Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch : Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary Studies

Description: A critique of psychoanalytic approaches to medieval literature--based on the "fatal flaws" of "Freudian methods of inquiry"-and a rejection of psychoanalytic approaches to Chaucer's Pardoner, including Patterson's previous work. Patterson suggests an approach that "interprets the symbolic structure by reference to discourses that are [. . .] contemporary to Chaucer," identifying the Pardoner's "sodomy" as "simony" and the Old Man as Despair, as well as an Oedipus figure. The article concludes with "some reflections on the place of theory [. . .] in medieval literary studies."