Snub and White: Chaucer, Logic, and Strode.

Description: Proposes using a more philosophical reading of RvT to enhance understanding of Chaucer's "academic knowledge and his relationship with Ralph Strode." An academic joke in RvT relies on snubness and whiteness as stock examples of inseparable and separable accidents. Symkyn's nose is inseparable from its snubness, but his wife misidentifies a "white thyng" (RvT, 4301) because whiteness is a separable accident. Argues that logician Ralph Strode may be Chaucer's source for this allusion; for the insult "swynes-heed" (4262); and for the logic-related terms "impertinent" (ClP, 54) and "at dulcarnoun" and "flemyng of wrecches" (TC, III.31, 33), which are academic nicknames for the Pythagorean theorem and the first difficult geometric proof.

Chaucer Subjects: Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations
Reeve and His Tale
Clerk and His Tale
Troilus and Criseyde