Chaucer's Pardoner and Host-On the Road, in the Alehouse

Author / Editor
Legassie, Shayne Aaron.

Title
Chaucer's Pardoner and Host-On the Road, in the Alehouse

Published
SAC 29 (2007): 183-223.

Description
Combines psychoanalysis, ethnography, and "queer theory" to examine pilgrimage, travel, and specific locations as narrative devices that undermine and assert masculinities in CT, especially those of the Pardoner, the Host, and the Knight in the "alehouse scene" of Part 6. Female gender performance is not similarly destabilized by travel and location in Chaucer's poem. Legassie draws comparisons and contrasts from various pilgrimage accounts and from the Guild Hall memorandum concerning the John/Eleanor Rykener trial; also challenges notions of the "liminality" of travel.

Chaucer Subjects
Pardoner and His Tale
Knight and His Tale.