, Alison's title as the Wife of Bath which he beleives Chaucer used not only to strengthen her characteristics (as Bath was a place that had a lot of buisiness in exporting cloth, therefore making it possible to have Alison be a succesful weaver)but to make a pun on her association with the more puritive and luxurious effects of water and to also associate her with the Celtic origins of Bath.

            Not only is her association with Bath seen as luxurious and puritive but it also effects the way she talks and thinks. O'Brien states that the use of two lines "As wolde God it level were unto me/ To be refresshed half so oft as he Solomon" and referring to "Jesus as the well of perfection that 'refresshed many a man'" are used to associate water with both sexual and spiritual desires. Having related women with water O'Brien beleives that the Wife of Bath also exposes the instinctual fear men have that women, like water (or vice versa), are a "shapeless, suffocating, engulfing force." Therefore women are obstacles for men and anything that is seen as an obstacle has to be marninalized in order to be dealt with. Which is an explanation of why women have been so marginalized in patriarchal societies.

            There are two things I had found most interesting in this essay.  One was about O'Briens note that in Chaucer's time there was a "greater emphasis on Scripture's sensus litteralis; like Alison in her sympathetic defense of and identification with the Samaritan woman, they permitted themselves a certain freedom in interpretation from authorative commentary."

            Another was on the Celtic story on the origins of Bath. It is very similar to the story the Wife of bath tells about the knight. In the Celtic story as well as Alison's story the knight gets rewarded with a beautiful wife after he agrees to marry the ugly hag she once was and also receives many rewards. However in the Celtic tale the old hag lives under the sea and one of the many rewards she gives the man who can stand her ugliness long enough to kiss her is able tog et water. Therefore suggesting that water has baptismal and sensual powers. And even though the women the knight meets in Alison's tale is not submerged in water we can assume that Chaucers tale would have had the same kind of meaning if it was taken from the Celtic tale.

            O'Brien ends his essay by stating that since water is associated with two meanings of purity and sensuality, women are held in the samekind of regard. They must either be completly pure or strictly sensual. This lack of a middleground, especially in patriarchal societies refelcts the marginalization and restriction of women which makes the Wife of Bath's character seem so wicked to her patriarchal fellow pilgrims even though she really is just trying break out of her marginalized state.—Colleen Desrosiers, 2/16/07

Richardson, Janette.  "The Facade of Bawdry: Image Patterns in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale."  ELH 32.3 (1965): 303-13.  JSTOR.  14 Feb. 2007.  <http://links.jstor.org>. 

                        In this article, Janette Richardson challenges the critical belief that Chaucer “Shipman’s Tale” is merely “typical fabliau zest” (303).  Richardson briefly defines fabliaux as bawdy French tales that emphasize immorality (often the moral corruption of the clergy) and someone is tricked without his or her knowledge.  It may have been more beneficial for Richardson to better explain this form; however, she seems to operate under the assumption that her readers are familiar with the term.  Apparently, several fabliaux appear within Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, all of which are extremely lewd and sexual in nature.  Richardson argues, however, that the “Shipman’s Tale” is not simply a depthless fabliau, but a carefully designed work of art that is a “mere façade of bawdry” (303).  Beneath the surface level humor is a much deeper level of moral insight that Chaucer presents by using figurative language. 

                        The article asserts quickly and affectively that the imagery in this tale centers around four main image clusters: animals, diet, sex, and trade.  The reader is explicitly told both that the author will be performing a close reading of specific images and what those images will be.  Richardson asserts that sexual metaphors and similes that are so “deceptively simple” really operate under a much larger and more significant irony (304).  The pattern that the four image clusters create serves to reveal the fallacy present in the mercantile worldview.  Richardson first attends to the most important image, trade.  One of the largest ironies in the “Shipman’s Tale” is that both the merchant and the monk, Daun John, use generosity and friendliness in ways that promote their own business ventures in order to turn a profit.  While the merchant’s intentions are honorable and the monk’s dishonorable, they form an “eterne alliaunce” that unites them as brothers.  This irony is more than palpable when Daun John uses his supposed friendship to “buy” the merchant’s wife sexually.  The article goes on to demonstrate how several images, including the “queynte world” that the merchant speaks of and the plow that represents how money has both profited and hurt the merchant, perpetuate a trade/sex metaphor. 

                        Richardson then discusses the animal and diet image clusters in the tale, explaining that animal images reveal the animalistic and sexual nature of people, while the diet images speak to their insatiable sexual appetites.  Thus, what the four main images do is make trade, diet (specifically, appetite), and sex so inseparable that together they simply represent the animalism of human beings.  Richardson is able to demonstrate this very nicely by presenting evidence in her article that follows the clear pattern that the image clusters themselves follow.  This is then what reveals the message (and Chaucer’s supposed moral judgment) of the “Shipman’s Tale”: What separates humans from animals is that they lack a spirituality that makes them function on a level above pure physical satisfaction.  Because trade has been clearly connected with sex and appetite, two undeniably animalistic qualities, it too is animal in nature and “not a preoccupation worthy of man’s proper state” (309).  Therefore, the entire mercantile lifestyle, and thus, worldview, is flawed.

                        Richardson then goes a step further, and perhaps too far, to show how Chaucer’s inclusion of religious images and mentions of God fully complete Chaucer’s “moral of the story.”  This section is longer than those previous and relies much less on textual evidence.  Overall, it suggests that the merchant, though he uses friendly deception in his business, yearns for substantial friendship in his private life, exemplified by his pact with the monk.  However, despite the meaningless practice of religion by the merchant, and others, within the tale (a speedy mass, oaths sworn to God, and prayer), the characters are missing a true sense of spirituality that would make their actions real.  Therefore, the true fallacy is blindness; the mercantile philosophy is flawed because despite good intentions, men are blind to the spirituality that is absent from their lives.

                        The main flaw of this article occurs in the final paragraph, when, after presenting this conclusion, Richardson goes on to reiterate that many critics have failed to recognize this moral level in the “Shipman’s Tale.”  She states that the clues necessary for uncovering this reading are present in the text and were placed there intentionally by Chaucer.  However, she then claims that if readers do not see this “deeper meaning,” Chaucer would only have one thing to say: “Blameth nat me if that ye chese amys” (313).  There appears to be an irreconcilable mix of New Criticism and Reader Response Criticism present within the article.

                        Richardson’s main reliance throughout the article is on basically New Critical close reading.  She examines specific images and presents their meanings and connections to one another as truths that establish an unquestionable pattern.  Although she states in the introduction that these figurative images and the heavy use of irony in the tale were designed by Chaucer the artist, she leaves him out of much of the early discussion.  Rather, Richardson sticks strictly to the text and carefully demonstrates ironies, double meanings, metaphors, juxtapositions, and patterns that support her argument.  The discussion is both clear and, in context, proves to be a valid argument presenting trade as a morally inferior human vice.  However, when Richardson extends her reading to include the ideas of Christianity and spirituality, her strong critical approach begins to fall apart.  It is here that she once again begins to refer frequently to Chaucer’s moral, not artistic, intentions.  The section includes far less textual evidence and operates under many assumptions, including that Chaucer condemned religious practice “for the sake of practice.”  She also condemns, and therefore suggests that Chaucer condemns, religion without spirituality.

                        This culminates at the end of the article when Richardson basically negates everything she has been saying by giving herself a loophole.  This reading is there, she says, but it’s not Chaucer’s fault (or hers) if the reader does not see it.  Now the argument is no longer about what the text is definitely doing, but about how the reader interprets what the text is doing.  What Richardson has been referring to as specific types of figurative imagery she now refers to as “clues.”  If the reader can find the clues, he can find the meaning.  By including this ending to the article, Richardson raises, at least in my mind, many doubts about what she has been arguing.  If these “clues” are only apparent to some readers, how do I know that it was Chaucer who put them in there?  Are there moral lessons in all of Chaucer’s fabliaux?  By mentioning all of these things, the author takes the reader out of an in-context, new critical situation in which the text speaks for itself, and into a confusing and less creditable area where if we readers do not pick up on this “it is our fault.”  Personally, I find Richardson’s argument to be both believable and provable, but her desire to cover her tracks and unwavering reliance on Chaucer as her supporter in this discussion make me question the article’s ability to stand up to opposition.  I suppose that’s the problem with trying to stick solely to New Criticism…--Laura Reese, 2/17/07

Robertson, Elizabeth. “The ‘Elvyssh’ Power of Constance: Christian Feminism in  Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer. 23:1       (2001): 143-180. 

In Robertson's article, she argues that while the Islamic world is presented as stereotypical and as the other, Constance is the otherness of the tale itself, not only by her Christianity, but by her class and gender as well.  Constance’s otherness, rather than being a sign of inferiority, makes her superior to any of the other characters in the tale.  “The Man of Law’s Tale” also demonstrates the “formation of religion itself as a category of difference intimately bound with one of the characteristic functions of Chaucer's writing itself—defamiliarization” (147). Chaucer employs other forms of difference—race, class, and gender—to reinforce the otherness of religious experience (147). 

The arrival of Constance effectively juxtaposes a different kind of otherness.  She becomes an embodiment of a foreign religion in foreign lands, and becomes the target of both desire (Constance’s husbands) and repulsion (the mothers-in-law.) Robertson argues that her otherness from gender combined with being a religious minority, creates the tale’s representation of apostolic Christianity as a threatening “elvish” force (160). Chaucer uses the category of religion to establish ideas of strangeness marked by repulsion and desire, falling into Edward Said’s theory of the Orient and orientalization, except as orientalization of the Christian world.

Unlike most feminist critics, Robertson’s view is that Constance is powerful, but unlike the Christian apologists, Robertson traces Constance’s problematic power to her gender.  Critics, such as Gail Ashton in her article, “Her father’s daughter: the re-alignment of father-daughter kinship in three romance tales,” determine Constance’s power in comparison to that of the other women in the tale, apart from the violent mothers-in-law.  These critics claim that Constance is left powerless in her submissiveness, which is in keeping with the ideal Christian woman. However, Robertson points out that Chaucer criticizes the mothers’-in-law power as corrupt and cruel by describing it as masculine (the Islamic mother-in-law is a “feyned woman” [l. 362] and Donegild as “mannysh” [l. 782].) Constance’s inaction and disgust with violence is more powerful and effective to the reader (and to those who convert) than an army that initiates mass destruction.

Robertson asserts that power should be not measured in terms of action and passivity; that Constance’s power and effectiveness are not as established in her actions so much as through her aesthetics.  Robertson takes examples of the foreign countries judging Constance as “so diligent, withouten slouthe,/To serve and plesen everich in that place,/That alle hir loven that looken in hir face” (l. 530-32), merely by Constance’s physicality.  Feminist critics might take this opportunity to argue that the aesthetic objectification of Constance, while powerful, is belittling.  However, the otherworldly sense of Constance’s powerful essence becomes a point to which Robertson does little justice. She cites Donegild’s description of Constance: “So strange a creature unto his make” (l. 700) and Donegild’s fabricated labeling of Constance as an elf (163), but Robertson dismisses any supernatural or elvish association with Constance, which would be ironic as an anti-Christian interpretation, if Constance were of a different spirit. Her “sexualization” as a wife and mother, her power through gesture and physicality, as well as the subdued incest with her father could dispel Constance as the Christian female ideal.

This article proves useful in examining Chaucer’s satire of rhetoric and employment of historical figures (Bertha, who married Aethelberht and restored earlier forms of Christianity for Anglo-Saxon England) as a basis for his tales.  His religious commentary on the loss of apostolic Christianity and the decay of institutionalized Christianity in his own time comes through as a consistent theme in Canterbury Tales (167). Likewise, the “law of man” is questioned in this tale, as the Man of Law fails to adequately articulate Constance’s experience religiously and as a woman (176).  By giving apostolic Christianity a female embodiment, Chaucer makes Constance’s world and values marginal, as if to reveal that his own values in Canterbury Tales for truth, justice, and a fundamental Christianity are marginal as well in his time.  Such racial and religious ideas comes in “The Squire’s Tale,” while feminist issues about a lack of power and otherness arise in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and the “Tale of Melibee.”—Rachel Bernstein, 2/17/08

Carter, Susan. "Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What Lies Behind Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale." The Chaucer Review 37.4 (2003): 329-45. 

            Susan Carter analyzes the Wife of Bath’s Tale and Prologue in relation to other similar stories using archetypal characters and argues that Chaucer stands alone in his techniques to highlight the breaking down of gender roles.  She sees the hag in the Wife’s tale, and ultimately the Wife herself, as archetypal “loathly ladies,” a tradition from Irish literature among others, the “Irish Sovranty Hag and Dame Ragnel.”  However, she compares the traditional representations of the character to those on the Wife’s Tale and reports that gender issues are singularly prominent in Chaucer’s work.

            Carter analyzes the elements of the archetype: wilderness location, sexual veracity, power struggles, and supernatural powers.  All elements present in the tale, Carter begins to evidence the breaking down of gender roles uniquely in The Wife of Bath’s Tale.  She quotes Jill Mann as saying, "[t]he 'anti-feminist' elements . . . constitute the force behind the tale's challenge to male domination. When the knight surrenders to female 'maistrye', he surrenders not to the romanticized woman projected by male desire, but to the woman conceived in the pessimistic terms of anti-feminism." 

            The argument for destabilization of gender roles comes through Carter’s analysis of the story’s relationships with King Arthur.  First with the Fairy Queen and then with Queen Guinevere, females always seem to have power over him despite his status in English folk lore.  He is not the one to sentence the Knight; she is.  His men do not judge his response; a group of women do.  This view of a ruling body made entirely of Women questions gender roles drastically.

            I found this article interesting for many reasons.  On the surface, it was the fact that I think that the Wife of Bath is most interesting when read from a feminist point of view, but after reading the article I realized it was more than a feminist article.  Taking into account the archetypal character of the “loathly lady” adds historical depth to gender issues in my mind.  I did not realize that such role-challenging traditions already existed in literature.  That article also questions itself, leaving room for further research, by stating that the author does not know where Chaucer encountered the character type.  This is something we have discussed in class: keeping in mind Chaucer’s literary predecessors and influences.  I also feel however that Carter’s extension, although brief, of the archetype into the character of the Wife flattens her character.  To make her a mere recreation of a literary figure, though altered and unique, is still to make her a function of “auctoritee.”  Perhaps this is the evil behind reading an illiterate character through a literate author and a female character through a male author.  Or, perhaps her unknown adherence to literary form was in some way part of Chaucer’s grand scheme.—Jen Curtis!, 2/17/07

Baum, Paull F. “Characterization in the Knight’s Tale.” Modern Language Notes, 46.5 (1931): 302-304. JSTOR. Goucher Coll. Lib., Towson, MD. 28 February 2007. http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0149-6611%28193105%2946%3A5%3C302%3ACIT%22KT%3E2.0.CO%3B2-O

            Though the article is over seventy years old, its writer still provides one method of examining Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale” that may not occur to modern readers bent on examining the story line-by-line for deeper meaning in each one. Baum first examines arguments that preceded his, one arguing as to why Palamon and Arcite are seemingly interchangeable, one arguing that Palamon obviously has the higher ground. The author concludes that, in essence, both are wrong. Chaucer, he argues, “has weakened such characterization as Boccaccio gave his principal figures” (302) but then makes up for it by “emphasizing the necessitarian element of the story.” Baum slightly sides with the interchangeable Palamon-Arcite argument; however, he regards their lack of distinguishable characteristics as “lay figures of a highly picturesque and amusing game.”

            Baum then goes on to point out Chaucer’s oftentimes hyperbolic descriptions, such as Palamon being knee-deep in his own tears, both knights up to their ankles in blood, etc. as evidence of Chaucer’s subtle fun-poking at the Knight and, for that matter, at the entire noble class. Baum notes the distinction between Arcite’s “earthly love” and Palamon’s “heavenly love” (303), but also notes that this makes little sense, given that Palamon’s plea to Venus incorporates his desire to have an earthly heir. The author also notes that the kings each knight brought into battle did not fit the “earthly” versus “heavenly” characteristics assigned—Emetreus, the blond, champions “earthly” Arcite, while swarthy Lycurgus sides with “heavenly” Palamon. The final irony of this story, Baum feels, is the simple “situation knot” (304) in which a bloody chivalric battle is to determine the winner of Emily’s hand, but the knight who prayed to the correct god ultimately won.

            Viewing the Knight’s Tale, frequently argued as the only truly romantic tale in all of the Canterbury Tales, as a subtly comedic endeavor enhances both the tale itself and the stories other pilgrims tell. As a reflection of the specific tale, the overthrow of character development in favor of plot strikes the modern reader, at any rate, as a natural comedic device. Were we to look at satirists who came along after Chaucer, such as Swift or Wilde, we would probably notice that well-rounded characters took second place to one-liners and subtle barbs within the plot. Comedic influence in the tale also makes sense in light of its ending; the they-lived-happily-ever-after came about in the last ten lines of the Knight’s speech and was too quick to be satisfactory. Considering also that the Greeks, who provided the basis for this tale, were not known for their traditionally comedic endings, the Knight’s insertion of a perky “it’s all going to work out fine” certainly “sends us back to look for the smile behind [Chaucer’s] description of the worthy and perfect knight himself” (303).

            Granted, why would Chaucer have to be subtle when some of his later tales had humor that even modern readers (and “modern” even beyond the sense that Baum meant in 1931) would find humorous? The Miller’s Tale contains all the elements that would make a 2007 movie audience roll in the aisles: cuckoldry, practical jokes, literal ass-kissing, and a well-timed, juicy fart. The answer, I feel, lies in Baum’s explanation: “Chaucer was no doubt a serious and in many ways a great artist, but I fancy our efforts to explain his work would only amuse him” (304). The mark of a great artist, at least in the Renaissance period that Chaucer preceded, was the ability to handle many different arts. Besides, his simple placement of the Miller’s Tale right after this epic romance indicates another wink at his audience. Following the noble and good Knight’s Tale with the crass fabliau that the narrator even advises the more delicate members of his audience to skip tells us that the Canterbury Tales are not so much to be taken seriously. In the Knight’s Tale particularly, the point is not so much the characters or their noble deeds. According to Baum, the point was to subtly flay the story with satire. –Bree Katz, 2/28/07

Knapp, Peggy A. “Deconstructing The Canterbury Tales: Pro.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer. 2:1 (1986): 73-81.

In Knapp's article, she explores the contribution of deconstruction and its applicable strategies for The Canterbury Tales, using “The Miller's Tale” as a primary example.  Knapp says she does not see deconstruction as the final answer for the "development of discourse," but as a modern contribution to the long withstanding discussion about signs and symbolism with which medieval thinkers were intensely concerned (74).

Knapp begins with the centering of authorial intention.  She quotes Jacques Derrida to educate the deconstruction beginner on the limitations of the control of meaning by authorial intention.  Knapp believes the centering of authorial intention is applicable to medieval writers; she uses Saint Augustine's The Confessions as proof of the existence of a system of significance that humans cannot write or articulate through words. This is reminiscent of a theological/philosophical stance (Kabbalah standing out foremost) of language being a fallible form of communication (74-5).

Knapp employs “The Miller’s Tale” as an example of authorial intention within authorial intention within authorial intention.  John’s interpretation of Nicholas’s flood prediction is separate from the authorial intention of Nicholas, who thinks his scheme will succeed and without consequence.  Robyn the Miller allows Nicholas to succeed in the story, presumably for the Miller’s own intention of criticizing the higher classes for their exploitation of status. All of this, Knapp reminds us, is within Chaucer’s power and his own set of authorial intentions. Between the Miller’s depiction as both adoringly coarse and as part of the world’s emblematic system that is linked with biblical types, Chaucer’s intentions of the Miller’s character carry out “other levels of significance and […] are deduced from the interpretation of the text” (75).  Whether or not it impacts the argument of Chaucer’s true authority over the tale, it may also be worth noting that “The Miller’s Tale” is supposed to be related to us through Chaucer-the-pilgrim’s narration as well; perhaps adding even a fourth layer in this instance. 

Reference is another applicable mode of deconstruction for The Canterbury Tales through its ability to construct a system of likenesses and differences for the reader.  Paying particular attention to the characters’ feet, it is noted in the Tales that Absolon has ornate shoes; the Parson pays little attention to his footwear as he walks among his parish; whereas the Monk prefers to ride a horse instead of walking.  Knapp admits that references, binary opposites, and other types of deconstructive “code” may not be logical means for discovering all intertextual interpretations, but nevertheless, the deconstructive spirit struggles to do so (77-8).  Though deconstruction may not be the most satisfying perspective of Chaucer, this part of the argument have been better constructed by Knapp and defended by an actual deconstruction enthusiast.

To conclude her article, Knapp uses the thematic centering of “The Clerk’s Tale” to enforce Derrida’s argument that readers mistakenly employ minute details to create a theme that is used for the rest of the story.  In “The Clerk’s Tale,” Knapp transforms the Clerk and Janicula into the readers with different self-constructed themes of Griselda’s story (79-80). 

While Knapp seems uneasy with employing a deconstructive style for reading the Tales, she advocates giving the radical reading a chance among the more traditional readings that have been given so far. Knapp introduces the basics of the deconstructive reading style to the Tales; and possibly in more contemporary times, there is a stronger argument for using it on the Tales as a whole in terms of binary opposites (Griselda and the Wife of Bath, the Cook and the Knight) in terms of class, narrative style, and character. The deconstructive view would be particularly intriguing next to a historical approach, which would provide as a more comfortable context for the Tales.  It would be particularly interesting to dissect the authorial intentions behind “The Cook’s Tale,” and what would happen should a reader create a theme to apply to the tale.

Knapp uses Derrida as her sole reference for basic deconstruction, and Augustine’s Confessions as a medieval predecessor to deconstruction; perhaps using a diverse selection of references and contemporaries of deconstruction would help to advance her argument on deconstruction. Knapp’s tone of disbelief, inability to master deconstruction from a novice level, and her distance from deconstruction throughout the article make it hard to prove a solid, authoritative argument.—Rachel Bernstein, 2/28/07

Arner, T. D. “No Joke: Transcendent Laughter in the ‘Teseida’ and the "Miller's Tale.’”     Studies in Philology v. 102 no. 2 (Spring 2005) p. 143-58

            Arner contrasts Chaucer’s own “Knight’s Tale,” “Troilus and Criseyde and “Miller’s Tale” with Boccaccio’s “Teseida.”  He claims that “Miller’s Tale” is quite relevant to “Teseida” directly and associate’s the laughter of the townspeople as well as the laughter of the pilgrims with that of Arcita.  He further links Boccaccio’s story with Dante’s Paradiso, comparing Arcita’s laugh to the smile of Dante, a “signal of his contemptus mundi.”

            Arner continues to describe the placement of the “Knight’s Tale” at the beginning of The Canterbury Tales and the significance of placing it in a pagan context.  Chaucer does not leave room for a life after life within the pagan world; he reserves this for “Troilus” and interestingly for “The Miller’s Tale.”  In “The Knight’s Tale” “The philosophical attitudes expressed through the actions and speeches of Theseus serve not only to justify Arcite’s death and explain the world’s governing principle of order in an effort to comfort the grieving Athenians, but also to instruct the Knight’s audience how to interpret and evaluate the events of the poem.”

            After the Knight’s noble tale, not a voice is heard to “ne seyde it was a noble storie” until the Miller speaks up.  The Miller functions to follow “The Knight’s Tale” with the metaphysical laughter that Chaucer excluded from it.  Arner says that Chaucer uses the laughter of the townspeople to turn “personal tragedy [into] public comedy.”  He says that “’The Miller’s Tale is thus linked textually and philosophically to the Teseida through the very moment that ‘The Knight’s Tale’ fails to include.”  Likewise the Pilgrims’ laughter at the fabliaux comes from outside the tale and allows them to criticize the vanity of Absolon and Nicholas.

            Laughter as a method of transcendence is a concept that has always fascinated me. It is interesting that once The Canterbury Tale’s narrative returns from Pagan to Christian times, the concepts of nobility disappear, sin runs rampant, and everyone can laugh at it because they have hope for salvation and paradise through confession and penance.  The ordering of tales here is incredibly significant and clearly illustrates Chaucer’s genius as a poet.  He uses textual commentary as social commentary, to wonderful effect.—Jacob Grover, 2/28/07

Ortego, James.  “Gerveys Joins the Fun: a Note on Viritoot in the Miller’s Tale.”  Chaucer Review 37.3 (2003): 275-279.  Project Muse.  Julia Rogers Library, Goucher College, Towson, MD.  February 25, 2007.  <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

            This article explores the meaning and history of interpretation of the word “viritoot” in the Miller’s Tale, which Gerveys, the blacksmith, uses to describe Absolon.  According to the article, the word only occurs once in all of Chaucer’s known work, and due to the obscurity and ambiguity of the word its meaning has been debated over the years; most scholars seem to attribute to it some meaning similar to “moving quickly” or “turning.”  Others refer to the devil, fairy lore, or a child’s top.  Ortego explains that “modern editors and scholars have yet to agree on a definitive gloss of viritoot that satisfies both the etymological sense of the word and also the contextual and narrative significance of the verbal exchange” (276), and posits that this word is a small part that contributes to the overall “dirty joke” that is the fabliau.  Since “gay gerl” can be translated as “wanton woman” (276), Gerveys may have meant these words to be a sexual joke.  He also makes reference to an obscure saint, St. Neot, who, Ortego says, was known primarily for being physically small and weak.  Finally, the Miller refers to Absolon having “tow on his distaf,” and as Ortego explains, this is more than simply a phallic reference—having to carry a distaff loaded with tow was a common punishment for “persons guilty of crimes of sex and violence” (277) in Chaucer’s London.  Ortego argues that “viritoot” is a corruption of the Latin vertutis, with the connotation of “virility”—saying that Absolon is sexually frustrated.  Unable to fulfill his desires physically, Absolon takes the poker, a phallic symbol, to fulfill them metaphorically.

            This article was very interesting to me in that it explored the history and meaning of a single controversial word in the Canterbury Tales.  Benson has a textual note on the word “viritoot,” and briefly discusses the history, but in fact cites almost entirely different translations than Ortego does, including “early riser” and “peering.”  (Benson does agree with Ortego’s assessment of “tow on his distaf,” or rather it may be the other way around, as Ortego cites Benson, so his choices of very different scholars to cite on “viritoot” may have been deliberate.)  However, Benson does not connect that word to the dirty joke of the fabliau, and while I do not entirely agree with Ortego’s reading of it, even the possibility is yet more (perhaps unnecessary) evidence of Chaucer’s skill and sophistication as a poet—not to mention something additional to make the tale even funnier.

            While I do not contest the veracity of Ortego’s evidence, if only because I have no way to support or discredit it, I do find issue with his conclusion.  Simply, the combination of “wanton woman,” a corruption of a word meaning “virility,” and a reference to a physically impotent saint, do not necessarily add up to sexual frustration—and I certainly do not believe that the additional reference to “tow on his distaf” means that Absolon is a sexual predator.  The internal evidence of the text denies that: Nicholas is the one who physically approaches Alisoun and grabs her by the “queynte,” while Absolon merely stands outside her window and plays music in an attempt to woo her, only daring to come closer and ask merely for a kiss when her husband has gone for the night.  Moreover, while Absolon may not have given up love forever, he is quite clearly no longer interested in Alisoun sexually.  His problem is not that he is unable to fulfill his desires physically—he no longer has the physical desire, and feels perhaps that the extirpation of this desire must be revenged with a metaphorical fulfillment.  Actually, what disgusts him is nearness to his beloved’s genitals, and no phallic symbols appear until after he has lost the desire.  If anything, Gerveys may be suggesting that Absolon is and always has been sexually impotent; following on this, the Miller’s reference to “tow on his distaf” may mean that Absolon’s sexual desires have hidden depths of which even his friend is unaware, since Gerveys does not know him to have ever consummated them.—Kaitlyn Miller, 3/1/07

Leicester, H. Marshall. “Newer Currents in Psychoanalytic Criticism, and the Difference ‘It’ Makes: Gender and Desire in the Miller’s Tale.” ELH 61.3 (1994): 473-499.

            As traditional psychoanalytic theory deals with making sense of the most complex aspects of the human psyche, it is perhaps appropriate that H. Marshall Leicester’s analysis of the Miller’s Tale using newer and infinitely more complex versions of psychoanalysis should also be tangled and long-winded. However, if one is able to get through the somewhat jumbled explanation of what Marshall considers to be new psychoanalytic theory and how she plans to use it, her analysis of the Miller’s Tale is quite compelling.

            In essence, Marshall argues that to interpret the Miller’s Tale through a traditional psychoanalytic reading—that is, to see it as a version of the Oedipus complex—is to ignore the inherent intricacies of the tale and its characters. She asserts that the tale is much more complex than traditional criticism would have it seem, particularly when it comes to social and gender roles, and uses a newer incarnation of psychoanalytic criticism in order to explore this multifaceted story.

 In Marshall’s reading of the text the Miller, as narrator, is stepping over social lines by defying the host and demanding to follow the noble knight in the tale order. As a transgressor of social boundaries the Miller is attached to the character of Alisoun who crosses traditional gender lines in a variety of ways throughout the tale.

Similarly, Alisoun is connected with Absalom through the parallel descriptions of the two of them. In Marshall’s assessment, the Miller’s characterization of Absalom also lands this would-be lover of Alisoun’s on the feminine side of the gender line—he seems to be more in love with being in love than desirous of having sex—and his anger at being tricked into kissing Alisoun’s ass stems not from emasculation, but from disillusionment in love.

            As Marshall sees it, the woman in this tale is far from being caged by the traditional social/gender role, though many aspects of her character and the tale could support that interpretation. For Marshall Alisoun is the most complex character and the rest of the tale’s population—John, Nicholas, and Absalom—are actually facets of her character. Alisoun exists in multiple versions and by realizing this the reader or listener is granted a much greater understanding of the psychology behind Chaucer’s work.

            This argument for the complexity of Alisoun’s character seems especially appropriate to Chaucer who was certainly not adverse to the idea of independent gender line skewing women (see the Wife of Bath). However, Alisoun cannot be a fully realized independent woman—her narrator, the drunken Miller, would likely not have been able to comprehend a completely independent female. Thus, the listener of the tale is obliged to read Alisoun’s true character through the men in the story.

            What is also interesting to me is, while keeping Marshall’s argument that the Miller is in some way challenging the Knight and social order by telling this tale, to consider the difference between the silent and chaste Emelye and Alisoun. Emelye follows all of the rules and Alisoun defies them…one must consider which man, the Knight or the Miller, had more experience with the nature of women.

Though this criticism may not be perfect, it certainly seems to hold more weight, in my mind anyway, than the traditional oedipal reading which involves viewing Alison as an object of fear and lust and not as a real character at all. Marshall’s view is refreshing, if a bit confusing, and is certainly applicable to many of the questions one might ask about the Miller’s Tale, such as: “Why is Absalom so girlie?” “Isn’t John really an okay guy?” and, most importantly, “Just what part of Alisoun did Absalom kiss?”—Rachel Conklin, 3/2/07

Bertolet, Craig E. “‘Well bet is a roten appul out of hoord’: Chaucer’s Cook, Commerce  and the Civic Order.” Studies in Philology 99 (2002): 229-246 25 Feb. 2007 <http://web.ebscohost.com/>.

In this well-written article Craig E. Bertolet tackles the Cook’s portrait in The General Prologue, The Cook’s Prologue and The Cook’s Fragment from a Marxist angle. He claims that they illustrate how civic order depended on trade and trade on solid reputations in the late fourteenth century. Although the Cook tries to build such a reputation, his disreputable character undermines his efforts (230, 246).

Bertolet first turns to Chaucer-the-Pilgrim’s portrait of the Cook in The General Prologue. What readers learn most about the Cook here is his repertoire of dishes and his culinary skills (230). Other than that, readers know nothing about him other than that he has a rather disgusting “mormal” or ulcer on his leg. As Bertolet notes and Anna Lehman seconds, the mormal casts a dubious shadow over anything that the Cook prepares whether he makes it “with the beste” or not, so it is a major disadvantage for somebody of his occupation (230-231). Bertolet interprets this mormal as a symbol of the Cook’s immorality: “[The mormal] is […] the only piece of the human known as Roger whom we see in The General Prologue, and it is corrupted and distasteful. Even though Roger hides behind his food, he cannot entirely conceal himself”(231). He ends by referring to Jill Mann’s claim that the mormal symbolizes the Cook’s gluttony, which comes to light in The Manciple’s Prologue (231).    

            Bertolet then compares the Cook’s portrait to other portraits in The General Prologue. Like the Cook, the Man of Law, the Physician, the Wife of Bath and the Guildsmen all depend on their reputations in order to survive. Ergo, they are obsessed with self-promotion (231-232). Bertolet also contrasts the Franklin’s hospitablity and appreciation of food for its use value with the Cook’s suspicious nature and treatment of food as nothing but a commodity (232-233).

Bertolet finishes his examination of the Cook with his analysis of The Cook’s Prologue. If the Cook were to be convicted of the charges the Host levels against him, the Cook would suffer greatly, not only because such shameful practices endanger lives, but also because they damage the guild’s reputation. In spite of this, the Cook seemingly admits to these crimes (235).

Bertolet believes that the Cook’s negative opinion of “herbergage” extends to the city shopkeeper. The wise shopkeeper, according to the Cook, never allows anyone into his or her private dwelling until he/she knows that the person is trustworthy. The risk to the family’s personal and professional reputations is too great to do otherwise (237). Bertolet believes the Cook expounds on this viewpoint in his cautionary tale. Perkyn betrays the victualler on both a professional and personal level.  He violates his apprenticeship contract with his master, destroys the shop’s reputation, and throws the victualler’s generosity in his face (239). Rather than let the selfish youth destroy his business and his status within the community, the victualler denies Perkyn London citizenship, one of the ultimate goals of apprenticeship (241-244). This, according to Bertolet, “[…] is an act that attempts to control the ungovernable elements of society by denying them membership to the power structures of society” (244). By having Perkyn end up with a crook who lives in a brothel, the Cook asserts that Perkyn’s crimes are just as felonious as theft and prostitution and should be punished likewise (245).

            Bertolet makes extensive use of both primary and secondary sources. He took no chance on overlooking evidence on account of its age, citing articles from as far back as the 1930’s. In particular I am impressed by his use of historical records. The many long footnotes yield fascinating information about medieval life. I also appreciate Bertolet’s writing style. It is professional yet easy to follow. I found it odd, however, that he went back and forth between referring to the Cook as “the Cook” and referring to him as “Roger.” I have been taught to always refer to a character by the name the speaker uses most often. I also found it worked against Bertolet as the given name humanized the character and therefore make it harder for me to see him as unsympathetic. In Bertolet’s defense, however, he could not ignore the name because it is a part of the text. After rereading the CT passages he cites, I found Bertolet’s argument to be logical. In particular, the Cook condemns Perkyn for having no more character than the larcenous compeer (I.4419). Bertolet’s use of The Manciple’s Tale also proves to be strong evidence. When the Cook falls off his mount, he is as pale and nasal-voiced as the dislikable Symkyn of The Reeve’s Tale whose suffering brings the Cook delight (IX. 19, 61; I. 4150-4151). The article is good work, and while it is not perfect, its reasoning is sound as far as I can tell.

            I feel as though Bertolet could have taken the article further than he did. If, as he claims, the Cook is an irresponsible character who believes that irresponsible business practices should be punished harshly, then the Cook, like the Reeve, is a hypocrite as well as a liar and a thief. After all, we learn in The General Prologue that the Reeve steals from his lord (610-612). Nevertheless, The Reeve’s Tale is about a thief’s punishment. Likewise, by agreeing to go on the pilgrimage with the Guildsmen and then shaming them with his public drunkenness, the Cook commits the very act that he damns Perkyn for. Furthermore, the Guildsmen prove themselves rather foolish when they hire a nit-wit cook with an apparently obvious skin condition for the sake of sign-exchange value. (Perhaps Chaucer places the Franklin’s portrait before the Guildsman’s and the Cook’s in order to show how the Guildsmen’s conspicuous consumption fails to impress the pilgrim: being a connoisseur and having a cook of his own, the Franklin would know whether or not the Cook was any good.) If this is Chaucer’s intention, then Fragment I is in part a meditation on the importance of knowing oneself.

            Finally, I am intrigued by the idea that the Cook’s portrait and Bertolet’s interpretation of it say as much about how people saw and still see the lower class as it says about the Cook’s shortcomings. Bertolet seems to forget that the Franklin is wealthy and powerful and therefore has the luxury of enjoying his food while the Cook does not. Today, the Franklin would be savoring Oysters Rockefeller at Tavern on the Green with his friends while the Cook would be dunking McDonald’s fries in hot oil. Moreover, the brevity of the Cook’s description seems compatible to me with what people of higher socioeconomic class often end up seeing of the people who serve them. When we go through the line at Subway or Chipotle or Pearlstone, how often do we notice nothing more about the people who serve us other than what they do and their most prominent physical features? Probably more often than we would like to admit. I know it is true of me. --Yvonne Rogers, 3/2/2007

Thomas, Susanne Sara. "The Problem of Defining Sovereynetee in the Wife of Bath's Tale." The Chaucer Review 41.1 (2006): 87-97.

Thomas’s article is a break down of the Wife’s tale in deconstructionist terms.  She walks the analysis through the tale, pointing out places where meaning is indeterminable.  She points out several contrasting meanings, her most powerful argument being the constantly shifting definition of the word “sovereyntee” in the text. She also flips positive and negative roles to create a question over the privileged position.   Her deconstructionist approach actually favors the contrasting reading and suggests at the end that the knight has not developed at all, nor has he met with a desirable outcome.

In her exploration of the general meaning of the word “sovereyntee” she points out that the knight does not desire knowledge of sovereyntee and in fact enjoys his ignorance.  She ends up defining the word at some point as being the master of one’s own desires.  An interesting point about that is that the knight is in no way in control of his own desires.  In fact, his desires are what put him in the position of punishment in the first place.  By giving the wyf power to decide what he wants, he is letting her define his desires and therefore not only giving her the freedom over her body and mind, but also over his own desires and therefore him in all ways.  This, however, is only one definition presented of the word sovereyntee, as she cites several other definitions from the text and other sources.  One of these definitions is “territory under the rule of a sovereign, or existing as an independent state.”  Though she does not offer this connection, under her reading the knight is the property of the wyf, who is described as a sovereign.  Perhaps this means that he does have some form of sovereyntee.          

In flipping the roles of positive and negative, she suggests that the wyf makes this reversal for the reader by saying that the message of the poverty sermon is “if you redefine your value system—so that negatives become positives—then you will find me desirable” (90).  In this she makes the wyf’s desirability not a question of the wife, but of society’s definition of what is desirable.  She also questions the “bath of bliss” reading of the ending in two ways.  She says that the seemingly desirable, meek woman has turned into a monstrous sovereign with the ability to change shape, a frightening thought.  She also suggests that the bath of bliss is only upon seeing her beauty and not a statement about the future of the marriage.  She also points out the reversed role of the poor wyf- who has power in court- and the knight- who, though he assumingly would have some pull, does not.

Thomas concludes that the Knight’s desires are given to the wyf, making him her property and giving up any and all freedom he had.  She promises him a happy life in vague terms of “goodness” which will assumedly be defined by her, as she is in control of the Knight’s desires.

I think that this article is very interesting for it’s reversal of roles and ideas that the Knight not only remained a static character but also lost freedom through the tale.  Her deconstructionist approach seems to be a little inconsistent at points, as she tries to prove lack of meaning at some points and contradictory meaning in others.  For example, while she asserts that the text offers no discernable definition for sovereyntee, she makes definitive statements about sovereyntee.  Though she offers several of the wyf’s views on sovereyntee in addition to other accepted definitions, she still passes judgment on the sovereyntee of characters in the tale.  She accepts one definition of sovereyntee over others with little explanation and then continues to analyze the entire tale according to that.  She decides that the knight does not have sovereyntee though even her title describes the term as indefinable. 

      Another problem with the article is the fact that she moves in more or less chronological order.  She references the knight’s love of ignorance and aversion to learning in the beginning, but does not connect it to the end where she discusses his failure to learn from the experience.  It may be that I just had trouble, but I felt as if this made her argument difficult to follow at some points and hard to summarize. 

As far as usefulness, I feel as though this article does have a few good points, which I may be able to use in my presentation. I will most likely refer to the definition of sovereyntee and the confusion it causes in the text.  The knight’s role in the tale is as well a part of this article that proves interesting.  Though he is a minor character, she mentions in passing that the wyf is simply an illusion to emphasize his inability to change and learn.  Though I would not reference such a small detail of the article, it does call his role and character into question with issues that may be quite interesting.  This article is not the best example I could find of deconstruction of this tale, but it offers several points that are interesting and illuminating.—Jen Curtis!, 3/2/07

Edwards, Robert R. “Source, Context, and Cultural Translation in the “Franklin’s Tale.” Modern Philology 94.2 (1996) 141-162. JSTOR. Julia Rogers Library, Baltimore MD. 26 Feb, 2007 <http://jstor.org>                  

            Edwards disputes the popular argument that Chaucer’s inspiration for the “Franklin’s Tale” is solely based on  Menedon’s story from Boaccacio’s Filocolo. The author believes that the pure volume of the text (about five books) gives good reason to believe that Chaucer might not have read it that closely. Thus, Edwards believes that “The question of Chaucer’s needs to be reopened by returning to the texts and manuscripts”(142). In the article he does not argue that Menedon’s story had some influence on the “Franklin’s Tale”, he believes that it is a combination of the story and the “cultural questions that frame it”(142). Thus he believes that the “Franklin’s Tale” is actually a cultural translation, and in the article he analyzes numerous texts to prove such.

            The article continues on, giving a deep analysis of the history of Filocolo, pointing out some of the similarities between the text and Chaucer’s work. After Edwards points out the influence Boaccacio had over Chaucer he states “ the social world portrayed in the Franklin’s Tale ....is the domain that Chaucer moves from a literary to a cultural translation”(154). Edwards analyzes the social worlds and visions of the two to attempt to figure out what Chaucer is saying about his culture through the “Franklin’s Tale.” Edwards concludes the article stating that the tale is a commentary on Chaucer’s thoughts on the social ranking and aristocracy of his time. In the end he believes that the tale was created by a “nostalgia” for the world that existed in Boaccacio’s writing.

            I found the article to be somewhat useful, but overall I think Edwards has a tendency to contradict himself. At the start of the article he makes it clear that he does not agree with critics who believe Menedon’s story is the basis for the “Franklin’s Tale.” However as the article continues he retracts this statement saying  that it is the story and the cultural aspects contained in it that Chaucer used in his work. He then goes on to talk about how these cultural aspects speak to Chaucer’s expression of social relations. Since I am doing my presentation on the “Franklin’s Tale” I found Edwards insights on the characters and social relations to be quite useful. Some of Edward’s insights on Chaucer’s opinions on the aristocracy seemed to be either off base, or to obvious.  Therefore while the article has some useful ideas, the argument is far from ground breaking and the end result is rather weak. –Kelly Rankin, 3/2/07

Delasanta, Rodney.  "The Mill in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale."  The Chaucer Review 36.3 (2002): 270-6.  JSTOR.  28 February 2007.

            In this article, Delasanta, like many critics seem to have done with Chaucer’s fabliau, uses symbolic imagery to reveal the Christian undertones running beneath the comical and sexual Reeve’s Tale.  He asserts that the mill at Trumpington is not only the setting of the tale, but an apocalyptic image that has religious origin and purpose.  Throughout the article, Delasanta relies on Chaucerian, historical, and biblical evidence to back up his claim, choosing to highlight the mill/apocalypse image tradition and let the Reeve’s Tale speak for itself.  In this sense, Delasanta performs a sort of Structuralist exploration of the image, placing it, and by extension, the Reeve’s Tale, within the pattern of apocalyptic mill imagery.

