Chaucer's Lollard Joke: History and Textual Unconscious
- Author / Editor
- Strohm, Paul.
Chaucer's Lollard Joke: History and Textual Unconscious
- Published
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer 17 (1995): 23-42.
- Description
- Reads Chaucer's reference to cooks' turning "substaunce to accident" (PardT 538-40) as a joke about Lollard attitudes toward the Eucharist. Employing Freudian psychology of jokes and New Historicist evaluation of Lollard views and views of Lollards, Strohm uses the reference to disclose the "unconscious" of the text--a metaphor for its many layers of meaning.
- Reprinted as "What Can We Know About Chaucer That He Didn't Know About Himself?" in Theory and the Premodern Text (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
- Alternative Title
- Biennial Chaucer Lecture. The New Chaucer Society Ninth International Congress, 23-27 July 1994, Trinity College, Dublin.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism.
- Pardoner and His Tale.