Taking the Gold out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman
- Author / Editor
- Schibanoff, Susan.
Taking the Gold out of Egypt: The Art of Reading as a Woman
- Published
- Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), pp. 83-106. Reprinted in Ruth Evans and Lesley Johnson, eds. Feminist Readings in Middle English Literature (Routledge, 1994), pp. 221-45.
- Description
- Discusses the "well-established 'topos' of manuscript literature that women readers alone are offended by antifeminist texts" and examines Chaucer's defense of himself in portraying Criseyde's guilt. Asserts that Chaucer's Wife of Bath, being illiterate, can resist literary misogyny: her mind is not full of texts that overwhelm her, and she simply rejects what she hears, changing it to suit herself.
- Christine de Pisan, a literate reader, is burdened with old texts and must painfully learn to read them not as an emasculated woman but as a woman reader.
- Contributor
- Flynn, Elizabeth A.,
- Schweickart, Patrocinio P.,ed.
- ed.
- Alternative Title
- Gender and Reading: Essaus on Readers, Texts, and Contexts.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Wife of Bath and Her Tale.
- Troilus and Criseyde.