Chaucer's Visions of Manhood

Author / Editor
Crocker, Holly A.

Title
Chaucer's Visions of Manhood

Published
New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Physical Description
xiii, 250 pp.

Series
The New Middle Ages.

Description
Crocker investigates how the visibility and invisibility of gender in Chaucer are linked to performativity and cultural privilege, especially for men. Discusses the figurative tradition of engendering sight as background to how Prudence in Mel is the "visibly unseen" part of her husband's visible masculinity. In PhyT and accounts of a court scandal concerning Elizabeth of Lancaster, women who are visibly associated with passivity consolidate men's claims to authority. BD attempts to resolve the scandal of gender's visibility through its relational construction of a memorial poetics. Crocker also includes expanded versions of previously published discussions of female invisibility in ShT and WBT (SAC 29 [2007], no. 234) and gender concerns in the Chaucerian proverbs of Harley MS 7333 (SAC 29 [2007], no. 54).

Chaucer Subjects
Tale of Melibee.
Physician and His Tale.
Book of the Duchess.