Abstract
In the following chapters, I shall be analyzing Chaucer’s Pardoner as a potentially subversive figure in terms of gender; one who, in his unan-chored oscillation among various possible sexes, genders, and erotic practices, could pose a threat to patriarchal authority. But he will also appear as Chaucer’s straw man, a figure who introduces this subversive potential only so that it can be disciplined by representatives of medieval authority, especially the Host and the Knight. In addition, the Pardoner will appear as a patriarchal figure himself, one who rejects the feminine and is anxious to assume the signs of a phallic and authoritative masculinity. But first, in this introduction, I would like both to ground these fluctuations in material reality and in poetic language, and to forecast some of the specific arguments I shall subsequently pursue in more detail. How might these disjunctive, discontinuous versions of the Pardoner function in terms of fourteenth-century politics? In what ways might gender be a factor in the political life of late medieval England? How might the economy of court patronage affect and be affected by the politics of gender? And how might all of these questions be related to Chaucer’s own status as court poet?
Nay, lat hym telle us of no ribaudye! (VI, 324)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Alfred David, ’The Strumpet Muse:Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloom-ington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 92.
Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381, The New Histori-cism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 27 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), p. 225.
Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), p. 279.
Paul Strohm, Social Chaucer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 153–54, 152.
Susan Crane, “The Writing Lesson of 1381,” in Chaucer’s England: Literature in Historical Context, ed. Barbara Hanawalt, Medieval Studies at Minnesota 4 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), p. 215.
See Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison: University ofWisconsin Press, 1989), pp. 162–68.
Caroline Walker Bynum, “Women Mystics and Eucharistic Devotion in the Thirteenth Century,” in her Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Urzone, 1992), pp. 146–47; Introduction to Feminist Approaches to the Body in Medieval Literature, ed. Linda Lomperis and Sarah Stanbury, New Cultural Studies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), p. ix.
Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence and Damnation: Minority Groups in the Middle Ages (New York: Routledge, 1991), p. 143.
Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period (Santa Barbara, CA [?]: Dorset Press, 1979), pp. 7–10
John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 283–86.
For instance, by Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse:Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), p. 6, and by Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, p. 160.
Copyright information
© 2000 Robert S. Sturges
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sturges, R.S. (2000). Introduction. In: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61877-4_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-61877-4_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-61879-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-61877-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)