Etymological puns reveal MkT, NPT, and SNT to be a trilogy concerned with the common themes of marriage, sexuality, and decline of the church. The tales dramatize a confrontation among the three pilgrims in which the Priest discloses the Monk's…
The rhetorical trope 'translatio' subsumes metaphor, allegory,and irony, providing a basis for understanding how the Pardoner translates himself into his characters and the Old Man into the rioters. The Pardoner represents his own Otherness while…
In WBP, Chaucer represents the Wife of Bath as Woman conceived in terms of masculine discourse. His presentation makes authoritative misogynist discourse both familiar and available for questioning.
WBT supplies the feminine gloss to the masculinist texts underlying WBP. It provides a marriage pedagogy in which the partners discover their own desires by attempting to learn each other's desires.
WBP dramatizes the emergence of the author in the late Middle Ages as a self actively engaged in creating meaning and in resisting meaning imposed on it by other discourses.
Although the Wife of Bath is a character constructed from masculine discourse, she appropriates that discourse into her own autoerotic sexual/textual glossing. In WBP, the Wife reveals an ambivalent feminine poetics within an apparently masculine…
Sir Francis Kynaston's 1635 translation of TC into Latin verse emblemizes the Renaissance need to valorize the present by simultaneously distancing the medieval past and articulating a tradition of continuity with it.
The dreamer/narrator's account of the Black Knight and Lady White in BD textualizes their discursive performances, revealing them to be institutionalized discourses desired by the narrator and his audience. The work provides interpretive closure…
Influenced by the conventions of Renaissance Petrarchism, Jonathan Sidnam's seventeenth-century translation/paraphrase of TC suppresses Chaucer's intimations that his poem may be read by both men and women in a way that transcends gender. Observing…
Dryden's praise of Chaucer in his preface to "Fables Ancient and Modern" is part of the critical orthodoxy of Chaucer's reception, but Dryden's reading/translation of NPT in the "Fables" has largely been ignored. The latter's alteration of the…
Through a historically situated investigation of the Pardoner's possible homeosexuality and its relation to language in PardPT, modern readers can resist Chaucer's (possibly) homophobic intentions, reclaiming and even celebrating the Pardoner's…
The Man of Law erases distinctions among spiritual, linguistic, and monetary exchange by trying to turn Custance and Christ into signs that can be circulated and traded for profit, raising the question of whether his tale is "true coining."
Reprinted in Gayle Margherita. The Romance of Origins: Language and Sexual Difference in Middle English Literature (Philadelaphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), pp. 100-28.
Chaucer's accounts of women who write and read letters in TC, MerT, and MLT reveal female privacy and autonomy to be sites of profound anxiety concerning the control of domestic space, women's actions, and women's bodies.
MilT constructs cuckoldry as a transaction between men that governs our reading of both the tale and the interactions between Miller and Reeve. The homosocial exchange of female sexuality is a secret concealed in cuckoldry but revealed in the…
The discourse of KnT displays the Knight's ideological desire to construct a boundary between a stable Christian cosmos and the restless eros of unregulated taletelling by establishing a political and narrative paradigm for the other pilgrims to…
Taylor, Paul Beekman.
Exemplaria 7 (1995): 371-93.
The time of the Canterbury pilgrimage imitates the time and eternity of the cosmos. In the poem, time acts as a measurable conceptual principle for men, but it is embodied as a perceptual force in women such as the hag in WBT and Griselda in ClT.
Both PardT and the Pardoner's interruption of the Wife in WBT are "touches of the queer" that temporarily denaturalize heterosexual subjectivity, revealing its performative nature.
In KnT, Chaucer presents three conceptions of knighthood, each arising from individual desires that displace social responsibility. Arcite and Palamon's rivalry is based in mimetic desire for ontological being. Theseus arbitrates their rivalry by…
A reading of PrT in the mode of Julia Kristeva reveals it to be the narrative of the "litel clergeon's" entry into self-hood and subjectivity by a traumatic passage from the maternal "chora," represented by the singing of "Alma redemptio mater,"…
Despite the increasing difficulty of retaining the Chaucer "canon" in university curricula of the 1990s, Chaucer-teaching is alive and flourishing, as evidenced in the colloquium on teaching at the 1994 New Chaucer Society meeting and the papers…
An undergraduate Chaucer course exploring the late fourteenth century as a time of political, economic, religious, technological, and epistemological change can both enrich students' experiences of the texts and help them realize that…
