The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature 1000-1400.
- Author / Editor
- Blud, Victoria.
The Unspeakable, Gender and Sexuality in Medieval Literature 1000-1400.
- Published
- Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2017.
- Physical Description
- ix, 211 pp.
- Series
- Gender in the Middle Ages, no. 12.
- Description
- Explores "varieties of the medieval unspeakable," from ineffability and mysticism to same-sex eroticism, in Old and Middle English literary tradition, employing an analytical method adapted from Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Giorgio Agamben, informed by feminist criticism. Includes discussion of the Pardoner, and critical traditions of the character (pp. 78-85, 104-5) as multifaceted and fragmented, a manifestation of the "vital and generative importance of the partial." Also discusses speech, speechlessness, and textuality in Chaucer's legend of Philomela in LGW (153-60) and John Gower's "Tale of Tereus," exploring their "cuts" and relative emphases.
- Chaucer Subjects
- Background and General Criticism
Pardoner and His Tale
Legend of Good Women
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations