Damaged Goods: Merchandise, Stories, and Gender in Chaucer's the "Man of Law's Tale."

Author / Editor
Cady, Diane.

Title
Damaged Goods: Merchandise, Stories, and Gender in Chaucer's the "Man of Law's Tale."

Published
The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), pp. 125-60.

Description
Explores how medieval travel writers "imagine storytelling and merchandising as analogous enterprises," how they intersect with "gender ideology" wherein "texts are imagined as both feminine corpora and feminized commodities," and how the Man of Law's aversion to incest can be linked with "anxieties" about poetic properties and succession. Shows that those anxieties are Chaucer's own, evident by contrast with Boccaccio's tale of Alatiel, and haunted by the critical fiction of Chaucer's rivalry with Gower.

Alternative Title
The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature: Value and Economy in Late Medieval England

Chaucer Subjects
Man of Law and His Tale
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations