Chaucer's Spring of Comedy: The 'Merchant's Tale' and other 'Games' with Augustinian Theology

Author / Editor
Rudat, Wolfgang E. H.

Title
Chaucer's Spring of Comedy: The 'Merchant's Tale' and other 'Games' with Augustinian Theology

Published
Annuale Mediaevale 21 (1981): 111-20.

Description
The idea of sex as hard work and the portrait of January as lover draws on Augustinian theories of pre- and postlapsarian sexuality, also important in WBT and MkT; nevertheless, bawdy treatments of Christian theories are "harmoniously absorbed by the Spring of Comedy" that infuses CT.

Chaucer Subjects
Merchant and His Tale.