Abstract
Amazonian women and eastern viragos (‘manly women’) recur in the literature of late medieval Europe. There are several virago-types in Chaucer’s work and, in each case, their Otherness is not limited to a simple binary gender issue. All of them are enmeshed in complex intersections of gender, religion, and ethnicity.1 Chaucer seems to highlight the instability of such categories of difference through time and place and this essay will draw out his apparent deconstruction of the medieval racial and racist clichés concerning Oriental women.2 Except for a few clear-cut cases of either pejorative or positive attributions (such as monstrous females versus Christian crusaders), Chaucer has an enigmatic attitude to most viragos. He builds on the typology of the virago, which will be discussed first, but as his viragos are not repetitive copies of a single template they must be considered individually, which means that there is only space here to concentrate on a few case studies. Taking the Canterbury Tales as its focal point, this essay examines the two mothers-in-law of the Man of Law’s Tale, Zenobia of the Monk’s Tale, and the Amazon figures of the Knight’s Tale.3
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Notes
Joan Cadden (1995) Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages, Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: CUP), p. 205.
See Juliette Dor (1992) ‘From the Crusading Virago to the Polysemous Virgin: Chaucer’s Constance’ in Juliette Dor (ed.), A Wyf Ther Was (Liège: L3), pp. 129–40.
Natalie Zemon Davis (1975) Society and Culture in Early Modern France (London: Duckworth), esp. p. 144.
Larry D. Benson, (general ed.) (1987) The Riverside Chaucer (Oxford, OUP). All my Chaucer quotations are taken from this edition.
Lee Patterson (1990) ‘“No man his reson herde”: Peasant Consciousness, Chaucer’s Miller, and the Structure of the Canterbury Tales’ in Lee Patterson (ed.), Literary Practice and Social change in Britain, 1380–1530 (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 113–55 (p. 124).
Terry Jones (1980) Chaucer’s Knight. The Portrait of a Medieval Mercenary (London: Methuen), p. 154.
Cooper (1989), p. 34. See also Terry Jones (1980), ‘Crusading into Christendom’, pp. 34–42 and passim.
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© 2011 Juliette Dor
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Dor, J. (2011). Chaucer’s Viragos: A Postcolonial Engagement? A Case Study of the Man of Law’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale, and the Knight’s Tale. In: Beattie, C., Fenton, K.A. (eds) Intersections of Gender, Religion and Ethnicity in the Middle Ages. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297562_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230297562_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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