Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons
- Author / Editor
- Martin, Priscilla.
Chaucer's Women: Nuns, Wives, and Amazons
- Published
- Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1990.
- Physical Description
- xv, 254 pp.
- Description
- Full-length studies of the women in Chaucer's poetry had to wait for the intense activity in feminist scholarship of the last two decades.
- Studying Chaucer's representations of women--the Wife of Bath,the White Lady, Criseyde, Alceste, the heroines of the Legends, the Prioress and the Second Nun, Emily, Dorigen, Constance, Griselda, Prudence, and the almost indestructible Cecilia--results in "two simple things one can say with confidence. The first is that women and the relationships between the sexes are Chaucer's favorite subject," and "the second is that he treats their relationships as a problem area."
- He writes of the "suffering caused to both sexes in their involvement with each other, of unrequited love, of unhappy marriages, of power struggles for 'maistry'." Martin examines Anel, BD, CT, HF, LGW, PF, Rom, and TC.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General.
- Anelida and Arcite.
- Book of the Duchess.
- House of Fame.
- Legend of Good Women.
- Parliament of Fowls.
- Romaunt of the Rose.
- Troilus and Criseyde.
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
- Prioress and Her Tale.
- Second Nun and Her Tale.