Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage
- Author / Editor
- Jacobs, Kathryn.
Marriage Contracts from Chaucer to the Renaissance Stage
- Published
- Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 2001.
- Physical Description
- viii, 181 pp.
- Description
- Four chapters explore the influence of contemporary marriage law on Chaucer's imagination, and three investigate similar influences on religious and Renaissance drama. Chaucer did not merely reflect his society's concerns with marriage and its formulas; he capitalized on his reader's awareness of the formulas' consequences. In CT, delineation of marriage can (1) expose characters' social status and establish reader expectations; (2) reconceptualize nonmarital sexual relations by using the language of the familiar marital contract; and (3) encourage a more sympathetic view of widows by examining the straits to which marital contracts reduced them.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Canterbury Tales--General.