            He begins by mentioning the image of the flood in the Miller’s Tale, which sets up a foundation of religious allusion in The Canterbury Tales; specifically, the idea of apocalyptic message and the lack of attention paid to it by modern Chaucer critics.  Because of the modern focus on New Historicism, Marxism, Feminism, Deconstruction, “et al.,” Delasanta asserts that “any theological topic” is overstepped by critics looking for something more than Christianity within the text (270).  However, the “comic incongruities” in the Miller’s Tale and the Reeve’s Tale (and all the fabliau) must not be overlooked as essential to the artistry of Chaucer’s Tales.

            While the Miller, a “neo-Noah” figure, does not experience a cleansing flood entirely comparable to the Great Flood, his “non-flood” has the same consequences: it destroys a world of corruption.  The difference is that Chaucer’s story includes a comedic, sexual level while maintaining an encompassing undertone of Christianity, an idea many critics choose to classify as “immiscible juxtaposition” (272).  However, Delasanta believes that the religious implications are the real message, only revealed by the sexual.  Grinding corn into flour has long been analogous with the sexual act of procreation, he explains.  In the Reeve’s Tale, as payment for Symkyn stealing John and Alain’s flour, they de-flour him by literally “deflowering” his daughter.  Delasanta includes a passage from the tale (lines 4035-45) rich in sexual connotation about “grinding.”  He briefly but smartly acknowledges the sexual double entendre that is obvious to current Middle English scholars and would have been unmissed by Chaucer’s contemporary readers/audience.  But then, wisely, the article gets into its central argument by extensively exploring the sacred possibilities of the mill image.

            Despite the bawdy sexuality of many of Chaucer’s tales, one must not forget, says Delasanta, that at the end of the road, and the end of the game, lies the holy shrine at Canterbury, the reason for the journey.  This is, after all, a pilgrimage, and a journey that is theoretically made solely because of religious devotion.  Says Delasanta, “the Chaucerian dirty story often depends for its own larger narrative glory on the unspoken paradigm of the pious fable” (272).  Here he mentions the Structuralist idea that poetry (literature) seeks to reconcile opposites.  In Chaucer, the sexual and the sacred are not “immiscible,” but artistically reconciled opposites.

            Delansanta first catalogs many Christian artistic and architectural representations of the mill.  One church, the Bern Cathedral in Switzerland, depicts a mill churning out communion wafers.  The article then goes on to connect the mill to specific apocalyptic ideology, quoting both Old and New Testament passages, including Matthew, who Delasanta claims that Chaucer would have been very familiar with (274).  His conclusion is that in a biblical context, the mill is usually associated with apocalyptic catastrophe.  In Luke’s version of the end of the world, Luke says, “In that night there shall be two men in one bed.  One shall be taken and the other shall be left.  Two women shall be grinding together [at the mill]” (17:30-35, 274).  The connections between this passage and the Reeve’s Tale are quite obvious and more than coincidental, and Delasanta allows the information to speak for itself, rather than explaining all of the double meaning and similarities to the tale to the reader.

            The article returns to the Reeve’s Tale in its final paragraph, when Delasanta asserts that while the tale ends with a comical doom rather than a catastrophic end-of-the-world doom, the same overall effect remains: the destruction of a “world” of corruption, the Miller’s world.  Delasanta acknowledges that another essay could and would need to be written in order to provide other Chaucerian examples of apocalyptic imagery within the literature; however, he does cite that in much medieval literature, the image of a mill appears at the end of days, or during catastrophe, meaning that this image would have been no secret to both Chaucer and his audience (275).  The mill in the Reeve’s Tale, he concludes, in undoubtedly an “apocalyptic symbol which transforms fabliau and points comedy in a direction entirely consonant with pilgrimage” (275).

            When I read this article for the first time, my only prior knowledge of its content being the title, I found myself easily accepting Delasanta’s (who was admittedly, which helps, not the first to suggest this idea) interpretation of the mill in the Reeve’s Tale.  Because he incorporates so many examples and, I think, proves the consistency of both the sexual and sacred mill images in literature, there really can be no contest that this tale, and the Miller’s Tale, has underlying apocalyptic messages.  This stems originally from the usage of mills in the Bible.  As Delasanta argues, Chaucer the medieval citizen has knowledge of this symbol, while Chaucer the artist uses it for a purpose. 

            Delasanta stresses the idea that modern critics pay little attention to the apocalyptic typology.  I believe that this is because the “pattern” of the mill image is no longer as prominent a part of our modern literary structure.  In the Middle Ages, when Christianity could not be separated from anything, including literature, because of its transcendence over life, imagery could clearly be interpreted in its Christian way.  The mill, in Chaucer’s time, has sexual connotations and sacred connotations that were inherent in the society.  Chaucer, the artist, was able to take his inherent knowledge and use it to form a story with several layers of meaning.  In the same way, critics are able to use current trends to find meaning in The Canterbury Tales, yet supposedly pay little attention to the older apocalyptic image.  I think the discrepancy lies in the time difference (including the fact we don’t really have the typical “mills” anymore) and the de-emphasis in our modern world on Christianity.  However, the mill image is obviously still very much valid and present in the overall blueprint of literature and Christianity, it just needs to be dug out and brought into a modern knowledge base in order for readers to find its significance.

            Not only has Delasanta provided the information, I think he does a convincing job of explaining why the Reeve’s Tale can and must be interpreted according to the pattern and implications of the medieval and biblical mill.  The setting was no accident, and neither was the connection between the Miller and Reeve’s tales.  The Canterbury Tales operates on multiple levels of meaning and artistry; the sexual and sacred reconciliation of the mill in this tale is merely one of them.—Laura Reese, 3/2/07

Casey, Jim. “Unfinished Business: The Termination of the Cook’s Tale.” The ChaucerReview. 41.2 (2006): 185-196. Project MUSE. Goucher Coll. Lib., Baltimore, MD. 24 Feb. 2007. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chaucer_review/v041/41.2casey.html>. 

        In this article, Casey presents some very interesting information and new insights into the debate surrounding the abrupt ending of the Cook’s Tale.  He begins by referencing Douglas Gray’s list of reasons for the shortened tale: there was more, but it was lost, Chaucer was prevented from finishing the tale, or Chaucer decided not to finish the tale.  However, Casey does not see this as a full list of possibilities; he includes the idea that the Cook’s Tale is perfect as is, and works as part of Fragment I. 

         Casey states that many critics have looked for a source of the tale, or at other outside sources to discover why it is short, but he feels that it is necessary to look to the tale itself to discover an answer.  Casey cites John Hines to refute the usage of “thematic closure,” saying that these arguments do not complete the story.  Continuing to examine other criticism, he looks to Frank Kermode’s statement that all books must have endings and Michaela Paasche Grudin’s assertion that Chaucer expected this type of closure, as he writes in Troilus and Criseyde.  Casey then contradicts this, citing Rosemarie McGerr, who says that open-ended stories did exist in the Middle Ages.

      Casey switches tactics, turning to the manuscripts and the Hengwrt scribe’s note.  He presents M. C. Seymour’s argument that the last pages of the Cook’s Tale were lost.  However, this is not enough for Casey who turns, finally, to his own argument that the ink of the manuscript tells us more.  The scribe’s note at the end of the Cook’s Tale is written in the same ink that the second Fragment is and that appears nowhere else in the manuscript.  Therefore, the scribe must have written the note before, during, or after writing Fragment II.  Casey turns, again, to Seymour and his argument that by the time the scribe wrote the Ellesmere manuscript, he knew more of the tale existed, but was unable to find it.  Turning to Linne Mooney’s argument that Chaucer knew the scribe and was familiar with him, Chaucer would have told the scribe to remove the note, giving us evidence that he had written more.

      Casey finally delves into his own argument that Chaucer made the Cook’s Tale just as it is, short and abrupt.  When the host request’s a tale of the Cook later, it first appears that he is saying the Cook has not told another tale.  However, Casey argues that the host is mocking the Cook and his lack of ability to tell a story.  Casey examines the host’s statements to the Cook (saying that he had sex, referring to London, saying a thief stole from him) and concludes they are references to Perkyn from the Cook’s Tale.  These references imply that Chaucer intended to keep the Cook’s Tale, just as it exists.  The assertions of the tale’s incomplete finish ignore the fact that the final lines, as Larry D. Benson says, are an appropriate ending couplet.  Casey closes by noting that no matter what he writes, this debate will most likely never be concluded. 

      The main weakness of this essay is that Casey spends the majority of his time writing about other criticism.  Although he should certainly draw upon other writers, especially with this open debate, he ends up not spending much time talking about his own opinions and ideas and instead talks about the ideas of others.  However, this does serve to make this an extremely useful article for learning the background behind the debate over the end of the Cook’s Tale.  One of the real strengths of Casey’s writing is that he draws upon Chaucer’s works, looking to Troilus and Criseyde as well as The Canterbury Tales to find evidence to support his claim.  By doing this he moves beyond the debate based on the physical aspects of the manuscripts and into the only evidence we have from Chaucer himself.  One of Casey’s other faults in his writing is the simple order of the evidence he presents.  For example, when discussing the manuscript debate, he appears to assume certain information about the scribe, which is only later proved by citing Mooney.  Overall, Casey presents a very informative and useful account of the debate over the abrupt ending of the Cook’s Tale, yet he only allows himself a small place in the argument.—Anna Lehnen, 3/2/07

Bukakov, Olga. "Chaucer's the Cooks Tale." The Explicator 61 (2002): 2-5. Wilson Web. Goucher College, Baltimore. 27 Feb. 2007 <http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com>.

            In Chaucer’s The Cooks Tale Olga Bukakov makes a link between the Cooks Prologue, Tale, and Genesis. Saying that the Cook’s bad moral behavior and Perkyn’s “fall from grace” correlate to the theme of defying higher authority and Adam’s fall from grace in Genesis. However in this essay she only makes the correlation between the two texts but does not explain how this correlation makes a difference in how one is supposed to read the Cooks Tale.

            Bukakov also does not seem to prove her thesis that the Cooks tale is not supposed to be read as a “ ‘degenerative movement’ ” in Fragment A but as “an opening of the Genesis narrative of Adam's Fall”, because she does not explain anything about the rest of Genesis and how it relates to the other Canterbury Tales.

            She does do a fair job in making strong connections between the story of Adam’s fall and the Cooks tale; in connecting the garden of Eden to the Victualers shop, the forbidden apple to the stolen money box, and the end of the story when Perkin is thrown out of the shop and has to live with a prostitute to Adam’s fall from the garden of Eden and living with Eve (a sinful woman) outside of paradise. She even makes the case for allowing the absence of an Eve like character because of a statement the Cook makes in his prologue that “ ‘ther is no theef withoute a lowke" ( 1.4415).” (A statement she did not even include in the essay, instead she puts it as a note, and which she does not fully explain.)--Colleen Desrosiers, 3/2/07

Kline, Daniel T. “‘Myne by right’: Oath Making and Intent in The Friar’s Tale.”     Philological Quarterly 77.3 (1998): 271-293. Humanities and Social Sci Retro                (WilsonWeb).  Julia Rogers Library, Goucher College. 28 February 2007        <http://hwilsonweb.com>.

In this article, Kline focuses on the role of oath making in The Friar’s Tale.  He contends that the tale is not simply a “theological exemplum” as many critics argue (screen 1).  Rather, he sees the exchange of vows, oaths, and pledges, (of an economic, legal, and religious nature), as a reflection of the changing social and economic climate of Chaucer’s time.  He explains that, in fourteenth century England, society was shifting slowly from rather rigid feudal and religious hierarchy to a more flexible, individualistic system where temporary social contracts could be made outside of the hierarchy.

Kline describes how different oaths and contracts shape the narrative of the tale. He begins by explaining how Friar Hubert is characterized in the General Prologue as a manipulator of language and his hierarchical status, setting the tone for his tale.  Kline continues with the Friar’s Tale itself.  He explains how the tale opens with the language of contracts when the summoner and demon-bailiff make an oath of brotherhood that turns into an informal contract when the promise of goods is exchanged.  In the next scene, the carter exclaims a series of religious oaths “which reveal the carter’s normative spirituality and introduces the legal parameters of intent” (screen1).  The discourse of law enters into the final scene when the summoner, due to the widow’s pledge, is held to his initial oath with the demon.  Kline explores the various oaths of each character in the tale, but focuses primarily on the fate of the summoner.  He maintains that the summoner’s fate in the tale is a result of his unsuccessful negotiation of two main discourses: his trust in his own economic and social contract with the demon, and the demon’s existing hierarchical obligations.  This, and the other oaths in the tale, says Kline, embodies the cultural tension surrounding the changes in the social and economic atmosphere as new forms of legal alliances began to supercede traditional feudal relationships. 

Having not yet read The Friar’s Tale, it is difficult to assess the author’s argument fully.  However, I found Kline’s analysis to be quite thorough.  Kline does not rely fully on the work of other scholars, but maintains a good balance between research and his own insight into the text.  He also refers to the text itself quite frequently to support his argument.  His article, though, takes a bit of a winding path.  The discussion of the tale and its oaths is mixed in with his discussion of the societal norms of the time.  Had he fully discussed the historical context of the tale before going into the details of the text, it may have been a bit easier to follow his logic.  However, students wishing to gain greater insight into the nature of the oaths made in The Friar’s Tale may find this article useful.  Students may also gain prospective from considering The Friar’s Tale in a social and legal context, not simply a theological one.  The information about religious and feudal hierarchies of the time may also be useful when examining other tales, especially those pertaining to church representatives or officials. 

(One aspect of Kline’s article that I question is his focus on the summoner in The Friar’s Tale.  While other characters’ oaths and behavior are noted, Kline spends most of the article examining the summoner’s situation.  Again, because I have not yet read the tale I cannot tell if this focus was appropriate or not.)—Leah Hoffman, 3/4/07

Allman, W.W. and Hanks, Thomas D.  “Rough Love:  Notes Toward an Erotics of the Canterbury Tales.”  The Chaucer Review  38.1 (2003):  36-65.  4 March 2007 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chaucer_review/v038/38.1allman.html

            This article is interesting from beginning to end and is perfectly suited to me as it does not contain Latin!  One of the article’s main points is that love is usually portrayed in violent ways in Canterbury Tales.  The authors propose that “Love in the Knight’s Tale….reflects stab wounds” and suggests that the blood Emelye sees dripping from the fire she builds as a sacrifice to Diana represents “defloration” (40).   Those ideas don’t seem far-fetched and I can agree with the authors.  Their ideas of the meaning of the buttocks burning in the Miller’s Tale are a little bit stranger.

They note “both Martin Blum and David Lorenzo Boyd have recently argued, “hende Nicholas becomes feminized by the final actions of the tale as he puts himself in the position of receiving a kiss from a man, then suffers penetration with a hot coulter in a parody of homosexual rape.  The earlier-feminized Absolon here asserts his masculinity in a sexually violent act characterized by penetration…” (42).   Absolon certainly is asserting his masculinity in a violent manner, but I am not convinced that Nicholas’ butt being branded can be labeled a “parody of homosexual rape.” 

One of the authors’ most interesting points is that Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale contains more sexual violence than its French sources.  They say the verbs used in the French tales are not as suggestive of stab wounds as Chaucer’s verb “priken” (44).  This is something I am certain I wouldn’t have known if I hadn’t read this article.  I don’t know that this means Chaucer had some issues with violence against women or if he just thought it made intriguing writing. 

 Another well-argued point is that Malyne’s ability to talk after what happens to her downplays the violence and makes readers more likely to think of it as something other than rape.  They contrast this with what happens in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, when people within the tale agree that a rape has occured.  They point out that, whereas Malyne spoke, this woman “has no words, indeed, is obliterated…” (49). On my own, I focused on how bizarre it was that Melanye talked to her rapist, on what she said.  This article brought my attention to the importance of the fact that she spoke at all, and made me think about what that means and how it manipulates readers.

Usually, the authors argue, women are victims and men are perpetrators of violence. The article can be summarized best, perhaps, with the following quote:  “The Canterbury Tales…consistently represents erotic love as a violent and bloody deed featuring men as agents and women as recipients” (54).—Shelly Haugrud, 3/4/07

Aloni, Gila. “Extimacy in the Miller’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review. 41.2 (2006): 163-184. Project MUSE. Goucher Coll. Lib., Baltimore, MD. 27 Feb. 2007.       <http://muse.jhu.edu/search/search.pl> 

            To introduce the foundation of her thesis, Aloni turns to the text itself, the Miller’s Tale, and catalogues that the words “pryvetee, privy, and prively” occur thirteen times.  She proposes that the thematic role privacy plays in the tale requires that readers approach it more critically than simply a “separate category connected with the concept of intimacy and opposed to the category of the public” (163). To succinctly describe the deconstruction of these binaries in the Miller’s Tale, Aloni borrows Jacques Lacan’s term extimité (or extimacy). Aloni paraphrases Lacan’s structure of extimacy as “the presence of what is Other at the place thought to be most intimate” (163).  Further emphasizing the deconstructive nature of this structure, she includes Jacques-Alain Miller’s assertion that “Extimacy is not the contrary of intimacy.  Extimacy says that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite.”  In her sophisticated thesis, Aloni offers two primary arguments.  Initially, she illuminates the Miller’s Tale by viewing physical spaces and relationships through the lens of extimacy.  In supporting her thesis she also provides evidence of the structure of extimacy throughout the Fragment One tales, and she uses the structure as an interpretive tool with which to expound upon the “degenerative mode” many critics extrapolate from the pattern of Fragment One.       

            Physical, or architectonic, spaces are a crucial element in the structure of extimacy because they are often in constant flux between the ‘private’ and the ‘public.’  In the most physical application of this idea, Aloni describes the Miller’s house as an agent of this binary deconstruction because “[it] is supposed to keep the Other outside, yet actually contains that Other” (164). In addition, John’s “jalous” nature creates the need for him to keep Alisoun, his possession, a private entity, and it leads him to mistakenly believe that in sheltering her she will remain his.  Not only does the possibility of another man within his own house not enter into his reasoning, but John also discounts the possibility that it is the Otherness within Alisoun that causes her infidelity.  To abstract the idea of space, she turns to recent scholarship on the female body as a source of deconstructing the binaries of the public and private.  She points to Thomas J. Pharrell’s observations on language in Chaucer’s time: “the nouns ‘pryvete’ or ‘privates’ could be used to reference the anus, the vagina, the uterus, and the penis (in either its sexual or excretory function” (166).  Aside from providing a critical background that of course mentions the fabliau version of ostentatio gentintalium in regards to the allusion to “Goddes pryvetee,” she also overviews a variety of criticism with the implied conclusion that the otherness represented by female genitalia is an apt example of extimacy because it represents the possible source of fear and innate otherness in the most intimate or private arena.  Orifices (both bodily and within a house), the major source of confusion in this tale, represent the structure of extimacy through their nature—that “inside and outside are continuous,” rather than opposites (166).

            In applying the idea of extimacy to relationships, Aloni focuses on the pairings of the husband/wife and landlord/tenet, and male/female, and the analysis of space is key to her understanding of relationships. In an astute observation that has implications wider than simply an application to this tale, she states “The very concept of a tenant is a category that disturbs the distinction between inside and outside, and the existence of a tenant enables Chaucer to question the notion of a stranger within” (170).  Sound, in the form of Nicolas’s music, persistent knocking, or Absalon’s wooing is a sharp reminder that these characters (and thus relationships) exist within a space where the notion of privacy is easily made public.  Though John could intrude on Nicolas’s ‘privacy’ by breaking down the door, he is frustrated by his inability to “get inside Nicolas’s mind, to take him ‘out of his studiyng’” (172).  In truth, Nicolas, the tenant, carefully constructed this picture of desired privacy in order to lure his landlord into this plot that facilitates infidelity.  This scene represents the extimate structure as it applies to the physical space and the ambiguity of John and Nicolas’s seemingly binary relationship.     

            Because of the interconnectedness of Fragment One and the broad implications for the structure of extimacy, it would be somewhat critically negligent for Aloni to abandon her thesis at this point. Instead, she continues to make connections to each of the tales as well as broader implications for the Fragment as a whole.  She finds the commonly accepted idea of the degenerative mode of Fragment One as a “progressive transition from order in the first tale to chaos in the last tale” to be inadequate to describe its nuances (164).  Her own assertion is that “central to Fragment I is an increasing exposure of the structure of extimacy and man’s inability to control woman” (164). The Knight’s Tale, under the conditions of courtly love, represents a female that is wholly inaccessible and defined by her “distance from her male desirers . . . her unconsumability” says Jacques-Alain Miller.  The subsequent Miller’s Tale uses the erotic triangle to parody the courtly, romantic structure of its predecessor.  Aloni argues that the Reeve’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale derive their sameness not in the architectural or plot similarities, but from their structure of extimacy.  Suggesting that the “distorted mirror effect” created by the doubling in the Miller’s Tale (two students rather than one and two women with sexual transgressions) means the two tales should be read as one, Aloni continues to map the path of Fragment One in terms of extimacy and man’s control over women.  In the fragmented Cook’s Tale, the ultimate example of extimacy and lack of man’s control over woman, love is represented as that between a “married prostitute and her numberless clients” (175).

            Aloni’s does a commendable job of presenting a convincing and evocative argument that extended its scope from the original target while maintaining a sense of cohesion.  She also avoids the common pitfall of over-summarizing and simplifying Chaucerian language by including brief textual quotes rather than relying on her own interpretation of events.  This allowed for more focus on her critically relevant observations and a New Critical allegiance to the text blended with the deconstructive tones.  One could argue that Aloni includes an excess secondary sources, but she uses them deftly, usually to explicate a concept succinctly, introduce counter-arguments, or to credit her own ideas, rather than as a crutch for her weaknesses.  The strength of Aloni’s thesis comes from her ability to expand it and so lucidly analyze the structure of the Fragment as a whole without reducing the individual complexities of the tales themselves, particularly the Knight’s Tale. 

            While Aloni already addresses clearly how her thesis can be applied to the other tales, I think the structure of extimacy has implications reaching farther than she noted. She touches on the tension between the cook and the host in her observation that “the very concept of a tenant is a category that disturbs the distinction between inside and outside” (170).  Indeed, the structure of extimacy has subtle implications about how we will read the subtext of the Canterbury Tales, the pilgrims themselves.  On a journey facilitated by the host, in which they are traveling in close quarters with the boundaries of privacy doubtlessly being constantly redefined, it will be interesting to see who acts as the “Other” by upsetting social order or delving too deeply into another pilgrim’s “privacy.” The structure of extimacy is relevant in the very nature of storytelling—the public exposure of what is the formation of most private thoughts and interpretations and how the “Other” operates within this—perhaps by interjecting or “quite” your tale. –Jen Madera, 3/4/07

Arner, Timothy D. "No Joke: Transcendent Laughter in the Teseida and the Miller's Tale." Studies in Philology 102.2 (2005): 143-158. Academic Search Premier. Goucher College Library, Baltimore, MD. 21 February 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com.

          In his article, Arner demonstrates Chaucer’s preference for tension over resolution through his inclusion and exclusion of Arcite’s laugh in his three translations of Boccaccio’s Teseida: Troilus and Criseyde, Knight’s Tale, and Miller’s Tale.  He creates this argument by examining the use of laughter in the Miller’s Tale, and contrasting it with the laughter in Troilus and the lack laughter in Knight’s Tale. 

          In Boccaccio’s Teseida, Arcite’s spirit leaves his body and rises to the eight sphere of heaven.  From his elevated vantage point Arcite looks down upon his funeral and laughs at the earthly limitations of those he’s left behind, and the lavish, pagan form their mourning has taken.  Through this laughter, tension is created with the reader at the ridicule of pagan hero funeral rites because the reader is denied the restoration of order typically created by hero funerals.  Chaucer used Boccaccio’s Teseida as the source of his Troilus.  In the last stanza of the Troilus, the narrator laughs at the pain in the world from the joy of heaven.  Like Teseida, there is a disparagement of the world’s vanity from above, mimicking the tension that allows each story to transcend its pagan background in a time of Christianity.  Each of these stories allows a “proper” Christian reading since they disparage the pagan earth and elevate heaven.  The tension created by the laughs in these two stories leaves them open to alternate interpretations by different readers, which can be thought of as a disorderly situation.

          The Knight’s Tale follows the plot of both Teseida and Troilus up until the death of Arcite—in the Knight’s Tale, Arcite’s laugh is omitted.  This is asserted to be a result of the noble Knight seeking to give his tale a sense of symmetry that emphasizes honor and security; as the pilgrim highest in social rank, these are qualities of great importance to the Knight, and their emphasis reflects his desire to seek and destroy potential disorder.  This turns out to be the failing of the Knight as a story teller—his anxiety to tell the best possibly tale confines him as he modifies the root tale of Arcite and Palamoun, constantly interrupting himself in order to keep the pilgrims focused on the earthly components of the tale.  Omission of Arcite’s laugh prohibits the transcendental Christian reading possible in Troilus and Teseida that can identify the vanity of earthly existence.  The absence of the laugh also eliminates alternate interpretations of the tale, highlighting the Knight’s need for order, and both the reader and the pilgrims receive the Knight’s tale with complacent acquiescence.

          Arner also praises Chaucer for his mastery of the fabliau—the Miller’s Tale is not derived from any one source, but rather draws on three different themes: the misdirected kiss, the Bible story/mystery plays implied by the Noah’s flood story line, and cuckolding.  Additionally, within its comedic fabliau structure, the bawdy Miller’s Tale parodies the courtly romance in the Knight’s Tale, and we see the crude, socially inferior Miller “quite” the noble Knight, primarily through inclusion of the laughter the Knight omits.  Arner says that though the “quiting” is usually attributed to the Miller, it is Chaucer’s translational decisions from Teseida to Troilus to Knight’s Tale to Miller’s Tale that leads to this success.

          The almost awkward silence invoked by the ending of the Knight’s tale is quickly disturbed as the Miller begins his tale: if the Knight is repressed in his tale-telling through omission of the laugh, the Miller’s tale is the opposite; as fabliau production of laughter is at the heart of the teller’s purpose.  Arcite’s laugh is incorporated into Miller’s Tale twice.  The first laugh occurs as the town folk laugh at John’s fall, ridiculing the madness of his actions after being so thoroughly tricked by Nicholas.  From a perspective unclouded by Nicholas’s lies, the town folk turn his humiliation into public comedy.  There is again laughter as the pilgrims laugh at the vanity not only of John, but also Absolon and Nicholas from their position outside the story.  These laughs represent the transcendental laughter that creates the tension in Teseida that is formed by this destabilization of the tale.  Adding to the destabilization of the Miller’s Tale is the chaotic manner in which the fabliau ends.  Rather than the order or symmetry the Knight employs, the Miller gives a brief recap of the frantic scene he’s recounted.  Leaving the reader and the pilgrims in the heat of the moment, as it were, invites discussion and interpretation, as seen in the pilgrims diverse reactions.  The tale-telling success of the Miller, therefore, is a result of Chaucer’s inclusion of Arcite’s laugh, and thus inclusion of tension and disorder, in translating the Teseida.

          I thought that this was a wonderfully presented argument.  I feel that the close attention the Arner paid to the use or omission of Arcite’s laugh in each text was appropriate and valid.  I agree that its presence creates tension that will prompt different readings of the tales, especially regarding each reader’s opinions concerning pagan beliefs and Christianity.  I also agree that disorder is created by inclusion of the laugh, and that the Knight effectively squashes chaos by omitting it—as Arner states, this is due to Chaucer’s masterful translations of Teseida.

          However, I do not believe that it is sufficient to merely use Arcite’s laugh alone as barometer of Chaucer’s success.  While manipulation of Arcite’s laugh gives rise to three different tales, Chaucer cannot make merely this one translational decision.  There must be a myriad of small translational decisions that Chaucer makes as he transcribes Boccaccio, the sum of which are what make his work so novel.  His ability to filter Boccaccio for both solemn, serious as well as bawdy, boisterous tale-telling cannot be defined by laughter.  Having not read either Troilus or Teseida, I do not know the original tone of the work Chaucer translated into Knight’s Tale or Miller’s Tale, but I believe that there could be aspects of Chaucer’s personality gleaned by tracing the different attitudes toward the same core story in each tale. 

          I also think that Chaucer’s framing of the Knight and Miller’s stories as highly structured and fabliau offer great insight not only on to the personality of the tellers, but as commentary on the social norms of Chaucer’s time.  The Knight clings to order despite his disheveled and unkempt appearance, while the Miller freely boasts of his drunkenness and indulges his churlish character without remorse.  When I try to imagine the intended audience for such a tale, it is very different from that I see listening to the Knight.  As the first two members of the undisputable first fragment, it is hardly conceivable that one tale would be preformed to one type of audience while the next to a different audience.  This calls to question availability of work such as Chaucer’s to the different levels of society, as well as if all classes of people would be hearing the tales at the same time.  This would be very interesting if as tensions rise between the pilgrims over offense tales the same tensions could have been expected to arise in the audience.  Furthermore, how these different ranks would interpret what they were hearing would also influence the degree to which a peasant versus a squire would be affected by the presentation of The Canterbury Tales.-- Lisa Gulian, March 2, 2007

Boenig, Robert. “The Pardoner’s Hypocrisy and His Subjectivity.” ANQ 13.4 (2000): pp. 9-15. EBSCOHost. Goucher College Lib., Towson, MD. 4 Apr. 2007. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=3785183&site=ehost-live

            Evidently, “The Pardoner’s Tale” has fascinated many a critic, and Robert Boenig is no exception. Here, Boenig examines the veracity of previous assertions that the Pardoner acts in a hypocritical manner by first cheerily describing the tricks of his questionable trade, telling an outstandingly moral tale, and then using the very same tricks he depicted so well earlier to try and sell his ‘relics’ to the other pilgrims at the end of his tale. Boenig first examines fourteenth-century Franciscan monks’ definition of hypocrisy: “Hypocrites are like fake beggars who…move their lips in pretended holiness, in order to receive something from the passersby, but when they are gone they dissolve into laughter” (qtd. in Boenig 10). The Pardoner, however, does not do this, or so claims Boenig. The Pardoner does not dissolve into laughter; he ends his tale in silence.

            If, then, the Pardoner is not such a hypocrite, Boenig asks, what is he trying to accomplish with this strange sequence of events? According to this critic, the Pardoner is not exactly trying to advance his own ends—he is instead parodying the Wife of Bath. Boenig argues that the Pardoner pokes fun at the Wife by paralleling her language in both prologue and tale—where she talks about the joys of sex in her prologue, he discusses the joys of money. Both have a wise, older character in their tales; the Wife of Bath’s preaches her cause, marriage, and the Pardoner preaches his cause, money. Both reference drinking, though the Pardoner goes against it where the Wife admits wine and dance excites her. Boenig then argues that the Pardoner’s silence at the end of his tale is a result of “[t]he control he loses at the end…over his audience” (14), as he failed to make said audience understand that he was merely parodying the Wife of Bath.

            As Boenig points, there certainly are many similarities between the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath. Both are essentially sermonizing, and both confess to love of something sinful—the Wife loves sex, the Pardoner loves money. Given that the “Pardoner’s Tale” does take such an interesting turn, however, in that he uses the exact tricks of the trade he earlier decried, Boenig’s explanation does provide a convenient explanation for places where critical favorites Wife of Bath and Pardoner vary in their message. Since the Wife seems to argue for drinking and jollity where the Pardoner essentially condemns it, an explanation that had the Pardoner responding to the Wife in such a preachy fashion logically connects the two. After all, of all the sins the Pardoner could have focused on—of the Seven Deadly Sins, the Pardoner only directly addresses “avaricia” and “luxuria” (14), the exact same sins of which the Wife is herself guilty.

            Accepting Boenig’s argument would also put the Pardoner’s interruption during the Wife’s prologue in a new light. The Pardoner may have interrupted the Wife to deflect her message, then used his own chance to speak as an opportunity to call her out on her message, since her prologue could be read as threatening by many of the men present. Since the Pardoner has much-discussed “sexual irregularities” (11), Boenig’s argument still meshes with that of critics who argue that the “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” is a way for the Pardoner to prove himself—if he attacks the Wife of Bath even indirectly, as Boenig believes, he somehow defuses any emasculating influences she may have left on the group. The Host’s and audience’s misreading of his intentions, then, would still leave him feeling like less of a man than he might like. Taking Boenig’s argument for its worth still fits with readings on the Pardoner’s sexual ambiguity; it simply puts the Pardoner’s protests in another context. –Bree Katz, 4/4/07

Carter, Susan. “Coupling the Beastly Bride and the Hunter Hunted: What Lies Behind     Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review.  37.4 (2003): 330-345.
            Susan Carter’s dissection of the anachronistic feminist tone of The Wife of Bath’s Tale starts by examining the origins of the tale for clues of similar tones.  In the Adventures of the Sons of Eochaid and Corca Laidhe, Carter finds the forest as a destabilization of gender roles; the Loathly Lady is as chaotic and violent in her control over the knight/hunter as the forest is.  Whichever source Chaucer pulled the tale from, he uses the tale to relate to the Wife’s preoccupation with “heterosexual commerce,” as Carter explains as desire, frustration, and pleasure influence power relations (332).  Therefore, Chaucer turns around the sexual roles—as well as the meaning of “sovereignty” when the knight transforms from a sexual predator to a sexual victim of the hag.

            Carter does well to point out the feminization of King Arthur’s court, as he turns over the case of the knight to Guinevere and it is the women in the court who beg king for control of this instance and judge the knight’s response.  Carter then supposes that the Loathly Lady restores the knight’s empowerment for bed to further enhance her own pleasure. Other instances of female domination include the refusal of the hunter/knight’s penetration into the feminized forest and the Loathly Lady anticipating the knight’s predilection as she prepares for him to become a base sexual object. Yet it is only with the hunter/knight’s fulfillment of bliss that the story can end.

            While most of Carter’s conclusions seemed pretty well supported, I struggled with Carter’s unpacking of Christian symbolism combined with the pagan representation of the Loathly Lady; for Carter she appeared to embody both as a Christian login framed by the Loathly Lady’s “pagan-goddess prowess” (337).  While Carter seemed to believe that the Loathly Lady’s words, “I koude amende al this,/If that me liste, er it were dayes thre” (1106-07) suggest Christ’s three-day resurrection and the folkloric penchant for the number three, the fact that the Loathly Lady changes before three days would dispel that association. Presuming that they had consummated their marriage at night, the Loathly Lady’s transformation at night time would likely be in keeping with pagan ties to the moon and lunar calendar. Therefore, the Christian three-day logic and “pillow sermon” that the Loathly Lady delivers appears to be inconsistent with the flesh/physical medium of the tale; which is an argument Carter makes as well. 

            Carter’s use of the New Critic’s paradox is well-established; Carter argues that the Loathly Lady can fluidly move from polar opposites in gender restrictions and roles for her own purposes, as revealed in the bedroom scene when the Loathly Lady can become more submissive for role-playing and intimacy’s sake. However, we do not necessarily get the same sense of enjoyment from the knight, who’s simply relieved that he now has a beautiful wife.  Whether or not she transforms back into the Loathly Lady and if the knight can contend with her frequent metamorphosis is never seen. –Rachel Bernstein, 4/5/07

Rigby, S. H.. “The Wife of Bath, Christine De Pizan, and the Medieval Case for Women.” The Chaucer Review 35.2 (2000): 133-165.

            S.H. Rigby presents Chaucer’s Wife of Bath as a classic example of the different modes of reading medieval texts, explaining that Alison has been interpreted as both a beacon of feminism and the very worst type of woman in Medieval society (and everything in-between). Rigby acknowledges that the difficulty of interpreting the Wife of Bath comes from the complexity of Chaucer’s works and the fact that there is evidence for all interpretations of Alison within the text.

            Rigby’s mode of interpretation of Alison of Bath makes use of a real life Medieval feminist, Christine De Pizan. Rigby explains that Pizan, a contemporary of Chaucer’s (though there is no evidence of their having had direct contact), shares many of the views of Medieval society as Alison of Bath, such as the hypocrisy of men. However, although there is a certain parallel between the outlook of the fictional Wife and the real life Pizan, their views are far from being completely coincident—in fact though they have frequently been compared the two are more different than the same. Unlike the bawdy Wife, Pizan was highly moralistic, defending women’s intellect (if not their rights) on the grounds that women have as much potential as men to act morally and rationally.

As Rigby tells readers, Alison of Bath is not only a problem when compared with misogynistic Medieval standards, but also when viewed against the standards of a Medieval feminists like Christine de Pizan: Alison commits just about every sin which Pizan says women must abstain from in order to “prove their moral worth so as to refute the misogynist charges made against them.” (139) Among other things that go against Christine’s rules for women, Alison is lewdly sexual, commits adultery, makes a mockery of the Church by using it to achieve social status, etc. Furthermore, Christine’s brand of feminism had very little to do with changing women’s role in society—women ought to do what they’re supposed to do, according to Pizan—but rather focused on achieving a sense of intellectual and moral equality with men.

            In Rigby’s evaluation of the Wife vs. Christine, Alison wins the hearts of modern readers, while Pizan attempted to win the minds of the established authority of her time. This is an important distinction for Rigby when it comes to reading Chaucer and deciphering the meaning of complex characters such as the Wife of Bath: In Rigby’s mind it is our modern sympathies which lead us to erroneously interpret the Wife’s defense of women literally rather than ironically. What is more, Rigby says that although readers are quick to latch on to Chaucer’s satirical treatment of other characters, such as the Monk and Friar, the Wife is somehow frequently exempt from this reading. With Chaucer’s use of satire and Pizan’s moralist defense of feminism in mind, Rigby determines that the Wife of Bath is meant to be read ironically—a harpy who by her very attempt to defend her sex makes a mockery of it.

With so much of the criticism on the Wife of Bath polarized into the feminist/whore camps, it is interesting to read an analysis of the Wife which compares her to a real-life Medieval feminist. It is especially interesting to note the marked differences between these two women, differences which seem to validate the ironic interpretation of the Wife more than a textual reading alone. By citing a flesh-and-blood historical source, rather than simply saying ‘from what we know of women at the time’, Rigby is able to make this argument far more compelling than it frequently appears.

Rigby’s argument is thorough, taking into account the similarities between Pizan and the Wife as well as the many marked differences. Rigby’s account of the Wife’s part in the Canterbury tales is systematic in defense of this point and the article would be useful for anyone writing about the role of the Wife in the tales, conflicting interpretations of Alison of Bath, or simply an investigation of the role of women in the Canterbury tales as they relate to the Medieval world.

With all of this in mind, Rigby still plays into the hands of the polarizing views of the Wife. Rather than presenting Alison as, perhaps, one account of women in the medieval world, Rigby pushes the reading of her portrait into a wholly satirical realm. This seems counterintuitive to Rigby’s own statements about the complexity of Chaucer’s writing—complexities which do not necessitate one essential interpretation of Alison of Bath. There is indeed a satirical voice in her prologue/tale/G.P. description, yet to interpret her as a wholly ironic character detracts from much of Chaucer’s skill. Alison of Bath is far too complex to be simply ironic—Her extremely difficult relationship with husband #5 Jankyn is evidence of this if nothing else is. It is also difficult not to take into account Alison’s other role in society; she is not simply the Wife, but also the prosperous merchant. Viewed in terms of the rising merchant class society her anti-moralistic actions cannot simply be attributed to Chaucer’s satirizing this would-be-feminist, but come off as a half-ironic, half-realistic portrait of a woman who knows what women are worth in her society and, rather than using Pizan’s highly moralized intellectual argument to attempt to change men’s minds and do very little about her actual position in society, the Wife uses what she’s got to take control of her own life through the one part of men that responds to women: It is unlikely that Alison would ever have achieved her financial success if she’d used only her brain. –Ray Conklin, 4/5/07

Beechy, Tiffany. “Devil Take the Hindmost: Chaucer, John Gay, and the Pecuniary Anus.” The Chaucer Review. 41.1 (2006): 71-85. Project MUSE. 4 April 2007.  <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chaucer_review/v041/41.1beechy.html>. 

Beechy begins her analysis with a defense of the bawdy Canterbury Tales that critics often apologize for, play down, or dismiss.  However, she finds recognition for these bawdy instances in the more recent study of “scatology.”  She notes that the poetics of scatology were widely understood in the Middle Ages, but have fallen out of popularity, no longer understood.  Beechy references Peter Beidler’s opinion that there is a need to examine the bawdy scenes seriously that will lead to a new reading of the tales.  She elaborates, previous interpretations of the Summoner’s Tale centered on either the rivalry between the pilgrims or the bawdy fart as a continuation of fabliau tradition, but neither of these really explain how satire works through the fart.  Beechy posses the question: Why use a fart in a story about greed? 

To answer this question, Beechy turns to John Gay’s 18^th century response, “An Answer to the Sompner’s Prologue of Chaucer.”  Although Gay’s “Answer” has remained virtually invisible, it sheds light on the logic of Chaucer’s scatological satire.  To explain the common sanitizing of the fart and apparent disappearance of the “Answer,” Jonathan Goldberg’s term sodometries is used.  Sodometries describes the subset of culture, unaccepted, that continues to evolve, and includes behavior such as sodomy.  Mark Jordan argues that the term sodomy was created as a theological way of minimizing desire, making it easily condemned, but the term has continued to change meanings. 

For an understanding of the connection between sodomy, desire, and the subsequent condemnation, Beechy looks to Freud’s theory that the anus is the first focus of sexuality in human development.  In the simplest terms, the anus is fundamentally opposed to the head, the source of reason, making the butt a source of evil, complete disorder.  In Western tradition, texts use the anus as a representation of evil, but also greed and consequently desire.  The church explains: sodomy is a fulfillment of desire without procreation, which is obviously sinful since procreation is the ultimate goal.  In these situations, the desired object becomes tainted as well (whatever that desired object may be).  According to Freud, feces is the first monetary exchange, as a baby gives that up, from the sexual anus, in exchange for praise; in the human mind, actual money is considered dirty because it is exchanged for other products, just like the feces. 

Both works use this money/filth relationship to satirize church power (Chaucer) and the fraud of speculative investment (Gay).  In the Summoner’s Prologue and Tale, allegory relates the friars’ greed with anality through Satan, and the object of that greed, money, with the substanceless and excremental fart.  In Gay’s “Answer,” he is critiquing the rising 18^th century greed.  Comparing the two again, Chaucer’s bee-friars are inanely following while Gay’s bee-friars are busy bees for industry, both reflecting their contemporary economic realities.  In Gay’s instance, the devil uses the friar’s ass, a symbolic rape; hence, friars are the place of evil in the world because they are damned by greed. As the Summoner’s Tale progresses, the fart is forgotten and focus turns to dividing the gift.  The division is an absurd solution, further suggesting the absurd value placed upon the fart, or the money it stood for.  In response, Gay emphasizes Chaucer’s allegorical critique of this created value, when it has no literal use. 

While coming to her conclusion, Beechy looks to Paul Hammond who traces the change in male/male relations from courtly to sodomy.  Gay makes a literal association between sodomy and greed for his satire on capitalism, following a trend to attack the literal nature of modern life, such as the closely valued Scientific Method.  Beechy emphasizes again how Chaucer’s fart is a serious satirical work, which places the Holy Spirit (essential value in life) and prayer, against the fart (the absence of value) representing money.  Through the friar’s greed, the fart is valued while really meaning nothing and is exchanged for something that means everything, the Holy Spirit.  This fart shows the shift from a bartering economy, exchange of products with direct usage, to the abstract value of money.  Gay saw a similar ridiculous value-ing in the money continually invested during his time. 

Beechy has a rather well constructed argument, but there are a few points I wish were stronger.  Although it is clearly a study with some popularity, she never explains what scatology is exactly; it would aid her argument if she spent a little time talking about the formation of this idea.  Instead, she treats it as she does Marxist and Freudian interpretations, where merely mentioning the name is enough to explain to the reader what she is doing.  As a main part of her argument, Freudian theory is holding her criticism together, but I’m not sure that she can appropriately apply Freud’s psychology to medieval literature, as the simple difference in time periods is so drastic.  Having said that, her application of Marxist theory is appropriate, as following the movement of money and sign-exchange could happen any time, and she uses it sparingly.  Earlier in the essay, Beechy states that critics should take Chaucer’s bawdy writing more seriously, but later she references his use of “creep” as charming, which would seem to undermine the seriousness of the work.  She also makes a statement that Thomas’ fart-gift is a “relief” to the reader, but she does not really qualify this word choice and would have been better without the term.  Once again, Beechy introduces a term, without defining it, even in a simple sentence; she starts referencing the Scriblerians, which the reader can eventually deduce was the group John Gay was writing with, but it would be easier to pay attention to her argument at that moment if she had simply explained who they were.  Overall, many of Beechy’s descriptions of the friar’s greed and gluttony start to overlap with a heated passion, which overlaps with wrath; there are certainly moments in the writing where the sins of greed and wrath just begin to form together (a starting place for my essay).—Anna Lehnen, 4/5/07

Weisel, Angela Jane. “‘Quiting’ Eve: Violence against Women in the Canterbury Tales.”  Violence against Women in Medieval Texts. Ed. Anna Roberts. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1998. pp 115-136.

In this article, Angela Jane Weisl illustrates how The Canterbury Tales reflects the world in which it was written, a world in which all women were seen as naturally corrupt on account of the biblical story of Eve. In the late fourteenth century, violence against women was not only common, it was also legal and considered necessary, even masculine (115-117). Such violence in Chaucer is either reduced to the level of physical comedy in the fabliaux, serves to caution women against defying gender roles in the romance, or is the means by which women obtain heavenly rewards in the holy tales. Moreover, the three female pilgrims exhibit the degree to which women are immasculated by their culture, telling graphic tales that fail to resolve the issue (117).

Weisl holds that the feminist messages in the fabliaux are undermined by the pattern of violence against women hidden behind the humor (121). In “The Miller’s Tale”, for instance, Absolon attempts to rape Alison with a hot poker, a malicious and possibly fatal injury. Because Absolon burns Nicolas by accident and the result is funny, readers forget the underlying horror (119). 

The second genre, the romances, normalizes the idea of total submission in marriage via their happy endings. In the case of rape victim in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and Emelye, conquered and stripped of independence in “The Knight’s Tale,” the violence is overt. Even the romances that contain no actual violence carry the same message. As evidence, Wiesl cites the “The Franklin’s Tale,” in which the black rocks symbolize the threat of abandonment, sexual assault, “loss of autonomy in marriage” and shame hovering over Dorigen (121). Although she opts not to kill herself, her contemplation of suicide features a long list of women who choose grizzly deaths over living with the shame society heaps on rape victims, equating their suicide with bravery (122).

The holy tales told by the Man of Law, the Physician, the Prioress, the Second Nun and the Clerk also promote non-sexual torture and death as the woman’s only honorable alternative to losing one’s virginity, being raped or both. Indeed, whereas sexual abuse is shameful, the non-sexual abuse women suffer for the sake of preserving their chastity is saintly, and the protagonists’ triumph at the end frees non-resistant readers to enjoy the graphic violence leading up to it without guilt (124).

Through their tales, the Prioress, the Second Nun and the Wife of Bath reveal the extent to which they have internalized this misogynist discourse. Wiesl interprets the young boy and the Jewish community in “The Prioress’ Tale” as symbolic of women (126-28). Furthermore, “The Second Nun’s Tale” follows the model of the hagiographies women were encouraged to read, stories that teach women to choose perpetual abstinence and to see torture as the way to Heaven (129). Lastly, although Wiesl sees “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” as the only tale that questions conventional thought about rape, Wiesl claims that sexual assault will never be completely eradicated in the Wife of Bath’s fictional world and that the rape is the motivation for the story (130).

Toward the end of the article, Wiesl turns her attention to “The Clerk’s Tale.” By comparing Griselde to Job, the Clerk turns Walter’s emotional violence into physical violence, and his allegorical interpretation celebrates complete passivity on Earth in return for dwelling in God’s kingdom after death. In the case of women, this means taking victimization in stride (131).

Finally, according to Wiesl, the degree of violence in The Canterbury Tales illustrates the extent to which violence lies at the center of medieval literature as a whole and that this in turn perpetuated actual violence against women by spreading false consciousness (132).

Having read all but two of the tales mentioned in this article, I would say that it is hard to argue with Wiesl’s assessment. She does not argue that her fellow critics are entirely wrong in believing that Chaucer takes a critical and sympathetic look at the treatment of women in the Tales. Indeed, she acknowledges that “ […] Chaucer’s women act and negotiate in a world ready to give them consideration and a voice […]” (117).  However, because Chaucer chooses to either downplay or ignore the violence committed against them, Wiesl believes that the Tales are largely antifeminist (117). This would explain why the Wife of Bath rather bravely chooses to tell her tale to predominantly male audience only to spend the rest of the pilgrimage quietly absorbing tales that attack her perspective.

Wiesl could have strengthened her argument that the three female taletellers represent real life women writers by citing someone other than Christine de Pizan, but she supports the main thrust of her argument with an abundance of evidence from the text itself, making this flaw relatively minor. 

Wiesl believes that the female voices in The Canterbury Tales prove Chaucer the author’s views toward women to be sympathetic, but he nevertheless fails to “check the secular, religious and narrative drive to contain, define and restrain [women] by force” (133). If she is right in thinking so, then it might be intriguing to take a closer look as to what degree Chaucer endorses bending the rules that he has internalized. I believe I have found an example in “The Franklin’s Tale.” 

In “The Franklin’s Tale,” Dorigen, in spite of her meditation on female martyrs, chooses to put off suicide long enough to tell her husband about her plight (V. 1457-1460). Arveragus can solve the problem by killing Dorigen immediately, but instead he spares her and allows her to keep her promise to Aurelius (V.1474). Granted, Arveragus threatens her with death should she ever speak of the incident (V.1481). Also, one has to wonder about a husband who would allow his wife to sleep with another man just so that she can uphold a promise that, unlike the heartfelt curse of the widow in “The Friar’s Tale,” she never took seriously in the first place: she never expects Aurelius to clear the beach (V.1001). However, he is willing to live with a wife who has been defiled according to his culture rather than just killing her as soon as she makes good on her promise.

Moreover, by only threatening her with death if she talks about her time with Aurelius, it follows that Arveragus does not see her having sex with Aurelius as wrong as she is only doing it because their belief in the importance of “trouthe” forces her to. By making the distinction between her having sex with Aurelius and talking about it, Arveragus makes it clear that women should only be punished when they have been deliberately disobedient. While not going so far as to say that “The Franklin’s Tale” is entirely feminist, it is at least an improvement on “The Clerk’s Tale” in which Walter tortures Griselde for no reason.

By making the hasty promise, Dorigen has a legitimate reason to kill herself and Arveragus a legitimate reason to kill her according to their culture, yet both characters choose to go against what they have been taught and the woman gets to share in the happy ending without being tortured. In this manner, Chaucer may not be arguing against the quiting of Eve, but rather arguing that quiting Eve is only necessary in certain situations. –Yvonne Rogers, 4/7/07

Davis, Craig R. “A Perfect Marriage on the Rocks: Geoffrey and Philippa Chaucer, and the Franklin’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review 37.2 (2002):129-44. JSTOR 11 March 2007.

            In Craig R. Davis’ article “A Perfect Marriage on the Rocks: Geoffrey Chaucer and Philippa Chaucer, and the Franklin’s Tale” Davis makes the argument that the main theme of the Franklin’s Tale is that “mutual obedience between spouses is a good idea, but also that it cannot be found or maintained without serious consideration of the public status of those spouses” (142). Davis tries to support this idea by claiming that structurally the marriage in the Franklin’s Tale mirrors Chaucer’s own marriage to Philippa Payne, thus Chaucer himself is speaking out about his own experiences.  In his introduction Davis emphasizes the fact that Chaucer married a woman from a higher class, just like Arveragus. He goes on to examine the amount of money Chaucer and his wife had, as well as outline the specific duties the couple would have had to perform due to their occupations.

            Davis quickly switches topics and focuses the rest of his article on the characters of the Franklin’s Tale. He divides the events of the story into three parts : “Unequal Marriage,” Mutual Obedience,” and “The Black Rocks, the Love-Garden, and the Busy Street.” Davis uses the “Unequal Marriage” section to state “ In the Franklin’s Tale Chaucer shows how such a strategic [socially unequal] marriage  might be experienced emotionally”(131). Davis focuses on the fact he believes both characters entered into the marriage based on true feelings and love. He emphasizes the time and thinking it took before the characters got married, and how the marriage was almost perfect. In the “Mutual Obedience” section Davis admits he agrees with the critic George Lyman Kittredge’s statements when “[Kittredge] said long ago that there is a special personal seriousness to Chaucer’s depiction of marriage in  the Franklin’s Tale, that the poet has invented in this romance an idealized relationship that he intends the reader to receive with special sympathy and respect”(133). Davis argues the purpose of the inclusion of mutual obedience is for Chaucer to share his experiences in it through his own marriage, and ultimately state a marriage based on such things has a great chance of being vulnerable to numerous outside forces.

            The section “The Black Rocks, the Love-Garden, and the Busy Street” is by far the largest section in the article. Towards the beginning Davis places a large emphasis on the existence of the rocks, arguing that the purpose of the rocks in tale is for Chaucer to  “weaken [Dorigen’s] character, just as he has strengthened his knight’s, in order to bring their disparate social identities into a more interesting and dramatic tension”(137). Davis points out that the rocks did not hinder Arveragus’ homecoming, thus they posed no threat to the couple’s happiness from the beginning. Davis goes on to again emphasize the love relationship with the couple, ultimately stating the trials and tribulations the couple experienced were included to express how true their love was, even in times of hardship. Davis concludes that section stating that “[ The couple’s] mutuality is restored, but this time on a more mature and self-aware footing”(141). Thus Davis believes the ordeal was necessary in order for their relationship to grow.

            Davis concludes his article warning his readers his intent was not to insinuate that the Franklin’s tale was a way for Chaucer to express his own marriage experience, but “[the tale] does suggest how our famously modest poet knew whereof he spake in the Franklin’s Tale and could use his art, like many another teller of tales, to transform his own social experience into an especially compelling and self-affirming fiction”(143). I used this article for my midterm, and originally I did not read it close enough. After Arnie pointed out the dangers of biographical fallacy, I closely read Davis’ introduction on the marriage of the Chaucers and his conclusion. While Davis claims he does not mean to insinuate that Chaucer wrote this tale based on his own personal experiences, he definitely does insinuate such things. What is worse than this however; is the fact Davis does not have any concrete proof to support his ideas. His section on the Chaucers is littered with “ perhaps, presumably, and probably” therefore a good section of this article is based on assumptions. In terms of his main argument, that the relationship was based on love and needed this experience to flourish, I pretty much agree with that. However, that argument is far from ground breaking, and is some what self explanatory. I found Davis’ insight on the purpose of the rocks to be interesting, and helpful while preparing for my presentation, but overall a close reading of this article reveals the arguments to be weak and unfounded. –Kelly Rankin, 4/7/07

Hanrahan, Michael.  “A Strange Succesour Sholde Take Youre Heritage:”  The Clerk’s Tale and the Crisis of Ricardian Rule.  The Chaucer Review.  35.4 (2001): 334-350.  Academic Search Premier.  EBSCOhost.  Julia Rogers Library, Baltimore, MD.  30 Mar. 2007 < http://muse.jhu.edu>

Hanrahan puts The Clerk’s Tale in a historical context.  Although the story of Walter and Grisilde is not original to Chaucer, he claims, readers in Chaucer’s day would have found it particularly relevant.

Like Walter’s people, King Richard’s people were (justifiably) afraid that he would not produce an heir, and someone worse than him might take his place.  Unlike Walter, Richard was already married when the people began to worry about his lack of a successor.  However, the people questioned his choice of Anne of Bohemia just as people questioned Walter’s choice of the low-born Grisilde.  Hanrahan draws additional parallels between Queen Anne and Grisilde. 

He also points out that Walter’s fake divorce from Grisilde resembles a real divorce of Robert De Vere, a friend of King Richard’s who he promoted to a Marquis, which was a new title, and then to a duke.  Hanrahan writes “De Vere, like his patron, and like Walter in the Clerk’s Tale, is guilty of elevating humble and unworthy figures above their station” (344).

Hanrahan claims that “divorce and remarriage as well as deposition and usurpation are entertained as alternatives to and consequences of an heirless realm” (335) and he argues the point relatively well, when he is on topic.  It almost seems like there is more than one topic in this article.  For instance, he spends a lot of time talking about obedience, and I’m not sure it relates well to his thesis.  This article would have been better if it were broken into three or four and the author expanded on each idea in a clearer way.  Still, I thought it was interesting and useful.  Before I read the article, I couldn’t get past the fact that someone else wrote this tale before Chaucer.  It’s as if it were set in stone.  Now I see that Chaucer really reinvented it.—Shelly Haugrud, 4/7/07

Vaszily, Scott.  "Fabliau Plotting Against Romance in Chaucer's Knight's Tale."  Style 31.3 (1997): 523-543.  Academic Search Premier.  Goucher College Library, Baltimore, Maryland.  5 April 2007.  <http://web.ebscohost.com>.

            Vaszily spends most of his time in this article discussing the characteristics and structural elements of fabliau as seen by other critics, Chaucer, and himself.  The article is organized into three main parts: the discussion of the fabliau genre, the execution of applying a fabliau reading to Knight’s Tale, and a brief conclusion explaining the significance of doing this type of reading.  While Vaszily attempts to make a case for Chaucer’s using fabliau characteristics to undermine the ideas of courtly romance and knightly power in the tale, the larger point that comes across much more significantly and clearly is the idea that Chaucerian fabliaux can be identified by defining characteristics that link them together as a genre.  Additionally, there is specific grammar associated with Chaucer’s fabliau, and perhaps fabliau in general, that suggests a larger structure and pattern within the genre.  Vaszily identifies six possible fabliau story structures that include common factors that can even be represented by letters in sort of pseudo-mathematical/logical equations.

            Vaszily asserts that while many critics have suggested certain characteristics of fabliau that could summarize the genre, these suggestions have been much too vague and not specifically tailored to reference fabliau.  For example, critics have described fabliau as “funny short tales in verse,” concerned with plot, written in the “naturalistic” style, and including a love or sexual triangle.  While alone, these characteristics are arbitrary and can describe many different types of medieval genre, together they begin to suggest a framework for the fabliau.  Vaszily uses the term dominant to refer to the “component of an aesthetic system that rules, determines, and transforms the remaining components.”  In terms of fabliau, he suggests that the dominant may be “hedonistic materialism,” a term which falls under the larger naturalistic style of writing.  Here Vaszily begins to form the basis of a “fabliau structure;” however, he is missing a key characteristic which specifically connotes the fabliau and not any other type of genre.

            Finding this common structural formula is the next major task the article attacks.  Vaszily explains that in the old French fabliau, the central events of their plots are generally “misinterpretations of ambiguous signs.”  There is usually a “duper” who is aware of the sign’s ambiguity and a “dupe” who is not.  Vaszily assigns the terms “Sender” (S) and “Receiver” (R) to these central characters in the misinterpretation.  For example, in the Summoner’s Tale, the Thomas, the Sender, tells the Friar he will give him “somwhat” if he promises to share it with the rest of the Friars.  Thomas recognizes the ambiguity in this promise, and thus, sends the Friar, the Receiver, a fart instead of the money the Friar is clearly expecting.  Here the article presents six possible equations involving the Sender and Receiver that can organize a story’s particular plot structure.

            Although some critics, like R. Howard Bloch, have suggested that fabliau lends itself more to deconstruction that structuralism, Vaszily feels that it is “funnier” to read assuming that every sign has a definite meaning, or signified, that the reader is supposed to pick up on.  The “ambiguity” that seems to be present can really only be interpreted in one way that reflects the tale’s overall story structure.  Chaucer’s fabliaux purposefully include stupid and “weak” interpreters that fall for the tricks they are subjected to.  Language plays a major role in modern literary criticism and usually must be “fundamentally subversive of linguistic convention.”  However, Vaszily argues that the ambiguity in Chaucer’s fabliau is not simply an example of figurative language, but of intentional and undeniable signs that lead the reader toward definite themes and interpretations.

            In the second part of the article, the author examines the concept of fabliau qualities occurring within non-fabliau tales, specifically, the Knight’s Tale, which is a courtly romance.  He cites two parallel examples of a fabliau story structure: when Palamoun and Arcite first fall in love with Emily, and when Saturn intervenes and decides the final outcome.  In both cases, there is an ambiguous message that is then interpreted in the opposite way than the Sender would have anticipated.  Vaszily also references Boccaccio’s version of the tale, noting that he does not include these moments of ambiguity, choosing instead rely on allegory and pure linguistic irony.  Chaucer, he argues, changes Boccaccio’s version in order to form the type of “bitter bit” structure that is characteristic of Chaucerian fabliaux.  Vaszily concludes the article by asserting that these fabliau structures that occur within the Knight’s Tale are justification of the modern reader’s skepticism of the affirmation of romantic ethos within the tale.  The naturalistic and skeptical attitudes of the fabliau genre shine through within this tale and thus undermine the romantic idealism it is superficially suggesting.

            I am not sure that I buy the idea that Chaucer was directly combining his fabliau and courtly romance genres in the Knight’s Tale for the reason that perhaps this type of story structure was simply characteristic of Chaucer, not just his fabliaux.  What does interest me is the lengthy discussion of the fabliau genre and the evidence Vaszily provides for its overall structure.  He is able to pull together the ideas of several critics, the actual Chaucerian fabliaux, and even reference the old French fabliaux without running into a great deal of complication.  However, it definitely seems like, which I also got from an article I read on the Shipman’s Tale, the Chaucerian fabliau may be different in style from other writers, which I suppose is to be expected.

            However, I am intrigued by the idea that there are plot patterns within fabliau in general, even to the extent that Vaszily felt he could take these established patterns and apply them to a tale that is not a fabliau and do a fabliau reading on that tale.  While the actual performance of this reading may not have been, at least in my amateur opinion, entirely successful, the notion is something I am considering looking into for my final paper.  I am not sure which tales, or which fabliaux actually, that I want to write about yet, but I am interested in the fabliau genre in terms of its characteristics.  All of these tales have original sources, which themselves were usually fabliau.  How does Chaucer follow the tradition?  How does he change it?  Do his changes produce something we could refer to as “Chaucerian fabliau” or is fabliau simply fabliau, with personal stylistic differences?  I choose to look at this article as something of an idea starting point after I found it because it manages to take the idea of figurative language and ambiguity, which play a huge role in the fabliau, especially the Shipman’s Tale, and turn it into a system of signs.  It takes what could be a New Critical concept and makes it Structuralist, without going so far as to deconstruct it.  I think that if I look in the right places, I can find some more truth to this idea and some way to apply it in a final paper, depending on what sticks out more – the differences of the similarities.—Laura Reese, 4/7/07

Ambrisco, Alan S. “‘It Lyth Nat in My Tonge:” Occupatio and Otherness in the “Squire’s Tale.’” The Chaucer Review. 38.3 (2004): 205-28. ProjectMUSE. Goucher College      Lib. Towson, MD. 4 April 2007. <muse.jhu.edu/search/search.pl>

            In his analysis of the Squire’s Tale, Alan S. Ambrisco first emphasizes the integral importance of the cultural division between the tale’s “non-Christian cast of characters” and Chaucer’s implied Christian audience (205).  Characterized by the foreign, this tale is often criticized for its narrative flaws and apparent disjointedness; however, Ambrisco argues “that the tale is unified not by its narrative elements but rather by the way its linguistic anxieties are revealed and processed” (205).  In his thesis, linguistic anxiety is used to address the underlying need for translation from the implied exotic languages of the text to the vernacular English of the telling.

            Before fully exploring the implications of his thesis, Ambrisco examines the use of the exotic and Oriental in the tale, particularly in comparison to its medieval counterparts.  Though, as Ambrisco claims, “no single source exists as a template for this tale of the Mongol world,” there were many predecessors with which Chaucer could be familiar.  In addition, Chaucer’s audience, both the pilgrims within the tale and the intended print audience, would have doubtlessly had some knowledge of the exotic East.  What is notable, however, is the degree to which the Squire’s tale differs from these possible templates, many of which reduced Mongols to “animalistic, sneering creatures” (206).  It was also fashionable at the time to make claims about Mongols, which ranged in their accuracy and depictions, in “romances, chronicles, and travel accounts” (206).   While scholars should “avoid claiming that the [Squire’s] Tale offers a full or even balanced picture of the Mongol world,” it is commonly believed that Chaucer’s work is the most realistic and informed of nearly all medieval tales of the Oriental exotic.  However, Ambrisco deftly points out “that very little specific information about Mongol characteristics or cultural practices—real or imagined—make it into Chaucer’s text,” while nearly all of the possible sources “describe the Mongols in detail, discussing their religion, politics, dress, facial characteristics, manner of warfare, food, and drink” (207-8).  What is, however, a chief characteristic of the Squire’s narrative is the time he devotes to not describing such details, or his extensive, and inept, use of the rhetorical device known as occupatio.  The device, used by both the Squire and his father, the Knight, is defined as:

                        “a trope of purported non-description, occupatio usually states that either the object to be described is beyond words, the demands of narrative economy prohibit lengthy description, or the rhetorician seeking praise lacks the ability to string together appropriate words of description.  While avowedly avoiding description, occupatio traditionally ends up describing at length.” (209)

However, it is integral to Ambrisco’s thesis to realize that the Squire’s use of this trope differs tremendously from his father’s.  The Squire’s continual misuse of occupatio “draws attention to Chaucer’s self-conscious, strained use of a rhetorical trope he elsewhere employs appropriately” (209).  The Squire’s failure to detail the Mongol court, which he continually claims is ‘exotic,’ “removes, rather than constructs, cultural boundaries between his exotic subject and his domestic audience” (210).  However, he does describe the foreign knight, the “other,” in detail, which makes the pilgrims unconsciously align their concept of the exotic to what is exotic to the Mongols.  Further encouraging his audience to adopt the position of the Mongols, the Squire’s Tale infuses a pseudo-European intellectualism in the people of the Mongol court.  The exotic gifts of the knight are “translated into non-exotic terms” by “linking the spending objects . . . with famous counterparts in Western heroic and intellectual design” (Middleton, qtd. 211).   Ambrisco claims that this is an invocation of Hartog’s ‘rule of the excluded other,’ which claims that in terms of ethnographic comparison, it is far more natural to deal with only two terms at a time.  Thus, “the exoticism of his culture overemphasized, the Mamluk [knight] comes to occupy the space of the other, and the Europeans/Mongols occupy the place of the self” (214).  However it is crucial that readers resist the urge to reduce Ambrisco’s thesis to a mere deconstruction of binaries or commentary on cultural relativity; rather, this initial premise is a springboard for his primary argument that though Parts I and II of the narrative appear disjointed, they are “intimately connected” by their linguistic anxieties.

            The use of occupatio virtually peppers Part I of the narrative, while it is absent from Canacee’s discourse with the wounded bird in Part II.  Also significant, the Squire’s “admissions of an inability to translate into English the [knight’s] marvelous speech” are absent, and he can, instead, readily translate the conversation of another species (215).  Initially, the pilgrims are “linguistically and spatially disenfranchised, but the Squire reduces or domesticates the other by refusing to let it evince signs of its own alterity, and in so doing he carves out a privileged space for the English language” (216).  Ambrisco notes that Chaucer has also displayed this linguistic confidence in Troilus and Criseyde and House of Fame.  Rather than dwelling on English’s inadequacy in translating the majestic speech of the knight, Ambrisco postulates that Chaucer is “underscoring English’s suitability for translation . . . the [tale] is not primarily about privileging West over East; it is about privileging the English language” (218-9).  In aligning the European audience with the exotic Mongol, the Mamluk knight is the incommunicable other, but the cultural ideas and speech of the Mongol court can be directly translated into not just the English language, but also the Western ideals and literature.  Thus, it is significant that in Part II, English, by way of the Squire’s narration, is the gateway for immediate access to other cultures, languages, and even species.  Indeed, the historical implications of this theme during Chaucer’s time cannot be underestimated; Chaucer, through his poetry, was continually asserting the capability of the vernacular language when its integrity was still under great debate.  Both Ambrisco and Flyer agree that this tale is a “‘metaphor for the difficulty of bridging gaps’ between male and female, birds and humans, and Europeans and Mongols” (223).          

            Ambrisco’s argument is compelling and supported well.  The article is heavy with his more preliminary observations and scholarship, but the originality of his main thesis does require a well-articulated foundation. Ambrisco is wise to anticipate the primary arguments and assumptions against his thesis.  Primarily, he argues that despite the dissolution of clear cultural binaries in Part I, Chaucer is not arguing towards cultural relativism or equality.  In addition, he recognizes that the pilgrim Knight, the Squire’s father, also employed the trope of occupatio in his tale.  However, Ambrisco does not address the argument that the Squire is consciously emulating the Knight and to what degree this inept use of the trope could also be reflective of his inability to emulate the true ‘gentlesse’ of his father. I found that Ambrisco often mentioned what could be the crux of key interpretive issues as though in passing, never fully questioning their potential significance.  For instance, if the Squire is the only proclaimed poet in the group of pilgrims, what does it mean that he is virtually inept (from a narrative standpoint) at telling rhetorical tales? If we are to assume his poetry, in suit with his character, is written in the more traditional, ornate Latin, what does his ineptitude at the storytelling game imply about the adaptability and worth of the vernacular? While he skirts the issue of potential incest and the Franklin’s rash interruption, Ambrisco does not connect this landmark interruption to his existing arguments where I believe a valid connection is substantiated.  If the Squire’s Tale, particularly Part II, is indeed a metaphor for the potential connectedness (or deconstruction) of binaries, in particular those of Eastern and Western culture, why does the Franklin feel so threatened or off put that he breaks precedent and actually terminates a fellow pilgrim’s tale? --Jen Madera 4.5.07

Lucas, Angela M. "The Mirror in the Marketplace: Januarie Through the Looking Glass." The Chaucer Review            33.2 (1998): 123-145. Academic Search Premier. Goucher College Library, Baltimore, MD. 21 March       2007. http://search.ebscohost.com.

          In her article Lucas examines the physical realities as well as the use of mirrors in literature and art during Chaucer’s general time period, and applies her findings to The Merchant’s Tale character Januarie’s mirror usage.  The mirrors that Chaucer and those living around his time period would have known were not the same as current day mirrors—though some glass mirrors existed, they were poorly coated, and not much better than the more common mirrors composed of highly polished metal.  Mirrors were most often and most easily crafted as convex.  As a result, in addition to the left-to-right reversal we still know today, mirrors then often reflected weakly images that were imperfect, tinted by the color of the reflective surface, and distorted by the convex surface—an illusion of reality. 

          Bearing in mind the skewed reflection mirrors of the time are known for, Lucas then examines several uses of mirrors in Christian and classical literature: the poorly functioning mirror representing the imperfections of humans “seeing” God in comparison to how He can see humans, the scientific fact that reflected light is weaker than unreflected light and the dependence of a mirror on the presence of light (as opposed to darkness) to function, the belief that only a pure soul can perfectly reflect the image of God, textual spiritual guides known as “specula” or “mirrors” that highlight for the reader how they are be at variance with the Word of God to allow the reader to correct themselves in hopes of being better able to reflect God, the imperfect vision and thus knowledge imparted from imperfect mirrors, and the fusion of Christian and classical mirrors to present ‘correct’ morals.  In art, Lucas points out that mirrors can be used to either suggest perfect vision and clarity or imperfect vision and shadows.

          Through her investigation of mirrors, Lucas then argues that the passage where Januarie sees women in a mirror in the marketplace suggests many ways to influence readings of the Tale.  The real-life use of mirrors in marketplaces enforces the idea that Januarie’s use of a mirror suggests his commoditized view of a wife and exposes his desires for an heir as materially-centered.  Januarie’s blindness can be connected to the highly frowned upon practice of scrying, as it was a practice reserved for young boys of pure heart.  Januarie’s metaphorical mirror in the marketplace also can be used to point out Januarie’s shallow desire for material goods, as shown by the sexualized parade of women he sees in his mirror, and the desire for May and all of the ‘goods’ she as a wife bring with her that is born of this parade.  Among other interpretations, Lucas points out how instead of portraying May as the ideal reflection of the Virgin Mary, the Merchant “reveals her as a perfect distortion of everything the perfect wife should be, a distortion which apparently reflects his own views about women…but which also reflects upon Januarie’s means of choosing a wife, which permitted him to remain ignorant of all but the desirable external qualities of his chosen bride.” 

          It is this argument of Lucas’s that I find most intriguing.  I love the multi-disciplined approach she takes to investigation the use of the mirror in this Tale.  Her ability to expose information about not only Januarie but the Merchant-teller also through Januarie’s mental mirror is fabulous.  The process of distortion of ideals is a powerful tool in reading this tale.  For instance, May’s actions becomes even less despicable to this already sympathetic reader if we additionally credit her with being a distortion of the bitter and angry Merchant as well as married to a man much too old for her.

          I would be interested in looking for similar items in other tales that act as portals into so much additional meaning as the mirror does in this one.  The historical significance of such seemingly everyday objects as mirrors cannot be ignored, as our connotations do not always align with those of Chaucer.  I also think that using art of similar time periods to support arguments is a wonderful resource.  I acknowledge the limitations that this would have, as it would only be feasible when the object of scrutiny had some relevance to painters of the time.  I wonder if, as a tale easily comparable to The Merchant’s Tale, the “koulter” used as a weapon by Absolon in The Miller’s Tale may open up similar avenues for further interpretation in that tale.—Lisa Gulian, 4/7/07

Hallissy, Margaret. "Widow-to-Be: May in Chaucer's "the Miller's Tale"" Studies in Short Fiction 26 (1989):  295-304. Academic Search Primer. EBSCO. Goucher College, Towson, MD. 3 Apr. 2007 <http://http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aph&AN=7133575&site=ehost-live>. 

            In “Widow-To-Be: May In Chaucer’s ‘The Merchant’s Tale’” Margaret Hallissy focuses on May and her skill in widowhood. Her argument is that since May is “too much the sensual animal to operate systematically and pragmatically in her own self-interest” that she is unintelligent and risks everything that would secure her well being as a wealthy widow.

            I would not dispute May’s impending widowhood, as Januarie is very old, and I would not dispute Hallissy’s theory that widowhood was a desired state in the medieval era where you were either a “clene maydenes” (a young unmarried woman under your fathers control) or a “trewe wyves” (a married woman under control of your husband).        One big flaw in Hallissy’s theory is that she does not give an example that May does not want a child. She mostly leans on the fact that widowhood was a desired way for a woman to live and that May must have known that she would not get pregnant by an older man so all of his estate would be in her possession and if May was to get pregnant then she would have to share her estate with the child. Which Hallissy believes is Chaucer’s way of telling his audience that “an intelligent woman should not risk pregnancy, ergo, May is not intelligent.” (304)

            However, I disagree with Hallissy’s reading of May as a gold digging wife. Since she does not give concrete textual evidence that May only married Januarie to become a widow and because she risks pregnancy (a problem to her own health and financial status) by sleeping with Damyan is giving May excessive blemishes to her character.–Colleen Desrosiers, 4/7/07

Simmons-O’Neill, Elizabeth.  “Love in Hell: The Role of Pluto and Proserpine in Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale.”  Modern Language Quarterly 51.3 (2001): 389-407.   EBSCOhost.  Julia Rogers Library, Goucher College, Towson, MD.  April 4, 2007.  <http://search.epnet.com>.

            This article begins with an overview of literature in late fourteenth-century England: satire, protest, romance, and novellas.  Chaucer, Simmons-O’Neill believes, used popular tale types to call attention to social injustice and changes in more subtle ways than satire or protest literature would, and that most of his stories are best seen as slightly modified versions of popular tales that his audience would already have known.  In the versions of the “pear tree tale” that Chaucer would have known, one involves God and St. Peter intervening on the behalf of the blind husband, and the other has God restore the husband’s sight: both are sharp, pointed criticisms of the evil of women (as are the majority of other tales of the type).  This had led some critics to believe that the “Merchant’s Tale” is meant to be a reinforcement of this criticism, in the light of the Merchant’s bitterness towards his own wife.  However, as Simmons-O’Neill points out, the intercession of Pluto and Proserpine is unique and casts a very different light on Chaucer’s version of this story, as does the fact that the lover is in fact a member of a different class than the wife and her blind husband.

            Simmons-O’Neill suggests that women in Chaucer’s tales, particularly Emilia in the “Knight’s Tale” and May in the “Merchant’s Tale” are deliberately shown to be trapped by the male world that surrounds them—even Diana and Proserpine, the goddesses to which they pray (and who are equated with one another both in De Raptu Proserpinae, a Chaucerian source, and by Emilia), are unable to save them.  It is not necessarily the fault of men, however—January must deceive himself into thinking of himself as youthful and virile in order to act towards his wife in the way that he wishes.  Two “falls” are suggested by the “Merchant’s Tale” and the garden in which the main action is set: the fall of Adam and Eve, for which Eve is almost unequivocally blamed, and the fall of Proserpine, a “contrasting mirror of the pagan Fall, exemplifying the lust and violence of men” (396).  In the pagan version, what is lost (Proserpine) is partially regained by her mother, Ceres.  Another source Chaucer would have known, Ovid, tells the story of Proserpine in full: in both the Metamorphoses and the Fasti, he describes the story of her kidnapping and rape by Pluto, Ceres’ search for her, and the compromise effected by Jupiter and the fact that Proserpine has eaten a number of pomegranate seeds in the Underworld, a symbol of her acceptance of her new place.  Also in the Metamorphoses, Pluto and Proserpine appear in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which Orpheus appeals to their love for one another in order to win back his own love—and succeeds.

            January blatantly shows the way in which men expect to be able to control women when he refers to his wife in terms of property for use or consumption (as a knife and as “tendre veel”), and also when he describes his wish to find a young wife whom he might mold like “warm wex” (2117)—though it is May who eventually molds wax.  May might attempt to free herself from such male control, but in reality, she merely seeks to “free herself from one lover for another”; she cannot envision herself breaking the rules of society and actually leaving the man who has married her.  She is, though, like Proserpine, whose partial freedom frees her from the duality between Venus (goddess of love and sexuality) and Diana (virgin goddess of the hunt).  Proserpine identifies January, Pluto, and Solomon—men of three widely varied mythologies—as rich, old, impotent men.  The three are also complexly related by spiced pomegranate wine in the Song of Songs.  In both a Russian version of the “pear tree tale” and Chaucer’s, women find their ability to save themselves “with words” (401).  January’s blindness and name also identify him ironically with the Roman god Janus, who can see in two directions at once, while at the same time he misuses Biblical injunctions to justify his control over his wife.

            Simmons-O’Neill also draws connections to the Wife of Bath and to the “Tale of Melibee;” Alisoun and Prudence, like January, reject oversimplified gender roles.  In this way, she claims, Chaucer “suggests the possibility that they [men and women] are both victims” (405).  She connects both January and May to all players in the tale of the rape of Proserpine—both ravishing, both ravished, and both searching.  The Merchant invokes Mary, the only perfect woman, who is also, like Proserpine in this tale, an intercessor on behalf of oppressed women.  Finally, Simmons-O’Neill reaffirms that the garden in the “Merchant’s Tale” is both Eden and the garden of Pluto, and that Pluto and Proserpine both mirror and magnify human conflict.

            This article is neither very organized nor, as far as I can tell, unified under a single thesis, but Simmons-O’Neill does suggest much that is very interesting about the role of these particular deities, Pluto and Proserpine, in the “Merchant’s Tale.”  The suggestion that is most interesting and applicable to the rest of the Canterbury Tales is the focus on class: “The Chaucerian revision suggests a concern with the need for change in both class and marriage relations, and the larger political and religious relations institutions which they mirror” (393).  This makes perfect sense as the “Merchant’s Tale,” then, despite its feminist bent—for is not a merchant part of the rising middle class, which had never before existed?  Class relation is certainly a theme among the Canterbury Pilgrims (think of the “Wife of Bath’s Tale,” which also equates class and gender relations), and Chaucer or the Merchant may well be making a subtle statement on the increasing fluidity of class boundaries.  This suggestion comes from the fact that unlike in other versions of the tale, the lover is actually of a lower social class, and May chooses him.

            I have read that the combination of Biblical and pagan imagery in the “Merchant’s Tale” has been a cause for scholarly concern, so I am pleased to see an analysis of the particular characters chosen and their connotations, rather than the mere fact of their paganism.  What other story suggests in the same way both acceptance of women’s traditional roles and rebellion against them?  And the fact that readers must think about the reasons for the inclusion of pagan deities in this tale invites us to analyze the mythological characters (gods, demons, and saints) in others of Chaucer’s tales.

            There are also parts of this article that I had to question.  Simmons-O’Neill writes, “Though May melts ‘warm wex’ to counterfeit a ‘clycket’ (4.2117), allowing Damian’s entrance into January’s wife and garden, it never occurred to her to use that key to let herself out” (400).  The metaphor is nice, but Simmons-O’Neill fails to examine the implications of May’s lack of thought other than the fact that she does not free herself from the male-dominated world in which she lives.  It would have been impossible for May to let herself out of the garden even if she had thought of it!  Not only does January use her as a seeing-eye wife and not take his hand from her unless she has an excuse that panders to his ego, if May had in fact fled from her husband, she would have been censured by the entire community—women and men alike—and would never have been able to live a normal or fulfilling life, unless she wished to be free and wild like Diana, which the association of her with Proserpine suggests she has no interest in.  Remember, Proserpine does not simply live her life partially in freedom and partially in thrall; she lives part of it with a husband and part with her mother, and the fact that she gives in to a plea to her status as a lover implies that neither part of her life is more preferable.

            The tale type to which Simmons-O’Neill frequently refers is also not explained well or given enough thought.  She never describes the basic structure of the tale type; she only refers to it when it is significantly different from Chaucer’s version.  There is one exception, and it is quickly glossed over: on page 401 she refers to a Russian tale that “evokes these same issues of resistance and reinterpretation,” which she only fully describes in a footnote.  Despite her focus on differences, this tale sounds exactly like the “Merchant’s Tale,” except that instead of Pluto and Proserpine the action is watched by King David (the father of Solomon!) and his wife, who, while they have no actual power over the situation, predict what happens in the same way that Pluto and Proserpine control it.  Why does Simmons-O’Neill not find it worth exploring that there is such a similar tale in existence?  Are many or all of the tales so similar?  If so, why does she not say so?  It seems that she has decided to skim over important points rather than risk weakening her arguments.—Kaitlyn Miller, 4/7/07

Beechy, Tiffany. “Devil Take the Hindmost: Chaucer, John Gay, and the Pecuniary Anus.” The   Chaucer Review. 41.1 (2006): 71-85. Academic Search Premier (Ebsco). Julia Rogers            Library, Goucher College, Baltimore, MD. 1 April 2007

            In this article, Beechy looks beyond the common view of the fart in Chaucer’s the Summoner’s Tale as a “low blow” to the Friar (who insulted the Summoner with his tale) or as a common bawdy and humorous element of medieval fabliau.  Instead, she sees the fart as the key satiric device in the tale.  Beechy explores this use of scatology as satire through comparison to John Gay’s little-known poem, “An Answer to the Sompner’s Prologue of Chaucer.”  She specifically seeks to examine why the fart was used, how it functions in the tale, and how it is related to greed, as well as offering a basic look at Gay’s poem.

            Beechy begins by explaining how the two works “transgress categories of decency in a way that Jonathan Goldberg describes as ‘sodometric’” (72).  She explains this term referring to the writings of Goldberg and Mark Jordan.   Sodemetrics, she says represents “a subset of culture’s transgressive practices and relations” (72).  Sodomy, or sodometrics, heads a broad category of human desire, specifically erotic practices and relations, condemned by society.  Understanding this explanation of sodomy, Beechy explains, allows one to examine the “anal-scatologic codes at work in and between Chaucer’s text and Gay’s” (72).

            Looking at both Freudian and pre-psychoanalytic understanding, Beechy establishes that the anus is generally associated with lower order human desire and evil.  She states that, “in the Western tradition the anus is often linked to transgressive sexuality and from there to evil and abomination” (73).  She goes further to associate the anus with greed, explaining that “in medieval theology both greed and sodomitical behaviors were related to luxuria, or excessive desire” (73).  Freudian psychology, she explains, associates money with filth, completing the association of the anus with greed. 

            After establishing this relationship between scatology and base human desire and greed, Beechy goes through careful analysis of specific aspects of Gays and Chaucer’s works.  She states that, “the symbolic link between money and filth, and the moral-philosophical association of greed with sodomy,” are used as satirical tools in the two works (74).  In the Summoner’s Tale, the scatological element satirizes ecclesiastical abuse of power, while in Gay’s poem it satirizes the “inherent fraud of speculative investment” of eighteenth century British capitalism (74).  Her examination of Gay’s poem is done for its own sake as well as to heighten our understanding of Chaucer’s Summoner’s Tale as serious scatological satire.

            In her analysis, Beechy begins by explaining how Gay’s poem echoes the Summoner’s Prologue by placing friars in the belly of Satan like bees in a hive, just as Chaucer places them in “erse” of the Devil (lines 1-8 of Gay’s poem).  The image of the friar’s flying around like bees in the hive-belly of Satan calls to mind images of swarming bees busy at work, a metaphor commonly used by writers during Gay’s time.  This image, therefore, moves Gay’s text beyond that of simple faux-Chaucerian form and verse.  It primes the reader to expect a satirical poem relevant to eighteenth century industry of capitalist England. 

            The connection between the two works is strengthened by the echoing of the image of Satan creeping back into the ass of the Friar in Gay’s poem just as the friars crept back into the “ers” of the devil in the Summoner’s Prologue.  Beechy continues her comparison by looking at the greed of the friars in the two works.  Friar John of the Summoner’s Tale is after both material goods and money.  Money, explains Beechy, is based in abstraction and is only valuable because it can be used to acquire material things.  Money’s value, therefore, is purely imaginary.  Furthermore, Friar John’s desire for an abstract concept, money, is embodied physically in the form of an excremental fart.  The fart is used as a satirical tool when Friar John strives seriously to determine a way to fulfill his oath to Thomas and equally divide the fart among the friars of his abbey.  The fart, the physical manifestation of evil and greed (associated with anal values) is valued beyond the Holy Spirit, which is essential for salvation.  The problem of dividing the fart and the wagon wheel solution further suggests “the absurdity of the reified ‘value’ produced by social contract” (the friar’s agreement with Thomas) (77).  This throws into question “real values of all kinds,” completes the association between greed and the scatological in Chaucer’s tale, and “prefigures the paradox of value and money that was to become such an issue in the new socioeconomic order of Gay’s England” (77 and 81).  

Gay, says Beechy, takes the association of greed and the scatological further into the realm of sodomy that she cited earlier.  Friar Thomas also seeks the abstract concept of financial gain through speculative investment, the acquisition of a house for cheap that the common country folk believe is haunted (a belief founded in the insubstantial or imagined).  His greed is based in the speculative investment common of Gay’s time in capitalist England.  Beechy cites Paul Hammond explaining that in the early eighteenth century the term “sodomy” referred most directly to anal sex.  Using this definition of sodomy, Beechy explains that the association between greed and the anus is literally sodomized when the devil enters the friar’s ass.  The poem, therefore, satirizes eighteenth century capitalist greed, (where investments are valued to what Gay saw as a ridiculous extreme), by equating it with the scatological and literal sodomy.  Just as the Summoner’s Tale satirizes the valuing of money (something with ‘imaginary’ value) over the Holy Spirit (real, spiritual value).

Beechy’s article offers a unique and serious look at the prime comedic element of Chaucer’s The Summoner’s Tale, the fart.  She examines seriously the moral implications of the action and what message it places on the tale as a whole.  She also offers a valuable look at Gay’s little-known poem, “An Answer to the Sompner’s Prologue of Chaucer.”  Overall, I thought her argument worked.  Viewing the bawdy element of the tale in a more serious light may lead students to other serious insights.  There were, however, several points where I felt her argument fell a bit short. 

