Between Boccaccio and Chaucer: The Limits of Female Interiority in the 'Knight's Tale'
- Author / Editor
- Friedman, Jamie A.
Between Boccaccio and Chaucer: The Limits of Female Interiority in the 'Knight's Tale'
- Published
- Jeff Rider and Jamie Friedman, eds. The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy. The New Middle Ages (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 203-22.
- Description
- Argues against reading Emelye as absent or purely symbolic and instead posits her as having a more complex subjectivity that can be more fully accessed when reading KnT alongside Boccaccio's "Teseida." Close reading of Emelye's prayer to Diana shows her potential for resisting male authority and indicates her nuanced interiority. Despite this moment of autonomy, Emelye loses agency in the text once her body functions as the site for fulfillment of male desire.
- Contributor
- Rider, Jeff, ed.
- Friedman, Jamie, ed.
- Alternative Title
- The Inner Life of Women in Medieval Romance Literature: Grief, Guilt, and Hypocrisy.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Knight and His Tale
- Sources, Analogues, and LIterary Relations