Proving Constant: Torture and The Man of Law's Tale
- Author / Editor
- Landman, James [H.]
Proving Constant: Torture and The Man of Law's Tale
- Published
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer 20 (1998): 1-39.
- Description
- In MLT, the torment of Constance is explicitly linked with the judicial torture of Alla's messenger. A notion of a "single, certain truth" underlies the concern with torture in the Tale, also reflected in the attitude toward fiction expressed in MLP and threatened by the inscrutability of women in MLT.
- Landman surveys medieval English legal attitudes toward torture and argues that the Man of Law is a "particularly appropriate narrator" who subscribes to a "logic of torture." MLT reflects this logic more clearly than SNT or ClT.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Man of Law and His Tale.
- Second Nun and Her Tale.
- Clerk and His Tale.