In particular, I felt her use of psychoanalytic criticism was a little incomplete.  She uses it in the introduction of her argument to explain how the anus can be used as a symbol of greed and moral debauchery and why money has a fecal association.  However, she conducts this discussion almost exclusively from the tale.  Her article may have benefited from integrating these psychoanalytic methods more fully into her argument.  Perhaps, though, such a move would be unwise given the extreme difference in culture and time period between Freud and Chaucer.  If such is the case, Beechy should have turned to other writings or theories to support this aspect of her argument. 

In addition, her discussion of the term “sodometrics” feels a little out of place or isolated.  Beechy uses her explanation of this term both to set up the foundation for her argument, and as a reference for why her topic has not been explored in this manner before.   However, her explanation is a little difficult to follow at points and, for all the effort she put into explaining the term, she hardly uses it in her argument.  She simply references the ideas she brought up in her discussion of the word.  I wonder if the same argument could be achieved without using this confusing terminology.

Beechy also has a habit of throwing terms and ideas or facts at the reader without fully explaining them.  Scatology, for example, is a term she never defines.  Perhaps a practiced academic would be comfortably familiar with the term, but many undergraduates like myself, I imagine, would need to look the term up (I did, and discovered it means “the study or preoccupation with excrement or obscenity,” I wonder if the GRE tests this word).  This weakens her paper a bit, as it may isolate some readers who are unfamiliar with the term.  In addition, she could have used her explanation of the term to strengthen her argument.  She also mentions the South Sea Company financial scheme several times but explains it only once in a sort of off handed manner that is easy to miss.  One not familiar with this part of history could easily miss this reference to the pitfalls of the emerging market economy of Gay’s time.  Beechy could have gone further with this point, strengthening her argument on the evils of capitalist greed.  Also, because she never specifies exactly who they were, Beechy’s discussion of Gay’s “fellow Scriblerians” almost seems out of place.  If she had simply explained who these writers were, her points about eighteenth century satire would have been stronger. 

While all of these points are distracting, they do not seriously hurt Beechy’s overall argument.  They are simply lost opportunities to strengthen her analysis.  Students will still benefit from a number of valuable insights made in this article.—Leah Hoffman, 4/7/07

Farber, Lianna. "The Creation of Consent in the Physician's Tale." The Chaucer Review 39:2 (2004):  151-164.

            Lianna Farber’s essay, “The Creation of Consent in the Physician’s Tale,” describes how Chaucer makes additions to the original versions of the story of Apius and Virginia in Roman de la Rose and Livy’s History in order to show “the way those who have control over [Virginia] educate her and teach her to understand reality.  In doing so, [the revised tale] depicts the processes that create consent” (162).

            Farber begins by pointing the reader to the moment in which Virginia actually consents to be killed; she points out that this is one of Chaucer’s additions.  She then enumerates the spectrum of established criticism which all point to the facts that: the tale is political; its narration is fractured.  The author goes on to show how it is Chaucer’s additions that create this break in narrative and that they directly support her claims of the tale being about the creation of consent.  She categorizes Chaucer’s additions as: “first, the long discursus by and about Nature on the formation of Virginia’s particular beauty and virtue; second, the abstract discussion of the responsibility governesses and parents bear for the children in the charge; and third, the scene where, after hearing Apius’s judgment, Virginius comes home to tell Virginia what transpired and Virginia agrees to her own death” (153).

            This article dealt primarily directly with the text and indeed contains almost a complete summary of the Physician’s Tale, within its pages.  Farber does a good job of dealing with possible critical issues that others have raised as she comes to the appropriate points in her explication of the text.  Her reading is unique and well informed and the article gives us a lens for looking at Chaucer’s ideas about the formation of virtue as well as the possibility of Virginia as an allegory for man within the political realm of power.  If Farber’s ideas hold water, which I believe they do, then she has given us a useful insight to consider while reading The Canterbury Tales.  From her reading of the Physician’s Tale, we can come to understand Chaucer’s conceptions of individuality and political power; specifically the powerlessness of the individual in the face of a political system that defines his very world.—Jacob Grover, 4/9/07

Aloni, Gila. "Extimacy in the Miller's Tale." The Chaucer Review 41.2 (2006): 163-84.

            Aloni’s article deals with the Miller’s tale in terms of a concept she refers to as “extimacy”.  She defines extimacy as “the presence of what is Other at the place thought to be most intimate” (163).  She discusses the opposition between the public and private in the tale, noting that extimacy is linked to the inability of men to control women, which can be seen throughout the Canterbury Tales.  She relates this opposition to the links of male with public and female with private.  This public power puts men in control many times, but this and other Canterbury tales break down this dynamic.  As women are traditionally caged in houses, these women find ways to make their homes the place of their adultery, making them free of this captivity by their husbands.  In the Miller’s Tale in particular, it is Alisoun who is locked in her home by her husband.  The privacy in the tale becomes synonymous with her, as she becomes synonymous with the house.  Just as the house defines the space that belongs to the carpenter, Alisoun is part of his property as well.  Aloni discusses Nicholas and his presence in the house as a form of extimacy.  All male characters in the tale, Nicholas, Absalon, and John, desire privacy with Alisoun.  Aloni defines privacy as a multitude of things, including “mystery, secret, a secret sin or desire, and sex organs” (165).  She links this last definition to the “kiss” Absalon receives at Alisoun’s window.  She then defines a more concentrated manifestation of privacy: Alisoun and John’s marital bed.  John thinks that this is the place of his power over her, but the only time we see her with him there, they are intruded upon by Absalon’s song. 

Aloni connects this idea to other tales as well, saying that it is a parody of the Knight’s Tale, and identifying the same theme in the Reeve’s tale.  She points out that in the Reeve’s Tale, there are two tenants and two women.  One critic that she cites, Mandel, notes that this shows a deterioration of love throughout the Canterbury Tales, going from the Knight’s tale to the Miller’s Tale to the Reeve’s Tale, but Aloni disagrees.  She sees this as an increase in extimacy and a relative decrease in the power of men over women.  As extimacy increases, the idea of privacy is broken down, and as this happens, the barriers between men and women are broken.  Women are no longer banished to privacy as the private has become public.

In the Reeve’s Tale as well, Aloni recognizes the pattern of stealing as a form of extimacy in that it violates the idea of private property.  She connects this to the rape of Symkyn’s wife and daughter because it is a way of stealing what rightfully “belongs” to Symkyn and disturbs the idea of private property.  She references the Cook’s comment on “pryvetee” of a man as a comment on “the Reeve’s supposedly conceptual problem of defining privacy in his home” (176).  She says that the Cook does not understand that the tale is about bringing the Other in, but that what is already private (the woman) is foreign herself.  She traces this trend from Emelye as Palamon’s property through Alisoun who takes her freedom herself, through the Reeve’s Tale where a father and husband is unable to control his wife and daughter, and says that is comes full circle in the Cook’s Tale with a prostitute wife who is not only able to control her body, but also takes her own private property in return for it.

Aloni concludes by saying that the trend of extimacy discusses woman in relation to her society.  She will always be the Other to her male-dominated society and they will always want to control her.  The theme of extimacy in the tale, however, highlights their inability to do so and therefore grants women freedom.  She notes that “The progressive decline in men’s domination over women allows Chaucer to present a non-misogynist view of woman without openly rebelling against the hierarchies of his society (176).  Her argument presents an optimistic feminist view and employs structuralist tools.

I think that this article will be very useful to me in my paper.  Though I have not thought of a specific thesis, I have been looking at the Cuckoldry theme as a topic for my final paper.  This article sheds light on this theme and I think that I will be able to draw a lot from it.  This article focuses on Fragment I, and I would not focus on the tales in fragments, but rather in a group based on theme.  This article would still be very useful to me, as I would want to include the Miller’s Tale and, after reading this article, the Reeve and Cook’s tales as well.  This article helped me to see a relation between these three tales, whereas before I had not seen them as similar.  I was looking at the cuckoldry theme in relation to a plot to outsmart the husband by the wife and the adulterer, but this article makes me realize that any time that a wife has relations with another man it is relevant to my theme because it is a violation of the husband’s private property. 

As for the article itself, I feel that in places it makes connections that I do not think are relevant or add to the argument.  Aloni discusses Nicholas’s relation to his room as a form of privacy and John’s insistence on breaking down the door, but I do not see a strong connection here to the theme of growing freedom for women.  She also discusses Absalon’s relation to Alisoun as the most private, as he comes in contact with her anus, but he is never allowed inside of the house, and thus never enters the privacy.  Another discussion related to this is one of holes, which Aloni says constitutes the greatest confusion in the tale.  She relates it to holes in clothing and orifices in women, some of which I understand and some of which I do not.

I think that this article tracks an interesting pattern through Fragment I, as the number of lovers increases along with the freedom of women.  I feel as though, however, her interpretations of the tales were skewed in order to fit this pattern.  She discusses the Knight’s tale as a tale of two lovers, Emelye and Palamon, ignoring Arcite.  Though Arcite never does become Emelye’s lover, he is a viable contender for the position and it is in fact rightfully his.  She recognizes Absalon as part of Alisoun’s love triangle, but ignores Arcite who dies as Emelye’s fiancé. 

All in all, I think that this article provides insight that is unique and useful.  I have not come across other articles on themes that so closely relate to the direction in which I want to take the Cuckoldry theme.  It is interesting that she was able to connect the tales in a fragment to one another, and I think I might look at other fragments to see if any of them contain the cuckoldry theme as much as this Fragment contains the extimacy theme.  I will definitely use this as a source for my paper and it might even influence the structure of my final paper.—Jen Curtis!, 4/10/07

Benson, David C. “Varieties of Religious Poetry in The Canterbury Tales: The Man of      Law’s Tale and The Clerk’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer. Vol. 2 (1986): 159-167.
             In his article, David C. Benson asserts that Geoffrey Chaucer experiments with different aesthetic and doctrinal possibilities of the religious tale genre in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale.” Benson states that while usually tagged as dull and uninteresting to readers, the two religious tales are actually a “demonstration of Chaucer’s literary virtuosity” (160). The rhetoric, as Benson explains, is used in contrasting ways to derive the same Christian values from the two tales that are the most ambitiously religious of Chaucer's stories in The Canterbury Tales. 
             “The Man of Law’s Tale” is depicted in Benson’s article as more whimsical and straightforward, whereas “The Clerk’s Tale” is austere and elusive in its religious message. Benson depicts Constance as a simple Christian heroine, who is constantly tested, much like Job and other tried heroes in the Old Testament.  The article proposes “The Man of Law’s Tale” as evenly dividing the opposites of good and evil, judgment and mercy, and that Constance’s physical preservation in the rudderless boat is by virtue of God. Benson calls the rhetoric ornate, saying that its sentimentality elevates the story to a positive education of Christian values. 

Benson glosses over the rhetorical artistry of “The Clerk’s Tale,” and focuses more on its religious message in contrast to “The Man of Law’s Tale.”  Save for a single mention of Job (l. 932), there is a dearth of religious references (163). Benson points out that the overall lessons and style of “The Clerk’s Tale” are kept prudent and discreet.  According to Benson, Chaucer keeps the sentimentality of “The Clerk’s Tale” to a minimum ( though probably for good reason—Griselda’s trials alone are great enough to derive emotion); Benson uses the example of Griselda’s loss of her child as it is portrayed in second person as a way of supposedly minimizing the sentimentality: “Have heer again youre litel yonge mayde” (l. 567). 

Towards the end of Benson's article as he explains "The Clerk's Tale," he dives deeper into the issues and finds the true comparison he's been searching for during the rest of his argument. It is Griselda's own action to stay unshakeable and to be obedient to Walter, standing against Constance's seeming inaction, that is the nature of spiritual release for the reader; Benson calls it an "existential exercise in obedience for Griselda and the reader" (166).  In Griselda's gracious speech after she discovers her children aren't killed and that her husband hasn't remarried, she declares how Walter's love is more important to her than death, and faints with her children back in her arms. Despite her grievances, Griselda resumes her love for her family and becomes a prime example of Christian subservience leading to spiritual freedom. In Benson's argument, she is the Christ figure while Constance serves as the Mary figure; and Griselda becomes the representation of God's actions.  While Griselda sacrifices her family and comfort of living for obeying her husband, it would be difficult to categorize Griselda into one Christian model.  She embodies all positive aspects of Christian figures.

Benson tends to oversimplify both tales for the sake of getting at the heart of Chaucer’s rhetoric, yet he often tends to generalize and repeat his arguments, only occasionally breaking new ground that isn’t explored fully enough.  Some of his arguments are debatable as well.  His assertion that Chaucer holds Constance in esteem because of her estate is highly contested by other sources on the topic; Elizabeth Robertson’s article considers Constance as a greater character because of her otherness by race, estate, gender, and religion.  

What could be beneficial in this article is more of an awareness of Griselda's power through speech and how audiences could react to her understated freedom of will, particularly in contrast to the more easily categorized and morally accessible tale of Constance as a servant, almost blind in her submission to God.  Like Job, Griselda’s life is restored, but she does not go through the same diatribes as seen in Job. The argument about Chaucer's rhetoric in each of the tales seems to be lacking; without enough citations from the text itself, the generalization of the rhetoric and poetry of each tale does little to support Benson's argument. –Rachel Bernstein, 4/12/07

“Anticlerical Poems and Documents: Introduction.” Ed. James M. Dean. TEAMS Middle English Texts. 1996. 11 April 2007 <http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/anticint.htm>. 

      This essay is not only an introduction, but also a very useful overview to medieval anticlerical literature.  When these poems and documents were written, anticlerical literature was the best outlet for both secular satirical writers and even some clergy to express their disapproval of the break between religious ideals and the disreputable reality of clergy behavior.  Anticlerical writing comes from a mixture of earlier Latin writings about the Investiture Controversy and a later interest in reforming the church and we are given a long list of authors of some of these pieces.  A major influence on English anticlerical writing was the conflict between secular and religious leaders at the University of Paris in which the non-religious at the school resented religious influence and which William of St-Amour began to write about.  St-Amour criticizes the Friars, citing multiple examples from the Bible and comparing the current religious climate with the end of the world.  Some of this revolutionary writing was incorporated into Le Roman de la Rose; a work Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are often drawn from.  This anticlerical literature is often considered in two ways: first, as documentation of the predicted end of the world and second, as a reshaping of previous antifraternal writings.  These antifraternal writings were potentially a representation of public opinion by placing friars in estates satires, as Chaucer does in the GP. 

      However, not all anticlerical writing was comedic, although satire was an efficient way of getting the message across, serious complaints were also made through the writing.  A poem from the Harley MS is dedicated entirely to the creation of a new order designed around the corrupt clergy, The Order of Fair Ease. Another work examined portrays the mendicant, begging, orders as peddlers and tricksters while another in the same folio attacks the tendency to compare friars to Christ.  Joseph Grennen is cited, saying that these friars are all going to hell (an unnoted connection to the Summoner’s Prologue).  The next two poems examined are paired, the second as a reaction to the first.  The first is a supposed layman’s attack of the clergy selling God’s word while the second is a reaction from a supposed friar, disclosing concern about layman access to Scripture.  Mary and Richard Rouse are then cited for their collection of accusations about friars keeping secular and laymen away from Scripture.  There are multiple interpretations and titles for this pair; Utley and RHR argue they are separate, while Browne and Wells combine them into one.  Overall, the author advises that it is good to look at them as a conversation, reminiscent to Friar’s and Summoner’s Tales.  Another poem, from Trinity College Cambridge MS, connects friars to the devil, saying they inherited his seven deadly sins with a special mission to cause harm on earth.  Scattergood comments that this poem reveals the bad feeling between secular clergy and friars. 

      Next, we are presented with Wycliffite and Lollard writings, explaining that John Wyclif famously created many anticlerical writings and developed a following known by those two names.  These followers opposed, among other things, the English church’s subservience to Rome, consecration of objects, masses for the dead and pilgrimages (another interesting addition).  The term Lollard may come from many different sources, but was often purposefully associated, by enemies, with loller, or lazy.  In fact, Chaucer’s Parson may have been a Lollard according to the host.  The political agenda of the Lollards was to expose the flaws of the church and the clergy as agents of Satan.  These ideas and politics were incredibly controversial and it was dangerous to be associated with them, but there were still attempted rebellions to demonstrate people’s conviction in these views.  The Wycliffite Bible was an extremely important work, the first complete Bible in English-making it available to anyone who can read or be read too.  The clergy were strongly opposed to this easy availability of Scripture, making this also a debate about access to religion and Wyclif’s mission of availability a very political move.  Looking to the Prologue of this Bible, there is complaint about curriculum changes at Oxford University to limit accessibility to Scripture, citing the masters’ creation of errors, which harm the lay people.  This writer also expresses his dedication to translate the Bible exactly from the Latin, but the inherent conflict arises that this leads to more confusing text.  The Prologue author’s claims destroy the power of laws forbidding translation of Scripture and destruction of Wycliffite and Lollard documents.  Once again, they want to limit access to these works.

      The Lanterne of Light is about a London currier, John Claydon, who was charged for having books in English, including religious writings and was burned as a heretic for these possessions.  The writer of this treatise creates a crisis atmosphere, especially in a description of the Antichrist (perhaps like car commercials, pressuring you to buy before prices jump).  The final work examined is an anti-Lollard poem about a real man, Sir John Oldcastle, from “Oldcastle’s rebellion.  He is portrayed from the clergy’s point of view, as a corrupt knight who has tricked many people and led them into spiritual hell with heretical interpretations of the Bible.  This poem was written to discourage others from following the example of the Lollards. 

      The author of this work does a very good job summarizing many different works of anticlerical literature, especially in an understandable chronological order.  The exploration of Wyclif and Lollards shows how this was not something a few random people wrote for fun, but rather an important political movement concerning access to these materials in addition to the corruption of the clergy.  The inclusion of an issue at Oxford is incredibly interesting in this arena as an issue of access, not only to Scripture, but also to academic writings and teachings which creates a culture of academic exclusivity, something we still cherish today.  In the discussion of Claydon’s heretical burning, the language referring to religious men, such as venomous, offers a very interesting connection to the ire experienced by the friar in the SumT, showing a real life issue of such strong anger.  The webpage connected with this essay is very useful, as it contains the poems, lyrics and other writings addressed in the essay for easy access to find exactly what this author is talking about.—Anna Lehnen, 4/12/07 

Allen, Elizabeth.  “The Pardoner in the ‘Dogges Boure’: Early Reception of the Canterbury Tales.”  Chaucer Review 36.2 (2001): 275-279.  Project Muse.  Julia Rogers Library, Goucher College, Towson, MD.  April 10, 2007.  <http://muse.jhu.edu/>.

            Allen begins this article with a quotation about examples being stronger than rhetoric and in fact miraculous, saying that the Pardoner “fulfills his fellow-pilgrims' desire for just such miraculous experiences” (91).  She then explains the scholarly confusion over the Pardoner’s sex and belief that the Host reacts strongly to him because he is deviant; but, she explains, he is meant to be ambiguous, and that is the entire problem. 

            The “Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale” is in a sense an answer to the Physician’s tale of a martyr, to which the host responds with strong feelings that are not quite what the Physician had in mind.  This may be a deliberate interpretation, and the Physician stabilizes virtue by killing off its prime representative.  But the Pardoner’s Prologue especially “forces an awareness of alteration and falsification upon the audience” (94).  Unlike preceding tales which should be interpreted in one particular way, the Pardoner forces his audience to consider the ways in which tales might be interpreted.

            There is a theory among editors that the more difficult version of a manuscript is the older one, since scribes would have emended texts to make them more easily readable.  But Allen chooses to use it as an interpretive model—to find what early readers would, in fact, have found difficult.  The Pardoner is a difficult character: he is hypocritical, ambiguous, and sets himself off from his usual audience by showing off his learning.  There have been a few very telling scribal changes to the “Pardoner’s Prologue” that seem to be an effort to simplify both his character and his diction, and to specifically show him as a greedy womanizer. 

            There is a text called the Canterbury Interlude, written by a fifteenth-century monk, which not only rearranges the Canterbury Tales but adds two stories: the story of the pilgrims’ arrival and adventures at their destination, and the “Tale of Beryn,” a second tale for the Merchant to tell on the return trip.  The Pardoner as he is rewritten in this text is a much more simplified character.  He is not learned (he cannot even read), he is unambiguously male and heterosexual, and he is a blatant symbol of greed and sexual appetite.  He becomes the butt of a fabliau, in fact, in his attempt to sleep with and steal from the tapster, Kit, who tricks him and leaves him quite unsatisfied.  Other characters are changed as well, particularly the Host, who is portrayed as a fair-minded arbiter and a man who works to keep the whole company united and treating each other well, rather than the reactionary judge he appears in the actual Canterbury Tales.  The narrator of the Interlude distinguishes between rowdy and virtuous pilgrims, and puts the Pardoner squarely on the first side and the Host squarely on the second.  Like earlier scribes, “the author seeks to regulate and correct Chaucer” (112).

            The tales are also reordered.  The author seems to give no consideration to the original order of the tales, and begins with most of the more complex tales, breaks it up with the Interlude, and follows with simpler moral tales.  And, interestingly, “the famous gelding line becomes, ‘I trowe he had a geldyng or a mare’” (115).  This puts the Pardoner in a different framework and, again, it is one that keeps his character simple and easy to understand.  However, it introduces a new complexity: his tale appears at first to be told by Chaucer-the-Pilgrim.  This has led some critics to suggest that the Pardoner is meant as a mirror of Chaucer himself, or perhaps that fifteenth-century readers believed that he should be.  Finally, all of this restructuring and rewriting shows without a doubt that early readers had just as much trouble interpreting Chaucer as modern readers do.

            This article was fascinating and unique—a new look at the possible interpretations for the Canterbury Tales.  I had never considered looking at the reactions of early readers to Chaucer’s writing except to place it in a cultural context.  Allen’s discussion of scribal changes and deliberate rewriting is a fascinating look at early audiences’ reactions, particularly to the Pardoner.  She neatly lays at rest the scholarly quibbles over the Pardoner’s sexual and gender status by explaining that he isn’t supposed to be straightforward or to make sense!  Not only did Chaucer mean him to be ambiguous, he is deliberately ambiguous (not to mention hypocritical) himself.

            The concept of scribes “correcting” Chaucer is especially interesting.  Nowadays it would be considered blasphemy to rewrite something that is as much a part of the literary canon as the Canterbury Tales is, but we also know that the concepts of authorship have changed, and so in the fifteenth century it may have been considered perfectly acceptable to rewrite Chaucer.  I would also note that this rewriting of the Pardoner to make him a more simple and understandable character may not be far off from some critics’ attempts to make sense of him (or any of the Tales), forcing every piece of evidence to fit with their theses or ignoring the pieces that don’t.

            There is just one thing that puzzles me about Allen’s article.  (Well, besides the fact that it could be significantly shortened in places without any loss of meaning or understanding.)  In several places, she makes the provocative suggestion that the Pardoner as a character is intimately related to texts and storytelling.  When the Pardoner and the tapster are flirting in the Interlude, she refers to nakedness, and Allen writes that “Thinking her nakedness a naked text” (108) he misinterprets her.  Later, she explains that “the Interlude makes the Pardoner easier to read principally by taking story out of his hands” (109).  This is a fascinating angle on the Pardoner and on the Canterbury Tales as a whole, and I wish that it would be explored more—though perhaps that would be a separate article.  What would it show if the Pardoner were seen to interpret everything as a story, and if he were interpreted principally as a storyteller?—Kaitlyn Miller, 4/12/07

Allman, W. W. and Dorrel Thomas Hanks. “Rough Love: Notes Toward an Erotics of the Canterbury Tales.” Chaucer Review. 38.1 (2003): 36-69. Project Muse. 11 Apr. 2007. <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/chaucer_review/v038/38.1allman.html>.

Despite the recent focus on “body/gender/sexuality” in the world of literary criticism as a whole, Allman and Hanks claim that most Chaucerians have overlooked this particular dimension of The Canterbury Tales, choosing instead to stand by the “idealization, often sentimentalization, of love and mutuality—itself a hallmark of liberalism’s domestic order and heteronormativity, something much larger than than its local instantiation in Kitterage’s reading” (36-39). The authors seek to rectify this omission by drawing attention to the “forbidding and sometimes self-consciously forbidden erotics” that they believe to be visible in all the tales via Chaucer’s use of clichéd cutting, bleeding and stabbing imagery to describe sex (36-39, 56).

Proceeding in Ellesmere order, the article presents instances of this analogy in nine of the tales, spanning the various genres featured in the collection. The article contains several disturbing claims about how these tales downplay the nature of sexual violence against women. For instance, the authors employ reader response criticism and the work of Elaine Scarry to highlight a disturbing aspect of Malyne’s farewell to her rapist, Aleyn. Pain renders victims speechless, but Malyne has both the ability and the will to speak, giving one of the longest speeches in the entire tale. This steers readers who are reading as men away from the notion that Malyne suffers when Aleyn attacks her (44-45). Furthermore, in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” Arthur and his court treat the rape at the beginning as the crime it is, yet the victim exits the tale immediately after the knight harms her. In this, the authors claim, the wife copies the Reeve (50). 

Nevertheless, Allman and Hanks mention several elements of the text that they claim run counter to this pattern. First, male characters that either speak of love in terms of cutting/piercing or perform sexual acts that the pilgrims describe in those terms end up paying for it in some fashion (54). Secondly, Chaucer transforms an old metaphor for female sexuality, the consumption of food, when Alison uses it to describe her sexuality as a dare in “The Wife of Bath’s Prologue.” Alison is not so much offering her body as a nurturing gift but inverting the Christian Eucharist, “[…] force-feeding [men] sexualized grace” (56).  Third, fourteenth century perspectives on sex hinder twenty-first century interpretations of the Tales as misogynist: whereas modern people—at least those of the authors’ cultural and socioeconomic background, enjoy the ability to choose their sexual partners, many fourteenth century people did not see one’s sexual pairings as a matter of choice. In this light, one could possibly argue, disgusting as the idea is, that Symkyn’s wife enjoy John’s company in bed (57). Finally, an “anti-erotics” in the tale that holds “phallic masculinity” and the sexual assault of women up to a critical light. For example, the brevity with which Chaucer describes the attempted rape in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and the successful rape in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” strip the incidents of any power to arouse readers who read as men and provide no distraction from the fact that they are crimes (58).

Allman and Hanks conclude by stating that “bodily economy of piercing men and pierced women, despite providing a structure within the tale collection and a connection to what is crucial to many of own contemporary accounts of the erotic, does not in itself easily capture the or contain the erotics of the individual tales, nor of the Canterbury Tales as a whole” (58). They also acknowledge that the paper fails to completely explain the erotics of the tale collection (58).

I had difficulty understanding the article as it is very dense, the vocabulary requires heavy use of the OED and I found concentration hard for various reasons. Nevertheless, the following is my assessment of the piece in so far as I understood it.

Allman and Hanks neglect to mention Angela Jane Weisl’s 1998 paper, “‘Quiting’ Eve: Violence against Women in the Canterbury Tales,” from Violence against Women in Medieval Texts, the paper that I annotated last week. This is especially aggravating in that they make the same point about the hot poker incident “The Miller’s Tale” that Weisl does in her argument concerning Chaucer’s use humor to distract his audience from the true nature of Absolon’s actions (Allman and Hanks, 41; Weisl, 119). Her observations on “The Reeve’s Tale” and “Sir Thopas” also support Allman and Hanks (Wiesl, 121-122; Allman and Hanks 44-45). Granted, just as Professor Myers reminds his Shakespeare class that it is impossible to read everything there is to read about Shakespeare, it is also impossible to read every single piece of Chaucer scholarship. Nevertheless, the omission weakens Allman and Hanks’ assertion that scholars have ignored the issue of sex in the Tales.  One would think that a graduate student and a professor hungry for explorations of body/gender/sexuality in Chaucer would have the drive and resources with which to locate a book published by the University of Florida that an undergraduate from Maryland found with little difficulty in her college library. After all, the Julia Rogers Library has had the book on its shelves since December of 1998. While I do not believe that this omission of Wiesl’s article makes this a bad source, I do feel that Allman and Hanks would have benefited from acquainting themselves with her work.

Allman and Hanks also couch their argument in generalizations about medieval thought, among them the idea of the fourteenth century person’s resignation to their lack of choice in sexual relationships. They also cite Vern L. Burlough’s claim that a man’s sexual prowess determined his manliness in Chaucer’s time and that lovesickness like Palamon and Arcite’s was a “womanly” flaw only curable by sex (39). Although many people of that time period may have indeed thought this way, I also keep in mind Professor Sanders’ advice not to generalize about medieval people.

I also found that several arguments in the article seemed to be flawed. For one, Allman and Hanks forget to mention that Damian, May’s extramarital lover in “The Merchant’s Tale,” is an exception to this rule regarding the punishment of men associated with the analogy between sex and stabbing (54). I also have a problem with a passage about “The Reeve’s Tale” in which they claim that the same analogy advertises masculinity as a way to control other men. They begin the paragraph with “We see no ambiguity […] in this claim,” only to later admit that their evidence for it rests on a passage plagued by unclear pronouns, thus making the passage ambiguous (46).

Nevertheless, the authors have a sound knowledge of medieval vocabulary, and I concur with their assessment of description of the steward’s attempt to assault Custance in “The Man of Law’s Tale” and the knight’s rape of the unnamed maiden in “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” (II.911-924; III, 888). I find it interesting that in both instances women intervene on behalf of other women. Just as Arthur’s queen and the Loathly Lady determine the fate of the rapist knight, the Virgin Mary throws the malicious steward off of Custance’s ship. While these instances of sisterhood in the text also appear to run counter to the misogynist undercurrent Allman and Hanks spotted in The Canterbury Tales, that undercurrent of sexual violence against women is still there. As with my argument with regard to “The Franklin’s Tale” last week, this may be evidence of either Chaucer’s or certain pilgrims’ desire to, if not eliminate the misogynist discourse of the late 1300’s altogether, than to at least mitigate it.—Yvonne Rogers, 4/12/07

Brody, Saul Nathanial. “The Fiend and the Summoner, Statius and Dante: A Possible Source for the Friar’s Tale, D 1379-1520.” The Chaucer Review. 32.2  (1997):175-182.

            This article suggests that the conversation between the summoner and the devil in Chaucer’s Friar’s Tale was inspired by Canto 25 of Dante’s Purgatorio.  Brody begins by explaining that one of the points he is most intrigued by in the Friar’s Tale is the conversation between the summoner and the fiend or devil and “the summoner’s willingness to continue conversing even after the yeoman tells the summoner, ‘I am a feend; my dwelling is in helle’” (175, qtd line 1448 of CT).  The teacher-student-like relationship that the two have also interests Brody.  He views the summoner as the “curious student,” asking a multitude of questions, and the devil is the “learned teacher” encouraging the summoner by telling him he will learn through experience (175).    Brody explains that he wishes to look at the summoner’s conversation with the devil in fairly general terms of how it may be inspired by Dante’s Purgatorio 25.  He does, however, acknowledge other scholarship, specifically the work of Pauline Aiken, which suggests that Chaucer’s depiction of the fiend was based on common knowledge or ideas about devils during his time, but explains that this is a much more detailed focus than what he will be dealing with.

            Brody first examines a portion of the text from Purgatorio 25.  He quotes at length from the text, providing both the original Italian and a translation.  The passage he quotes is Statius’s answer to Dante’s question (“How can one grow lean there where the need of nourishment is not felt?”) about the starved appearance of the repenting gluttons (176).  Brody summarizes and explains the significant points of the excerpt, highlighting, in particular, how Statius gives Dante an extended explanation of the relationship between the body and soul in response to his simple question about the appearance of the gluttons.   

            Through this recollection of the text of Purgatorio 25 and the Friar’s Tale, Brody draws parallels between the conversations in the two works.  First, he explains, both men (the summoner and Dante) are on journeys when they encounter spirits (devils) who answer their questions and act as guides.  Both Dante and the Summoner’s souls hang in the balance.  The questions they ask have no depth, they focus only on the surface of things, the material, while overlooking the spiritual.   Dante asks about the physical appearance of the penitent gluttons, but does not think for himself what the cause may be.  Similarly, the summoner asks about the form the devil takes, rather than stopping to consider the moral implications of aligning himself with a fiend.  

            Brody continues to draw parallels between the two works by examining the responses that Statius and the devil give to Dante and the summoner respectively.  Citing both texts, Brody explains that both Statius and the devil’s responses attempt to explain “the relationship between the soul of a spiritual being and the form it assumes” (179-80).  The devil’s explanation of what form devils take and how they go after human souls, says Brody, actually echoes “what is latent in and central to Statius’s speech” (180).  The idea that “the soul is more important than the body,” human beings are morally tested in the world, and reward and punishment are assigned based on the outcomes of these moral tests (180).  The lesson of both Statius and the devil, says Brody, is that the soul is always at stake.

            Brody is not bothered by the fact that the outcome of the two tales differs (Dante arrives in paradise, while the summoner is taken to hell).  He states simply that, “Chaucer’s interests are not Dante’s” (180).  Chaucer, Brody says, purposefully sets his tale in this world, not the afterlife, unlike Dante who sends his characters on an allegorical journey through hell, purgatory, and then paradise.  Other differences in style and choice, which Brody does not elaborate on, also set the two works apart, he says.  Again citing no specific examples, Brody says that works by Chaucer that have been shown to be influenced by Dante’s writings often take a different direction from Dante’s text.  To support his claim that Purgatorio 25 influenced Chaucer’s writing of the Friar’s Tale, Brody cites scholar Howard Schless’s criteria for attempting to gauge whether one text is a source for another.  He rules out some of the possible methods for proving influence, concluding that here, the method for showing influence in accordance with Schless’s guidelines, must be to show that the relationship between the two texts is “supported by some unique feature of thought or terminology” (181).  Summarizing briefly the points he raised in the rest of the paper, Brody claims the similarities between the two conversations in the tales meet Schless’s criteria.  He admits that it is still impossible to prove the relationship with complete certainty, but does cite another scholar, Piero Botani, who explains that Chaucer’s works only echo Dante in some ways, never maintaining a constant direct connection to Dante’s writings.  Brody concludes , therefore, that the connection he has just established between the Friar’s Tale and Purgatorio 25 is “both possible and reasonable” (181).

            This article offers students an interesting insight into the conversation between the summoner and the devil.  There is no question that Dante’s work influenced some of Chaucer’s writings, so I am inclined to agree with Brody that such a connection is “both possible and reasonable.”  I felt, however, that Brody could have made a bit more of an effort to convince us of this idea.  He quotes and summarizes the two works at length, particularly the text of Purgatorio 25.  To a certain extent, the main points of the two stories did need to be reiterated so that Brody could make his case, but I feel he could have gone a bit further.  Also, had he discussed the quotes he uses from the two texts together, comparing them directly a bit more often, he may have been able to strengthen his case a bit.  (Rather than quoting and summarizing Dante exclusively then looking at Chaucer, drawing general connections between ideas in the two works.)  Throughout the paper, Brody tends to make sweeping general statements without explaining them much or at all.  Like in the conclusion of the paper when he says that, “significant differences in style and approach follow from this choice [Chaucer’s choice to send the summoner to hell] and separate Dante from Chaucer,” yet he never elaborates on what differences in style and approach there are between the texts.  The majority of his paper, in fact, seems to be based on generalizations of plot points in the two tales (shown mainly through plot summary). 

I suppose Brody accomplished his goal of sticking to the general (as he says he will do when explaining how his work differs from others’).  However, in staying with the general, I thought the point Brody was attempting to make lacked power.  It seems like simply a general conclusion rather than something based on a critical close reading of the text.  Brody never goes so far as to suggest what sort of an impact this may have on our reading of the Friar’s Tale.  Perhaps, he refrains from doing so because he cannot claim with complete certainty that the Friar’s Tale was, in fact, influenced by Dante’s Purgatorio 25.  However, as the article reads now, it is useful to students mainly in the sense that it outlines the conversation between the summoner and devil, offering a few small insights into the text itself.  (Students may see some point in the discussion of the conversation that could lead them to draw additional insights or as a starting point for another paper, etc.)—Leah Hoffman, 4/12/07

Grossi, Joseph L., Jr. “The Unhidden Piety of Chaucer’s ‘Seint Cecilie’.” The Chaucer Review. 36.3 (2002): 298-309.

            Grossi’s article examines the differences between Chaucer’s Second Nun’s Tale and its source Jacobus de Voragine’s De sancta Caecilia from Legenda aurea. Grossi begins his investigation by stating the majority of scholars are in agreement to the fact the tale has a strong Christian message, just like its source. Grossi writes “[Scholars] agree [the tale] shows the primitive Christian Church scoring an easy spiritual triumph over a feeble and feeble-minded pagan Roman Empire” (298). Now while there are large similarities between the two works, Grossi points out that the subtle differences in the tale, mainly the emphasis of “Cecilie’s strength and the prefect Almachius’ weakness” indicate Chaucer’s opinions on Christianity (298). This observation introduces Grossi’s main thesis, that “in taking careful pains to depict the spiritual vigor of the early Church and the moral turpitude of its imperial enemies, Chaucer makes the Second Nun’s transcendentalizing [sic] cause seem understandable, relevant, and admirable”(298). This argument is a change from most criticism surrounding the tale, due to the fact that most scholars believe the Second Nun is the least liveliest of all the pilgrims, and ultimately the “least human”(298).

            Before Grossi gives examples to support his claim, he makes it clear that he is in no way telling his readers to believe St. Cecilia or the Second Nun herself are suppose to represent Chaucer himself. He is merely suggesting that the more “livelier raconteurs – the Miller, the Wife of Bath, or the Canon’s Yeoman” should not be used overlook the Second Nun. He is basically saying that just because the Second Nun is concerned with piety (as opposed to the other pilgrim’s obsession with sex and money), readers should not ignore her message. Grossi begins his argument examining the appearance of Rome in the tale. He believes the purpose of emphasizing the city is for readers to see how “material privileges [relates to] authoritarian rulers” (299). Grossi points out that St. Cecilia herself was a noble, a detail which is addressed by the tale and its source. However, Grossi points out that while Jacobus discusses St. Cecilia’s nobility, Chaucer “stress [es] her equality to her pagan peers and future executioners” (301). Grossi believes this modification, combined with other examples he mentions in his article, make the Roman Empire seem “less fearsome and formidable in Chaucer than it is in Jacobus” (301). Grossi goes on to point out numerous subtle differences between the two texts, such as St. Cecilia’s objections to Almachius and her answer to Tiburce.

            Towards the end of the article Grossi acknowledges the criticism by other scholars stating the faults they found with the text. He maintains the faults other have found in the text, merely enhance the meaning Chaucer was attempting to achieve. Grossi concludes his argument by stating that through the Second Nun’s Tale “Chaucer sought to widen the intellectual divide between Roman paganism and primitive Christianity” (305).  Grossi restates that ultimately he believes Chaucer’s purpose was to create Christian characters “ who possess greater resolve and social commitment than the pagan Rome that they dare oppose, a civilization whose intellectual torpor reveals itself finally through its incompetence, insanity, and vain recourse to brutality”(306).

            After reading this article about three times, I have come to the conclusion that Grossi’s arguments are not that effective. The article is somewhat useful due to the fact it analyzes the source of the tale, but that is pretty much it. It is obvious that Grossi is a really religious guy (which I have no problem with, because I’m some what spiritual myself), but I think his dedication to his religion clouds his critical methods. Through out the article he constantly says that readers should not forget about the Second Nun, and complains about Chaucer’s audience finding her boring compared to the more scandalous characters of the other pilgrims. I think he should have placed more emphasis on providing more examples to support his claims. He spends too much time begging his readers to give the Second Nun a chance, and not enough time giving memorable examples to support his thesis. While writing this annotated bibliography, I intended to summarize the examples he gives, but they were short and not really that interesting. I understand that his argument is based on subtle differences, however I feel like the entire article was Grossi begging people to read the tale and repent. –Kelly Rankin, 4/13/07

Ambrisco, Alan S. ""It Lyth Nat in My Tonge": Occupatio and Otherness in the Squire's Tale." The Chaucer Review 38 (2004):  205-228. Project MUSE. Julia Rogers Library, Towson. 12 Apr. 2007.

            Professor Ambrisco’s essay on the Squire’s Tale claims that “the tale is unified not by its narrative elements but rather by the way its linguistic anxieties are revealed and processed” (205).  The criticism combines an obvious anthropological strain with a close reading of the text’s much criticized narrative disjunction and flawed use of occupatio.  Ambrisco’s reading can be divided into three sections: An analysis of Part One describing Squire’s occupatio and the concept of a unified middle, in which Chaucer’s persuades his audience to view the Mongols as “Pseudo-Europeans” (213); An analysis of Part Two, in which the Squire’s occupation disappears and English is praised as a translational tool; and a third part that digresses briefly into the role of gender in the Squire’s Tale and rather inefficiently attempts to link it to the previous two stronger arguments.

            Ambrisco illuminates a few critical attempts to locate a central source for the Squire’s Tale and shows that one does not exist.  He also shows that the text contains elements based upon factual traveler’s accounts as well as propagandist literature; it should not be relied on as ethnography.  He continues to show how the text uses occupation to provide an exoticism surrounding the Mongols without using factual data.  He claims that by “telling us the Mongol court is exotic but failing to present any evidence supporting that judgement, Chaucer removes rather than constructs, cultural boundaries between his exotic subject and his domestic audience” (210).

            Once the audience has identified with the Mongols, Ambrisco notes, that Chaucer inserts yet another “other” into the tale in the form of the Mamluk.  By comparing his exotic gifts with western examples, Chaucer further identifies his audience with the Mongols.  Having succeeded in creating what Hartog describes in his criticism of Herodutus’s History as “the rule of the excluded middle,” Ambrisco concludes his first part by stating that “the Squire rhetorically confronts the threat of the foreign, either reducing the cultural other to something known or completely removing it from the realm of signification [through occupatio]” (214).

            Ambrisco notes that Part Two of the tale has less occupation in it than part one does.  He attributes this to the fact that the Squire is translating the language of a Bird instead of Mongolian.  This, Ambrisco claims, exemplifies Chaucer’s support of the English language as a tool for translation.  Here, the critical essay digresses into other instances, such as Troilus and Criseyde, in which Chaucer praises English as a translational tool.  Professor Ambrisco writes that “Chaucer tactically and unabashedly uses claims of access and immediacy to bolster both his authorial enterprise and the status of the English vernacular” (218).  This is significant due to the tense debate over whether scholarly and holy text should be translated into English for domestic consumption.

            The third portion of the essay is a dense, intensely anthropological explication of the significance of Canacee as a “pagan princess,” the “pagan princess” as literary trope, and her role as a gender commodity.  He briefly addresses the incest question raised at the end of the tale and attaches this third segment onto the other two by claiming that “Canacee’s place in the tale [which is one of a duality of Mongolian as well as non-Pagan princess] thus violates the rule of the excluded middle” (222).  Ambrisco’s conclusion of his essay posits an almost previously unmentioned thesis “that the Squire’s Tale, despite its narrator’s overt proclamations of respect towards Ghengis Khan and the Mamluk emissary, is antagonistic rather than sympathetic to the Mongol world, to Canacee, and to the foreign languages encountered by its English-speaking narrator” (224).

            I chose this criticism because it had to do with the primary literary device that I noticed while reading the Squire’s Tale and I was pleased by the essay’s description of occupatio’s function.  During the first two portions of the essay, Ambrisco stays close to the text and proves his points succinctly and thoroughly.  The third portion of the essay was as disappointing as the first two were illuminating.  The anthropological tone of the essay consumes Ambrisco’s original stated intent in writing to the point where it is almost as if another author took over the writing.  The third portion is not bad anthropological writing per say, I thought that the references to Said were quite potent and right on target, since they had to do specifically with the concept of otherness and orientalism.  I feel that the critique could have done with some pruning or some expansion.  Introducing gender into the criticism when the essay is 85% over is rather a large can of worms to open when you’re just starting to pack up your critical rod and reel so to speak.  Overall, the essay was exceedingly informative, just rife with off topic digressions.  Despite its shortcomings, Ambrisco’s insights into Chaucer’s use of occupatio make this essay essential reading for criticism on the Squire’s Tale or occupatio.—Jake Grover, 4/13/07

Hume, Cathy. "Domestic Opportunities: The Social Comedy of the Shipman's Tale." The Chaucer Review 41.2 (2006): 138-62.

            Hume’s article is about the accepted roles of medieval women (especially wives) and their relationship to the Merchant’s wife in the Shipman’s Tale.  He analyzes six main aspects of this role: hostess, social networker, housekeeper, status symbol, business assistant, and that she is the keeper of semi- autonomous finances. 

            As a hostess, Hume says that the wife is expected to bring guests into her home and welcome them, making them comfortable.  Hume points out that the description of the wife is a bit suggestive and discusses her beauty in close relation to her role as hostess, suggesting that she is promiscuous.  As a social networker, the wife befriends the monk who is, as Hume points out through period letters, of high social status in addition to being her husband’s close friend and “cosyn”.  Hume uses etiquette guides from the time to assert that it is part of a wife’s role to befriend her husband’s friends.  She points out in this section that the word “cosyn” may be a pun on the word “cozen” which meant cheat and/or prostitute.  She notes an inversion of courtly love when the wife pledges her service to the monk, rather than the man serving the woman.  This friendship must be abandoned because, Hume says, it is socially unacceptable for a man and a woman to be friends.  As a housekeeper, the wife is expected to be in charge of all of the affairs and servants in her household.  Women frequently received held from male friends of their husbands while their husbands travel. Hume notes a child who is present during the interchange between the monk and the wife and cites her has a witness (and possibly an ineffectual chaperone) who will not discover her to her husband, as happens in the analogues of this tale.  As a status symbol, the wife is expected to keep up appearances of respectability in their wealth and her actions.  The Merchant asks her to be honest/ chaste and thrifty in his absence.  Hume cites this an example of dramatic irony because the audience knows that she is planning adultery and that she is in debt, making her neither.  Her ability to keep up this appearance even to her husband shows an exploitation of this role.  As business assistants, medieval wives were trusted to take payment of debt in their husbands’ absences.  The wife uses her ignorance of business to say that she was confused about what to do with the money when the monk gave it to her.  As she has already spent it, her husband cannot reclaim it.  The last aspect of the wife’s role is that she and the merchant share semi-autonomous finances.  Traditionally, husbands and wives had separate accounts, but in the late medieval period, it was becoming more and more common to share money, as Hume demonstrates through period letters.  The traditional roles declare that men bring in the money and women organize it, but these roles are blurred in the Shipman’s tale, allowing the wife to take advantage of her control over the Merchant’s money.

            Hume notes that the analogues require the wives to return the money given to them by their husbands.  He says that this tale, rather than punish the wife for her indiscretions, has actually rewarded her.  Hume says that this reward is given to her as a result of her effort to push the boundaries of her accepted roles.  She describes this harmless sin as “domestic opportunism.”

            I think that this article takes an interesting stance on the Shipman’s tale, as it portrays the wife ultimately as a victim of social injustice who is able to in some way take what she deserves.  She knows how to work within her realm to get what she wants.  Oddly, however, Hume comments that, at the end of the tale, the wife’s prospects for repeating this act are slim because she can no longer trust the monk as her accomplice.  This contradicts the rest of the article in a way because Hume had not previously placed any importance on the Monk’s role in the act.  It had seemed before that the Monk had been merely a participant, while the wife was the mastermind of the scam.  I feel that in this interpretation, it would be more fitting to say that the monk’s involvement is replaceable with another man’s.  This would more fit the empowered view of the wife that the rest of the article supports.

            I think that Hume’s use of primary sources enhanced her argument tenfold.  She used letters between husbands and wives of the time as well as a French etiquette manual to support her claims of the accepted roles of women at the time.  She even located one letter discussing the social status of monks, which fit her argument perfectly.  She broke her argument down into points and proved each point well, though she had a couple unrelated bits of information in one or two sections.  For example, the discussion of the meaning of the word “cosyn” did not really affect her reading of the wife as a social networker, but she included it there (I assume) because it did not fit anywhere else.  That flaw aside, along with the fact that she forgot to translate from French once or twice, her article was very well written. 

             I found this article interesting and useful because it presents a view of the cuckoldry in the Shipman’s tale that supports the reading of the cuckoldry in the Miller’s tale from the article I read last week.  The theme of cuckoldry as a way to empower women is something that I feel is present in many of the tales.  I do not know how many tales I want to include in my discussion, but I think that this will be the theme of my final paper.  Both this article and last week’s use the idea of women staying within their bounds (physical or social) and using them to cuckold their husband and in this way gain some semblance of freedom.  While in this article, the wife works with her social expectations to get money from and have sex with the monk, Alisoun in the Miller’s tale stayed within her home and brought Nicholas into it in order to have sex with him.  Both of these readings present an inverted relationship between men and women, presenting women as having power over men, as last week’s article explicitly stated the flip of the public/ private roles of men and women.  I think that this is interesting coming from a male writer, and I think that it creates a “Wife of Bath” mentality among many of the women in the Canterbury tales, including women who are not only written by a male author, but told by a male pilgrim.—Jen Curtis!, 4/13/07

Fyler, John M. “Domesticating the Exotic in the Squire’s Tale.”  ELH.  55.1 (1988): 1-26.             JSTOR. Goucher Coll. Lib., Baltimore, MD.  8 April 2007. 

            Fyler opens his argument about the centrality of incest to romance by aptly drawing a comparison between the Man of Law’s “sanitized tale” and the Squire’s Tale, in which “incest is much closer to the surface” (1).  Though he does not further detail the thematic similarities between the two tales, Fyler does cite that the Man of Law’s explicit use of the namesake Canacee in his tirade against incest does support the argument that the outlined relationship between Canacee and Cambalo does indeed “promise that his Canacee too will be incestuous” (1).  This brief invocation of the thread of incest that runs within the Canterbury Tales itself is simply an introduction to Fyler’s well-supported argument that incest, as a central motif in the genre of romance, must perform a function within the text.  After detailing Levi-Strauss and Northrop Frye’s functional analysis of incest, Fyler continues to argue that incest so often found in romance because “the incest taboo forbids us to treat the same as if it were other, and it insists on the need for deciding which is which.  This insistence gives it a particular affinity with romance as a literary genre because of the romantic tropes that most vividly mimic its structure—doubling and repetition” (2).  Indeed, it is the doubling and repetition often found in romance that often forces the readers to examine the central questions of identity that often revolve around the deconstruction of binaries: what is other versus what is extension of self and what is real within a supernatural world?

            Again, Fyler reminds us that Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale makes use of these tropes by the doubled image of two wicked stepmothers who torment Custance.  Referring to his earlier definition of the incest taboo, Fyler sets up his central thesis by stating that “If the incest taboo prohibits treating the same as if it were other, Chaucer shows that there are corresponding difficulties, and comic potentialities, in treating the other as if it were the same—that is, in domesticating the exotic too readily” (3).  The primary threats of disenchantment are represented through Cambyuskan’s four gifts from the strange knight, because they are gifts “from an innocent world to a fallen one: they offer the means of reintegration, of recapturing a lost world of freshness, transparence, and clarity.  Their purpose is to make the distant or obscure accessible or the exotic familiar” (4).  Fyler believes these gifts reflect the central goals and difficulties of the genre of romance.  The Squire attempts to “protect the innocence and elegance of his exotic world” with occupatio, or what Fyler refers to as “the inexpressibility topos” (4).  However, the opposition to this desire is represented by the “peple,” who are thoroughly disenchanted as they approach the majestic brass steed with their own Westernized ideas.  They refuse to “grant innocence or exotic otherness” to the gifts; they, instead, adopt the domesticated ideas that they are either sinister, explicable in terms of science, or simply unimpressive imitations of known precedents (4).  Fyler believes that Part II of this tale strengthens this idea that familiarity invariably leads to depreciation through the twisted love story of the falcon, in which tercelet abandons the falcon as soon as he has decisively won her love.  Fyler, writing in 1988, briefly touches on the linguistic implications of this idea (to which Ambrisco will later devote more scholarship) that verbal currency is “inevitabl[y] devalued . . . as it is worn by use” (6).

            Through this linguistic awareness and interplay between the innocent and the disenchanted, the Squire is continually, and likely unknowingly, presenting imperfect binaries, which invite the audience to go further and deconstruct them.  Supporting this and the naiveté of the Squire, Fyler says, “[He] repeatedly leaves us at the line between sameness and otherness, innocence and experience, the familiar and the exotic . . . At every level of the poem[. . .] we find twinned terms, doubles that we are invited to consider identical or equivalent, but that then separate into nonrelation” (10).  He hypothesizes that the continual uses of these paradoxes, including the duel familiarity and exoticness of Cambyuskan’s court, is so underscored and vivid in part because of “Chaucer’s interest in the relation between tale and teller” that is always in play.

            In a compelling extension of his argument, Fyler addresses the trend that some critics, namely Skeat and Baugh reveal their own need to domesticate the exotic in their analyses of the Squire’s Tale.  Skeat and Baugh claim that the threat of the incestuous relationship is actually just a repetition in name, referring to completely different characters, and that the falcon is simply a “princess who as been magically transformed into a bird” (15).  By making such claims without substantial evidence, these critics are revealing their intense desire to domesticate or explain what appears to be ‘other’ rather than exploring it and creating a new set of expectations.              A versed Chaucer scholar, Fyler says that “the quality that most distinguishes the Canterbury Tales from other frame narratives of the fourteenth century is Chaucer’s interest in using a tale to characterize its teller, and to shed light on his or her preoccupations, insights, and habitual blindnesses” (20).  Thus, his analysis would be incomplete if it did not address the role that the pilgrim Knight himself plays within the narrative.  The limited narrative success of the intertwined romantic tropes of incest, doublings, binaries, and the exotic characterize the Squire not just as a storyteller, but also as a lover.  His “enthusiastic innocence,” which is central to his style as a narrator is also indicative of his “overly confident and naïve appropriation of the female to male concerns” (20).  His romance is characterized not by his commentary on men, but by “acts of sympathy or gentilesse” towards women (19).  However, the Squire is too naive to realize that he is risking “defeat in his own amorous pursuits by dwelling on male perfidy[.]  If no man is to be trusted, why should he?” (18).

            While Fyler’s lengthy article raises interesting observations about the genre of romance and the representation of the binaries of the exotic and domestic, his arguments are easily lost in the dense, often tenuous organization of this article.  The breadth of his Chaucerian scholarship is obviously impressive, but it is often convoluted because he invokes so many different sources as both direct support and secondary observations.  For instance, he devotes three pages to extensively quoting Nature’s confession from Roman de la Rose, but he fails to put it in the context to show why he thinks it relates to both the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale and the Squire’s Tale.  However, Fyler does raise some points that have implications beyond the Squire’s tale succinctly and powerfully.  In recognizing the incest link between the Squire’s Tale and the Man of Law’s Tale in the introduction, Fyler opens the possibility for further comparison of the two tales, which was particularly beneficial because I would like to pursue how the exotic is portrayed in the MoL’s tale.  In addition, Fyler makes the important and concise observation that “of the tales that attempt to imagine the world beyond the bounds of Christendom—those of the Man of Law, Squire, Prioress, and Second Nun—only the Squire does so sympathetically” (11).  As we are closely approaching the remaining two tales mentioned, I now feel more prepared to read them in a critical context and I would also like to pursue possible reasons why the Squire’s tale adopts this singular view. –Jen Madera, 4/13/07

Pulham, Carol A. "Promises, Promises: Dorigen’s Dilemma Revisited." The Chaucer Review 31.1 (1996): 76-86.

          Out of controversy surrounding the ideality of Arveragus and Dorigen’s marriage and the placement of The Franklin’s Tale in the marriage group, Pulham uncovers the source of the characters’ actions by examining some of the promises made in the Franklin’s Tale from sociological, historical, and philosophical perspectives.

          Pulham argues that our modern reading of Dorigen’s entrapment between conflicting promises as unrealistic is a culture-bound response; from our time period we recognize the joking manner in which she promised Aurelius, and don’t understand her driving need to honor such a promise.  Sociologically, the time period of Dorigen, Arveragus, and Aurelius was one where breaking promises carried the heavy consequence of shame.  For Dorigen, breaking her word to Aurelius would incur not only public shame to her noble reputation but private shame at violating her marriage vows.  Dorigen’s need to keep her promises can be clarified by the state of Chaucer’s, and thus Dorigen and Arveragus’, society.  Their society was transitioning to literacy from an oral culture where the spoken word was considered binding to a literate one, which made her verbal exchange with Aurelius significant in a way we today do not readily comprehend.  Additionally, Pulham says that the introduction of literacy lead to miscommunications as the ability to lie was developed.  The advent of fiction is credited to the ability to lie and Dorigen’s promise to Aurelius can be considered a fiction since she never intended to follow through on the promise.  As a burgeoning practice, Dorigen’s use of fiction was beyond Aurelius’s understanding, which aided in creating Dorigen’s uncomfortable situation.

          Pulham also believes that medieval views of marriage and adultery shed light upon the actions of Arveragus and Dorigen in regards to their intent to fulfill Dorigen’s promise to Aurelius.  There exist medieval traditions that describe marriage as between equal partners, and also as a bond that increases in affection with time.  Additionally, as sex for pleasure was deemed a sin, adultery (presumably between lovers) was sinful, and adultery by women considered more so than by men.  In court, adultery charges were determined by considering each act of adultery separately, and also the lies told in the process of committing the adultery.  In light of this history, Dorigen’s hesitance to keep her word to Aurelius becomes obvious, and Pulham says that Arveragus and Dorigen’s decision to acquiesce to Aurelius’ promise was the best decision possible under the circumstances.  Arveragus agrees with Dorigen that their public reputation must be maintained and the promise upheld.  Since Dorigen has no desire to be with Aurelius, she will not find pleasure with him, which minimizes the sin of her adultery. 

          The philosophy of promising involves a promisor and promisee.  The promiser is often vague in stating their intentions, and the degree by which the promisee’s expectations are raised by the promise often has an impact on the promisor’s sense of obligation.  As such, Aurelius’s accomplishment of Dorigen’s ‘impossible task’ brings great responsibility to Dorigen as Aurelius expects that his success will bring him his heart’s desire.  This responsibility, exposed through the philosophy of promising, exposes Dorigen’s decision to completely fulfill her pledge to Aureilus.  The seriousness with which Aurelius hears and acts upon the promise forces Dorigen into a situation where her morals and reputation are called into question as she is forced to decide between the consequences of breaking a promise to either her husband or Aurelius.  In this way, Aurelius manipulates Dorigen into keeping a promise she never meant to keep by changing the joking nature of the promise, leaving Dorigen no choice but to fulfill her in-jest promise. 

          I find that this article to be a valuable exemplar of a strategy to separate modern mindsets from the reality of Chaucer’s society.  Awareness of the pertinent culture’s sociology and philosophical views as seen through history can help provide the modern day CT reader with a set of reference points to guide them more accurately through the text.  However, I must disagree with the author on a few of her interpretations of the Franklin’s Tale:  I find Pulham’s claim that Dorigen and Arveragus’ relationship is strong enough to withstand one act of sexual intercourse a bit presumptuous.  Though the couple is clearly devoted to one another, I do not feel that we are know enough about their relationship to have any insight into how they would react and deal with adultery.  Additionally, I am not convinced that the deal Aurelius strikes with Dorigen is specifically for a single act of sexual intercourse as Pulham seems to maintain—while I am the first to admit I may be misinterpreting the text, to my eye Dorigen promises to love Aurelius best, which to me indicates that she would leave Arveragus and giver her heart to Aurelius.--Lisa Gulian, April 15, 2007

Bishop, Kathleen A.  "The Influence of Plautus and Latin Elegiac Comedy on Chaucer's Fabliaux."  The Chaucer Review 35.3 (2001): 294-317.

            In this article, Bishop explains that she does not mean to argue that Latin elegiac comedies are direct sources for Chaucer’s fabliaux, but rather means to “trace a comic tradition anterior to Chaucer” (297).  Rather than suggest that Chaucer definitely read Plautus (which no one knows for sure, although it is suspected that he would have had access to this type of literature), she places Chaucer within a comic tradition that begins with Plautus.  Bishop cites two forms of comedy: “One, derived from Latin sources, is scornful, and full of ridicule, moving toward unresolved discord; the other, of non-Latin derivation, is sympathetic, moving toward concord and marriage” (Bentley qtd. in Bishop 301).  Chaucer falls under the first category; Shakespeare would fall under the second.  The most important aspect of the Chaucerian fabliaux, according to Bishop, coincides with the first type of comedy; there is not the traditional “happy ending” that Aristotle, among others, attributed to comedy.  Additionally, there are deception, trickery, and complication in the fabliaux that are also reminiscent of Plautus’ comedic style.

            My (lack of) experience considered, I had a hard time following this article because there was so much diverse information presented in one article.  Granted, it is a long article and all of the information clearly coincides and follows a logical pattern, but I was a little confused by the author’s methods.  What interests me about it is not necessarily the Latin comedic tradition at this point, but the idea of the sources for and tradition of the fabliaux.  Chaucer’s fabliaux, although unique, all clearly follow many of the same conventions and structures that that link them together as a group.  What Bishop is doing in this article is attempting to place this cluster within an even larger tradition – that of Latin elegiac comedy.  Bishop also writes that Chaucer’s fabliaux were clearly “written by a man with an undeniably avid interest in the literary tradition preceding him” (300).

            Another important facet of this article is that of comedy in general.  When compared to the Old French fabliaux, sometimes Chaucer’s fabliaux are similarly referred to as short, humorous plots.  However, Bishop acknowledges Chaucer for the artist that he is, giving him the knowledge and talent to follow an established literary genre while adding his own artistic integrity as well.  Many of the Latin comedic themes appear within Chaucer’s fabliaux, including deception, trickery, love, and sexual intrigue.  The main debatable connection, however, is the idea of the comedic “happy ending.”  According to Aristotle, Donatus, and Dante, comedy requires a happy ending (301).  Similarly in both the Latin elegiac comedies and Chaucer’s fabliaux, the interpretation of whether the ending is “happy” or not seems to lie in the audience’s control.  Bishop uses Bentley’s two forms of comedy to explain this discrepancy; Chaucer’s fabliaux and the Latin comedies seem to be examples of discordant comedy.  She says, “The fabliau and its ancestors seem to work against this prototype of felicitous and harmonious resolution, countering it with another comic universe in which lust, not love, is the norm, and the outcome of the complications is not harmony, but chaos, ostensibly undermining the status quo” (302).

            The article goes on to cite examples of this idea in both Plautus’ work and in the Chaucerian fabliaux.  Bishop focuses on the idea of complication and the fact that all of the fabliaux require the duping of a victim.  The characters are almost always people of means, and often combine money and love as a means of getting what they want in the end.  Mistaken identity also appears in Chaucer’s fabliaux, which Plautus emulated from antiquity.  The senex, or “blocking figure [that] frustrates the desires of other characters and will not have fun,” is a comedic character prototype that appears in Plautus, and usually as the cuckold in Chaucer (307).  The slavuus, or self-confident slave who serves to provide humor, is also a character type, among others. There is also a common thread in deceitful, yet powerful, female characters.  Something else that is unique to Latin elegiac characters and Chaucerian fabliau characters, and not the old French fabliaux characters, is the use of complex and “dazzling” language.  Both Plautus and Chaucer’s characters exhibit dazzling verbal skills that often play an important hand in the way the story plays out. 

            Although Plautus has been generally criticized for undermining the tradition of the comedy, Bishop argues that he and Chaucer acted (wrote) with a political agenda.  There common plot structures lead toward ambiguous endings that parallel the society’s in which they lived.  For example, why end a comedy in marriage if marriage, as seen in the fabliaux, is not always ideal?  While teetering on dangerous ground, both Plautus’ comedy and Chaucer’s fabliaux also serve to entertain as well, and this is how their author’s approach them.  “Perhaps,” concludes Bishop, “in the similarities of the societies of the ancient Rome of Plautus and the Middle Ages we discover one of the keys to explain the many affinities in the types of bawdy comedy which we have explored” (314).

            To say that I completely understood this article would be lying.  However, what I did understand is, like in the article I annotated last week, the idea that Chaucer’s fabliaux fall within a larger literary tradition than simply emulating the Old French fabliaux.  This article also cites many of the character types, themes, and linguistic patterns that connect Chaucer’s fabliaux as a group, which are similar if not exact to those mentioned in other articles I have read.  But more importantly, it suggests yet another source for and larger structure that these tales may belong to.  The idea that the fabliaux are not just isolated within Chaucer in terms of source and structure emphasizes their existence as a specific genre or system of signs that can be always expected to work in a certain way.  In my last annotation I questioned whether the differences or similarities would stand out to me more in the fabliaux, and this article leads me toward the similarities.--Laura Reese, April 13, 2007

Finnegan, Robert Emmett.  “ ‘She Should Have Said No to Walter’:  Griselda’s Promise in The Clerks Tale.”  English Studies. (1994): 303-321.  Academic Search Premier.  EBSCOhost.  Julia Rogers Library, Baltimore, MD.  30 March 2007 http://web.ebscohost.com

            I like straightforward article titles, but this one made me worry that the article might be a little to simplistic.  I agree, Griselda should have said no.  What’s left to talk about?  Fortunately, this article is not overly simplistic.  Instead of one purely emotional reaction, it has three topics with plenty of historical background and interesting looks at definitions of key words.

            The first topic is “the significance of the terms assenten and consenten as they relate to the vow” (303).  The author points out that the meanings of the words are hard to separate from each other in the Middle English Dictionary by giving the definitions found therein (304).   He then cites Walter Skeat’s definitions, with an explanation that each word came from a French word, which came from a Latin word.  Apparently, the differences between the meanings of the words can more easily be discerned in Latin, because of the prepositions ad and cum.  The first could be translated as “to” and the later as “with.”  The author writes “simply put, one can ‘agree to’ something without ‘agreeing with’ it or its proposer” (304).  I appreciated the clarity and thoroughness of the writing in this section and throughout this article.  It made it possible for me to understand the points even though I don’t read Latin. 

After establishing the difference between the words, the author cites several instances in which each occurs.  He points out that Walter may have only expected Griselda to assent to his wishes, and that she went wrong when she consented to them (306) He needed an external an agreement, but it seems she lost her soul by giving him an internal one.

The author proceeds to imply that the oath Griselda made to Walter before she married him was not binding.  He cites the writings of Thomas Aquinas, and concludes that “a vow or an oath leading to sin is not to be honoured” (309).  What I gather is that, basically, the sin of breaking the vow is weighed against the sin that would occur if the vow was kept.  A person is supposed to pick the lesser of two evils.  Obviously, Griselda didn’t.  She kept her word, but at the (possible) expense of losing her children.  The author also cites the writings Burchard of Worms and Robert of Flamborough, which contain points similar to those made my Aquinas (311).

The third part of the essay looks closely at the words tempten, assaien, and assaillen.  The author gives definitions from the MED and points out that assaien and assaillen sound similar and are substituted for one another in some manuscripts of the CT (313).  He suggests that the meanings of the words overlap and that “in certain contexts, assaien could carry some of the aggressive meanings proper to assail(l)en” (314).  He says that assaien is linked numerous times in the text to tempten.  He gives the OED definitions of tempten and shows that the two definitions of the word have very different implications.  When the word is used in connection with God, one might assume it is in terms of a test.  Walter’s motives, however, seem sketchy.  Perhaps the definition that best applies to the word when used in connection to him is “to entice…to do evil” (314).  The author pushes this theory by noting the narrator’s inability to determine a (good) reason for Walter to test Griselda (316-319).

The conclusion of the article is surprisingly humorous.  The author cited A.C. Spearing, who believed Griselda’s being tested by Walter parallels Abraham being tested by God.  He proceeds to tear that argument to shreds.  He points out that Walter was much more persistent and ruthless than God.  God only tested Abraham once—Walter tested Griselda three times (32).

Overall, this was a satisfying and useful read.  I think the article/essay contains enough information and topics for three separate essays, but it works well as a single unit too.—Shelly Haugrud, 4/15/07

McGowan, Joseph P. “Chaucer’s Prioress: Et Nos Cedamus Amori.” The Chaucer Review. 38.2 (2003): 199-202

In this interesting, albeit brief, article McGowan tackles the brooch and takes it back to its origins. The Prioress’s gold brooch has been a source of controversy for a variety of reasons (nuns aren’t supposed to be wearing brooches at all!), but especially because of the hemstitch Amor vincit omnia (love conquers all). McGowan’s discussion of the notorious inscription centers around the classical origins of the phrase, which comes from Virgil’s Eclogues.

McGowan explains that Virgil would have been something of common knowledge to anyone with an education—including poets and upper-crust nuns. Furthermore, the interpretations of amor were also divided then, as now, between a secular love and a celestial one. As McGowan tells us, though amor in Virgil’s Eclogues almost certainly refers to love of the flesh, the phrase was appropriated by those of a pious nature well before Chaucer’s time.

An interesting point made by McGowan is that the Prioress, whose love ought to have been purely celestial, would have certainly been exposed to quite a bit of talk about earthly love on the way to Canterbury. Furthermore, her name Eglantine could have called to mind secular romances as it was the name of at least one romantic heroine. With this in mind, McGowan speculates about just what sort of love the Prioress’s brooch refers to.

His speculation seems to conclude that it is quite likely that the brooch’s motto combines celestial and earthly loves, a combination which is not anything unique in the Canterbury tales. The Prioress, according to McGowan, might be both respectful of her Christian duty and full of sentimentality inspired by the popular romances of her day.

Oddly, after his initial use of Virgil to set the stage for the quote (he even goes so far as to tell the story surrounding the words), McGowan tells readers that “the restoration of Virgil to the discussion would in no way resolve any of the seeming contradictions.” (201) This does seem to be the most accurate interpretation of the brooch’s inscription, but it seems counterintuitive to bring up an interpretive device such as the line’s origin and then conclude that the device is ineffectual for solving any sort of problem. Though I certainly agree that the Prioress’s character is too complex for the words of her brooch to refer to strictly celestial or strictly earthly love, the wording of McGowan’s conclusion makes his essay seem more of a failed effort to fit her into one box or another, then an actual argument for her complexity.

Despite the somewhat defeatist tone of the essay (I might just be cynical) it would be very useful for anyone arguing for the complexity of the Prioress’s nature and needing outside support for that idea. Furthermore, it provides some helpful background on the origins of Amor vincit omnia and the relation of Virgil’s works to Chaucer’s contemporary society.

McGowan’s closing line serves to open up further speculation about the Prioress: “Not all is engraved upon the brooch—the hemstitch’s complement is understood, memorially triggered, and the Virgillian message may add to the portrait’s ambiguous complexity: Love conquers all, and we must give in to it.” The completion of the quote—and McGowan feels that common knowledge of Virgil would allow Chaucer’s audience to automatically finish it—brings even more complexity to the Prioress. If, indeed, there is a combination of both earthly love and Christian faith entailed in her brooch’s engraving, she would be powerless against both loves. Both loves would force her to bow to them individually and her balancing of faith and earthly love would certainly be a drain. Perhaps that is why she tells such a violent and pain-filled tale about faith: She has no choice in loving and obeying her god—the love rules her, disallowing her to be free.—Ray Conklin, 4/15/07

Spring 2005

Caon, Luisella. “Final -E and Spelling Habits in the Fifteenth-Century Versions of the Wife of  Bath’s Prologue.” English Studies 83 (2002): 296-            310.

            In her study of the WoB’s Prologue, Caon compares fifty-four manuscripts and four printed versions of the text in order to determine how, when, and why the final -e is used. She begins by stating the “common opinion” that, although it appears in print, the final -e was no longer pronounced by the fifteenth century scribes who copied Chaucer’s works (296). She also gives a history of the final –e. The letter disappeared from written English much later than spoken English, but began disappearing “from North to South in all dialects in turn,” from two-syllable words with short vowel sounds and then from those with long vowel sounds, and from nouns and verbs before adjectives.  The -e was retained to allow poets an easy extra syllable when needed, by speakers of certain dialects, and by authors who decided to be “conservative” in their use of the vowel (297).

After careful study of the manuscripts (which she breaks up into groups based on the approximate date of their completion) and their inclusion or exclusion of the final -e, Caon determines that scribes applied rules to their usage of the letter. Some scribes’ uses of the letter were due to the dialect they spoke, while others used them to distinguish between weak adjectives (ones preceded by a definite article) and strong adjectives, and/or plural and singular adjectives, according to the linguistic custom.  By the middle and end of the fifteenth century, it became evident that these rules were either not known or not adhered to anymore, yet scribes continued to use the -e in a systematic way. By the last half of the century, two scribes used the final -e as modern English speakers do: to denote vowel length (306). 

I was surprised at how interested I was in this article. In the end it showed through a specific example how English evolved from a very Germanic language into what we speak today. Danish still adds the final -e to denote plural and possessive in adjectives – it makes sense that English once did the same. Caon also emphasizes how languages may have rules that are difficult to follow and thereby get changed, and how literature can be used to track such changes, but perhaps not as easily as one might think. As oral language changes over time, the article says, written language remains more fixed.

With this being the case, Chaucer – and any other author – becomes antiquated linguistically almost the moment he begins to write things down. Why is there a tendency to hold onto more formal rules of language for writing and not speech? Why should the written word not change at the same rate as the spoken one? Maybe it is a question of what was written down and what written materials last. Too bad we don’t have any of Chaucer’s notes telling his family to take out the trash – the contrast between his formal and informal writing could be astounding.  --Johanna Goldberg, 2/2/05

Bertolet, Craig E. “‘Wel bet is rotten appul out of hoord’”: Chaucer’s Cook, Commerce, and Civic Order.”  Studies in Philology.  99:3 (2002): 229-246.

            Bertolet discusses the Cook’s role as the only “hired” man on the pilgrimage and what this means in terms of the growing need for commerce in Chaucer’s London.  In addition to addressing the implications of Roger of Ware’s less than sanitary cooking methods in the competitive trade of food, Bertolet draws comparisons between the Cook’s marketing strategies as a businessman and those of the other pilgrims.  In particular, he chooses to focus on the Physician, the Man of Law and the Wife of Bath who all try to convince the party (and the reader) in the General Prologue that their professions are worthy of a positive reputation, making their portraits “part description, part advertisement” (231).  Because they are not part of an established rank where money is of no concern, like the Knight or Prioress, they are reliant on these vocal resumes and their appearances to solicit patronage and present images of success. 

            Bertolet also dissects the relationship between master and apprentice by specifically looking at Perkyn’s situation in the Cook’s Fragment.  The unruly behavior that an apprentice like Perkyn exhibits, Bertolet attests, is a liability to his master, both economically and socially.  As he is legally bound to his apprentice by contract and responsible for his actions, the prosperity of his shop and his own personal status are at serious risk.  Because the Cook’s master finds Perkyn to be of no true value, failing to be the model for the scholar or clerk, he is quite wise in ejecting him from his position without granting him citizenship in London, as per the contract between them.  Perkyn didn’t uphold his part of the deal, so he gets nothing.  His punishment of living with a thief and prostitute, two great offenses to the City, might be greater than death or prison, as he will never be able to rise above this status.  In this way, the “rotten appul” is expunged from the local businesses, but still remains a threat to London itself.  Like in the Miller’s and Reeve’s Tales, the Cook’s Fragment is addressing the importance of taking caution with outsiders in commerce and in the household, and constructing a respectable status that will deter the trouble that they bring. -- Scott Sell  2/17/05     

Justman, Stewart. “The Reeve’s Tale and the Honor of Men.” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (1995): 21-27.

Justman examines the Reeve’s outlandish, “obsessive” quest for nobility (21). He begins by analyzing the character of John in the Miller’s Tale, who in many ways is Symkyn’s opposite, even as the results of his inaction are, in essence, the same as those of Symkyn’s action. John in effect does nothing to stop himself from becoming cuckolded, setting himself – and his pilgrim parallel, Oswald the Reeve – up for the “jeering” reaction of the crowd (both the tale’s crowd and the crowd of pilgrims), a “charivari,” in the end (23). The Reeve attempts to get back at the Miller through his tale by removing Robyn’s “sexual power” and “social importance,” and as a result making women the victims of men’s quests for esteem (25). Justman writes that the search for honor and the resulting questions that are raised about nobility separate the tale from its probable Old French source. He concludes, “If the Reeve’s Tale shows that churls should leave honor to their betters, it also shows the honor ethic for what it really is. Stripping that ethic down to a violent mania, the tale poses an ironic commentary on nobility itself” (26). 

I like how Justman relates the tale to the teller in a way that adds to my understanding of the relationships and character development within the tale. For a character to so seamlessly enter into his tale speaks to Chaucer’s abilities as a writer. Chaucer recreated a text around a character/teller and used it to give the reader insight into the character’s priorities. This tale must be viewed as a product of its teller; the changes made by the Reeve (i.e., by Chaucer on behalf of the Reeve) give us insight into his character. He becomes obsessed with his reputation, with his ability to conquest. The clerks’ actions seem more vengeful in his tale than in the French fabliau, for the women’s active consents have been removed. The tale becomes more forceful because of this, but perhaps it also becomes less humorous.

The pilgrim audience does not offer the tale a “jeering” reaction. The tale does not publicly cuckold the character under attack; the pryvetee in the tale remains through the ending, only having been removed in the bedroom itself. A fabliau’s humor, then, and the key to its success, seems to come from “charivari,” from a public awareness and ridiculing of cuckoldry, one that makes the audience laugh at rather than deride a character. An ending should bring humor, not revenge. In this sense, the Reeve’s ending fails, and brings honor neither to Symkyn nor to the Reeve. At the same time, it does not remove what little honor Robyn may have had.

As Justman alludes to, the regression from The Knight’s Tale – a tale filled with honor and nobility told by a noble – to The Reeve’s Tale makes Symkyn’s and Oswald’s connected quests for nobility seem ridiculous from the start. There is nothing noble in them, nor in the tale itself. The parallels to The Knight’s Tale – the two suitors, the wife and daughter, the ending battle –show The Reeve’s Tale as an attempt for a non-noble to break down noble motifs and show their absurdity. Really, it demonstrates that when a commoner makes fun of noble motifs, he becomes more common. The regression that occurs within the first fragment leaves The Knight’s Tale in a category of its own, not only because it is the only non-fabliau, the only tale to take itself seriously, but because it gives the following tales a place from which to fall. It shows what they can never be and what they appear to actively try not to be. Thus, it is almost ironic that the tales, especially The Reeve’s Tale would include so many similarities to The Knight’s Tale. These elements, while they may try to mock the noble tale, perhaps serve to show what the Reeve aspires to be – worthy of honor – but can never become.

The article emphasizes the misuses of women in the tale, and even states that “the reduction of women to pawns of men” grows more and more blatant throughout the first fragment (26). Perhaps the WoB was meant to follow fragment one. Something more satisfying than an unclear parody on an aube is certainly needed to give women a voice. -- Johanna Goldberg, 18 Feb. 2005

Roppolo, Joseph R. “The Converted Knight in Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale.’” College English, 12.5 (Feb., 1951) 263-269.

Roppolo describes “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” not only being about the disgraceful appearance of a woman who, like in a fairy tale, becomes beautiful but also about the change of a selfish Knight to find beauty and wisdom in a woman.  Roppolo goes on to describe three scholarly ways to interpret the tale.  Firstly being “almost complete disregard for the Knight.”  He briefly describes the first interpretation as having two main points: the first being “it is a fairy story” merely telling the story of a Loathly Lady and the second point stressing the importance of the Wife’s thesis of sovereignty (263).  With this interpretation “[t]he Hag and the Wife of Bath became the two characters of major importance, and the Knight is almost a mechanical, instrument used for purposes of plot” (264).  The second interpretation, “those which make generalizations concerning the Knight,” include comments made by Lounsbury.  For example, in his Studies in Chaucer, he “finds the Wife’s tale ‘full of wisest observation, of keenest insight into character and motive;’” however, there is no attention called to the Knight’s characterization or motivation.  Furthermore, one critic discusses how the Knight’s character in the Hag’s sermon as “unwarranted” (264).  And the third interpretation makes “some analysis of the Knight’s role” (263).

            This third criticism of the Knight’s characterization is most analogues to Roppolo’s interpretation.  He turns the tale around by describing that the Loathly Lady’s life depends on the Knight exhibiting the correct answer to the question of what women most want.  Roppolo shows that Chaucer exhibits the Knight in a different light when compared to other similar stories.  Instead of looking at the tale through the lens of the Knight as an altruistic character, Roppolo sees Chaucer’s character as changing through selfish reasons.  Specifically, Roppolo states that Chaucer does portray the Knight’s “conversion,” which is different from other medieval tales.  In the analogues “the reasons for which a perfect knight embarks upon a quest are altruistic rather than personal; in Chaucer’s tale the Knight is a rapist who is sent upon a quest in order to save his own life… [in the analogues] the knight marries the Loathly Lady willingly; in Chaucer’s tale the Knight marries the Hag unwillingly and behaves ungraciously toward her” (265). 

            It seems that with this emphasis shift from the lady to the knight, there is a showing of the “functional nature of the so called digressions and inconsistencies in the story” (266).  The Knight is a member of the court of King Arthur and the Round Table, which does not typify morally corrupt behavior like rape.  It is possible to view this act under the “courtly love system” where the knight would have no regard “for the chastity of peasant girls;” however, no where in the tale is the girl claimed to be a peasant (266).  The disregard for the young lady, according to Roppolo, focuses in on the Knight’s characterization.  The earnestness in the Knight’s character shown by his value of life over honor in order to save himself and release himself from his original promise of marrying the Loathly Lady is less than admirable.  At no point does he show any courtesy or good sportsmanship in regards to marrying the Hag, who saved his life.  On their wedding night the Knight’s vanity kept him away from performing any “marital duties” (267).  It is not until now that the Lady’s “lecture on gentilesse” converts the Knight’s virtues.  The Lady states that being of a low class and impoverished are not necessarily disgraceful.  On the contrary, they engender rich virtues that even old age and ugliness are characteristics of true nobility.  These exact characteristics are what the lady sees to be inhibiting the Knight to being truly noble himself.  It is at this point the Knight is converted and is given the Chaucerian decision which emphasizes character.  He must decide if he would like to have the Lady “old and ugly but faithful, or young and fair and perhaps unfaithful” (267).  Roppolo suggests that the Knight’s response is somewhat sarcastic when he gives the Lady the chance to decide for herself.  Roppolo presents the important note that the Lady does not choose to be young, fair, and true until she is assured by the Knight of sovereignty.  Moreover, the Knight is not completely converted until he performs “the symbolic act of drawing aside the curtains to let in light which reveals that the Lady is in truth young and fair” (268). 

            This emphasis on the Knight within the tale solves two problems that Roppolo suggests.  First, it allows for the rape scene to be meaningful.  “[T]he Knight’s character is revealed” and the Wife of Bath’s thesis is demonstrated; the idea that sovereignty over marriage should be the wife’s.  Furthermore, “rape necessitates domination, and certainly it is a crime against female sovereignty” (268).  Interestingly, the Queen is the one who decides on the Knight’s punishment, “who in this instance dominates her husband” (268).  And second, “the sermon on gentilesse is not a digression; rather it is the turning point of the story” (268).  It is here where we see the importance of both the sovereignty of women and the conversion of the Knight as vital elements of the story.  Lastly, they both are revealing more about how Chaucer is “skillfully continuing the process of character revelation” (268).~~Tara Haag, 02/18/05

Bertolet, Craig E.  “’Wel bet is roten appul out of hoord’: Chaucer’s Cook, Commerce, and Civic Order.”  Studies in Philology. 99:3 (2002): 229-246.

Bertolet approaches the Cook’s Tale through the prism of economics. During Chaucer’s time, London required all would-be tradesman to be sponsored by a master craftsman.  At the end of their apprenticeship (usually ten years) the apprentice became a journeyman, and gained rights as both a citizen of London and a professional tradesman.  Perkyn, therefore, is the ultimate example of the type of apprentice a master would not want, bringing infamy to both himself and to his master.  A tradesman is defined by his reputation, and any apprentice who plays dice, gambles, engages morally suspect women, and generally regards his own pursuit of pleasure over his work will not reflect well on his master.  Perkyn is relieved of his apprenticeship, and gains no citizenship papers.

                Bertolet also argues that civic order is essential to a functional economy.  It is essential, as the platitude ‘wel bet is roten appul out of hoord’ demonstrates, to remove all dysfunctional elements in order to preserve the functionality of an economy.  Perkyn’s expulsion as his master’s charge demonstrates that either the master is unable to govern his apprentices, or that the apprentice is completely unwilling to apply himself.  Bertolet states that his master keeps Perkyn to the end of his service—chancing all his other ‘appuls’ by doing so—in order to avoid a possible later lawsuit by Perkyn against the master.  Keeping Perkyn so long, according to Bertolet, demonstrates how the master tried, and wasted, valuable energy on Perkyn.

                Within the economic framework of his paper, Bertolet also outlines the importance of the Cook’s abilities over his personality.  During the General Prologue, little attention is paid to the physical or economic description of the Cook.  Rather, we get a portrait of abilities, probably reflective of the fact that tradesman are defined entirely by their wares.  The Cook, as an individual, is of little importance; the only important aspects of successful business are the reputation and the reality of good wares.  This Cook, like Perkyn, may not be a good example of a successful tradesman.—Joe Turner, 2/18/05

Parry, Joseph D. “Interpreting Female Agency and Responsibility in ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Merchant’s Tale’.” Philological Quarterly, v. 80 no. 2 (Spring 2001) 133-67.

Parry begins by noting that many scholars have commented upon the silence of the female characters in the individual tales Chaucer’s pilgrims tell. His intent in this article is to show how that silence -- and the occasions when these characters do speak or act -- are significant. They serve to invite interpretation, he argues, and in that capacity, they defy the abilities of their fellow characters, the teller, the teller’s audience, and finally Chaucer’s audience as well to decisively judge them. This is what ultimately gives them their power, both within and outside of the context of their own tales. In proving this, Parry is especially concerned with the way these women are (and more importantly, are not) included in the poetic justice of the world their teller creates for them: “Chaucer’s incompletely interpretable women -- who often play the central, generative role in configuring the action and the very character of his poetic narratives -- allow Chaucer’s readers to think through the interpretive possibilities and problems that inhere in the processes by which a culture conceptualizes agency, accountability, and justice” (133). Both Alison in “Miller’s Tale,” and May in “Merchant’s Tale” escape the sort of justice meted out at the ends of their respective stories. Parry says this is extremely telling: the tales certainly present the women as complicit in some degree to deception and adultery, but they are never punished within the bounds of the narrative the way the male characters are. This is because, Parry says, they both “are and are not fully part of the systems by which we may conceptualize retribution and accountability for actions,” and so both demand and frustrate interpretation at the same time (134).

Most of Parry’s argument is developed in the context of the Miller’s Tale. He notes that while Alison is described in the familiar (at least to Chaucer’s original courtly audience) terms of “the Virgin Mary and the medieval bestiary tradition,” she is also objectified and made remote and foreign by this introduction (135). Her culpability in the affair with Nicholas and the trick they play upon her husband is complicated by the fact that she is presented as both innocent and wild. The animal imagery may in fact suggest that she is exempt from punishment because she is not fully capable of taking responsibility for her actions (144). We never do get to see inside her motivation -- she is merely described to us, and the only glimpses we receive from her of her desires come in response to provocation by others. This allows everyone, Parry notes, from Absolon, Nicholas, and John, to Chaucer’s audience, to construct of Alison what they wish her to be; consequently, no one is able to fully know who she really is (137). This is, of course, in perfect line with the Miller’s stated moral of the story: you shouldn’t try to know the secrets of God or your wife, and so the Miller as the teller doesn’t fully allow us to see Alison as a person, or try to explain why everyone but her gets what was coming to them (144).

The section on the Merchant’s Tale is less exhaustive. Primarily, Parry makes his point by showing that the Merchant sets up his tale as a conflict between the genres of Romance and Fabliau (with Damyan arriving from a romance to rescue the sympathetic character of the suffering May from her imprisonment in a fabliau plot), with neither genre ultimately winning, although the fabliau does seem to have the upper hand by the end (161). Parry pays a good deal of attention to the fact May’s thoughts are interrogated, but never explicated; the Merchant allows for May’s existence of an independent cognitive entity from the men around her, but does not supply us with any description of her or of what actually is going on in her head (156-160). The result of all this invited and unrewarded speculation, Parry posits, is that “we seem invited to judge the characters, above all the Merchant, for the ways in which they use ideas, value variously and opportunistically social values, and thereby transform the value of ideas and the idea of values that govern human behavior” (163).

The main flaw of Parry’s work is that the writing is a bit overly recursive at places, and consequently his argument gets a trifle circular at times. However, his thesis is extremely interesting, and the evidence he marshals is impressive. He is fascinated by paradox and the layers of relationship and responsibility that are unique to the structure of the Canterbury Tales, and does a thorough if occasionally frustrating job of attempting to capture and convey that sense. He certainly raises some interesting questions about the roles and views of women presented in these two tales. Before reading this article, I believe I missed Alison’s free pass in the Miller’s summation of his characters’ fates. I suppose as I was reading it, “Thus swyved was this carpenteris wyf,” (3850), was her appropriate fate: she got what she wanted, but was deceived in some way that was fitting at the same time. The story almost forces us to collude with the Miller’s chauvinistic consciousness -- she is not exactly a person, in the end, to either John or the Miller. She instead represents what they wish her to be -- and what she fails to live up to, in their eyes. The tale tellers’ treatment of their respective female characters tells us a great deal about their views of the world -- and not just their views of women. The women in both stories function as objects of desire, and their lack of “punishment’ for their own role in trespassing the moral code is surely significant. What is Chaucer saying -- or allowing his narrators to say? It could be argued that they are the agents of desire (as Parry seems to suggest and then back away from without further exploration), but this should be held against them, should it not, under a medieval, male world-view? It seems more likely then that they are given immunity because their complicity is bound up in the roles created for them by the men who, uninvited (including their husbands), desire them.

            Perhaps the most underdeveloped (and undeservedly so) part of Parry’s thesis is his assertion that they way each woman specifically functions within her tale (as he points out, there are subtle yet important differences) reflects the ongoing theme of the roles of destiny vs. fate, and the interventions of the gods, in the tellers’ narratives. If this was explored further, it would certainly show that the Miller is answering the Knight’s Tale in more than one way. He isn’t just refuting the Knight’s world of courtly romance, he’s further messing with the Knight’s conflicted vision of the universe. The Merchant’s Tale, then, could also be seen as responding to this continuing debate. The answers about these people’s views of Divine Providence might make us ultimately question just why some of them are going on a pilgrimage in the first place -- more people than the Wife of Bath might be using this trip for something other than spiritual ends. What lies for each of them at the mid-way point of this little traveling game, the shrine of the martyr-saint Thomas Beckett? Parry’s thesis that the “passive” female characters of these two particular tales, which do not seem to have aspirations of high art or philosophy, are instead carefully constructed paradoxes meant to invite interpretation and meditation upon the act and limits of interpretation can be exploded to illuminate and drive a great deal of interpretative issues about nearly the entire text of Canterbury Tales. ~Jessie Dixon, 2/18/05

Mitchell, J. Allan. “Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity.” Studies in Philology 102:1 (2005): 1 - 26.

In this article, Mitchell attempts to distinguish the morality behind The Clerk’s Tale and how the text is able to be perceived in a myriad of possible interpretive moralities. As Mitchell states “the problem is how to choose,” a problem which Chaucer arranges in the text through a series of dichotomies (3). Griselda’s absolute obedience makes her appear saintly as a wife, though monstrous as a mother. Through this obedience, Walter appears powerful as a husband and a ruler, but irresponsible as a father and also as a husband. These characterization, and the events which surround them, allow for the audience to view the tale either as a parable or as a parody.

Mitchell argues that “the Clerks Tale can profitably be viewed as parabolic insofar as the term can withstand the shock of any additional paradoxes, including the paradox that Chaucer incorporates parody into a serious moral parable” (6). The tale is a parable of patience and servitude, a characteristic highly esteemed in medieval women, though it is paradoxically one which displays seemingly atrocious acts. Through this Mitchell believes that the text does not allow for generalities, that it cannot merely be reduced to a tale about such and such. It is, instead, a complexly woven web of morality, one which enables any moral decision to have an equally immoral outcome. Speaking of the clerk, Mitchell resolves that, there is “the possibility that for him Griselda still exemplifies textbook wifehood,” while at the same time realizing “that it is practically impossible to imitate Griselda” (10).

Mitchell states that the tale is a “parable of exemplarity,” one which does not allow for the reader to come to a universal meaning, but rather one which allows for the audience to recognize the possible outcomes and decide for themselves. Quoting Salter, Mitchell declares that the genius of the tale lie in its “ability to decide upon and abide by one single set of moral standards” (17). This inability to conform to one designated code of moral conduct allows for the text to be concluded as undecidable, pushing the audience to adapt one of its polar outcomes in order to establish personal moral meaning. This ethical deliberation is a result of the text’s undecidability, one which calls the audience to responsibility rather than accepting it indifferently or apathetically (18-9).Through deconstructing the text, Mitchell attempts to show how the tale makes a parable of its audience. The patience required by the tale’s audience, along with the continual moral deliberation and value judgment throughout the story, enable the audience to be, figuratively, in the shoes of Griselda. Therefore, Mitchell believes that, while being a tale of the moral equivocations of Griselda, it is in turn a test of the moral equivocations within the audience.

This article, as well as the tale, would prove as a good source for a paper on the WoB or on any of the female storytellers within the collection. It directly addresses the condition and morality of woman within the Clerk’s Tale and, furthermore, it proves to offer various possible readings of the tale as well as various moralities. Also, it would prove as a possiblity for the the lack of choice of Emelye and whether choice or reticence were better.—Jeff Judge, 2/18/05

McKinley, Kathryn L. "The Silenced Knight: Questions of Power and Reciprocity in the Wife of Bath's Tale." The Chaucer Review 30.4 (1996): 359-78.

Kathryn L. McKinley, in "The Silenced Knight: Questions of Power and Reciprocity in the Wife of Bath's Tale," disagrees with critics who say that the tale's "closing lines suggest a 'silencing'...a muting of woman's cry for equality" (359).  She contends, rather, that the knight is the one who is silenced by the hag's gentilesse speech.  Furthermore, the knight is silenced by allowing the hag to make the final decision between fair or foul. The key assertion that she is making is that the pillow lecture is what transforms the knight.  It is mentioned that "Chaucer innovates with the romance form by placing two contrary romances within the fairy tale" (360).  The first of the romances being that the knight must solve the riddle: what women most desire, in order to save his life.  However, at this point, he has no inner change.  Moreover, in the second of romances, the knight must solve another riddle: that of fair or foul.  It is at this point that he does have a personal change.  This transformation occurs only because the knight is able to finally see the hag’s inner beauty rather then fixating on her exterior.  McKinley argues that “The conventions of the romance genre require that there is such a final moment of revelation, of inner understanding, 'purchased with suffering'" if there is ever going to be a moment of inner change (360).  Throughout the article, McKinley reiterates the fact that the knight's transformation occurs after the hag's speech on gentilesse (true nobility, honor, and goodness) and that it is not until this lecture on gentilesse that there can be any transformation of the Knight’s virtues.  The hag states that being of a low class as well as impoverished is not necessarily disgraceful.  On the contrary, she engenders rich virtues such as old age and ugliness that can characterize true nobility that even the knight does not display.  These exact characteristics are what the hag sees to be inhibiting the knight to being truly noble himself.  It is at this point the knight is converted and is given the Chaucerian decision which emphasizes character.  He must decide if he would like to have the hag old and ugly but faithful, or young and beautiful and perhaps unfaithful.  Before the pillow lecture McKinley makes it very clear in her analysis that the Knight did not show characteristics of gentilesse but rather he was extremely rude and ungrateful to the hag.  By the end of the tale however, the knight's attitude toward the hag drastically changes.  McKinley states that "at the story's center is a male character who is in dire need of an education, one which the hag takes it upon herself to provide" (363).

Some see that once the knight has given his true loyalty to the hag that “he is rewarded through the removal of the impending punishment” (369).  However, the knight’s final decision of giving the hag the ultimate decision is seen, in this article, as the reason for his reward.  After the hag is assured that she has been given the power/sovereignty in the marriage, she then tells the knight that she will be both fair and good to him.  For this reason, it seems that he is awarded only after he gives up his power.  Additionally, he is showing true loyalty to his lady.  The fact that the knight refuses to make a choice between foul or fair furthers the idea that he has given his full consent to the hag.  By doing this, the knight not only places the decision on the hag, but he also gives her the power to actively make a decision, which allows the female voice to be heard.  “His response to the hag’s test could at the simplest level reflect the principle of female ‘sovereignty’ illustrated in the Wife’s Prologue, but on closer inspection, it shows him giving greater weight to her own decision-making—and ultimately a tacit agreement with the main point of her pillow lecture (placing value on inner worth, not on superficial, temporal goods such as riches, youth, or beauty)” (366).  The hag, the female character, enables the knight to undergo his needed transformation.  In the end, McKinley argues that the woman is not giving up her power but rather the knight giving his up in order to change. 

            I am not sure I agree with McKinley entirely on this account.  It seems that even after all of the Hag’s assertions of conquest to get what she wants from the knight it seems as if she is conquered.  This seems to be the case because in the end she still decides to give the knight what he wants, and that is for her to be aesthetically pleasing.  This to me shows a sign of being conquered in a way that is more than what McKinley is willing to state.  Despite the efforts to stand up for herself, and truly express her feelings in her lecture, the hag backs down from her original motive and satisfies the knight instead.  This to shows her lack of strength to hold onto the power she was fighting for.  Furthermore, at the end of the tale the hag “obeyed hym in every thing,” which does not seem to show full sovereignty in marriage like McKinley is trying to argue (Chaucer, 1255). ~Tara Haag 3/25/05

Reiff, Raychel Haugrud.  “Chaucer’s The Pardoner’s Tale, 855-58.” Explicator  57:4  (Summer 1999) 195-197. 

In her article, Reiff presents two reasons for Chaucer’s use of the word capouns in the Pardoner’s Tale: one being for the sake of realism in the tale and the other as a symbolic portrait of the Pardoner himself.  Capons, castrated roosters, according to Reiff and other medieval/Renaissance sources, were seen as a delicacy for the wealthy and were usually only served for special occasions (i.e. Henry IV makes frequent references to Sir John Falstaff’s appetite for capons).  The Friar’s request of Thomas’ wife for a simple meal in the Summoner’s Tale, including “a capon but the lyvere”, “softe breed” and “a rosted pigges heed”, is particularly humorous since the Friar claims he a man of little sustenance.  He is humbly demanding some of the richest foods available—certainly not ones that could normally be found in a peasant household.

In the Pardoner’s Tale itself, the thief that has been sent to fetch food and wine, tells the apothecary he needs poison to take care of the “polat” that is threatening his capons.  The apothecary, most likely realizing the valuable nature of the fowl, sells the poison without any reservations.  The thief then adds the poison to the wine, with the intention of killing off his other conspirators.  The realistic aspect of this transaction that occurs between the thief and the “pothecarie”, Reiff attests, would be accepted by Chaucer’s audience as they too would acknowledge the worth and costliness of the certain type of bird. 

Reiff’s other argument deals directly with the Pardoner and his physical qualities.  The General Prologue introduces the Pardoner as a corrupt cleric, and as such, Chaucer mirrors his moral perversion with his lack of maleness.  Christine Ryan Hillary offers that more modern criticism has read the Pardoner to be a homosexual, a common basis for satire in the 14^th century.  However, Reiff understands him to have been born a eunuch, although he is portrayed to be spiritually and morally dead.  Due to his position that allowed the abuse of wealth and power, he uses those elements to counteract his own femininity. Described as “a gelding or a mare” (691), the Pardoner is a eunuch who, with his arrogance and bawdiness, tries desperately to conceal his “deformity” (Reiff 196).  However, his feminine voice, bare face and womanly, long hair all point to his inability as a man, despite his boasting of having “a joly wenche in every toun” (452).  By using the key symbol of the castrated cock, Chaucer is able to subtly draw this parallel of unmanly qualities to the sterile state of the capon. ~Scott Sell 3/23/2005

Wimsatt, James I. “John Duns Scotus, Charles Sanders Pierce, and Chaucer’s Portrayal of the Canterbury Pilgrims.” Speculum, 17.3 (1996), 633-45.

Wimsatt debates the question of how far Chaucer has made his pilgrims realistic, individual characters, and to what extent are they manifestations of “types” (mere estate satires). He does this by considering the work of two philosophers: Scotus, whose system of scholastic realism dominated the universities in Chaucer’s day, and Pierce, a Victorian American philosopher who based much of his work off of Scotus’ thought (663, 634). He uses Pierce’s work primarily to critique Chaucer’s characterizations and to refine one of Scotus’ more obscure points. However, Wimsatt explicitly argues in his introduction that Chaucer would have been familiar with Scotus’ thought, and, “Chaucer’s image of society in the Canterbury Tales […] conforms very well to the philosophical realism of his day” (634). In the light of this assertion, he explores how the character portraits in the General Prologue reflect both the individual and typical aspects of the pilgrims, which conforms with scholastic realism’s philosophy. He agrees with Jill Mann’s thesis that the portraits do represent a form of estate satire; however, “one still seeks a philosophical grounding for the art…. In terms of scholastic realism the pilgrims must embody natures in common with others like them, and there must be a principle by which each is individuated […] it is necessary that the pilgrims represent both types and individuals” (634). In order to prove his case, he spends a great deal of time discussing the differences between Scotus and Pierce’s philosophy, especially the minute differences in the way they use specific terms. The difference between the type and the individual is that of an essential “haeccitas” of a person and the “formalities” which compose this type. The haeccitas is the embodiment of the medieval belief that people are born to their station and occupation in life: the Miller is a Miller in a capital “M,” quintessential way. Wimsatt points out that Chaucer identifies his characters far more strongly with their professions than with their individual names: “the names of but nine of the pilgrims become known, and each is mentioned only once” (637). But the characters still shine through as unique personalities; this is the result of their individual formalities, the specific elements and anecdotes that comprise their personalities (636). While some of the details Chaucer gives may serve as stereotypical traits of their profession and place in the world, added together, Wimsatt argues, they create a fully realized, unique and human portrait.

Wimsatt’s primarily New Critical reading of the General Prologue is interesting. It is well explicated, and ultimately proves its point. I feel that it focused far too much on comparing the two theorists, and too little time actually applying their work to Chaucer. The inclusion of Pierce is a bit ambiguous as well. It is impossible that Chaucer would have been familiar with the Victorian’s work. Therefore, it is extraneous to Wimsatt’s stated thesis: “In this essay I argue that Chaucer’s image of society in the Canterbury Tales, presented primarily in the General Prologue, conforms very well to the philosophical realism of his day and that his Ricardian artistry was fortified by the logic of Oxford and Cambridge” (634). Because of this, it seems unnecessary to include Pierce in order to provide contrast or explanation of Scotus. It makes sense to critique Chaucer’s characterizations in terms of Pierce’s theories, but Wimsatt doesn’t spend a great deal of time doing this, and does not manage to tie the two authors together as neatly or thoroughly as he does Chaucer and Scotus. His argument is strongest when he sticks to Scotus’ work and its reflection in the General Prologue. It covers many facets of a complicated philosophical issue, and manages to do so without becoming overwhelming.

The contrast Wimsatt grapples with in this article is certainly central to our understanding of the Canterbury Tales as a whole. If we are going to approach a tale under the basic assumption that it somehow reflects its narrator, we can not fully understand that relationship until we analyze what part or degree of the teller it comes from -- is Robin the Miller’s tale Chaucer’s attempt to tell a story as a Miller would tell it, or as Robin would tell it? Most probably, Wimsatt argues, it is the tale of Robin the Miller, whose identity as Robin is in some way part of his larger identity as a Miller in Chaucer’s world view. How Chaucer relates and prioritizes the two aspects of his characters, their individuality and their archetypal quality, is key to understanding the characters as his medieval audience would have. The article helps one get inside the medieval mindset and intellectual milieu Chaucer most likely worked and wrote within, which is essential for understanding his work. Wimsatt notes, as many commentators and critics have before him, that Chaucer creates his own world within the framework of the tales. To appreciate that artistic mastery, and to analyze how far the logic and philosophy of that world matches or deviates from that of the world in which Chaucer lived, we have to first be sure we understand it, and can see it reflected in his work. ~Jessie Dixon, 3/24/05

Sheridan, Christian. "May in the Marketplace: Commodification and Textuality in the Merchant’s Tale.” Studies in Philology 102:1 (2005): 27-44.

Sheridan responds to assertion by E. Talbot Donaldson that "we may have been led by the Merchant's narrative, especially by his rhetoric, to make some emotional investment in the relationship, the juxtaposition of January and May, and I one find it hard immediately to liquidate the investment" (27). Rebutting the commerciality of Donaldson's argument, that the reader's investment is in the juxtaposition of Januarie and May, Sheridan argues that the "Merchant's Tale" only displays mercantilism in an attempt persuade the reader to view the text as a product of commercial means, one who's textuality is “formed in the interactions among reader, author, and language” (29).

These interactions, assimilated to the medieval marketplace, enable for the textuality of the characters to be viewed in commercial terms. May, as the object of desire and, therefore, the most desired commodity, initially enters the tale as a text, one of Januarie’s creation who goes unnamed for, as Sheridan points out, nearly a hundred lines. Januarie’s legal documents, his correlation of a wife to property, and his use of “feffed in,” the OED states that the modern day enfeoff means “to invest with a fief; to put (a person) in possession of the fee-simple or fee-tail of lands, tenements, etc,” construct May as a commercial object ( ll. 1698). Her commerciality, much in the way that an object can define it’s value in the marketplace depending on the relationship between the buyer, the seller, and the object, corresponds to her textuality and the way that she has the ability to control not only the value of language in the tale, but more importantly her own value.

May’s ability to control her value in the text is a product of her ability to change positions within the text. Sheridan believes that “at various points in the tale, she is a text an author, and an audience” (30). This distinction, that May has the capacity to obtain all three positions with the tale, sets her apart from Damyan and Januarie. Damyan and Januarie, according to Sheridan, only function in the author’s position, demonstrated by Damyan’s love letters to May and Januarie’s legal documents and speeches. These texts that they create, along with the text of the garden, which is visual text constructed by Januarie’s carnal desire, are presented to May, the audience, who, as both text and author, is able to interpret them, function within them, and construct them to her advantage.

May, as the only character who is able to read the text’s of others and control others through this text, is also the only character who gets what she desires. For Januarie, “no matter how much property he may bestow on her, May will never be the ideal wife he imagines in the Tale’s opening” and for Damyan “there is a dissonance between the romantic ideal implied in describing his letter as a ‘compleynt’ and their eventual coupling in the pear tree” (Sheridan 36). Only May can have the Januarie, and his bestowed property, as well as Damyan, and his secret love (at least the way she planned). This ability to read and reinterpret texts is a correlation to the process of commodification, as she is both buying the other character’s textual interpretation of herself and selling them her reinterpretation.

While using Marxist, Feminist, and Reader-Response criticisms, Sheridan provides a possible source for a paper that would consider the commodification of women in The Canterbury Tales, especially concerning the Emelie in the “Knight’s Tale” and Griselde in the “Clerk’s Tale.” The comparison of Emelie to May, both as characters who serve as commodities, based on their exchange value, to the men in their tales, would prove to demonstrate the medieval attitude toward women, offering a topic for a Historicist, Feminist, or Marxist criticism. The comparison to Griselde, as well as Emelie, could demonstrate the extent of consent and how women are actually able to create consent while appearing to conform to the value created for them by patriarchal society. Either comparison, though possibly together, could supply a distinction between woman as a text and a reader and woman as a text, an author, and an audience. This distinction, with enough support, could show the how resisting reader, i.e. May, is able to create consent by resisting the patriarchal stereotypes imposed on her. Through resisting the stereotypes, and therefore the patriarchal system, May is the quintessential example of role reversal and contrasts sharply with the Tales’ presentation of both Emelie and Griselde, constructing the possibility of a paper comparing the passive women in the Tales to the aggressive woman or a paper on the commodification of women and their place within the marketplace. Either way, it would offer a solid source on a Feminist or Marxist paper, and also a Feminist-Marxist paper.—Jeff Judge, 3/25/05

Campbell, Emma. “Sexual Poetics and the Politics of Translation in the Tale of Griselda.” Comparative Literature 55 (2003): 191-            216.

            Campbell’s article considers the depictions of Griselda in Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer in order to determine “the relationship between gender and translation” (195). She stresses each authors’ treatment of Griselda, specifically her states of dress and undress, to show how each author represents Griselda’s “gendered identity”; she effectively turns the three versions of Griselda’s body into textual artifacts (195). Campbell first establishes Judith Butler’s “theory of ‘gender trouble,’” the notion that translation serves to reestablish the dominant discourse (195, 197). She writes that while translation can perpetuate value systems inherent in source texts, it can also disrupt the dominant discourse by placing an emphasis on the cultural values of the vernacular (197).

            Campbell finds Boccaccio’s tale to create an ambiguous view of Griselda, due in part to Dioneo, the teller of her story in the Decameron. This character tells tales with more “artistic freedom” than the others in the brigata; his tale thus requires from the reader a different approach than the other tales that are told. Dioneo makes clear from the outset that his is not a tale that one should model one’s behavior after (199-200). The presentation of Griselda’s body is “elusive” in the text, for in Dioneo’s disgust at Gualtieri’s (Walter’s) actions, he turns Griselda into a “divine spirit”; her corporeal self becomes overshadowed by her spiritual self (203). Griselda’s behavior cannot be expected of the human wife.

            Unlike Boccaccio, Petrarch’s view of the tale focuses not on the husband (in this case, Valterius) and his brutality, but on Griselda’s virtue (205). Petrarch’s depiction of Griselda depicts her as more like a virgin martyr or the Virgin Mary than an abused wife; he takes more seriously the merits of her behavior, while Boccaccio reads against them (206). Therefore, writes Campbell, “the ‘reality’ of her status as wife and mother become problematic,” especially as Petrarch attempts to distance her from this role in his conclusion, where he states that modern wives should not imitate Griselda’s behavior (206-7). At the same time, Griselda’s constancy “can never be entirely detached from the physical and social functions she performs as a woman” (207).

            Campbell believes that Chaucer “unravels” Petrarch’s tale, wanting the reader to understand it as “a story about wives” through an increased emphasis on the physical rather than the spiritual (208, 209). She writes, “Griselda’s example is set aside as an unrealistic aspiration for contemporary woman,” and is overshadowed by the ideals of female behavior set forth by the Wife of Bath (211). She concludes by stating that while Chaucer begins to disrupt the discourse of gender presented by Petrarch, he does not “stage a serious critique of the gender politics implicit in authorship itself,” and shows that “translation can but does not have to disrupt the authority it cites,” and instead may just alter the form of the authority (213). 

I cannot readily judge the ‘correctness’ of Campbell’s analysis of the three tales as I have not read two out of the three of them, but I was struck by how the authors’ (Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Chaucer) uses of the narrator allows a tale to take on a more or less ironic tone and thus a different view of Griselda and of gendered identity. If one argues that the act of translation can cause changes in discourse, then one must view (as I think Campbell does) both the authors and the narrators as translators, confusing the issue of who is responsible and even telling a story, as there are so many levels of narration running underneath the tale. Once we get to Chaucer, we must be aware not only of Chaucer, Chaucer the Poet, and Chaucer the Pilgrim as inscribed narrators below the Clerk, but also of Petrarch and his narrator (along with the French translation Campbell believes Chaucer to have read), Boccaccio and his narator, and the unwritten forms of the tale that came before Boccaccio. As is the case with any folk narrative, one cannot easily determine where the author’s and tellers voices begin or exactly whose cultural constructs surrounding gender are being expressed. One is sure, however, that all previous forms of the tale and values inherent in those forms are inscribed into the tale presented to the reader.

Still, it is possible for the reader to see where Chaucer broke from Petrarch and sided more with Boccaccio in his translation of the tale. It is interesting to note that Chaucer tells one of the more subversive forms of the tale, as he inserts the narrative voice at crucial moments to read against the text. Does this speak for Chaucer the author or for the Clerk? By writing through the Clerk, Chaucer attempts to express the point of view of the Clerk, just as by writing through the Knight or the Wife of Bath, he attempts to express their points of view. The reader must then take into consideration the Canterbury Tales as a whole in order to decide for him or herself which discourse on gender and which gendered identity to embrace or eschew.

I am still perplexed by the complexities of Chaucer’s translations in terms of his depictions of female characters. Criseyde becomes more rounded, Emelye less rounded, and Griselda somewhere in between (at least in comparison to Petrarch’s Griselda).  Chaucer did not translate in order to “disrupt authority” (Campbell 213). He translated to recreate and reshape his literary precedents in his own culture and language without such moral imperatives. Translations, to Chaucer, do not appear to be a form of resistence to the authority created by his predecessors. Instead, they are the means by which art is made. Chaucer should not be expected to rebel against the gender discourse in his translations, as doing so does not appear to have been his intention by any means. But he was able to do so, as Troilus and Criseyde shows, just as he was able to shift his readings of gender in the other direction, as he does by objectifying Emelye in the Knight’s Tale (or by having the knight do so). Should we hold authors to different standards today, especially in light of Feminist criticism, for why should one embrace a dominant discourse when one has the opportunity to resist and attempt to affect change?—Johanna Goldberg, 3/25/05

Finnegan, Robert Emmett. "‘She Should Have Said No to Walter’: Griselda’s Promise in the Clerk’s Tale." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature. 75 (1994): 303-21.

            Finnegan conducts a very thorough linguistic study of the terms ‘assent’ and ‘consent’ as they pertain to The Clerk’s Tale.  His main argument is that Griselda is morally suspect because she “makes herself an accomplice to homicide,” (303).  He catalogues the uses of assent and consent, and bases his argument on the semantic difference; whereas assent implies agreeing to something, consent implies agreeing with something.  The reason she is morally suspect, then, is “…she moves from a situation of assenting in the abstract to whatever Walter wishes in their marriage, to the condition of consenting in the particular instances of the murder of her children,” (304).  Finnegan then cites the text to prove that she believes her children will be murdered, and her consent (or feeling of being in agreement with their murder) makes her morally suspect.

            He then cites examples from medieval theologians like Thomas Aquinas to establish that medieval doctrine dictates, “a vow or an oath leading to sin is not to be honoured,” (309).  Finnegan also includes much of his sources (like Aquinas and the Vulgate Bible) verbatim to illustrate the differences between oaths one should keep and oaths one should not, but unfortunately Latin is not available to me.  His emphasis on semantics shifts to the terms ‘assail’ and ‘tempt’, which he uses to illustrate how Walter does not fit the role of God in an allegorical interpretation.  He cites the Epistle of St. James to prove that Walter, by tempting, not only is not fulfilling the role of God, but is evil by necessity.  Therefore Griselda, by consenting to his Walter’s will, becomes an accomplice to evil.—Joe Turner, 3/26/05

Ambrisco, Alan S. “‘ It Lyth Nat in My Tonge’ : Occupatio and Otherness in the Squire's Tale.” Chaucer Review 38:3 (2004): 205-228.

            In Ambrisco’s article, he argues that “the tale is unified not by its narrative elements but rather by the way its linguistic anxieties are revealed and processed” (205).  The image of the Mongol culture, disguised in occupatio, presents both “the exotic appeal and cultural differences” of Oriental culture while not providing a solid foundation for this differentiation (208). Ambrisco’s concept of otherness in the “Squire‘s Tale,” an act which serves to domesticate the Mongols and places the knight as the other, is grounded in the Squire’s ethnocentric view of the world.

            The arrival of the knight effectively juxtaposes his culture from that of the Mongols and functions to “suppress Mongol cultural and ethnic difference” (210). This juxtaposition also proposes to assimilate the Mongols, who would normally be considered the other, to Western culture in an attempt to integrate the East as some product of the West that the Orient imitated. The integration of East and West, in the “Squire’s Tale,” occurs through actions or thoughts of similitude, one which denies the differences between the self and the other in order to turn the other into the self. Similitude, according to Ambrisco, occurs most prevalently in the Mongols “lewed” conceptions of the knight’s gifts.

Through normalizing these gifts as an allusion to some previous event, or art, of Western culture, the Squire is making the Mongol culture the self and the knight’s culture the other. This otherness is furthered because “these explicit comparisons and identifications nominally acknowledge Mongol difference but disavow that difference precisely at the moment of its potential articulation” (212). The paraphrasing of the knight’s words directly serves to differentiate him as the other, refusing him “full coherence or articulation” (213).As Ambrisco states, “the Squire’s reluctance to describe the Mongols comprises an instance of Hartog’s ‘the rule of the excluded middle,’ and its use in the tale is not accidental: it is an integral part of the way the Squire processes non-Christian cultures“ (214).

            This rule of the excluded middle, while overtly Europeanizing Mongol culture, also occurs in the tale’s treatment of women. Women are placed as the excluded middle, somewhere between men and the animals, as the only female character in the tale is Canacee and she is effectually a flat character. The Squire, by not using rhetorical devises, presents “a fantasy of linguistic competence and the dream of an immediate and unapologetic English translation” (216). The lack of rhetorical devices in part two of the tale professes the otherness of woman, “presenting itself as a more troubling form of otherness for the incorporative mechanics employed in the ‘Squire’s Tale’” (220). This allows for the “Squire’s Tale” to be constructed on a basis of privilege. The tale is not about the construction of “privileging West over East; it is about privileging the English language, about giving the English language the ability translate great distances and foreign languages” (219).

            Ambrisco's article, discerning the difference between the self and the other in the ”Squire’s Tale,” would make a great source for a paper on the other, possibly something comparing the other in the “Man of the Law’s Tale” and the “Squire’s Tale.” Correlations between the two tales, on the basis of the barbarity of the other, are easily formed, as the other in the “Man of the Law’s Tale,” in the form of the sultaness, displays an animosity toward Christians. Though this animosity or barbaric behavior does not take place in the Squire’s tale, the conceptions of the Mongol culture, as reported by explorers in the thirteenth century, certainly were barbaric. In this comparison of barbarism amongst the other, one could also survey the alienation of the other from Western culture and the prejudice of Western culture against the Eastern heathens. The comparisons of the feasts in the “ Man of the Law’s Tale” and the “Squire’s Tale,“ or even a comparison to “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” could benefit from the portrayal of the other in this article. Though the Green Knight was not from the Orient, he is definitely a form of the other in literature, set apart from the English courts and wielding supernatural powers, much like those of the knight’s gifts in the “Squire’s Tale.”

            This article would also prove to beneficial in a study of Chaucerian rhetoric, as this is the first time that a narrator inaccurately uses a rhetorical trope. A comparison of the Knight’s use of rhetoric to his son, the Squire’s use of rhetoric, and the ways of knowing that come out of this rhetoric could use this article as a source. The imitated rhetoric fashion of the Squire, as a false or idiosyncratically literal occupatio, could be compared to the Knight’s use of this trope. This could spawn a paper on the use of rhetoric in dealing with courtly love, or at least courtly occurrences, even referencing the “Man of the Law’s Tale” as another source for rhetoric in the attempt for courtly romance.—Jeff Judge, 3/30/05

Gaynor, Stephanie. “He Says, She Says: Subjectivity and the Discourse of the Other in the Prioress’s Portrait and Tale.” Medieval Encounters 5 (1999): 375-90.

            In her article, Gaynor considers the dynamics of Othering in the Prioress’s Tale. She determines that the Other defines the self, and that in the Prioress’ Tale, Prologue, and Portrait, “Chaucer describes and ventriloquizes a sexual other, who, in her Tale, demonizes a ‘racialized’ other” (376). She writes that the Prioress displaces her own Otherness by endowing the Jews of her tale with the very Othering qualities that she possesses: “sensuality, greed, bodiliness, proximity to filth, and their resistance to the Law” (376). In the Prioress's Portrait, writes Gaynor, Chaucer amplifies that which the narrator should not see, the Prioress' emphasis on dress and food (and eating habits, says Proverbs, are signs of "sexual excess"), or "gluttony and lust" (376). Gaynor finds that the Tale's portrait of Jews takes these negative potentialities and literalizes them in the extreme.

            Gaynor argues that “anti-Semitism may have enabled the discourse of women,” as it places women in a role of authority over the Jewish Other, allowing them to move out of the role of “colonized” Christian Other (378, 377). The sins of the Prioress become transferred in an extreme way to the Jews in an attempt to cleanse her of her sins and to place herself in a similar category as the innocent babes she speaks of in her Prologue.

            Gaynor cites incidents where the Prioress' authority is taken away and she becomes the Other in her own Tale. This occurs in the intrusive "quod she" on line 581, which "calls attention to the ways in which the position of the authorized Christian subject is only begrudgingly granted to females" (381). When the Prioress interrupts her own narrative, however, Gaynor believes her confident tale-telling abilities shine past the male tendency to "undermine her discourse" and confirms her place of authority over the Other in the Tale (381). Gaynor ends her article by stating, "To speak, to assume the position of a speaking subject, necessarily involves the use, the abuse of an other" (390).

            While I do not think Gaynor finds the Prioress' ability to gain authority in tale telling by persecuting the Other to be an excuse for her anti-Semitism, I am troubled by her final argument. I do not think that the Prioress, or any speaking subject, must abuse an Other in order to claim authority (especially if the speaker already has authority). While tales, both Canterbury and otherwise, almost always include protagonists and Othered antagonists and dehumanized flat characters (in the Canterbury Tales, often female characters), abusing the Other does not necessitate joining a discourse of hatred.

            For the abuse of an Other to be needed to enable the discourse of women is a scary thought, and one that I do not believe to be true. The Wife of Bath did not look to further Other an already Othered population. Instead, she attacked those who Other her. Discourses of change are possible; unfortunately, they are not always heard or accepted in the way that the continued discourse of hatred is.

            I like the idea of reading both the Prioress's and Wife of Bath's narratives as attempts to resist their Othered positions. However, I am not convinced that either is affective. While the Prioress establishes herself as privileged through her tale, she remains Othered within the Christian society. She may resist her state, but she does not affectively combat it, instead affirming her position as both self and Other. The Wife of Bath resists her position forcibly, and yet does not affect change. The tale tellers who follow her continue to present unequal male-female relationships, continue to exploit their female characters sexually. While the Wife of Bath may tear such stories from her husband's book, she does not remove them from societal consciousness. What is a woman to do?—Johanna Goldberg, 4/1/05

Travis, Peter W. “Chaucer’s Heliotropes and the Poetics of Metaphor.” Speculum, 72.2 (1997): 399-427.

            Travis’ article explores how Chaucer uses metaphor, specifically that of the heliotrope, in two different works: The Prologue to the “Legend of Good Women,” and the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” He begins by considering the Franklin’s plea of rhetorical ignorance in his Prologue, and using this passage to consider the varying attitudes Chaucer’s contemporaries had for the formal devices of poetry, especially rhetoric. Travis traces the debate over the use and functions of metaphors in the medieval literary tradition to Aristotle and Chaucer’s earlier European predecessors, including Aquinas and Alanus de Insulis. He also extensively surveys the heliotropic tradition in Western literature, in a highly philosophical discussion. There are two types of heliotropes:

Heliotropia was the medieval Latin name for a diaphanous gem to which lapidaries attributed the power not only of reflecting the sun’s light but also of generating its own light so that it was capable of rivaling, even occluding, the light of the sun. Heliotropium, on the other hand, was the medieval Latin name for a flowering plant […] that is unusually sympathetic to the rays of the sun, opening at dawn, bending in the sun’s direction throughout the day, and closing at night. (401).

            Travis looks at Chaucer’s poetic treatment of these phenomena as metaphors and “meta-metaphors” (401). After an extensive philosophical and historical argument, he explains how Chaucer employs Chaunticleer as a heliotrope (of the heliotropium variety) in “The Nun’s Priest Tale.” He aims to illustrate that “it is the metaphor’s […] most mysterious behavior, the arc of its back-and-forth motion through analogical space, that proves to be the central focus of Chaucer’s gaze” (411). He analyzes the comparisons used in the description of this extraordinary bird, which is explicitly linked to the sun, to show how they blur the lines between qualities of humanity and “chickenness” (423). Thus, he argues that Chaucer is trying to engage his audience in a broader philosophical debate by creating a character embodying “six dimensions of […] metaphoricity -- his iconicity, semantic liminality, semiotic colors, self-glorification, authorial self-naming, and solar wisdom,” which leads to “Chauntecleer’s final and most important quality as Chaucer’s signature heliotrope: his categorical humanity” (420). He argues that by posing a comparison between human and animal, Chaucer is asking his readers to not only debate the difference between them -- to debate if there are differences between them -- but also to argue that whether “the metaphor of articulate animals relate[s] in any proper way to reality” (424). He then quickly demonstrates that the answer to this question Chaucer wishes to convey is a resounding ‘yes.’ Metaphors build upon each other, and are the only way we can know the world. Thus, Travis says, Chaucer uses the heliotrope of Chauntecleer to reclaim the exalted status of metaphors as an important ways of seeing the truth of the world, and therefore integral to rhetoric and poetry (425-7).

            Travis’ article is extremely thorough, and manages to prove a very demanding philosophical argument. It is primarily a deconstructionist reading of the tale, and does draw heavily on the theory of Derrida. Because of the nature of his argument (and grounding theory), Travis’ logic gets a bit recursive at times. Much of the piece is extremely abstract, dealing with various definitions of metaphors, and the philosophical import of metaphorical traditions. Along the way, there are some clever insights -- the “authorial self-naming” of “CHAUnteCleER,” the bird which is Chaucer’s metaphor for poets as one who “sings clearly,” which accords with the French heliotropic tradition, the exploration of the triple heliotrope in “Legend of Good Women,” and the parallels between Chaucer’s use of this rhetorical device and the Pearl poet’s (419, 413-4, 413). However, there is far more philosophical survey in this piece than literary criticism. It is not until page 411 that Travis specifically considers “Chaucer’s Heliotropes,” the titular concern of the paper. Despite this, Travis does cover those metaphors, once he has established his theory and history, in a great deal of depth, and raises some intriguing questions in his analysis.

            Travis’ reading of Chauntecleer is interesting in several ways. It explicitly raises many questions about the nature and use of metaphors, and suggests more. While Travis focuses on a specific type of metaphor in Chaucer’s work, his ideas could be abstracted to track different instances of metaphors -- or nearly any other poetic or rhetorical device -- within the tales. A specific narrator’s use, misuse, or neglect of such devices might, read in the way Travis is suggesting, say a lot about their views of the world. Certainly several of the pilgrims, including the Franklin, whom Travis briefly considers in his introduction, make explicit references to poetics and rhetoric. The Host instructs the Clerk not to forget his audience and overload his tale with fancy language and rhetoric, and the Wife of Bath begins by expressly denouncing written, learned “auctoritee.” If certain devices are used consistently throughout tales, it might be possible to do a deconstructionist reading of the “grounding ideals” of Chaucer’s world -- the metaphors he is unable to envision his world without, and makes common to every pilgrim. And, as much of Travis’ argument is based in the literary tradition Chaucer was probably aware of, and Chaucer draws from various and sundry sources for his tales, a detailed comparison between the poetic devices and metaphors used in the original sources and in Chaucer’s version might also reveal some interesting philosophical insights. If, as Travis suggests, metaphors are the way in which we understand the world, then understanding Chaucer’s use of them is essential to understanding The Canterbury Tales. ~Jessie Dixon, 4/1/05

Daileader, Celia R. "The Thopas-Melibee Sequence and the Defeat of Antifeminism." Chaucer Review. 29:1 (1994) 26-39.

            Celia Daileader compares in her article, “The Thopas-Melibee Sequence and the Defeat of Antifeminism,” that women’s silenced voices are heard in The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale as well as the Tale of Melibee.  Throughout the article Daileader compares the prominent women in the two tales.  Even though Dame Prudence and Dame Alice are dissimilar women (one being quiet and reserved and the other being loud and flamboyant) they share similar stories and beliefs.  Dame Prudence and Dame Alice share allegorized themes with feminist concerns throughout both of their tales.  Both women are concerned that women are viewed as powerless as well as voiceless.  In Dame Alice’s there is a central problem, an action called rape, and in Dame Prudence’s a female body is violated.  Both tales “challenge the patristic injunction against a woman’s counsel also foreground the issue with the violation of a female body” (26).  Furthermore, Daileader draws upon Carolyn Dinshaw’s opinion that Chaucer dissects “gendered hermeneutic” ideologies by denying women a voice (26).  Daileader addresses the problems regarding Dame Alice as being the mistreatment of women’s speech and their bodies under “patriarchial ‘auctoritee,’” which are eventually resolved in the “Thopas-Melibee sequence, by the very ‘auctoritee’ who gives her a voice” (26).  It is evident that Chaucer sees a concern with feminine discourse and therefore creates two outspoken women characters on issues of misogyny.

            Daileader proclaims that “In Sir Thopas he uses his persona within the text to undermine his ‘auctoritee’” thus clearing a path for Dame Prudence’s “Tour De Force.”  It is here where the Thopas-Melibee Tale echoes the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale but allows Chaucer to challenge “anti-feminist patristic tradition” and the “concept of a unified patriarchial authority” (27).  Melibee is “stylistically plain” but also rhetorically complex (28).  The tale of Melibee and the Wife of Bath’s tale both begin with an allegorized rape.  According to Daileader, the violence committed against Sophie is considered a rape due to the violation of her body.  Furthermore, this act against her illustrates the inferiority of women within a male society.  Due to the injuries to Sophie’s five senses, she experiences what it is to be a silenced female.  Her mother, Prudence, and Dame Alice in the Wife of Bath are fighting against this silencing of females.  In the end, Prudence stands up for her daughter and speaks for her.  Daileader argues that by Prudence speaking in opposition to the violence acted upon her daughter, she is projecting her voice against her felt inferiority.  Not only are her feminist views strong, but also her Christian beliefs.  Due to these strong Christian beliefs, she believes that violence will not be the solver of any malice.  On the other hand, Sophie’s father, Melibeus, initially thinks that gaining vengeance on the perpetrators is what he should do.  Prudence, however, views their daughter’s situation differently and tries to convince her husband to heed her words of nonviolence.  By the end of the tale Melibeus listens to Prudence’s wisdom and adheres to her nonviolence rhetoric.

            Daileader states, “Chaucer shows his heroines to be well aware of this injustice, but also gives them voices to deny it” (35).  Prudence and Alice speak against what society wishes them to be and they try to define themselves.  The difference between Prudence’s and Alice’s argument, Daileader suggests, is that Prudence’s “is far more cumbersome” and less entertaining but is more effective and respectable (36).  Finally, the last similarity Daileader draws is the fact that in both The Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Tale of Melibee male characters are transformed in the end because of women.

            It is interesting that Daileader found so many similarities between the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale and the Tale of Melibee.  The inner mind of these two initially voiceless characters is very intriguing.  It can be argued that in the Wife of Bath’s Tale the hag transforms herself into a beautiful woman merely because that is what the knight wanted.  The central problems, according to this article, in both tales are rape.  Therefore, should a rapist be awarded a beautiful wife without punishment?  Even though Chaucer is portrayed to be some what advocating of women’s voices, why is it that the girl who gets raped in the Wife of Bath’s Tale and Sophie in Melibee are forgotten and not mentioned towards the end of their tales?  These are all very intriguing questions that the article allows one to think about. ~Tara Haag 4/1/05

Green, Donald C.  "The Semantics of Power: 'Maistrie' and 'Soveraynetee' in 'The Canterbury Tales.'" Modern Philology.  84:1 (1986) 18-23.

        This article, like many others, traces explicit and implicit meanings of words relating to dominance and subordinance in The Canterbury Tales.  The most evident tales in which the dominance/subordinanace dichotomy is operating are the Clerk's Tale and the Wife of Bath's Tale.  He draws a linguistic parallel between the use of 'governance'
in the end of the Wife's Tale and the Clerk's response to Harry's request to tell a tale.  This linguistic similarity is, according to Green, an explicit response to the Wife.  This linguistic parallel serves to strengthen the Clerk's undoubted psychological need to
respond to the Wife's harsh characterization of Clerks in general. Green then continues by referencing the importance of the term 'assent' in the Clerk's Tale.  He draws a parallel between Griselda's assent and the Clerk's assent, saying, "…there is a close parallel
between the Clerk's agreeing to abide by the rules of the game established at the Tabard Inn and Griselda's earnest agreement to live according to the rules established by Walter at their betrothal," (19).  While true that agreeing to the rules of the tale telling game
requires assent to a game largely undefined, I do not see how this parallel functions beyond a purely superficial level.  Every pilgrim, by his logic, would fit that cast.  He uses the same logic to approach Walter's assent to the 'People's' request and the 'People's' assent to his choice.
        Green then argues that the world of The Clerk's Tale operates under a strict set of morality.  He argues, "…the harshness of Walter's treatment of Griselda is criticized, but his sovereignty, his right to dominate, is never challenged," (18).  Similarly, the townspeople never question Walter's legitimacy or his right to rule, they merely make suggestions based on their own anxieties, for which Walter's role requires him to respond.  Similarly, Griselda, as a wife, acts according to her role as defined by her assent to Walter's betrothal request.  He says, "In short, all would seem to agree that sovereignty
is inherent in certain roles, and that it reflects the divine order," (21).  He then argues that the real differences between the tales told by the Clerk and the Wife have to do with their themes: he says that the knight submits to the Hag's 'love', rather than her role as a
spouse.  The tale the Wife tells, therefore, concerns a more courtly love, whereas the Clerk's concerns marital love.  The wife acquires her power by right (which is where Walter derives his power over both Griselda and the townspeople) but by guile and maistree.
        This article, while short, concerns many of the terms whose definitions are not clearly understood today.  Terms like assent, maistree, governance, etc., which later critics like Finnegan (in his "'She Should Have Said No to Walter': Griselda's Promise in the Clerk's Tale.") explore in more depth.  This is a good introductory piece to the problems of understanding medieval linguistics, and draws some good conclusions concerning the Wife and the Clerk.—Joe Turner, 4/1/05

Ashton, Gail.  “Her father’ daughter: the re-alignment of father-daughter kinship in three  romance tales.”  Chaucer Review (34:4) 2000, 416-27.

            Ashton’s article compares aspects of family in the three versions of the Christian romance story of Constance: Chaucer’s The Man of Law’s Tale, Gower’s The Tale of Constance in Confessio Amantis, and Thomas le Chestre’s lai Emare. 

            She begins by considering Constance’s role as the exiled daughter and the ambiguity of her character. She concentrates on the dynamics of family and marriage laws presented in each version, specifically the nature of Constance’s relationship with her father and the notions of daughterhood and motherhood that she represents.  The former is portrayed in all three versions as a venerable position, acting as the “privileged reproductive link between father and son” (Ashton 417); in other words, a means for a family’s lineage to exist and prosper.  Constance as the daughter, however, serves very little purpose in this way and, being expendable, simply becomes male property, both to her father’s demands and her husband’s sexual desires.  This dual role is compounded by the “exile and return” motif, which marks Constance’s inevitable reunion with her husband and father.  Ashton suggests that this course of action allows Constance to renegotiate her position within both families, sealing and re-establishing them as “functional, ordered group(s)” (Ashton 421).  These reunions, of course, do not occur without establishing Constance as a mother, and so we have Maurice, soon to be crowned as Emperor Mauricius.  In her article “The father’s house and the daughter in it: the structures of western culture’s daughter-father relationship”, Lynda Boose argues that a daughter is only to reach significant status when she reenters her father’s household as a stable and prosperous example of motherhood, a means to further the bloodline.  Constance, however, is able to acknowledge her positions and retain order in society by returning as a forgiving Christian wife and a son—eventually heir—in arms, hence guaranteeing the stability and masculine rule of her father’s kingdom.

            Ashton also chooses to focus on the shifting characteristics of Constance.  She equates her identity in The Man of Law’s Tale with an absence of character, a protagonist who is seen for her virtue, but whose female voice is almost never heard.  This similar role is seen in Gower’s and le Chestre’s versions, with a focus on the way Constance is controlled by the patriarchy of Rome, Syria and Northumberland.  However, in each version, it ultimately becomes Constance’s choice to withhold her identity throughout her travels, allowing her to “pass through the surface layer of narration” and become the ‘every-Christian’ woman (Ashton 420).  In Confessio Amantis, she even goes as far as to seemingly deny her birthplace and daughterhood in responding to her uncle’s basic question of identity—what is your name?  “‘Mi name is Couste,’ sche him seide” (Gower 1163).  Her vagueness here, Ashton suggests, works more as an example of her allegiance to her status as another man’s “wife”, rather than a bitter rejection of her father.  Indeed, in The Man of Law’s Tale, Custance identifies herself as her father’s property, “youre yonge child Custance,” and recognizing his power as Emperor by calling him “fader” (1105-13).               

            Chaucer reshapes his source material and “feminizes” his Custance to connect inextricably the story of the ideal Christian life with that of a woman, for it is only those qualities associated with the feminine in the tale—prayer, faith, helplessness in the hands of God, passivity, submission—which can for the purposes of the tale depict Christian faithfulness.  It seems appropriate then for Chaucer and The Man of Law to exclude any overt mention of an incestuous relationship between Constance and her father, which la Chestre’s lai Emare does include as the reason for Emare’s exile.  When she refuses his marriage proposal, her immediate fear is their own reputation as the monastic family and his “obligation to care for her and her honor…” as well as a “…duty to the community” (Ashton 423).  Because incest is a social taboo, the Christian concern therefore must be focused on the good of society, not the victim herself.  The article also brings up the motif of the “enchanted” robe in Emare, one that does not appear in Chaucer’s or Gower’s version.  Although the robe has been interpreted very differently—as the very power of sexuality, as well as an image of order—Ashton suggests it takes on meaning as “the repositioning of the daughter-father role” and can be seen by characters within the work as a physical beacon of her virtue (Ashton 425).  It also functions as stabilizer through Emare’s transition from coveted daughter to wife to mother to the combination of the three.  After she successfully reclaims her position in both households, the robe is no longer necessary since she has proved herself spiritually pure and important to the progression of her family.          

Mitchell, J. Allan. "Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and the Question of Ethical Monstrosity." Studies in Philology 102 (2005): 1-26.

            Mitchell begins by questioning the portrayal and reception of Griselda and of the morality of the “Clerk’s Tale.” He argues that “the way in which instability can be a part of moral deliberation itself, is indeed the general condition of moral deliberation Chaucer thrusts upon his audience” (3-4). Mitchell then moves into a discussion of whether the tale is a parable or a parody, taking into consideration New Testament and philosophic teachings, and concluding that “Chaucer incorporates parody into a serious moral parable” (6).

            Mitchell questions the “virtuous suffraunce” in the tale, claiming that “the explicit moral itself gives rise to the dilemmatic,” as the tale does not answer the question of “how to practice the moral value of patience” (7). He touches upon how other pilgrims (the Host and the Merchant) view the patience of Griselda, arguing that in mentioning the responses of others, Chaucer “is highlighting a potentiality readers cannot ignore when they attempt to assess the morality of the Clerk’s Tale” (9).

            What I found to be the most intriguing question of the article is whether Griselda “sets a negative or positive example” (12). Mitchell assesses Griselda’s “moral responsibility” and argues that, of her own volition, she goes “further than what is asked of her” when making her prenuptial agreement (13). Not only does she consent to what Walter requests, but she also agrees never to disobey him in thought or deed, which Mitchell argues indicates that she “voluntarily and indeed eagerly submits to an extent [Walter] does not actually require” (13). Her example shows, according to Mitchell, that wives of the Clerk’s time are better than Griselda, for they “would not consent to idolatry or homicide” (15). 

            In concluding the article, Mitchell determines that the tale’s portrayal of “the monstrous as moral” causes the tale’s morality to remain questionable to the end. Mitchell argues that this “is a call to responsibility . . . insofar as any ambiguity that audiences experience can be an inducement, instead of an obstacle to ethical deliberation” (18-19). Griselda plays a large part in creating such ambiguity as “the monster that haunts our reception of the moral tale” (25).

            Mitchell’s argument troubles me in how close it comes to giving me cause to blame the victim. According to Mitchell, Griselda sets the terms for Walter’s abuse of her, and in abusing her, Walter merely tests the boundaries that she has set for herself. Still, Griselda does not bring about the abuse, nor does she ask Walter to abuse her even as she says she will put up with it. And while Griselda’s stoicism is similar to Job’s, Walter is neither G-d nor an agent of G-d.

            The abuse of Griselda and that of Cecelia is worth comparing here. Cecilia accepts the tortures imposed upon her knowing that G-d will provide in the end because her tortures were brought on by her righteous Christian action. It seems that Griselda has no such clear assurance. She is not, in the end, even shown to be the perfect Christian wife, as her character remains as ambiguous as the tale’s morality itself. What will such suffering bring to Griselda? These two examples show that acceptance of pain does not a martyr make.

            While the Merchant and the Host may want their wives to be more like Griselda, and while all comes out happily in the end, the problem of Griselda’s suffering remains. When read as Mitchell reads the tale, Chaucer finds such abuse unnecessary. Perhaps, then, the reader should give additional consideration to the arguments presented by the Wife of Bath and even the ignored pleas of Emelye. Yet both these women must make their desires known; if they want to live by their rules, they must impose their will upon their husbands and husbands to be (something that Emelye is unable to do).

            What of the women who can compromise? Even Dorigen yields to the will of her husband in the end in such a way that causes her grief, while Prudence’s arguments are not heard until the last pages of the enormously long “Tale of Melibee.” Pertelote’s wisdom proves incorrect in the “Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Thus, even women in more equal relationships are seriously flawed. The only consoling part of all of this is that the men are not much better.--Johanna Goldberg, 4/22/05

Norsworthy, Scott. “Hard lords and bad food-service in the Monk’s Tale.” Journal of English and Germanic Philology. 100:3 (2001) 313-332. 

            Norsworthy focuses on the Monk’s somewhat ambiguous identity within the frame of his role as a cellarer, “the overseer of the service of meals in the refectory.  The article concentrates on the duties of the position and how this pertains to Chaucer’s portrait of Daun Piers.  It then shifts to the Monk’s Tale itself and explains what particular sections of the tale reveal about its teller, using the Nebuchadnezzar-Belshazzar tradition of feast and the starvation of “Erl Hugelyn of Pyze” (2407) in prison to support the connection between food and leadership.  The close of the article looks forward to the Nun’s Priest Prologue and Tale and pinpoints medieval cellarers, and perhaps Daun Piers, as metaphorical cannibals, eating the “povre” alive with taxes, cruel demands and neglect.

            Norsworthy begins within the Monk’s Prologue and the relationship that is formed between Daun Piers and Harry Bailey.  It is Harry’s assertions that establish the Monk’s potential position at the abbey as “som worthy sexteyn, or some celerer” (1936).  Both positions involved the supervision of food-service within the church and the naming of these offices, Norsworthy writes, is all the more attractive in light of the imagery which is prevalent in the Monk’s portrait in the General Prologue.  Like the Summoner’s Tale, there is anticlerical sentiment that surrounds the Monk in regards to his gluttony that his position allows him.  The emphasis on food and drink within the Tale can then be seen as an important factor, in terms of power positions that inevitably collapse and the Monk’s own fears of falling into disfavor because his abuse of monastic power.  A reoccurring source in Norsworthy’s article is The Rule of St. Benedict which outlines an entire chapter about the expectations the church had for cellarers, comparing a good cellarer as “the universal provider” and an important facet to the social functioning of the monastery.  It also exercised some cautions, most notably cautions against excess in eating and causing the congregation to be unhappy, which Daun Piers obviously excels at. 

            The Monk’s retelling of Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar comes shortly after his introduction of the similar falls of Lucifer and Adam, setting both Babylonian stories against the backdrop of Hell.  Making the gourmand connection here, The Monk mentions at several points of the blasphemous food-service at Belshazzar’s feast and, more specifically, the defilement of the sacred vessels which the Monk, as a cellarer, would be wholly responsible for.  Norsworthy suggests this as further evidence of the tale, and many that follow, not as cautionary anecdotes about the disastrous consequences of unlawful eating and drinking, but the Monk’s own indifference in terms of such habits.  His moral impurity can be noted in respect to his disregard for obligations to the church, especially in the handling of sacred utensils and food. 

            Daun Piers version of the story of Ugolina of Pisa focuses on the imprisoned, starving father who tries to eat his own arms while his equally hungry children beg him to eat them.  The monk also comments on the quantity and quality of the prison food that they are soon denied, which is itself “povre and bade” (2422), suggesting his own responsibilities for the spiritual and physical nourishment of the congregation, which included prisoners, both as a father-figure and a man of God.  Norsworthy also uses this passage to describe a rule that Benedict insists that the Monk is breaking.  Through his unrelenting series of haphazardly told stories of murder and betrayal, he is going against the wishes of both Harry, who calls upon the Monk to “be myrie of cheere” (1924), and the church, which forbids cellarers to sadden the congregation.  When his tales of misery come to a close and he refuses to speak of hunting or anything cheerful, he is denying “a good word” which Benedict thinks to be an integral aspect of food-service.  His unwillingness to cooperate in pleasing the pilgrimage with his words then “suggest a multi-faceted failure to provide daily bread in every medieval sense, as physical sustenance, the body of Christ, and sacred text” (Norsworthy 327). 

            Norsworthy concludes his article with an analysis of tyranny, specifically in terms of corporeal mutilation and torture, and the cannibalistic relationship that exists between master and servant.  Cellarers were most often responsible for contracting massive debts, “waging bureaucratic war with the sacrist, and struggled mightily to make townspeople pay customary rents, taxes, and services” (Norsworthy 322).  Norsworthy then refers to a German miscellany copied in the fifteenth century: “There is an exemplum of a certain old woman who said to a certain monk, ‘My lord, you do not eat cow’s meat but you eat live human beings because of the taxes you exact from the poor.’”  This poor old woman can then be seen in the introduction to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, her poverty evident by her meager diet and what has been unfairly taken away from her.  Norsworthy finally elaborates on the connection between Daun Piers and the clever fox, similarly to the one that follows in the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, in that he succeeds in boring his audience, even to the point where Harry Bailley begins to doze off to sleep, so that he can “eat them”.  The words of the Host and this parallel suggest that the Monk is not someone that can be wholly trusted when his hidden passions include “a lust for hunting, a taste for fowl, and a mind to serve nothing but dull fare” (332).

            At points in this article, new and interesting connections are made between what we perceive the Monk to “be” and what Chaucer’s audience would already suspect about Daun Piers.  There are also many beneficial aspects in terms of the specificities regarding the monastic duties of cellarers, as well as the historical relevance of the Monk’s stories of “sentence”.  Norsworthy emphasizes the relationship between the supposed “providers” and the “sondry folke” in such a way, that this would prove very helpful in a dissection of the clerical structure of medieval England and the repercussions immoral practices had on the church. ~Scott Sell 4/22/05

Johnson, Lynn Staley. “Chaucer’s Tale of the Second Nun and the Strategies of Dissent.” Studies in Philology 89.3 (1992): 314-33.

            Johnson’s article shows that the “Second Nun’s Tale” portrays Cecilia’s life as a martyr, while also describing other elements of the Prologue and Tale.  Chaucer’s emphasis upon “enlightenment, purity, ‘bisynesse,’ and creative fruitfulness,” is further intensified (314).  Both present a theme that every Christian can find usefulness in conversion as well as marriage.  By pairing Cecilia’s story with the “Canon’s Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale,” Christians are able to see the contradiction of marriage as well as in conversion, which implicitly implies the right and wrong way to be a Christian.  Johnson explains that through the Tale Chaucer is able to present and mediate problems that ultimately reveal status and authority of the early Church while using Cecilia as the forefront figure.  Chaucer is able to use the Second Nun’s story to illustrate not only the life of a martyr but also the early existence of the Christian Church.

            The Prologue and Tale are thought to be written between 1373 and 1386, which is known as the “decade of conflict” (319).  During this time the church went through a separation, where there were two popes, one in England and one in France.  Additionally, there was political and social unrest and “anticlericalism” at the time as well (317).  The legend of Saint Cecilia, written by Chaucer, was evidently written during or thereafter the decade of conflict.  Chaucer’s version reveals similar concerns for the status and moral authority of the Church during this time period.  This story also accounts for Chaucer’s view of Saint Cecilia’s martyrdom as somewhat of a political act as well, especially since his own life during this period was very politically and socially involved

            The ideals of virginity, devotion, confrontation of authority, courage, martyrdom and death are conventions of the early Church, which are all represented through the story of Cecilia.  Similar to other stories of the time, Cecilia displays the ideal female chastity and sanctity, which allow her to defy figures of secular and familial authority and become radical, universal emblems of female strength.  Additionally, the story illustrates social and religious restructuring, which is what makes the story of Cecilia slightly different than other works of the time.  Cecilia offers a complete reversal of accepted social norms, for example, what Johnson explains as domination of her husband in her marriage.  Similarly, however, Cecilia threatens male authority like the Wife of Bath, giving power to these women.  Cecilia challenges male authority differently by offering a way to gain sovereignty without sexually manipulating her husband. 

            Johnson goes on to explain that Chaucer uses two sources, Golden Legend and the Franciscan abridgment, of Cecilia’s legend for his own version of the translation.  He writes the story in order to highlight the martyr herself.  In Chaucer’s interpretation of Cecilia’s legend, he portrays her as an even stronger character and places her as the spokesperson for Christianity.  Chaucer omits the fact that in the Golden Legend Cecilia commends her fears to God before her marriage.  And, Chaucer follows the Franciscan abridgment where speeches by Valerian and Tiburce are not included.  It seems that Chaucer removed anything that would distract the audience from Cecilia’s characteristics that link her to the early church and Christ.  Johnson states “That Chaucer recognized the problematic levels of reality mediated by his translation [which] is underlined by his decision to include it in the Canterbury book” (331).  In the “Second Nun’s Tale,” Cecilia offers a redefinition of human relationships through her aggressiveness and preaching.  In the end, it is important to remember that there is not just one message being posed through Cecilia in the “Second Nun’s Tale.”

        This article allowed me to consider Cecilia as more than just a martyr figure but also as a representation of social and political reforms of the time.  The comparison with the “Canon’s Yeoman Tale” also furthered my understanding of the opposite effects that the two tales have on one another, which makes sense that the Yeoman tale proceeds the Second Nun.  Furthermore, Johnson’s comparison between Cecilia and the Wife of Bath illustrates the different forms of female power within the Canterbury Tales.  By changing Cecilia’s views on gaining authority from that of the Wife of Bath’s, Chaucer was again highlighting Cecilia’s character by giving her a voice through her actions of purity and sanctity. ~Tara Haag 4/22/05

Astell, Ann W. “Nietzsche, Chaucer, and the Sacrifice of Art.” Chaucer Review 39:3 (2005): 323-40.

            Focusing on the Manciple’s Tale, Astell views “Chaucerian literature itself as a kind of critical theory that offers in its antimythic, antisacrifical stance a sophisticated rejoinder ... to Nietzsche’s mythic sacrificial aesthetics” (324). Her differentiation between the mythic and antimythic, sacrificial and antisacrificial, results from the Nietzschean concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, characters which Chaucer’s Manciple’s Tale invoke and personify. The Apollonian, which Astell equates to tales with romantic themes, and the Dionysian, which Astell equates to fabliau, sharply contrast one another throughout the other tales, but work actively with one another in the Manciple’s Tale.

            This distinction between the Apollonian and the Dionysian creates a distinction between art and nature. Astell believes that each God attempts to control some realm of art, or nature, as art is mimetic of nature. Furthermore, she believes that “the replacement of Dionysos (in the prologue) by Apollo (in the tale) shows the two gods of art to be mimetic in their rivalry to the point of interchangeability” (325). The tale even demonstrates a degree of interchangeability, as “Apollo enters the Manciple’s Tale as a romance hero,... but the tale’s plot casts him as a cuckold, the deceived husband of a fabliau” (325-6). This presents the tale as a product of earlier tales, one which refutes the previous teller’s attempts to demean each other and ends up as a “double sacrifice” (325). Astell believes this “double sacrifice” is “the destruction of art and the exile of the truth-teller as a scapegoat” (325). She also believes that the sacrifice of the truth teller as a scapegoat attempts to resolve the tale’s tension with the pilgrim audience. By metaphorically casting the Cook as Dionysus, or Apollo, the Manciple casts himself as the crow, the truth-teller exiled because he “spoke ... an unwelcome truth” (328-9). As a “god of moderation,” Apollo recognizes that he must counteract his self-conscious omniscience with Dionysian forgetfulness.

            Using the Nietzschean first principle, Astell separates Nietzsche’s mythical violent sacrifice with Chaucer’s antimythic antisacrifice. The wine offered to the Cook, in the prologue, acts as a sacrifice to Dionysus while “ the slaughter of Apollo’s wife, the breaking of his harp, and the exile of the crow are all sacrifices offered by Apollo to his own honor” (327). Apollo’s sacrifice functions to isolate himself from art in the same way that the Dionysian sacrifice functions to isolate the individual from nature, making the Cook unthinking and forgetful. Apollo’s sacrifice, as a violent one, first destroys his muse (his wife) and his art (his instruments) then finds a non-violent sacrifice by exiling the bird. Through turning the crow’s truth into a lie, Apollo attempts to maintain the “fair illusion” of his wife’s fidelity, the same way that the pilgrims attempt to maintain the “fair illusion” of their tale telling motivations, or the innocence of their art (329, 332).

            This fair illusion, on the part of Apollo, occurs because of his “aristocratic Nietzschean power to see and to name things as he wills, in accord with his illusions” (330). Therefore, for Apollo, his construction of moral good happens to be what is good for him .Astell then derives that the moral of the Manciple’s Tale is that “the speaker of truth will suffer for the moral and psychological confusions of his hearers” (332). The sacrifice of the crow separates “art from truth, aesthetics from ethics” (332-3). Through denying truth in the Manciple’s Tale, Chaucer is able to utilize truth in the Parson’s Tale. The Nietzschean denial of individuality contrasts the Chaucerian “communal experience that preserves ... the ‘I’ of the individual in ethical terms” (336). This denial of truth, in the Manciple’s Tale, and the utilization of truth, in the Parson’s Tale, allows for Chaucer’s retraction to be viewed as a humble sanctification of his true religious devotion. For Astell, the Manciple’s Tale, paired with the Parson’s Tale, creates a polar view of man’s relation to both art and to God. The sacrifice of art serves to shatter the mimesis nature by art and pays homage to God, as not art could ever recapture the beauty that he created.

            This article would prove useful in a paper contrasting fabliau with romance, as the fabliau embody a Dionysian morality and romance embodies an Apollonian morality. Through this, one could examine how the Dionysian and Apollonian, in the “Saint’s lives” tales, is penitential to God. Looking at the fabliau stereotype of the cuckolded husband, or of man’s unease toward marraige (JOE), one could use this article to show how the Dionysian is at work in times of uncertainty, as forgetfulness produces doubts and fear within and individual. One could also examine the romances, for example the Knight’s Tale, to see how the Apollonian presents itself as a product of the individual’s devotion to God. The Knight’s Tale’s mention of Apollo serves as a good starting place for examination, though the Apollonian and Dionysian do present themselves in Christian tales.

            One could also use this article in a paper analyzing Chaucer’s presentation of art and nature in the Canterbury Tales. This could examine the tale telling process as a whole and the reactions, and tales, of pilgrims in an attempt to debase other pilgrims. This paper, however, could tie in with one contrasting Chaucer’s use of fabliau and romance. The nature presented in Merchant’s Tale, Squire’s Tale, or Nun’s Priest’s Tale could be analyzed in order to determine whether Chaucer is portraying nature truthfully or untruthfully and how this reflects the Apollonian or Dionysian morality.—Jeff Judge, 4/22/05

Dugas, Don-John. “The Legitimization of Royal Power in Chaucer’s ‘Man of Law’s Tale’,” Modern Philology, 95.1 (1997), 27-43.

            Dugas begins his article by pointing out that the vast majority of criticism of the “Man of Law’s Tale” focuses on the role of Custance. He intends to look at another dimension of the story -- the tale as a “ ‘plot of thought’” (27). His argument is that Chaucer’s Man of Law is a royalist who uses the relatively innocuous genre of pseudo-saint’s life “as a subtle attempt by the teller to uphold kingly authority and privilege in the face of serious challenges and at a time when such advocacy could have mortal consequences” (28). To prove this, Dugas has to lay quite a bit of groundwork. He first surveys the Western tradition of translatio imperii, the creative historiography rulers back to the ancient Greeks and Romans engaged in whereby their right to power is said to have come from their descent from the great heroes of the past, who themselves were descended of the gods. He explains this by noting several early English chroniclers’ assertions that Britain was settled by Brutus, a descendent of the Trojans, just as Rome was settled by Aeneas, whose mother was the goddess Venus. He notes that English monarchs through the Tudor age used this tradition to establish their claims to the throne, hiring historians to link them with the legendary King Arthur. Dugas then considers the concept of “virtuous kingship” (31). He notes that Chaucer departs the farthest from his sources in the courtroom scenes with Alla, establishing him by the introduction of the “Britoun book, written with Evaungiles,” to be a righteous pagan who needs only the testimony of Custance to become Christian in name as well as fact (31-32). Dugas notes that there is a tradition of Western authors treating certain historical personages as precursors to Christianity, who embodied all of its precepts, yet had the misfortune to live before the coming of Christ (33). He then more closely analyzes the implication of the inclusion of a book containing Christian gospels in the hands of a pagan king. He sees its purpose, to establish Alla’s virtue and legitimacy as a ruler, as a theme repeated in the purpose of Maurice, Alla and Custance’s son. Through Alla’s sense and virtue and Custance’s Christianity and royal claim through her father, Maurice is made the next emperor of Rome (33). Thus, “the Man of Law’s retelling of this tale depicts a clear, legal, Christian succession. Such quasi-historical narrative is consistent with the practice of medieval courtly poets, historiographers, and lawmakers who refined and codified the divine origins and clear succession that are at the heart of translatio imperii” (38). Dugas then analyzes how similar rhetorical moves were made by both sides -- but especially among the royalists, among whom he would number Chaucer and his fictional lawyer -- in the struggle for power between Richard II and his rebelling nobles. The author even sees parallels between Richard and Maurice. Therefore, he concludes, “by eliding the historical and the fictional, the Man of Law assures his audience that at the heart of the (largely unknown) Anglo-Saxon past is a proper, ‘instinctive’ Christianity, a stable marriage, a legitimate heir who is crowned emperor, and a secure aristocratic lineage that returns to England symbolically in the form of Christianity” (42).

            Dugas’ argument is complex, and covers a lot of ground. The sections on the tradition of translatio imperii and the Britoun Book were well laid out, managing to give the necessary amount of background information without sacrificing attention to his application of those ideas extremely nicely. He firmly establishes Chaucer’s work within the traditions and identifies where and why he makes his departures from them. For these areas, the arguments are easy to follow, and quite logically sound. For the section on virtuous kings, there seems to be a bit of a leap between establishing Alla as an example of this tradition and the importance of his son for England. Dugas does attempt to deal with this issue, explicitly stating that such a disconnect apparently exists, but his resolution is not entirely convincing. He seems to want Maurice to play too many roles: Richard II in England, and Charlemagne in Rome. The latter role, he says, accounts for the transition between Alla and the contemporary, Christian, English monarch. He does show that there are some parallels between Maurice and the first Holy Roman Emperor (primarily that both are crowned by popes), but how this relates at all to the contemporary British political system -- or its recent past -- is left a bit hazy. This gap is important, because the whole of the translatio imperii tradition depends on the ability to establish a direct line of descent. If Maurice goes to Rome never to return, crown or no crown, he is of little use to the Man of Law in trying to deal with the current English predicament, even allegorically.

            This thesis certainly has important implications for the relationship of the Man of Law’s character to his tale. The two seem a bit incongruous otherwise. If Dugas is right, is the Man of Law the only character with a political agenda? And what would motivate the Man of Law to tell such a tale, considering his audience? If he is trying to make a political statement, albeit in a veiled way, what effect does he think (or hope) it will have on such a mixed group, including women, peasants, and clergy -- groups which are supposed at least in theory to be removed from the affairs of princes? His moral -- especially through the impressive invocation of translatio imperii -- may be intended to awe some of the peasants back into their proper places, and would likely find favor with the Knight -- whose Theseus is very similar to Alla, especially as an example of the virtuous pagan king. But if they truly understood the point he is trying to make, certainly some of the pilgrims would object. Given the changing economic and political situations of the era, the guildsmen might have taken issue with the Man of Law’s thesis. Perhaps their lack of interjection (at any point) may indicate either that Dugas is incorrect, or that his theory holds, but the guildsmen failed to understand the true import of the tale, so cleverly was it disguised. And the Wife of Bath, railing against authority (and eager to hear her own voice), might well have jumped in, if only to annoy the men who thought women should stay away from politics. Dugas’ theory raises several interesting lines of interpretive inquiry, although it seems that if Chaucer was using the tale in this way, it was to vent either his frustration at the challenges to Richard II or the Man of Law’s, as the argument does not initially appear to be taken up by other tellers. If further examination concludes that only the Man of Law is concerned with this issue, it might indicate that his tale is in some sense a failure, because it does not manage to fully engage its audience. ~Jessie Dixon, 4/22/05

Georgiana, Linda.  “The Clerk’s Tale and the Grammar of Assent.”  Speculum 70 (4): 1995.  793-821.

            Georgiana takes another look at the peculiar language of the Clerk’s Tale, paying attention to semantics with the same approach and attention to detail as Robert Finnegan (“’She should have said no to Walter’, 1995) and Donald Green (“"The Semantics of Power: 'Maistrie' and 'Soveraynetee' in 'The Canterbury Tales.'", 1986).  Her focus starts with the term ‘avysement’, the usage of which she catalogues for several tales (Melibee, Merchant’s Tale, and finally Clerk’s Tale).  She states, “In all of these tales prudent discretion or its lack is the distinguishing feature of the tales’ major characters” (795).  Honing on the Clerks’s Tale, she argues that Walter, at the beginning of the tale, acts quite unadvisedly, paying attention only to hunting.  The people intercede, advising Walter to marry in order to produce an heir and ease their anxiety.  The act of advising is essentially political, based on rationality and seeking to produce the most prized result.  Walter chooses Griselda because of her virtue (a carefully ‘advised’ act), which the people praise—just as they later denounce the arbitrary, cruel treatment of Walter towards Griselda and his children.

            She later states that there are “…clear narrative parallels between Griselda’s submissive behavior and that of Walter’s people,” pointing to the fact that Griselda’s assent to Walter’s marriage contract is phrased politically (797).  She agrees to Walter much like a vassal who pledges homage or featly to his lord, and it is precisely this act that unravels Griselda’s character.  By agreeing to something before hearing the terms, Griselda is denying herself the chance for advisement.  Her assent is, “…more immediate and less prudent in any practical sense,” (803). 

            Walter is given the ability to act like a God in his moral testing, and Griselda has already given her assent to comply.  Georgiana argues, then, that her ‘assent’ becomes the most important attribute of her character.  “Griselda’s character does not develop…What do change, however, are the demands made upon her assent, which make its absoluteness increasingly difficult to explain in terms of politics, morality, or any other rationalized social practice” (808).  According to Georgiana, Chaucer does not seek to explain or elicit sympathy for Griselda, but to point to the fact that she acts without advisement, or discretion.

            This article points again to how important language is to the Canterbury Tales, which is essentially filled with tales about tale telling.  Each pilgrim tells a tale, and through their language seeks to convey a certain moral, or elicit a certain response from another pilgrim.  It is interesting to consider the effect of careful advisement in terms of tale telling.  Allison’s misquoting of ancient texts, for example, could be horribly unadvised in terms of the irresponsibility of fraudulently upholding her argument with fabrications.  Or, conversely, she could be considered well advised, by making her sources fit her argument.  Also her tale is explicitly advising all the male Canterbury Pilgrims by instructing their behavior, and this could be the reason Allison is so dangerous to the Clerk and Pardoner.—Joe Turner, 4/24/05

Spring 2003

Rose, Christine M.  “Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale: Teaching Through the Sources.”  College Literature 28 no2 155-77.  Online.  Wilson Web.  2001

            Summary: The author’s argument in this article is that the “Man of Law’s Tale” in Canterbury Tales is easier to understand when Chaucer’s sources for the basis of the tale are considered and compared to the changes that he made.

            In this article, Rose points out that many people, upon first reading the “Man of Law’s Tale” are confused as to what its point is.  Being a teacher of the text herself, Rose explains that she teachers it as a tale about the ideal Christian woman of Chaucer’s society.  Using the texts that Chaucer borrowed from to obtain the basis for his tale, Rose backs up her argument effectively.  She lists some of these texts, but focuses mainly on Nicholas Trevet’s Les Cronicles.

                        Trevet’s character in Les Cronicles is called Constaunce, a name similar to Chaucer’s Custance.  Trevet’s Constaunce, however, is nothing like Chaucer’s Custance in personality.  While Trevet focuses on her intelligence and wit, Chaucer references the Virgin Mary and makes Custance passive and compliant.  Similar circumstances occur to each of these characters, but their ways of handling them differ as much as their personalities.  The mother-in-laws of the girls are shown differently in each version as well, while Trevet shows reasons why these women dislike their daughter-in-law, Chaucer completely leaves this point out, preferring to let the teller of the tale, the Man of Law, berate them for their behavior. 

            Rose mentions other works that Chaucer obtained the basis of this tale from, but none in as great detail as with Trevet.  Her argument is effective regardless, with well-presented information to back up her claims.  She uses the passages from each work wisely, letting them reflect off the other, which clearly allows her readers to see the similarities and the differences in each.  With the other works Chaucer used in this tale (such as Gower’s Confessio Amantis, and Boccaccio’s Decameron) mentioned briefly, it’s a very successful argument.--Beth Robson, 2-22-03  

Burakov, Olga. “Chaucer’s 'The Cook’s Tale'.” Explicator 61:1 (Fall 2002) 2-5.

        Burakov explores the Biblical element present in "The Cook’s Tale." She points to a lack of scholarly analyses of this tale, except for those examining Chaucer’s reason for leaving it incomplete, or those interpreting it “within a unified framework of Fragment A view the tale as a final stage in a ‘degenerative movement’ that governs the whole fragment.” I have no idea what this means but she also attributes the shortage of interpretation of the tale to an inaccurate understanding of its importance when examined through the proper “lens,” which she claims is the book of Genesis. Specifically, Burakov compares apprentice Perkyn Revelour’s path to banishment from the bakery by his master to Adam’s “trajectory” from Eden by God (2).
        Burakov begins with the "Cook’s Prologue" in support of her argument. Her first biblical connection is the Cook’s reference to “Salamon.” Burakov claims this reference implicitly acknowledges the biblical sage’s “authority” and “advocat[es] his wisdom” (2). Secondly, Burakov claims that the Cook’s “def[iance]” of Harry Bailly’s authority over the pilgrims, which occurs as he states the purpose of his tale, reflects Adam’s rebellion against God in eating the forbidden fruit. In addition to the Cook’s act of rebellion in the prologue, Burakov alligns Perkyn Revelour’s sin of “pursui[ng] pleasure” such as partaking in “dys, riot or paramour” (1.4392), with Adam’s irresistible attraction to the wrong fruit. (2). Furthermore, Burakov compares the shop (in which Perkyn is apprentice) with the Garden of Eden, his “godlike” and “anonymous” master with the God of Genesis (3), and a proverb mentioning a rotten apple with the fruit of the tree of good and evil. Lastly, Burakov associates Perkyn’s prostitute roommate with Eve, pointing out that each is a “fallen” woman (4).
        Although portions of Burakov’s analysis seem weak, this article is useful because if offers an interpretation of the tale other than a focus on its incompleteness. A few of the areas she explores beg for further interpretation. Her reference to the apple as a symbol of “decay and mortality” perhaps has been examined more thoroughly somewhere else, but if not, offers a jumping off place for a more thorough analysis. Secondly, a possible connection to "The Knight’s Tale" is found in Burakov’s reference to Perkyn Revelour’s “relentless pursuit of pleasure” (2). I’m reminded of our class discussion pertaining to the myth of the Minotaur, the labryinth and the pursuit of human pleasure. Interestingly, Burakov dares to step into the forbidden world of utilizing the Bible as a primary reference tool for interpretation of a text written during a time in which Christianity dominated society. With that in mind, because this tale contains a direct reference to King Solomon, a comparison of his book of proverbs compared to the tale could prove interesting. - Pamela Flowers * 22 February 2003
 

Robertson Jr., D. W. The Probable Date and Purpose of Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale. Studies in Philology 84 (1987): 418, 22p. EBSCOhost: Academic Search Elite: MLA International Bibliography. Julia Rogers Library, Goucher College. 22 February 2003.

D. W. Robertson, Jr.’s examination of the character of the Knight, using both the "General Prologue" and "Knight’s Tale," leans heavily on historical criticism to explain Chaucer’s palette and intentions. This serves Robertson’s main thesis well, which involves dating the writing of the tale. Along the way, he presents some interesting insights into the construction of the tale and the tale cycle, the characterization of the Knight, and the intentions of Chaucer as author.

Almost half of Robertson’s paper is a "brief chronicle" to explain the religious and military politics of the Crusades, paying particular attention to Philippe de Mézières and his Order of the Passion. The chronicle also serves to link Chaucer to a number of knights, whom Robertson will later link to in battles where the Knight is reported to have fought. Robertson also links Chaucer to a number of influential thinkers, whose philosophies on knighthood, statehood and the function of literature Robertson will later claim have some bearing on the descriptions of the Knight, the KT or the Canterbury Tales generally. This functions as an important and useful background for his main thesis, though it brings forward no original ideas.

Robertson bills this article as the first in a series of articles to address the KT. This first should concentrate, he says, on the Knight’s description in the GP, leaving interpretation of the KT for later papers. He explores the various connotations of the general descriptors attributed to the Knight: "worthy," "truth," "sovereign excellence," "humility," "meek," "gentil." He makes brief mention of the Knight’s modest dress and entourage. Robertson devotes a great deal of space to the battles in which the Knight has fought, pointing out various knights contemporary to Chaucer and with whom he was possibly or probably acquainted. This is where Robertson may stray a bit too far into historical criticism, suggesting that Chaucer created a "composite" Knight modeled on these individual knights. However, Robertson’s analysis of which battles are evident and conspicuously absent allows him to date the KT with quite firm conviction between "the death of Queen Anne in the summer of 1394" and "the defeat at Nicopolis in September 1396." The major flaw I see in his argument lies in the position of the Riverside Chaucer that the KT was originally written for The Legend of Good Women (1386-88), the prologue of which mentions Palamon and Arcite. Also, Robertson himself admits that the GP is thought to have been composed between 1384 and 1389; the Knight is so tightly woven into the GP, as well as the subsequent tales, as to make it hard to believe that he would have been created a full decade later and doctored into the GP.

While Robertson does focus on the descriptors attributed to the Knight in the GP, he tends to stray into long asides on KT interpretations. What is particularly maddening is the way Robertson does not fully develop these theories, many of which could be short papers in their own right. He suggests, for example, that the politically motivated marriage of Palamon and chaste Emelye, intended to restore order between Thebes and Athens, may have been a gentle nudge for Richard to marry Isabel, the six year old princess of France, and restore relations between England and France. He makes a far briefer supposition that "The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale" may have been intended for a very different audience, as adding this character does not require additions to the GP.--Maryah Converse, 2-22-03

Green, Richard Firth.  "Chaucer's Man of Law and Collusive Recovery."  Notes and Queries.  40:3 (September 1993) 303-6.

Green focuses on three lines in Chaucer's description of the Man of Law:

So greet a purchasour was nowher noon:

Al was fee symple to hym in effect;

His purchasyng myghte nat been infect.

In particular, Green focuses on the phrase "fee symple," explaining its meaning and significance in the context of medieval property laws.  Chaucer's use of this phrase suggests that the Man of Law is dishonest.

In medieval England, a variety of laws and customs existed to control the transferral of property.  For example, when a person transferred property, he had the option of restricting that property with a "fee tail."  This restriction required the new owner to pass on the property to one of his descendants.  If he failed to do so, the property returned to the original owner or his heirs.  In contrast, the "fee simple" allowed the new owner to do just about anything he wanted to with the property.

English landowners, of course, developed ways to get around the fee tail, giving themselves the rights of fee simple through underhand dealings.  Breaking entails was common and acknowledged practice.  For Chaucer to say of the Man of Law that "al was fee symple to hym in effect"--if not in legal reality--suggests that the character participated in such dealings.  This would explain how he could be "so greet a purchasour" of land.  Considering England's legal system and the illegal methods common at the time, Green's interpretation of Chaucer's description of the Man of Law seems valid.

            Understanding his legal background is necessary to understanding a "Man of Law."  Green's description of England's complicated legal system is clear and concise, and he scatters it with quaint excerpts from actual legal documents.  (On a note of interest, anyone who thinks modern legal documents are long-winded should take a look at Green's quotation from the "preamble to a Statue of Richard II").  Green's interpretation of the Man of Law also challenges the more traditional view of the character as an honest man, bringing strong evidence to his case.—Shuli Bloomensteil, 2-23-03

Beidler, Peter G. “The Price of Sex in Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review Vol. 31, No. 1 (1996).

             Beidler’s article begins with a question critics have pondered for many years: What is the current monetary value of the 100 francs presented in The Shipman’s Tale?  In his article, Beidler refers to past articles in which conclusions ranging from $3,000 to $40,000 American dollars were found depending on the year written.  Beidler pulls the question further, showing its importance.  If 100 francs is a small amount of money, the Merchant’s Wife is portrayed as a victim of stinginess and cruelty.  If 100 francs is a tremendous amount, it portrays the Merchant’s Wife as a spend thrifty, materialistic woman.  The articles purpose continues to reveal itself as Beidler refers to past articles that argued the 100 francs was a small amount of money.  Through internal, economical, and comparative evidence, Beidler examines the many methods of discovering his desired, elusive answer and disproving his predecessors.  Beidler uses articles and contacts in the fields of history, economics, and literature to discover a rate of exchange.   He clearly believes that 100 francs in 1385 was a large sum of money, however he fails to find a concrete rate of exchange.  Like articles of the past, Beidler’s findings range from $4,000 to a drastic $80,000 American dollars.  However, unlike articles of the past Beidler finds that 100 francs was a large sum of money.  Historically, 100 francs could have purchased 500 gallons of wine, 50 swords, or 111 pounds of basil in 1385.  When compared to Chaucer’s source, Boccaccio’s Decameron, Beidler discovers that Baccaccio’s tale used 200 florins, worth over 150 francs.  Therefore, he determines that Chaucer lowered the sum of money to make the tale less outlandish while maintaining the large cost.

            Although Beidler fails to find a concrete rate of exchange for Chaucer’s 100 francs, he does prove the price’s large sum.  Therefore, the article does not prove anything, but does disprove previous arguments.  His methods are all concrete as well as his sources, proving the thesis soundly.  Surprisingly, the historical, literary, and economical sources flow together nicely, maintaining a fluid structure throughout the article.  Beidler’s strongest counter arguments lie in his historical and comparative evidence, for he admits early in the article that finding an economical answer is virtually impossible.  This economical point, however, is crucial to Beidler’s argument.  All in all, this article is an absolute success, diving deep into the literary work, the history surrounding it, and the economics of medieval society.--Brandon Arvesen, 2-23-03

Parry, Joseph D.  “Interpreting Female Agency and Responsibility in The Miller’s Tale and The Merchant’s Tale.”  Philological Quarterly 80 no2.  133-67.  Online.  Wilson Web.  2001

Summary:  The author’s point in this article is that Chaucer portrays conflicting views of women in The Miller’s and the Merchant’s Tales.  He also questions female agency and responsibility.

            The argument the author is trying to convey in this article is unclear, if there is one.  Parry makes his points clearly, but doesn’t always stand by them, having a tendency to make a point and then point out that the exact opposite can be true.  One example of this could be on the second page of the article, where he tries to back up a point with the statement: “into the ways in which women thereby are or are not fully part…” There are numerous points in the article where Parry does this, causing his point to be less effective than it could be.  The article focuses on the opposing characteristics in each of the female characters in both Tales, and the fact that neither female is punished for their crimes against their husbands.  Parry points out that unlike the females, the male characters in these tales are punished for their mistakes, and the fact that their female counterparts are not causes confusion in the text.  He doesn’t consider that perhaps the female characters are already being punished with their husbands.  Both May and Alisoun are married to husbands much older than they are, something that would cause most young women to act out, which they do.  They have already earned their punishment, for they are both still married to the same men, the only thing that has changed is that they have now earned their punishment. 

            The female characters are focus of each of these Tales, and perhaps Chaucer focuses so much on the conflicting aspects of their personalities to make them more human, for the men are already taken as human by the readers.  During Chaucer’s time, women were not treated with the same courtesies that men were, so if they were shown as people that reacted to things the way a man would, they might be seen as more human. --Beth Robson, 2-28-03

McKinley, Kathryn L. “The Silenced Knight: Questions of Power and Reciprocity in The Wife of Bath’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review      Vol 30, No. 4 (1996)

            McKinley aims to argue some feminist readings often associated with The Wife of Bath’s Tale.  She mainly draws her argument against the largely accepted feminist criticism that claims the tale’s ending contradicts its message and silences women.  This article says the tale gives authority to women and silences the Knight (men), and proceeds to explain that Chaucer was negotiating questions of power and reciprocity in marriage.  McKinley focuses on three areas: the hag’s pillow speech, thematic juxtapositions, and binary oppositions within the tale.  Many feminist critics believe the hag’s speech is disconcerting after the Wife of Bath’s list of conquests in her prologue.  However, McKinley argues that like Ovid, Chaucer uses dramatic juxtaposition of theme differences to prove a point.  These binaries begin during the hag’s speech, during which Chaucer jumps from humor to post-marriage gloom over the course of a few lines.  By the end of the tale, McKinley argues, the established binaries show themes in marriage.  The Knight has changed from a rapist to one capable of self-sacrifice and powerless (after his crime) to the acceptance of mutual power.  This creates a sense of radical freedom won through personal cost, and confirms the will of the hag over the Knight.  Thereby showing the silencing of the Knight and men, not women.

            McKinley begins her argument rather slowly, wasting many lines on what should have been a synopsis on her opposition.  Once the lengthy review of popular feminist criticism on the Wife of Bath’s Tale has passed, McKinley begins her argument and thus her article begins to shine.  With precise quotations and textual references, McKinley easily argues against her other feminist critics and clearly explains her point.  The article conveniently ignores certain facts, however, to consistently prove its point.  For example, McKinley ignores the fact that the woman the Knight rapes is left without retribution.  In brief, McKinley proves her point but fails to accept the entire text she works with.--Brandon Arvesen, 2-28-03

Klitgård, Ebbe. "‘Dreme he barefoot, dreme he shod’: Chaucer as a Performer of Dream Visions." English Studies. 81 (2000): 506, 7p. EBSCOhost: Academic Search Elite: MLA International Bibliography. Julia Rogers Library, Goucher College. 27 February 2003.

While this article is not Canterbury scholarship in that it concentrates on the narrative voice in Chaucer’s earlier works, the conclusions drawn by Klitgård can be extended to shed light on Canterbury Tales, particularly the GP. The title quotation is drawn from Chaucer’s House of Fame and indicates "a playful and humorous distinction between dreaming a-night (barefoot) and daydreaming (with one’s shoes on)" in the otherwise serious opening that invokes the sleep god Morpheus. This quote illustrates the down-to-earth and familiarizing voice of Chaucer, which Klitgård indicates is particularly suited to performance poetry.

Klitgård contends that Chaucer is "developing a new vernacular rhetoric" in more ways than simply to use "naked wordes in Englissh" instead of Latin or French, as Chaucer tells his son in A Treatise on Astrolabe. While Chaucer is certainly making a conscious effort to establish himself as a learned man, Klitgård cautions against the "illusion of allusions" (a phrase borrowed from A.C. Spearing). Unlike a work like Joyce’s Ulysses, Chaucer is not writing poetry that requires prior knowledge, i.e. not alluding to, but "appropriating" from the "sweep of international rhetoric" and translating that rhetoric into the English vernacular. To this end, he develops a distinctive set of Chaucerian personae with which his audience can relate, and employs a conversational tone full of "that is to seyn" and "I had red" to make his work more accessible to the listener/reader.

This observation brings to mind the Knight’s Tale and the narrative voice of the Knight. He breaks into his tale repeatedly to abridge a long section of the Boccaccio or relate the tale to his own experience. Particularly pertinent is the passage where he invokes his listeners’ culture, saying that any English knight worth his salt would have gone to the tournament in Athens. We also see him weaving in Boethian rhetoric, in plain English, to illustrate and explain his points. It is easy to see, based on Klitgård’s argument, how Chaucer could have taken the lessons he had learned in creating personae for himself and applied them directly to the Knight as a storyteller. It raises the question for me as to whether this might indicate a particular sympathy on Chaucer’s part for the Knight and the old chivalric code that represents.--Maryah Converse, 3-3-03

Ashton, Gail. “Patient Mimesis: Griselda and The Clerk’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review Vol. 32, No. 3 (1998) 

            Ashton presents an article in which she discusses an oddly pro-feminist outlook on Griselda and The Clerk’s Tale.  She claims that through narration gaps and blank silences, Chaucer’s female audience hears Griselda articulate her own identity and women’s identity in a patriarchal society.  Medieval society, Ashton explains, desired silent, passive, and withdrawn women; making emotional concealment the ideal.  The article aims to prove Griselda’s suffering and ideal femininity combine to resist masculine oppression through silence and patience.  Silence provides secret self-nurturing in Griselda, and therefore gives her a hidden sense of self.  According to Ashton, Griselda uses mimesis to resists and refuse conformity through passivity and an active yet covert defiance of masculine law.  She reflects the ideal, but is not reduced by it.  Griselda’s outward patience is deceptive, she reminds Walter (her husband) of her patience and uses it to end his cruelty.  Ashton proves that Griselda uses mimesis to survive: she can undermine herself and resist appropriation.--Brandon Arvesen, 3/3/03

Beidler, Peter G.  "Fire in the House: Ralph Waldo Emerson's Misreading of Lines 1139-45 in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale."  The Chaucer Review 37.1 (2002) 86-94

In this article, Beidler takes issue with Emerson's interpretation of several lines in the "Wife of Bath's Tale" in Canterbury Tales.  These are the lines Emerson seems to misinterpret:

"Take fire and bere it into the derkest hous
Betwix this and the mount of Caucasus,
And let men shette the dores, and go thenne,
Yet wol the fire as faire lie and brenne
As twenty thousand men might it behold;
His office naturel ay wol it hold.
Up peril of my lif, til that it die."

The gentleman's old wife is chastising him for degrading her for her lack of "gentility."  She maintains that true gentility should be determined by one's actions, not one's background.  Her reason for this belief is that one of gentle birth may still act in an "ung-gentle," vicious manner.  One can only be considered noble on basis of one's "gentle," virtuous actions.  She gives the knight an analogy to explain this idea: A fire left to burn in a house, alone, behind a closed door, burns just the same as it would before twenty thousand men.

Emerson completely misinterprets these lines.  He takes them out of context and uses them in an essay on symbolism in poetry, saying that Chaucer is praising gentleness in these lines, and comparing fire to "good blood in a mean condition."  Beidler accuses Emerson of paraphrasing Chaucer's words to fit Emerson's worldview and intentions in the essay.  Beidler notes that Emerson did not have access to modern, extensive translations of Chaucer's works; however, he claims that Emerson would have had access to a glossary whose translations should have made the meaning of these lines clear.  Beidler goes on to make a general statement about Chaucer's readers, saying that many readers have transformed Chaucer's meanings "through creative paraphrase."  Beidler's critical view is a caution to readers to assess Chaucer's works honestly and accurately, without falling prey to Emerson's mistakes.--Shuli Bloomensteil, 3/3/03

Goodall, Peter. “Being Alone in Chaucer.” The Chaucer Review 27:1 (1992) 1-15.

While this article does not concentrate on Canterbury Tales exclusively, Goodall examines instances in Chaucer’s works in which “the activity of being alone or the access to solitude” is different or similar to its modern usage.  In the first two sections of the article, Goodall points out differences concerning privacy between the Middle Ages and the modern era. He explains that the most common use of solitude in Chaucer’s work is in the “courtly context of the lover seeking privacy in order to lament his misfortunes” as in Book I of Troilus and Criseyde. He writes, “We find Troilus ‘bywayling in his chamber thus allone’” (547). Goodall speaks to a lack of privacy in the Middle Ages regardless of one’s social standing. He claims solitude was not a desirable state and was often seen as an “unnatural condition to be remedied.” Hence, bedrooms especially were not private chambers. In the second section, Goodall associates solitude with the Middle English term “prive” meaning “secret” and its often sexual, and usually negative, connotation. He refers to Nicholas’ grab at Alison’s “queinte,” a move made “prively” by Nicholas, as evidence for this point. In Goodall’s third section, he looks at those applications of “privy” which coincide with today’s meaning of “in private” or “confidential.” He offers the prologue to the Cook’s Tale, in which “pryvetee” indicates “home” as example. Finally, Goodall sees “ ‘pryvetee,’ in the sense of secret knowledge as well as personal privacy, [as] one of the major…themes of the First Fragment.

Goodall’s thesis can be tested against many of the tales. A search in the Chaucer concordance reveals five instances of the word “alone” and six for “privily” in the Man of Law’s Tale alone. It would also be interesting to create a list of binary opposites utilizing Goodall’s terms as a jumping off point. Lastly, Goodall refers to Cook’s Tale as an example for “pryvetee” meaning “home.” However, while it certainly does mean home, in the context of the bawdy tale he has just heard, the Cook certainly implies a sexual and negative interpretation.--Pam Flowers, 3/3/03

Burger, Douglas A.  “Deluding Words in The Merchant’s Tale.”  Chaucer Review 12.2 (1977): 103-8.

The words used in the Merchant’s Tale of Canterbury Tales conceal the truth, pointing out a large contrast between fantasy and reality.  They provide an illusion for what is really taking place.  Burger uses examples from the text to point out that a third of the tale is taken up by speeches and apostrophes that serve to strengthen Januarie’s mental constructions of marital life (in the beginning of the tale) and make him easier to deceive.  It’s a suitable way for the Merchant to tell his tale, considering his own grasp on words and reality mentioned in the General Prologue.  For a man who can’t always depend on his profession to support him, it’s suitable indeed.

This argument made a great deal of sense, and it was sufficiently backed up with examples from the text.  Some of the points in the argument sounded like something that could be applied to a Shakespearian work as well, especially when Burger asserts that Januarie is using the elaborate word structure used in the first part of the tale to create his own fantasy of May.  It is very similar to the Taming of the Shrew, where Lucentio falls in love with the idea of Bianca, and discovers she is a different person than he thought she was at the close of the play.  This almost becomes true in the Merchant’s Tale, but Januarie allows words to ‘blind’ him again, in this case May’s.

Even when Januarie tells his friends of his decision to get married and asks their opinions, he doesn’t really listen to them unless they suit him.  Placebo has such an opinion, or rather, lack of one, since he is simply agreeing with Januarie.  But when Justinus offers his opinion, Januarie discards his advice and goes to marry May anyway.  Januarie has already been blinded by love, and it will take a much larger force than the tale has to offer to make him ‘see’ again.--Beth Robson, 4-4-03

Tkacz, Catherine Brown. "Samson and Arcite in the Knight's Tale." Chaucer Review. 25 (1990): 127-37.

Tkacz's article picks up on Arcite's vow to cut his hair as an adumbration of his demise and a comparison to biblical Samson. She suggests that Chaucer is not only merging three common conceits concerning Samson, but also elaborating and rearranging Boccaccio's original to extend the Samson metaphor.

She begins by reviewing other examples of the use of Samson in literature contemporary to Chaucer and in Chaucer’s own works. There are three dominant tropes: Samson as the fool for love, Samson as the strong man overcome by love and the psychomachia of his relationship to Delilah. Unique to Chaucer is a repeating trope of Samson as committing suicide. Significantly, Samson is often paired with wise Solomon or strong Hercules as biblical examples of hubris, including in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue (ln. 679, 721-3, 724-7), the Monk’s Tale (ln. 3205-3332, 3274-6), the Man of Law’s Tale (ln. 201) the Pardoner’s conclusion (ln. 955). Then Tkacz explains that Chaucer not only elaborated but has actually significantly rearranged the Boccaccian ‘original’ in tercia pars. Where Boccaccio "narrated each individual prayer—beginning with Arcite’s—and then the journey of the personified prayer to the [Olympian] temple of the god whose aid was sought," Chaucer describes the temples on earth, then the tournament knights, then the prayers, with Arcite’s saved for last to lead into the scene with Saturn. Tkacz continues with a close reading of the details in Chaucer’s descriptions. In Venus’s temple, Solomon and Hercules are mentioned, and Samson is conspicuously absent. In the temple of Mars are both a suicide victim and a barber, as well as significant architecture: mighty pillars like those that slew Samson. When Arcite makes his vow, these pillars shake, as the lists also shake when Theseus proclaims Arcite as victor. By putting Arcite’s prayer last, she notes, Chaucer brings him closer to the argument of the gods, in which Saturn mentions being the god who killed Samson. Finally, she points out that Arcite is different from Samson in that he never has the love of Emelye and has, finally, deceived himself. She relates this to a work published around the time of Chaucer’s birth, Guillame de Deguileville’s Le Pelerinage de la vie humaine, which Chaucer uses in An ABC. In de Deguileville’s poem, Samson represents the body and Delilah the soul, and "the individual person is a Samson, who ought to avoid being a Delilah to himself."

I found Tkacz’s argument to be beautifully tight. I was impressed at how many details she found in Knight’s Tale to corroborate the Samson-Arcite parallel. It only emphasizes how incredibly tight this tale is, which to me lends credence to my suggestion in my short paper that all the Knight’s interjections are more than mere pleonasm. Also, Tkacz drew my attention to the use of architecture in Canterbury Tales. It is a detail to which I hadn’t paid close attention, so she’s given me a new angle from which to read some of the other tales as well.--Maryah Converse, 4/12/03

Boenig, Robert.  “The Pardoner's Hypocrisy and His Subjectivity.”  ANQ 13.4 (2000): 9-15.

This article argues that the Pardoner is not the hypocrite that he claims he is in the Prologue to his Tale, but instead uses his tale to parody the Wife of Bath.  Boenig offers a description of hypocrisy first, using a fourteenth century preacher’s manual.  He points out that according to the definition, a hypocrite is one that “moves his lips” in false holiness, and “dissolves into laughter” after their performance.  The movement of the Pardoner’s lips at the beginning of his Prologue are not in false holiness, but an admittance of his hypocrisy.  There is also no laughter at the close of his Tale, but instead, the Pardoner falls into silence. 

The general opinion of critics is to agree with the Pardoner’s opinion of himself, and think of him as a hypocrite.  Boenig points out that Chaucer would have known the definition of hypocrite, since he explains it in connection to the Seven Deadly Sins in the Parson’s Tale.  If Chaucer is well-aware of the meaning, it wouldn’t make sense for him to simply write the Pardoner as a character that is taken at face value, as many of the critics have.  Boenig then asserts his argument by giving several examples of the similarities between the Pardoner’s Tale and that of the Wife of Bath.

From the constant references to Kittredge, another critic, Boenig’s argument is not the accepted one, but a new perspective on an older opinion.  Boenig does not claim to be right in his article, but lets his points speak for him, and he makes valid points.  The similarities between the Pardoner’s Tale and the Wife of Bath’s are not hard to find, which makes the argument more plausible, since it doesn’t feel like the author had to stretch very hard to make his claims.  The image of the Pardoner that the reader is left with, if this argument holds, is much less stable than earlier arguments have left him.  Boenig asserts that we would be left with more of a sketch rather than an actual presence of him if this argument were to be applied. --Beth Robson, 4/13/03

Finnegan, Robert Emmett. "‘She Should Have Said No to Walter’: Griselda’s Promise in the Clerk’s Tale." English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature. 75 (1994): 303-21.

Concentrating on the first two tests of Griselda’s patience, the abduction of her children, Finnegan makes a close semantic study of the language of promise in The Clerk’s Tale. He begins by using the MED to construct careful definitions of ‘assenten’ and ‘consenten,’ determining the former to be ‘agreeing to’ something and the latter as ‘agreeing with’ something. When Walter proposes to Griselda, he asks for her ‘assent’ to all his requests, i.e. that "nevere ye to grucche it, nyght ne day? / And eek when I sey ‘ye’, ne sey nat ‘ney’, / Neither by word ne frownyng contenance?" When Griselda goes a step further and promises never to disobey him even in thought, Finnegan concludes that she has moved clearly into the region of ‘consent,’ i.e. agreeing with Walter, not just agreeing to his orders. Finnegan’s analysis concludes that Griselda also ‘consents’ to the (as far as she knows) murder of her children and becomes accomplice to it. He uses nine sources previous to Chaucer’s time, including Thomas Aquinas and John Wycliffe, to show that even the most prominent theologians believed that, however grave the giving of an oath was considered, it was a graver fault to hold to an oath that leads one into committing mortal sin. This is, for Finnegan, another point against Griselda. Then he turns to Lenvoy de Chaucer where a narrator cautions the audience that "No wedded man so hardy be t’assaille / His wyves pacience in trust to fynde / Grisildis." Finnegan uses the MED to construct a definition of ‘assaillen’ (and, he argues, its variant form ‘assaien’) as an assault and attempted destruction of Griselda’s patience. On hand of a number of examples from the tale, Finnegan goes so far as to say that Walter’s assault is evil, and as such, Griselda is consenting to, i.e. agreeing with, evil. Thus Griselda’s virtue has been corrupted, and once corrupted, like a coin bent in testing it for assurance of its composition, this virtue is forever negated. Finnegan concludes that, "[r]eally, Griselda should have listened to Aquinas. She should have said no to Walter."

This is an interesting piece, linguistically at the very least, but quite esoteric, and perhaps a little too reductive. At times it seems that Finnegan is just trying to find another reason to justify his dislike of Griselda. Where this subject could become truly interesting might be in applying the same semantic issues to the Friar’s Tale and analyzing the degree of sincerity of speech there, or exploring how the Clerk’s use of ‘assenten’ and ‘consenten’ might dialogue with the Friar’s Lollardist theme (at least in those tale orders where the Clerk follows the Friar).--Maryah Converse, 4/13/03

Sayers, William.  "Chaucer's Shipman and the Law Marine."  The Chaucer Review 37.2 (2002) 145-158.

Sayers pulls a lot of important lines out of the Shipman's tale and explains what they mean and why they are significant, placing them in the broader context of Chaucer's society, maritime law, and Chaucer's own profession as a customs officer.  (A customs officer was an individual appointed by the government to supervise trading and apprehend smugglers.  They weren't too successful--the customs officers, that is.  The smugglers were generally quite successful!)  He first treats the term "Shipman" (l 388).  The term could refer to either a captain or a sailor, so Chaucer's use of the word is ambiguous.  Good old Harry Baily clarifies the Shipman's status when he refers to him as a "ship's master" (Sayers 145).  Sayers inserts and translates direct quotations from documents such as the Roles d'Oleron and the Oak Book of Southampton, both legal works setting down the laws having to do with sailing ships.  The quotations he chooses describe the role of the captain and elucidate further points as he brings them into his article.

Sayers explains that "wonynge fer be weste" hints that the Shipman is a smuggler, since the western coast was a common site for smuggling.  This is only one hint of many that the Shipman is a smuggler.  Interestingly, Chaucer seems determined to make the reader believe that the Shipman is a good fellow, and equally determined to drop hints that he is not!  Apparently, he wants to make us wonder.

Sayers explains some other lines, such as the strange word "lodemenage" (l 403), which is usually translated as "skill in navigation" (Sayers 152).  Sayers gives an etymological analysis of the word, tracing it back to Norman French and through a variety of other languages.  He identifies the places mentioned in the line "noon swich from Hulle to Cartage" (l 404), pointing out that the Shipman's travels spanned from Hull in Yorkshire to Cartagena in Spain.  As a side-note Sayers also pulls in an interesting comparison between the Shipman and the Knight.--Shuli Bloomensteil, 4/14/03

Kelly, Henry Ansgar. “A Neo-Revisionist Look At Chaucer’s Nuns.” Chaucer Review 31:2 (1996): 115-132.

            Kelly claims to present a “more even-handed, eclectic, and ‘de-totalized’ account of the subject of historical and literary nuns” than other critics (115). In the first paragraph, Kelly skillfully acknowledges the “peculiar dangers” for critics in dealing with religious topics in literature because of “traditional allegiances and prejudices” (115). Not intimidated, he launches into a discussion of the inaccuracies presented by critics regarding religious figures in Chaucer’s works, particularly nuns. For example, Kelly batters the popular assumption that the “mendicant orders were in a state of decline and corruption at the end of the fourteenth century” with evidence from Swanson that claims the church, at least the English Franciscans, “did not need reform” until at least the fifteenth century. Kelly points out that reader’s “attitudes toward Chaucer’s celibate clergy and religious have been basically formed by Protestant commentators and historians” (115). He sees this as a problem because some, particularly Eileen Power who wrote Medieval English Nunneries and is considered a “main authority on nuns,” display “prejudiced views” (115).

            Then, Kelly presents roughly ten pages of information regarding nuns in Chaucer’s day. For example, the ratio of nuns to priests in Chaucer’s day compared with 1964, the inconsistent ages at which nuns took their vows and whether or not it was common for nuns to possess pets. He argues against the belief that poor women were often forced into a religious lifestyle because they were unable to offer dowries to prospective husbands. To prove this point he looks to the relatively small number of nuns in the fifteenth century presented in Philip Hughes’ The Reformation in England and Power’s book. He claims nuns “seem to have been drawn mainly from the upper classes, because of the custom of requiring ‘dowries’ from entrants” (117). In fact, Kelly claims, nuns were not forbidden possessions but such property had to be available for “use” by the nunnery and reported to the abbess. Kelley writes concerning common methods of income for nunneries such as the teaching of young children and argues strongly against some critic’s interpretation of the Prioress as a “lax and artificial nun” (126). He suggests a positive outlook on the nun and recommends weighting the opinion of medievalist Sister Mary Madeleva more heavily in order to balance Power’s opinion.

            Further, Kelly “suggest[s]” that Chaucer wrote the Prioress’s Tale first then created a character for the telling. From there, he segues into the topic of nasal singing and its “unseemliness” (127). Kelley ends his argument with his own description of how Chaucer wanted his audience to view the Prioress. He writes: “Chaucer wished her to emerge…as a religious superior who is very attentive to religious duties and to an external decorum, and whose sympathies extend to the humblest of God’s creatures” (128).

When considering the applicability of Kelly’s work for our study of CT, we must take into account his presentation of the Prioress in a radiant light, completely ignoring her divisive tale. With that in mind, it seems important to first examine Kelly’s claims for accuracy, and then if they prove true, to test some common assumptions regarding the religious figures in CT. For example, if it is true that nuns were often from upper class families we need not judge the Prioress harshly for her meticulous behaviors. In fact, this would explain her impeccable table manners. In addition, assuming the accuracy of Kelly’s statement regarding the “groundless[ness]” of critics accusation of “widespread abuse” of inattentive parsons, it seems contemporary interpretation of Chaucer’s opinion of the church requires a major readjustment. Kelly argues boldly. Although his argument appears, at a glance, to be well research, to seriously consider the potent implications of his argument a great deal of testing of his sources against the text is absolutely required.--Pam Flowers, 4/15/03

Neuse, Richard. “Marriage and the Question of Allegory in The Merchant’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review Vol. 24, No. 2 (1989): 115-131

                 The question of allegory in The Canterbury Tales has always been a provocative, seemingly answerless one.  Is each tale an allegorical one, if so how can we tell, and if not which tales are allegorical?  Richard Neuse attempts to attack these furious questions in his article, focusing mainly on The Merchant’s Tale but mentioning many others.  According to Neuse, the Clerk and Merchant’s Tales are both allegorical.  The allegory, however, is an intertextual problem.  In order to understand the allegories in either tale, Neuse argues one must have a virtual focus on the text, and an interpretation of an antecedent text.  For example, in The Clerk’s Tale the speaker retells one of Petrarch’s tales.  By the end of his tale, however, the Clerk seems to differ in opinion from Petrarch on marriage as a theme and allegory.  Neuse continues his argument, claiming unlike the Clerk, the Merchant is concerned with the institution of marriage, not the actual relationship.  This impersonal focus on marriage sets The Merchant’s Tale up for an allegorical reading.

                Neuse begins his allegorical analysis of The Merchant’s Tale with a strong structuralist view of the text.  His initial proofs are blatant but necessary, pointing out the main characters obviously allegorical names (January and May).  According to Neuse, the marriage of January and May is a seasonal mismatch of youth and age.  The Merchant mentions the specifics of his own marriage in his prologue.  Neuse claims that the Merchant (who slanders his wife vigorously) is actually looking for the cause of his failed marriage.  The Merchant clearly blames his wife, but is most likely covering up his inability to speak his own sorrow.  The tale itself fits the Merchant’s search because it investigates the institution of marriage.  However, the Merchant lacks a defined, personal perspective giving his tale an encyclopedic feel.  Neuse continues to outline the tale, mentioning that the Merchant and January share a similar view of marriage.  Placebo and Justinus warn January not to be hasty, yet their views on marriage mirror January’s (the Merchant’s).  From this, Neuse derives that The Merchant’s Tale has set up one uniform view on the institution of marriage expressed through allegory.  January clearly thinks of marriage in Biblical terms, yet he sees the institution of marriage as a chance to obtain a servant more than a wife.  Neuse suggests that the allegory in the tale points out the church’s flawed view on the institution of marriage.  Once the tale has been thouroughly outlined, Neuse begins to refer to Chaucer’s own influences.  He mentions Augustine’s theory on Biblical Allegory (a popular method of biblical analysis during Chaucer’s time), which states if the literal meaning of the Bible does not promote charity, it should be read as an allegory.  Neuse ties this theory into Solomon’s “Song of Songs” and Dante’s Inferno, both of which are referred to by January in The Merchant’s Tale.--Brandon Arvesen, 4/15/03

Johnson, Lynn Staley.  “Chaucer’s Tale of the Second Nun and Strategies of Dissent.”  Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry 89.92 (1985) 314-33.

The opinion offered in this article is that the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale, especially concerning it’s relation to the Canon Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, was possibly a commentary by Chaucer on the political situation in England at the time.

Johnson points out that it is unclear when Chaucer wrote the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale, but it is generally thought to be written between 1373-1386.  England was very unstable during this period, the combination of church and state causing tension between those in political power and those in clerical power.  One of the main issues seemed to be papal control.  With the Black Death, and depression, among other things, to add to the conflicts, tensions were strained.  The Great Schism took place in 1378, which meant the appointment of two popes; in Avignon, France, and the other in Rome. 

Chaucer’s choice to tell the tale of St. Cecilia, and the sources he chose to use in the telling, point toward Johnson’s claim.  She asserts that he specifically used two different versions of the tale St. Cecilia, both of which prominently featured Cecilia in the tale.  Also, the fact that this tale is typically described as a secular saint’s life, gives Chaucer the perfect cover to comment on England’s situation at the time without gaining any unwanted retaliations from those in power. 

Johnson says that the life of St. Cecilia is proven to contain hints of radical social and spiritual restructuring in something like a twelfth-century biography called The Life of Christina of Markyate, which has Christina following the example set by St. Cecilia, and defying social norms to reach her desired goals.  Using this example to back up her claim, Johnson applies it to her argument.  She closes the article by pointing out the Canon Yeoman’s Prologue and Tale, which shows a much different church than the one shown in the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale.  It is a contrast of a primitive church to a modern one, and the primitive one is more appealing. --Beth Robson, 4/27/03

Schildgen, Brenda Deen. Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Gainesville: UP Florida, 2001.

             In her introduction, Schildgen proposes an examination of KT, ST, MoLT, FT, WoB, PT, MT, and SNT from “outside a Christian-dominated world.” She writes that the presence of these tales, which “offer many philosophical views about what constitutes ‘wisdom’ and ‘lawe,’” in addition to “exploring alternative moral attitudes to the Christian mainstream of Chaucer’s time,” clearly demonstrate Chaucer’s interest in the world outside Christian England’s borders. Furthermore, because Chaucer avoids a clear political stance in CT, Schildgen sees this as Chaucer’s way of “invit[ing] analysis…subjective interpretation” or “empower[ing] individuals to enact the condition of the age.” She claims that Chaucer included such tales to “remind his audience that there was a time before the rise of Christianity” and that “there are and have always been people outside the world of Christianity who do not adhere to its cultural norms and practices.” Therefore, Schildgen claims, the Host’s invitation to tell a tale is “merely an opportunity for a debate” and to explore non-Christian values and alternative worldviews.

            In the chapter entitled “A Prioress and a Monk: Providential History on Trial” Schildgen offers a concise review of the “providential tradition of interpreting history” beginning with Virgil and through the first half of the fourteenth-century after which, she claims, “history writing became much more diversified.” She describes “ ‘family-chronicles’ and ‘chronicles of the period’ as records of a conversion from religious-oriented explanations for events to “divid[ing] the supernatural from everyday events of life.” With that in mind, Schlidgen argues that Chaucer pits the Monk’s “chaos theory of history” against the Prioress’ “conservative and anachronistic providential theory” which plays itself out in each narrator’s reaction to the “other” represented in his or her tale. To the Prioress, the Jews represent the “other,” who she, in effect, “demonizes” in her tale of the young Christian boy murderer by Jews. Schildgen points out that the Prioress, through her tale, “adher[es] to commonplace prejudices, to the theory of providential history, and to a binary system of absolute good and absolute evil.” The Monk sees the pagan world as “other” but with the commingling of pagan myths and Christian narratives in addition to the presence of Fortune, his “view of historical processes” grows “murky” in opposition to the Prioress’ clear “polarity.” 

            Schildgen’s fascinating study of the importance of non-Christian elements in CT provides yet another hue through which other scholars may examine CT. Her book is highly useful for preparing tale presentations and researching papers for this class! For example, in the chapter entitled “Pre-Christian Britain in the Wife of Bath’s and the Franklin’s Tale,” Schildgen offers a thorough exploration of promises and oaths within the two tales. From there one might utilize her points of argument to examine other tales containing oaths such as KT or perhaps to scrutinize CT religious figure’s oaths to God. In addition, in each chapter Schildgen analyzes one or two tale’s non-Christian rudiments such as “Fortune, the Stars, and the Pagan Gods in the Knight’s and Squire’s Tales.” This new book is a wonderful addition to our medieval library. --Pam Flowers, 4-28-03

Matthew C. Wolfe. "Placing Chaucer’s Retraction for a Reception of Closure." The Chaucer Review. 33 (1999): 427-431.

This article, though short, gives a clear and quite fascinating interpretation of Chaucer’s Retraction as well as making some pertinent points along the way about tale order and the editorial process since the death of Chaucer himself. Wolfe’s first claim comes as a caveat that we cannot be certain of the order that Chaucer may or may not have intended for his tales at the time of his death. Certainly some tales lead clearly into each other, but there is no sure indication that Chaucer intended the completed/surviving tales to be read straight through as the first installment of episodes. It is equally likely that Chaucer was working on separate sections of text that would be linked with additional tales had time allowed. Though Wolfe does not say so, I suggest that the presence of the Cook’s Fragment may support this theory. Wolfe’s second major argument centers around a particular manuscript MS. Gg.4.27 in Cambridge, University Library, from which several folios have been torn, including one (444) thought to possibly have contained the Retraction, which does not appear in the extant manuscript. This manuscript, dated around 1420, brings together Troilus and Criseyde, The Canterbury Tales, Legend of Good Women, Parliament of Fowls, some of Chaucer’s short lyrics and two works by John Lydgate. Around 1600, Joseph Holland replaces 35 of the missing pages from Speght’s 1598 edition. Though these additions have been moved since then, Wolfe suggests that Holland placed the Retraction, "not at the end of the Canterbury Tales, but rather at the end of the codex." Wolfe’s reading of this is that Chaucer meant to comment on his entire oeuvre with his Retraction—certainly his other works are mentioned—and keeping the Retraction attached to the Tales blinkers the scholar to a more generalized interpretation. He supports this with Douglas Wurtele’s suggestion that the Retraction is actually a splicing of two texts, the conclusion to the Parson’s Tale (ln. 1081-84 and 1090-92) and the retraction itself (ln. 1085-90).

Wolfe does not cover a few pertinent points, assuming perhaps that his average reader (more scholarly than we) is already aware of them. He makes no mention of any other instances of the Retraction appearing disconnected from the Tales. Arguing on the basis of a single manuscript is tentative at best. I am also unconvinced by his generalizations about Chaucer’s "family." He seems to suggest that, upon Chaucer’s death, his surviving family opened up his study to find stacks of loose paper and bundled manuscripts willy-nilly, and that the family consciously collected, read, compared and interpreted the scraps and fragments in order to compile them and present a "collected works," as it were. (Of course, this is a somewhat facetious exaggeration on my part.) This does not take into account the possibility—even likelihood—that Chaucer’s works were already circulating in manuscript, with all the variance that this implies, at the time of his death. It also suggests a level of literary awareness and sense of authorial consciousness which, while clearly applicable to someone like Fitzgerald’s son, seems out of character for Chaucer’s contemporaries, perhaps particularly for his family, who are not known to have been of a literary bent. Nevertheless, Wolfe gives us an interesting new light in which to consider the problematic Retraction.--Maryah Converse, 4/27/03

O’Brien, Timothy D. "Fire and Blood: ‘Queynte’ Imaginings in Diana’s Temple." The Chaucer Review. 33:2 (1998) 157-167.

        In this article, O’Brien argues that Emelye in the Knight’s Tale is intentionally flat and passive as a statement about the Knight and his views about women. O’Brien uses the use of the word "queynte" and the themes of fire and blood in the scene where Emelye visits the temple of Diana, along with the Knight’s general telling of the tale to prove his point.

        In a discussion of whether the use of the word "queynte" in the temple should be taken as a sexual pun, O’Brien primarily examines the arguments of Larry D. Benson, John Fleming, and W.F. Bolton. Benson and Fleming’s arguments focus primarily on the use of the word in the fifth book of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, but O’Brien effectively applies their arguments to the Knight’s Tale. According to O’Brien, the debate comes down to context, with "Benson protesting that such a double meaning as is claimed for "queynte" in the Troilus passage cannot occur without a clear, immediate context for it; and Fleming arguing that Benson is right about the need for context, but wrong about the lack of it" (158). Bolton’s take on the word "queynte" applies more directly to O’Brien’s thesis because he is addressing the Knight’s Tale specifically, and because he believes the word to have a double meaning. However, O’Brien points out that Bolton makes the mistake of assuming that the double meaning is obvious, primarily because of the repetition of the word in the passage, and therefore sabotages his own argument.

        O’Brien says that Bolton goes wrong in not setting up a context for the word to have sexual connotations, and O’Brien sets out to prove that the context that Benson thinks is lacking is really present in the tale as a whole, although not readily obvious in the passage itself. O’Brien briefly addresses the use of "queynte" in the Miller’s Tale as possible support for a double meaning in the Knight’s Tale. He cites a number of critics who have agreed that because of the interactive nature of the Canterbury Tales, a tale can be applied recursively to give a better understanding of a previous tale. O’Brien especially looks at Peggy Knapp’s discussion of the Miller’s Tale as a parody of the Knight’s Tale, in which she acknowledges the Miller’s use of "queynte" as a part of this parody. Synthesizing Knapp’s argument with his own, O’Brien identifies in the Miller’s Tale a general theme of quenching, which he suggests could even be grounds to argue that the Miller’s entire tale is in fact inspired by the very word "queynte" in the Knight’s Tale.

        The article proceeds to look at the Knight’s actual telling style as context for a sexual interpretation of the word "queynte," with the implication that a sexual interpretation of this word offers a new perspective on the character of the Knight and on Chaucer’s intentions for the tale itself. O’Brien uses the Knight’s description, or lack thereof, of Emelye bathing as an intimation of the Knight’s feelings and values concerning her character, and perhaps women in general. Basically O’Brien shows that by keeping to himself the details of her bathing, the Knight is possessing Emelye in the same way that Theseus, Arcite, and Palamoun seek to possess her. The Knight is also calling to attention these details by refusing to disclose them, which O’Brien says "serves as a variation on his favorite rhetorical color of occupatio" (161). O’Brien explains that by calling attention to Emelye as an object of sexual pursuit or possession, the Knight creates a context for a sexually inclined interpretation of "queynte" later in the tale.

        Incorporating into his argument the Structuralist concepts of syntagmatic and paradigmatic, O’Brien proves that the very climate of the Knight’s Tale in context of society as a whole and in terms of human associations calls for a sexually oriented interpretation of the tale and the word "queynte." O’Brien compares Chaucer’s tale to its predecessor, Boccaccio’s Teseida, to further illustrate the distinctive emphasis on sexual politics in Chaucer’s version. He points out that Emilia in Teseida actually seems to want to marry, to some extent. He shows that Emelye, contrarily, seems to truly wish to preserve her virginity and avoid joining a world of coupling and childbirth. O’Brien shows how Chaucer has constructed a tone of masculine dominance and oppression of women in the Knight’s Tale to justify his portrayal of Emelye as fearful of marriage and maybe even men, yet entirely submissive and powerless.

        I think O’Brien successfully proved his thesis; the article is well developed and well supported. The article is a really interesting analysis of the Knight and his use of the word "queynte" in his tale. I must say I find it hard to believe that Chaucer didn’t mean for an eyebrow to rise at the repetition of a word with the potential for a double entendre. Especially in light of his use of the word with a strong sexual implication in several other tales of the same work, it seems unlikely that the Knight using it four times in five lines isn’t even minimally suggestive. Although I know I don’t necessarily think exactly the same way that Chaucer’s listeners would have, I think if someone with the utmost sincerity used the word "screw," for example, four times practically in a row, it would probably flash through my mind at some point and in some form that the word is also used as slang for having sex. But regardless of whether that just means my mind is in the gutter, O’Brien thoroughly proves that there is a latent context in the tale that makes an ambiguous interpretation of the word totally appropriate, not just probable or possible.

        I think the connection to the Miller’s Tale is valid, although it should be handled carefully. O’Brien’s mention of fire was significant to the theme of quenching, and also of lust and desire in the Miller’s Tale, and I think it is generally accepted that the Miller’s Tale is composed with the Knight’s Tale in mind. Obviously the Knight is not composing his tale with the Miller in mind, but the Miller’s interpretation of or reaction to the Knight’s Tale could very well offer insight into the Knight’s Tale, at least from the perspective of a churl. The idea that the Knight withholds information about Emelye intentionally so as to in a sense possess her could seem to contradict his chivalry, but actually seems rather in keeping with the rather misogynistic mentality of men of the fourteenth century. Although I think that the Knight does not tell of Emelye’s bathing rituals because of a sense of noble decorum, the principles behind the rules of chivalry at the time could support a view of women as needing to be possessed.

        I thought the introduction of the concepts of syntagmatic versus paradigmatic worked well to demonstrate the abstract understanding required in order to see a definite context for O’Brien’s assertion. The comparison of Emelye to Emilia in the Teseida calls attention to some interesting differences between the two characters. Chaucer’s alterations of the original character could be interpreted as implying that Emelye wishes not to be confined to the world of gender relations and childbirth, which are frightening and unfair, as O’Brien suggests. They could also reveal, in either Chaucer or the Knight, a rigid misogynistic attitude that is different but as strong as Boccacio’s, although I think because of factors like the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the description of the Knight in the General Prologue, this is a less likely interpretation. I like the implication that the bleeding brands and other aspects of the scene in Diana’s temple allow a glimpse of a less pretty reality, to which Emelye is mercilessly subjected, than the Knight intends to present. This could be in keeping with the possible theme of decay throughout the Canterbury Tales; that is the idea that the chivalrous and perhaps unrealistic world of the Knight is giving way to the more grounded and less romantic world of the majority of the pilgrims.

        I would like to know what O’Brien thinks Chaucer was attempting to say by making the Knight tell his tale this way. If he is portraying the Knight as restraining Emelye, does that mean that Chaucer has a low opinion of the Knight? The portrait of the Knight in the General Prologue, though it could be ironic, implies that Chaucer thinks highly of the Knight; in fact, the Knight may be one of the only pilgrims who is portrayed favorably in the General Prologue. It would be interesting to consider further the Miller’s and the Wife of Bath’s use of the word as a reaction to the Knight’s use of the word. By making other characters criticize or at least poke fun at the Knight and maybe even romance and chivalry, is Chaucer mocking the Knight or the churlish mockers? I think it could be useful to consider O’Brien’s observations and speculations in a view of the tales as a social commentary. I’d be inclined to think that if Chaucer were criticizing anything with the Knight’s Tale, it would be the norms and standards of the social culture to which the Knight belongs, rather than the Knight himself. —Liz Sabatiuk, 4/15/01

Campbell, Jackson J. "The Canon’s Yeoman as Imperfect Paradigm." The Chaucer Review. 17 (1982): 171-181. 

        Jackson J Campbell argues that the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale is Chaucer’s preparation for the Parson’s Tale. Although the Yeoman is trying to change from his former life, he cannot free himself from the material world and "the Yeoman’s history and performance are an imperfect paradigm of the process and experience that the Parson’s Tale is soon to make explicit at considerable length." Campbell describes the Yeoman as having a fascination, like an addiction, to alchemy, and hence an inability to discard the material world. Even in his reformed state the Yeoman gives extensive lists of his alchemical knowledge for no reason except his fascination with alchemy and his desire to show it off.

        Campbell claims that this type of confusion shown in the Yeoman’s character is Chaucer’s way of showing him as a person at a major turning point in his life. According to Campbell, the Yeoman is actually ambivalent toward his former master and seems to be in despair over alchemy, rather than an aversion to the Canon. The Yeoman obviously rejects the type of trickery which the Canon in his tale performs, but Campbell argues that "he sees his own motivations and those of his lord in quite a different light from those of the false priest-swindler."

        In effect Campbell argues that while the Yeoman views the Canon in his tale as morally wrong, he does not view the scientific idea of alchemy as wrong and therefore cannot move from the material into the spiritual realm. According to Campbell, Chaucer chose the Yeoman to discuss alchemy because he was using alchemy as a fictional structure through the context of a particular character. All of the pilgrims are traveling to confess, but without true penitence it will not do any good. The Yeoman enters the group really wanting to change, and is in effect hoping to cleanse himself the way the rest of the pilgrims hope to at the end of their pilgrimage. "Chaucer’s handling of the episode, however, is subtle, for the Yeoman’s conversion falls short of the ideal. He is at least capable of change, and his reform may be praiseworthy, to a degree, but it is finally incomplete and inadequate. He cannot in the end free himself from material trammels." Campbell argues that Chaucer specifically chose the Yeoman because his desire for change at that moment, and his inability to see beyond the material world, make the Parson’s Tale more forceful.