Constance and the Silkweavers: Working Women and the Colonial Fantasy in Chaucer's 'The Man of Law's Tale'

Author / Editor
Bracken, Christopher.

Title
Constance and the Silkweavers: Working Women and the Colonial Fantasy in Chaucer's 'The Man of Law's Tale'

Published
Critical Matrix: The Princeton Journal of Women, Gender, and Culture 8:1 (1994): 13-39.

Description
Cast as a discussion among four participants (Reductio, Thea, Ceres, and Cassandra), this closet drama explores relations among power, gender, trade, religion, and their representation in MLT. The characters are, loosely, representatives of different but nonconflicting critical schools, discussing how (and whether) patriarchy speaks through the poem, its kinds of commodification and repression, parallels between matters related to women and Islam, and the applicability of MLT to the modern world.

Chaucer Subjects
Man of Law and His Tale.