What's the Pope Got to Do with It?: Forgery, Didacticism, and Desire in the Clerk's Tale
- Author / Editor
- Scanlon, Larry.
What's the Pope Got to Do with It?: Forgery, Didacticism, and Desire in the Clerk's Tale
- Published
- New Medieval Literatures 6 (2003): 129-65
- Description
- Scanlon reads ClT against a historical tension between aristocratic arranged marriage and canonist marriage of consent, focusing on the espousal scene, the papal letter forged by Walter, and the conclusion and Envoy of the Tale.
- Didactic or exemplary, rather than allegorical, ClT is less ideological or ironic than it is expressive of a desire to celebrate--despite its costliness--a feminine spirituality located in the domestic sphere. The unhistorical nature of the papal dispensation signals the desire.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Clerk and His Tale.