Disciplining the Tongue: Speech and Emotion in Later Middle English Poetry.

Author / Editor
Strub, Spencer.

Title
Disciplining the Tongue: Speech and Emotion in Later Middle English Poetry.

Published
Ph.D. Dissertation. University of California, Berkeley, 2018. Dissertation Abstracts International A82.09(E). Fully accessible via ProQuest Dissertations & Theses and at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3cr3q8b9; accessed August 18, 2025.

Physical Description
iii, 142 pp.

Description
Explores speech in late medieval English "literature and prescriptive religious writing," focusing on how "inward feelings [are] realized only in intersubjective exchange." Includes discussion of, among others, "Piers Plowman," "Mum and the Sothsegger," and CT, In the latter, "Chaucer makes mirth, comfort, and pleasure––words that elsewhere describe the act of prayer––the emotional norm that governs the telling of the Canterbury Tales: sacred pleasure becomes the pleasure of idle fiction."

Chaucer Subjects
Canterbury Tales--General
Language and Word Studies