'Lad with Revel to Newegate': Chaucerian Narrative and Historical Meta-Narrative

Author / Editor
Strohm, Paul.

Title
'Lad with Revel to Newegate': Chaucerian Narrative and Historical Meta-Narrative

Published
Robert R. Edwards, ed. Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr. (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1994), pp. 163-76.

Description
The language and imagery with which the Cook denounces Perkyn's revelry in CkT evoke the rhetoric with which contemporary writers denounced the so-called Peasants' Revolt of 1381. Perkyn's revelry may seem "innocuous" to readers today, but "the imagery of revelry carried a heavy symbolic freight in the later fourteenth century." Through narrative containment, Chaucer and contemporary chroniclers imposed closure on events that threatened the dominant social order.
Reprinted in Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).

Alternative Title
Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr.

Chaucer Subjects
Cook and His Tale.