The Caytif Body: Fiction and Flesh in the Parson's Tale

Author / Editor
Price, Merrall.

Title
The Caytif Body: Fiction and Flesh in the Parson's Tale

Published
Medieval Perspectives 28 (2013): 45-62.

Description
The Parson is exceptional among the Canterbury Pilgrims for his corporeal invisibility; his GP portrait gives no corporeal details and ParsPT efface his body, along with fiction, verse, and the colors of rhetoric. Moreover, ParsT displays hostility to sexuality beyond its analogues and expresses a pathological vividness in its metaphors and similes for the flesh as a fetid captor of the soul. Only with difficulty does the Parson reconcile himself to a Redemption accomplished by Incarnation.

Chaucer Subjects
Parson and His Tale