The Sultaness, Donegild, and Fourteenth-Century Female Merchants: Intersecting Discourses of Gender, Economy, and Orientalism in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale

Author / Editor
Wood, Marjorie Elizabeth.

Title
The Sultaness, Donegild, and Fourteenth-Century Female Merchants: Intersecting Discourses of Gender, Economy, and Orientalism in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale

Published
Comitatus 37 (2006): 65-85.

Description
Anxious about the threat of Eastern hegemony and the increasing authority of merchant women, the narrator of MLT crafts characters that subtly feminize the East, "Orientalize" the feminine, and discredit women's economic participation as a threat to patriarchal structure. The Wife of Bath destabilizes this subtext.

Chaucer Subjects
Man of Law and His Tale.
Wife of Bath and Her Tale.