Yeoman Services: Chaucer's Knight, His Critics, and the Pleasures of Historicism

Author / Editor
Scala, Elizabeth.

Title
Yeoman Services: Chaucer's Knight, His Critics, and the Pleasures of Historicism

Published
Chaucer Review 45 (2010): 194-221.

Description
In striving to contextualize the portrait of the Yeoman in relation to real-world late medieval weaponry and hunting gear, critics overlook both the Yeoman's service as the "bearer" of aristocratic masculinity and the portrait's phallic humor. In doing so, they inevitably repeat the latter, even as they leave unacknowledged the "ardor" of "scholarly arduousness."

Chaucer Subjects
General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales