The Pestilential Gaze: From Epidemiology to Erotomania in 'The Knight's Tale'
- Author / Editor
- Fumo, Jamie C.
The Pestilential Gaze: From Epidemiology to Erotomania in 'The Knight's Tale'
- Published
- Studies in the Age of Chaucer 35 (2013): 85-136.
- Description
- Various associations of sight and death indicate that KnT is a "nightmare vision of vision itself" which, in comparison with Boccaccio's "Teseida," flattens the character of Emelye, intensifies her agency, and indicts chivalry. In KnT the motifs of "perilous vision and toxic sexuality" that inhere in legends of Thebes and Amazonia combine with imagery of pestilential vision associated with plague in various treatises, emphasized by association with Saturn's malevolent gaze.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Knight and His Tale
- Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations