"Anima carnis in sanguine est": Blood, Life, and "The King of Tars."

Published: Journal of English and Germanic Philology 115, no. 4 (2016): 442-62.

Description: Connects the shapeless mass of flesh, which Christian baptism miraculously reforms into a baby in the Middle English romance "The King of Tars," with a bloodless mass described by Chaucer's contemporary Henry Daniel as an "elvysch cake." Claims that "elvysch" can be interpreted as strange, transformational, and excessive, in a "Chaucerian sense," and the concept may be echoed in the rumor of a "fiendish" birth in MLT and of Saracen "bloodlessness" in SNT.

Chaucer Subjects: Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Language and Word Studies
Man of Law and His Tale
Second Nun and Her Tale