A Voice for the Prioress: The Context of English Devotional Prose
- Author / Editor
- Osberg, Richard H.
A Voice for the Prioress: The Context of English Devotional Prose
- Published
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer 18 (1996): 25-54.
- Description
- The naive, heavily repetitive, oratorical style of PrT appears to be influenced by late-medieval devotional prose written by men for women. Broader patterns of recurrence signal oppositions in the "Tale" that subvert its feminine voice and its claims to authenticity. The rhetoric of apostrophe fails to replace the absence of the subverted voice, leaving the Prioress less a character than a style. The article includes a chart of repetitive rhetorical devices.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Prioress and Her Tale.
- Style and versification.
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations.