Abstract
Critics tend to impugn Chaucer’s Man of Law for possessing an economic attitude toward stories and storytelling. This chapter argues that the Man of Law’s view is not a product of poor storytelling or Chaucer’s satirical pen, but rather one shared by a wide range of medieval writers and rhetoricians who present stories as commodities to be merchandised through rhetoric. This economy of storytelling is tied to gender in two key ways. One, stories are depicted not only as commodities, but also as feminine corpora, and their advertising through rhetoric is often framed in sexual terms that take a disturbingly violent turn. Two, those writers who lack poetic property are described not only as poor, but also as emasculated. This chapter examines how gender ideology undergirds medieval economies of storytelling and the way in which that ideology is framed by sexual violence and nationalism.
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- 1.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 30–5.
- 2.
Smith, Contingencies of Value, 33.
- 3.
Marc Shell makes a similar point in Art and Money, observing that “precisely how such confusion occurs, if it does not already exist, is not so clear” (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 141, nt. 1.
- 4.
On this point see, for example, Laurel Hendrix, “‘Pennance Profytable’: The Currency of Custance in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale ,” Exemplaria 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 141–66. Hendrix contends that the Man of Law “converts the enigmatic workings of God’s providence into the logic of the marketplace” (154) and “collapses the distinction between spiritual, verbal and monetary exchange, attempting to reduce Custance and Christ into signs which are freely traded and manipulated for profit, and the act of ‘enditing’ into a form of merchandising” (141). Roger A. Ladd identifies the Man of Law as the first in a series of mercantile misreaders in the Canterbury Tales who are “unable to pull fruyt from narrative chaf” due to their commercial self-interest. See Ladd’s, “The Mercantile (Mis)Reader in The Canterbury Tales,” Studies in Philology 99, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 17–32, at 19.
- 5.
Geoffrey Chaucer, The Man of Law’s Tale , in The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed., ed. Larry D. Benson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 87–104, line 47. All quotations that follow are from this edition and are cited parenthetically by line number.
- 6.
Chauncey Woods, “Chaucer’s Man of Law as Interpreter,” Traditio 23 (1967): 149–90, at 156.
- 7.
R. A. Shoaf, “‘Unwemmed Custance’: Circulation, Property, and Incest in the Man of Law’s Tale ,” Exemplaria 2, no. 1 (1990): 287–302, at 293.
- 8.
Kathryn Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy: East and West in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale ,” Chaucer Review 33, no. 4 (1999): 409–22, at 413–4. Kathryn Lynch links this “economy of excess” with the East as imagined by the medieval West. I will return to this claim and its gendered ramifications in the final section of the essay.
- 9.
Shoaf, “‘Unwemmed Custance,’” 288.
- 10.
Marc M. Pelen, “Providence and Incest Reconsidered: Chaucer’s Poetic Judgment of His Man of Law,” Papers on Language and Literature 30, no. 2 (1994): 132–56, at 154–5.
- 11.
Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy,” 414.
- 12.
For a discussion of the persistence of the idea of a rivalry between Gower and Chaucer and its gendered implications, see Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry , Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, ed. R. F. Yeager (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press, 1991), 130–52. For a discussion of the supposed rivalry between Gower and Chaucer and its relationship to masculine identity , fiscal anxieties, and scholarly investments, see my essay, “My Purse and My Person: ‘The Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse ’ and the Gender of Money,” in Money, Commerce and Economics in Late Medieval English Literature, ed. Craig E. Bertolet and Robert Epstein (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 109–26.
- 13.
See, for example, Roger A. Ladd, Antimercantilism in Late Medieval English Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Craig E. Bertolet, Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and the Commercial Practices of Late Fourteenth-Century London (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2013); and Jonathan Hsy, Trading Tongues: Merchants, Multilingualism, and Medieval Literature (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2013).
- 14.
On the possible influence of Mandeville’s Travels on Chaucer’s work, see Hugo Lange, “Chaucer und Mandeville’s Travels,” Archiv für das Studium der Neuren Sprachen und Literaturen 74 (1938): 79–81; Josephine Waters Bennett, “Chaucer and Mandeville’s Travels,” Modern Language Notes 68 (1953): 531–4; C. W. R. D. Moseley, “Chaucer, Sir John Mandeville, and the Alliterative Revival: A Hypothesis Concerning Relationships,” Modern Philology 72, no. 2 (1974): 182–4; David May, “Mandeville’s Travels, Chaucer, and The House of Fame,” Notes and Queries 34, no. 2 (June 1987): 178–82; and Kathryn L. Lynch, “East Meets West in Chaucer’s Squire’s and Franklin’s Tales,” Speculum 70, no. 3 (1995): 530–51. In this chapter, I follow the practice of Ronald Latham and refer to Marco Polo’s text as The Travels, rather than The Description of the World. See Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. and ed. Ronald Latham (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1958).
- 15.
Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy,” 410.
- 16.
Marco Polo’s Travels was originally written in French or Franco-Italian and, twenty years after its first appearance, existed also in Venetian, Latin, German, and Tuscan as well. For a description of these versions of Marco Polo’s text, see John Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 105–15. Mandeville’s Travels was translated from French into over a dozen languages, including Welsh, Old Irish, and Czech. A pictorial edition of the Travels even exists. For a discussion of the various versions of the Travels, see M. C. Seymour, Sir John Mandeville, in Authors of the Middle Ages 1 (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1993), 8–49 and Iain Macleod Higgins, Writing East: The “Travels” of Sir John Mandeville (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), xii–xiii. For the general influence of Mandeville on medieval texts and audiences, see Rosemary Tzanaki, Mandeville’s Medieval Audiences: A Study on the Reception of the Book of Sir John Mandeville (1371–1550) (London: Routledge, 2003). C. W. R. D. Moseley notes that the popularity of Mandeville’s Travels extends well into the early modern period. The text was printed more than any other secular work, suggesting that printers were well aware they had a valuable commodity on their hands: “Early printers, for whom speculative commercial production does become a reality, would have known that Mandeville was a book for which there would be sure demand. These many manuscripts created, in fact, both market and taste for the multiple copies made by the new technology.” Moseley, “‘New Things to Speak of’: Money, Memory, and Mandeville’s Travels in Early Modern England,” The Yearbook of English Studies 41, no. 1 (2011): 5–20, 9. On the influence of Mandeville’s Travels on early modern literature, see the essays collected in A Knight’s Legacy: Mandeville and Mandevillian Lore in Early Modern England, ed. Ladan Niayesh (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
- 17.
Josef Krása, ed., The Travels of Sir John Mandeville: A Manuscript in the British Library, trans. Peter Kussi (New York: G. Braziller, 1983), 13.
- 18.
Patricia A. Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), 138–40.
- 19.
Marcus Fabius Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1921), 8.3.63, 9.2.40, 8.3.62.
- 20.
John Mandeville, Mandeville’s Travels, ed. M. C. Seymour (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 15.19–25.
- 21.
Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, ed. and trans. Ronald Latham (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1958), 41.
- 22.
Christian Zacher notes that critics of medieval pilgrimages often claimed that curiosity, and not religious fervor, was the primary motivation for traveling on pilgrimages. Curiosity was seen as a sensation that could be satisfied especially through sight. Travel narratives , with their painted rhetoric, would be one way for those back home to quench their curiosity as well, albeit by secondhand means. Christian Zacher, Curiosity and Pilgrimage: The Literature of Discovery in Fourteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 19–33. Zacher notes that “to be ‘busy’ is one delight of the curious, and Mandeville himself is always ‘busy’”: for example, he stresses that he “did great busyness” at the Kahn’s court to learn the trick of making metal birds dance and sing (157). The links between curiosity and busyness provide another interpretive lens for reading the lines in the portrait of the Man of Law, which state that “Nowher so bisy a man as he ther nas, / And yet he semed bisier than he was” (Chaucer, Canterbury Tales, “General Prologue,” lines 321–22, in The Riverside Chaucer).
- 23.
Hugh of St. Victor, Didascalicon: De Studio Legendi, a Critical Text, ed. Brother Charles Henry Buttimer (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press, 1939), 2.23.10–7.
- 24.
Hugh of St. Victor, The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor: A Medieval Guide to the Arts, ed. Jerome Taylor (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 76–7.
- 25.
As Eugene Vance notes in a discussion of this passage from The Didascalicon, it is impossible to trace precisely how and by what means the language of commerce and rhetoric influenced one another: “the multiple discourses that constitute any given speech community not only develop together; they also act upon and interfere with each other, even though we cannot always be sure in which discourse new concepts first arise, and even though certain innovating discourses of the past are not audible to us now. There obviously was a specifically mercantile discourse in the twelfth century, and the oratores obviously heard it, if from a distance.” Mervelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 118.
- 26.
Alberic of Montecassino, The Flores Rhetorici, ed. D. M. Inguanez and E. H. Willard (Montecassino: Miscellanea Cassinese, 1938), 6.45.
- 27.
Qtd. and translated by R. A. Shoaf, Dante, Chaucer, and the Currency of the Word: Money, Images, and Reference in Late Medieval Poetry (Norman, OK: Pilgrim, 1983), 116.
- 28.
For further information on Chaucer’s sources, see Robert M. Correale and Mary Hamel, Sources and Analogues of the Canterbury Tales, vol. 2 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005).
- 29.
David Wallace, Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1997), 185.
- 30.
See Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath and Sherman McAllister Kuhn (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1952), s.v. strange (definitions 2a and 2b).
- 31.
See R. C. Goffin, “Quiting by Tidings in the Hous of Fame,” Medium Aevum 12 (1943): 40–1. In Curiosity and Pilgrimage, Christian Zacher quotes Mandeville, whose language suggests this link between novelty and tidynges: “men hang ret liking to have speke of strange thinges” and that “newe things and newe tydynges ben plesant to here” (228).
- 32.
Hsy, Trading Tongues, 68.
- 33.
See entry for thrifty in A Chaucer Glossary, ed. Norman Davis, Douglas Gray, Patricia Ingham, and Anne Wallace-Hadrill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 154.
- 34.
In Gower’s text, Custance is considerably more active, converting the merchants to Christianity. On Custance as narrative, see Carolyn Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 95. On the commodification of Custance, see also Sheila Delany, “Womanliness in The Man of Law’s Tale ,” Chaucer Review 9, no. 1 (1974): 63–72; and Laurel Hendrix, “‘Pennance Profytable.’” Not every reader views Custance as a passive object, however. David Raybin, for example, argues that Custance uses her speeches in order to get back at her tormentors, including her parents. “Custance and History: Woman as Outsider in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale ,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 12 (1990): 65–84. Robert B. Dawson also sees Custance’s rhetoric as more complex and aggressive than it might seem at first and argues that the Man of Law is a more complex narrator than he initially appears to be as well. “Custance in Context: Rethinking the Protagonist of the Man of Law’s Tale ,” Chaucer Review 26, no. 3 (1992): 293–308.
- 35.
Nancy Vickers, ‘“The Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best’: Shakespeare’s Lucrece,” in Shakespeare and the Question of Theory, ed. Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman (New York: Methuen, 1985), 95–115.
- 36.
David Wallace notes that “this term rekenynge is a curious one: in the CT it denotes the kind of detailed calculations associated (most commonly) with mercantile trade, astrology, or the state of the soul. It appears three times in the GP: the Shipman is said to ‘rekene wel his tydes’ (line 401); the Reeve makes his own ‘rekenynge’ of his young master’s stock value (line 600); and the pilgrims pay their ‘rekenynges’ before leaving the Tabard (line 760).” Wallace, Chaucerian Polity, 185.
- 37.
Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 95.
- 38.
Winthrop Wetherbee, “Constance and the World in Chaucer and Gower,” in John Gower: Recent Readings, ed. R. F. Yeager (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 65–93, at 84.
- 39.
Rodney Delasanta, “And of Great Reverence: Chaucer’s Man of Law,” Chaucer Review 5, no. 4 (1971): 288–310, at 296.
- 40.
On texts as feminine corpora, and the gendered structure of medieval poetics more generally, see, for example, Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 3–27; Paul Allen Miller, “Laurel as the Sign of Sin: Laura’s Textual Body in Petrarch’s Secretum,” in Sex and Gender in Medieval and Renaissance Texts: The Latin Tradition, ed. Barbara K. Gold, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1997), 139–63; Robin R. Hass, “‘A Picture of Such Beauty in Their Minds’: The Medieval Rhetoricians, Chaucer, and Evocative Effictio,” Exemplaria 14, no. 2 (October 2002): 383–422; Jill Ross, Figuring the Feminine: The Rhetoric of Female Embodiment in Medieval Hispanic Literature (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 13–14, 44–49; and Mary Frances Brown, “Critique and Complicity: Metapoetical Reflections on the Gendered Figures of Body and Text in the ‘Roman de la Rose,’” Exemplaria 21, no. 2 (2009): 129–59.
- 41.
Giovanni Boccaccio, “The Seventh Story on the Second Day,” in The Decameron, ed. Aldo Rossi (Bologna: Cappelli, 1977). Chaucer’s and Boccaccio’s heroines share a number of similarities : Both women are given to husbands to solidify political bonds, both are desired by men who have only heard of their beauty (rather than seeing it firsthand), both women travel in a boat, both leave behind violence in their wake, and both hesitate to reveal their identities at various moments in the tale. On the links between the two stories , see Thomas H. McNeal, “Chaucer and the Decameron,” Modern Language Notes 53, no. 4 (April 1938): 257–8; and Robert W. Hanning, “Custance and Ciappelletto in the Middle of It All: Problems of Mediation in The Man of Law’s Tale and Decameron 1:1,” in The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, ed. Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (London: Associated University Presses, 2000), 177–211.
- 42.
Despite all the similarities between the two women and their stories , two significant differences are their religious and national identities: Alatiel is Muslim and Egyptian, and Custance is Christian and Italian. How those differences impact the different ways in which two European authors present their stories is disturbing and telling. If Alatiel were European and Christian, like Custance, she, too, would likely have escaped “unwemmed” as well. Indeed, faced with rape at the hands of a “theef,” both Mary and Christ come to Custance’s aid, and her attacker is thrown overboard (2.915–24). Alatiel receives no such aid. The ways in which these two European writers market their stories not only point to the role that gender ideology plays in that marketing, but also to how the national and religious identity of a character—and an audience—impacts the way in which that story is marketed, a subject that I will return to at the end of this chapter.
- 43.
Boccaccio, Rossi, Decameron, 254–5.
- 44.
Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, ed. John Payne (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 149.
- 45.
Boccaccio, Rossi, Decameron, 258.
- 46.
Boccaccio, Payne, Decameron, 153.
- 47.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 9. Early modern writers will make explicit the economic potential inherent in this kind of rhetorical opening. The early modern period called dilatio copia , a word that etymologically underscores its link to wealth and power. See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 1979), 3. In his treatise on copia, Desiderius Erasmus explains precisely how rhetorical abundance can elicit desire and, consequently, sell a text:
The first method of enriching what one has to say on any subject is to take something that can be expressed in brief and general terms, and expand it and separate it into its constituent parts. This is just like displaying some object for sale first of all through a grill or inside a wrapping, and then unwrapping it and opening it out and displaying it fully to the gaze.
See Desiderius Erasmus, “Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style,” in Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 24, ed. Craig R. Thompson, trans. Betty I. Knott (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978), 280–659, at 574.
- 48.
Parker, Literary Fat Ladies, 15.
- 49.
Vickers, “‘Blazon of Sweet Beauty’s Best,’” 97.
- 50.
William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), lines 33–5. And of course as we saw in Chapter 4 in the case of Lydgate’s Fabula Duorum Mercatorum , one does not have to actively “publish” in the way that Collatine does to turn one’s erotic goods into commercial wares. Simply displaying them before another can have a similar effect.
- 51.
On rhetoric and literary rape, see R. Howard Bloch, Medieval Misogyny and the Invention of Western Romantic Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 111; and Robin R. Hass, “‘A Picture of Such Beauty,’” 396. I am mindful of the danger of collapsing metaphors of sexual violence with actual physical violence perpetrated against women and men. However, as Carolyn Dinshaw reminds us, they cannot be entirely separated either: “To equate reading with rape would be to underestimate drastically the transgressive reality of rape, on the one hand, and to slight the potentially positive value of literary interpretation, on the other. But this fact also invites us to consider causal relationships between gendered representation and actual social relations between men and women; it invites us to consider the relations that form the bases for figurative discourse and that, in turn, are affected by literary representation” (Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 11).
- 52.
Karl Marx, “Exchange,” in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, ed. Frederick Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: International Publishers, 1967), 88–96, at 88.
- 53.
On the sexual violence embedded in this description of exchange , see Karen Newman, “City Talk: Women and Commodification: EPICOENE (1609),” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 181–95, at 183.
- 54.
It is perhaps not surprising that another of the narrators who indulges in rhetorical embellishment is also one of the Canterbury Tales’ most prolix: the Wife of Bath. She is the pilgrim who insists that her body is still of value, although she concedes perhaps less so than when she was “new.” On the role of dilation in the tale, see Lee Patterson, “‘For the Wyves love of Bathe’: Feminine Rhetoric and Poetic Resolution in the Roman de la Rose and the Canterbury Tales,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 58, no. 3 (July 1983), 656–95.
- 55.
In the “accused queen ” stories , the heroine often flees her homeland to avoid her father’s sexual advances. For a discussion of the popularity of this genre in the Middle Ages, see Margaret Schlauch, Chaucer’s Constance and Accused Queens (New York: New York University Press, 1927); Elizabeth Archibald, “The Flight from Incest: Two Late Classical Precursors of the Constance Theme,” Chaucer Review 20, no. 4 (Spring 1986): 259–72; and Nancy Black, Medieval Narratives of Accused Queens (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003). Carolyn Dinshaw suggests that vestiges of these older incest narratives might linger in the Man of Law’s Tale , accounting for Custance’s reluctance to identify herself to those around her both in Northumbria and upon her return to Rome (Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 101–2). For other discussions of incest’s role in the Man of Law’s Tale , see Marc M. Pelen, “Providence and Incest Reconsidered”; R. A. Shoaf, ‘“Unwemmed Custance’”; and Elizabeth Scala, “Canacee and the Chaucer Canon: Incest and Other Unnarratables,” Chaucer Review 30, no. 1 (1995), 15–39.
- 56.
Dinshaw, Chaucer’s Sexual Poetics, 94–5. Dinshaw reads the gaps and disruptions inherent in patriarchal ideology in the Man of Law’s admission that incest may be unavoidable (90).
- 57.
For example, in the opening of The Plaint of Nature, Alan of Lille’s narrator complains that
The active sex shudders in disgrace as it sees itself degenerate into the passive sex. A man turned woman blackens the fair name of his sex. The witchcraft of Venus turns him into a hermaphrodite. He is subject and predicate: one and the same term is given a double application. Man here extends too far the laws of grammar. Becoming a barbarian in grammar, he disclaims the manhood given him by nature. Grammar does not find favour with him but rather a trope. This transposition however, cannot be called a trope. The figure here more correctly falls into the category of defects.
See Alan of Lille, The Plaint of Nature, trans. James J. Sheridan (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1980), 67–8. For other moments when Alan’s text conflates certain grammatical excesses with sodomy, see pp. 133–4, 156–9, and 164. For an excellent discussion of the links between sex and writing generally, and in Alan’s text in particular, see Jan Ziolkowski, Alan of Lille’s Grammar of Sex: The Meaning of Grammar to a Twelfth-Century Intellectual (Cambridge, MA: Medieval Academy of America, 1985).
- 58.
Anna Walecka, “The Concept of Incest: Medieval French and Normative Writings in Latin,” Romance Languages Annual 5 (1993): 117–23. The example of sex with an infidel as a type of incest seems counterintuitive, given that such an act might be read as ultra-exogamous, rather than endogamous. It therefore serves as a useful example of how, like sodomy, the label is less about specific acts and practices, and more about the representation of those acts and practices. On incest and intercultural relations, see Leslie Dunton-Downer, “The Horror of Culture: East West Incest in Chrétien de Troyes’s Cligés,” New Literary History 28, no. 2 (1997): 367–81.
- 59.
Larry D. Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 856, note on lines 921–92.
- 60.
Book 5 of Metamorphoses begins with a story of thwarted uncle–niece incest as well (the battle between Phineus and Perseus), making incest the frame of the entire book. Whether the relationship would be considered incestuous in Chaucer’s time is unclear; sexual relationships between uncle and niece were not necessarily considered illegal (Benson, Riverside Chaucer, 1074, nt. 2602). H. A. Kelly observes that authorities may have thought such relations were illegal due to a misinterpretation of neptis for niece rather than granddaughter. See H. A. Kelly, “Canonical Implications of Richard III’s Plan to Marry His Niece,” Traditio 23 (1967): 269–311. See also Kelly’s “Shades of Incest and Cuckoldry: Pandarus and John of Gaunt,” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 13 (1991): 121–40. Kelly argues that Pandarus and Criseyde’s relationship would be read as incestuous by Chaucer’s audience.
- 61.
Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Anthony S. Kline, University of Virginia Library Ovid Collection, 2000, http://ovid.lib.virginia.edu/trans/Ovhome.htm (accessed September 19, 2018), 5.299.
- 62.
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 64. All subsequent quotations are cited parenthetically by page number.
- 63.
Alfred David, “The Man of Law vs. Chaucer: A Case in Poetics,” PMLA 82, no. 2 (1967): 217–25, at 217.
- 64.
David, “Man of Law vs. Chaucer,” 220.
- 65.
Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape and Manhood,” 134.
- 66.
Stephanie Trigg, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 50–5. David Wallace also observes that in the Man of Law’s Tale , a “sense of commercial aspects of fiction writing—storytelling as commodity production—places him [Chaucer] much closer to Boccaccio than to Petrarch” (Chaucerian Polity, 205).
- 67.
Lynch, “Storytelling, Exchange, and Constancy,” 414. All subsequent quotations will be cited parenthetically by page number.
- 68.
Polo, Travels of Marco Polo, 175–6. All subsequent quotations will be cited parenthetically by page number.
- 69.
James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 22.
- 70.
John Lydgate, Fabula Duorum Mercatorum , ed. Pamela Farvolden in John Lydgate: Fabula Duorum Mercatorum and Guy of Warwyk (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2016), line 35.
- 71.
On this connection, see G. A. Luttrell, “The Mediaeval Tradition of the Pearl Virginity,” Medium Aevum 31 (January 1962): 194–200.
- 72.
Marco Polo, Milione: Redazione Latina del Manoscritto Z, ed. Alvaro Barbieri (Parma: Fondazione Pietro Bembio, 1998), 55.9, my emphasis.
- 73.
William Shakespeare, Othello, in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus (New York: Norton, 1997), 5.2.356–7.
- 74.
Polo, Travels of Marco Polo, 88. This comment is made by Marco Polo’s narrator in the context of the hospitality practices in the province of Kamul, in which men bid their wives provide guests with anything they ask for, including sex. No one, the narrator reports, is ashamed by it, and the women are “ready to oblige,” as noted in the quotation. Perhaps not insignificantly in the context of this discussion, Mongu Khan also tries to stop this practice without success. Eventually he gives up, stating, “since you desire your own shame, you may have it” (88).
- 75.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210.
- 76.
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Forms of Capital,” trans. Richard Nice, in Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, ed. John E. Richardson (New York: Greenwood, 1986), 241–58, at 242. In a recent, excellent analysis of gift exchange in the Shipman’s Tale, Robert Epstein sketches some of the limitations of Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of “disinterest” when applied to the tale. Chief among them is that for Bourdieu, all social relations and exchanges are marked by competition and materialism, leaving very little room for other kinds of motivations, such as love and friendship. See “The Lack of Interest in the Shipman’s Tale: Chaucer and the Social Theory of the Gift,” Modern Philology 113, no. 1 (August 2015): 27–48. As a reader of the Man of Law’s Tale , I continue to find Pierre Bourdieu’s observations about disinterest particularly useful, not because storytelling and romance cannot, theoretically, be read as disinterested, but rather because it is almost always assumed that they are disinterested. Perhaps the larger question is why do we read interest or disinterest in some of the tales (and in certain social and cultural institutions and relations) and not in others? What ideological work is being done in these readings?
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Cady, D. (2019). Damaged Goods: Merchandise, Stories, and Gender in Chaucer’s the Man of Law’s Tale. In: The Gender of Money in Middle English Literature. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26261-7_6
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