The Names of Women in the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's Hidden Art of Involucral Nomenclature
- Author / Editor
- Frese, Dolores Warwick.
The Names of Women in the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's Hidden Art of Involucral Nomenclature
- Published
- Juliette Dor, ed. A Wyf Ther Was: Essays in Honour of Paule Mertens-Fonck (Liege: University of Liege, 1992), pp. 155-66.
- Description
- The tradition of involucrum explains the Second Nun's preoccupation with the name Cecilie, associates the Prioress and the Monk with Abelard, associates the Wife of Bath with Bathsheba, and relates the Clerk's references to Petrarch and "Poo" to Chaucer's celebration of vernacular poetry. The name-play allows readers the "cooperative option of verbal reconstruction" by which women's names can "be made whole and geometrically visible."
- Alternative Title
- Wyf Ther Was.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
- Clerk and His Tale.
- Prioress and Her Tale.
- Monk and His Tale.
- Second Nun and Her Tale.