ABSTRACT This article examines the intersection of bodily sovereignty and reproductive justice as seen in the figure of the Clerk’s Tale’s Griselda. Griselda’s embodied, reproductive sovereignty, the very “wombe of here / That was youre wyf” (IV 887–88), is repeatedly tested by her husband’s tyrannous cruelty. Yet Griselda’s womb is also the site where Chaucer offers a more enduring and positive vision of sovereign generosity in a married woman’s non-free capacity to suffer and to give.
ABSTRACT This article explores the medieval history of the quitclaim instrument to better understand its significance in the case of Staundon v. Chaucer and Chaumpaigne. From its early uses in property conveyancing to its later adaptations in legal arbitration, the quitclaim proved a flexible instrument for negotiating within and outside formal litigation processes, making it an especially valuable strategic tool for unmarried female property holders. Characterized by its paradoxical action—to declare oneself “quit” or “quiet”—the quitclaim could signal satisfaction or acquiescence, recompense or relinquishment. It crystallizes, in this way, the complex historical legacy of Cecily Chaumpaigne, whose voice asserts itself in the Chaucer life-records precisely to promise its future silence on the subject of raptus. The Chaumpaigne quitclaim, this article argues, challenges modern scholars to understand such compromises as form of gendered legal agency, with implications for a variety of Chaucer’s works, including the Franklin’s Tale.
ABSTRACT This article invites scholars and teachers of Chaucer to consider trauma related to intimate violence in the context of teaching and learning about Chaucer’s life, literature, and critical legacy. It develops best practices for teaching documents related to Chaucer, including the records of Staundon v. Chaucer–Chaumpaigne, in light of a liberative teaching ethos that integrates trauma-informed approaches. Four principle-guided strategies that apply the transformative work of trauma-informed pedagogy are developed: safety, transparency, particularity, and engagement. These strategies, along with related classroom activities and assignments, aim to create a learning environment that welcomes students to engage with Chaucer’s literature, biography, cultural contexts, and critical legacy while acknowledging the presence of intimate violence and providing supportive ways of managing its varied effects on readers.
ABSTRACT Rather than leave behind the uncertainties produced by the raptus charge, we need to linger in the discomfiting feelings it has occasioned, and also to recognize how similar negative feelings around male (sexual) violence circulate in the Canterbury Tales. Its emphasis on masculine misrule means that “What kind of man are you?” becomes a question asked with increasing urgency as the tales progress. Chaucer’s focus on the “matter of woman” thus toggles back and forth between the “happy” affects of a poet prized for his genial humanity and the disruptive feelings produced when male/female interactions are represented as weirdly deformed by the violence inhering in late medieval sexual politics. This complex push-pull of affect is crucial to recognizing how the Canterbury Tales develops a specifically Chaucerian ethics by providing its own archive of feeling, one we need to bring alongside any documentary archive of Chaucer the man.
ABSTRACT The recent discovery that Cecily Chaumpaigne released Chaucer for culpability in her raptus as part of labor dispute that did not involve sexual violence, salutary as that has been, still occludes Chaumpaigne’s agency. Attention to the way both Sophocles’s Antigone and Chaucer’s Criseyde suffer the same fate illuminates the ways that even the most careful attention to English laws (and more than one kind is crucially at issue here) can blur what Chaumpaigne tried to mobilize these laws to say. Close reading of the newly discovered documents alongside the ones long known takes the measure of just how much is now made clear while isolating what about Chaumpaigne’s actions and wishes in these matters remains ambiguous.
Geoffrey Chaucer's engagement with Guido delle Colonne's Historia destructionis Troiae (1287) is more rhetorical than historical. This article examines Chaucer's use of Guido's Latin color and cadence in Troilus and Criseyde and the Legend of Good Women, which reflects principles of the ars dictaminis, as they emerge within the Italian vernacular of Filippo Ceffi and epistolary instruction in artes dictandi, especially those produced in late-fourteenth-century England. In this context, Chaucer's citation of Guido and Ovid in the Legend of Hypsipyle and Medea acquires a valence associated directly with the ars dictaminis, which includes the teaching of cursus, a method of rhythmical punctuation evident throughout Guido's Historia. This article argues that Guido's color and cadence emerge in Chaucer's work at the level of style, which reveals how thoroughly the historical matter of Troilus and the Legend relies upon the subtle use of rhetorical forms.
Chaucer is famous for his rhetorical control of narrative architecture. But for the puzzling construction of some narrative poems, such as the Merchants' Tale (with its incongruous assemblage of genres), rhetorical theory does not provide a rationale. Ancient and medieval rhetorical thought did not have a category for architectural breakdowns, what this article calls "messiness." Using the Merchants' Tale to exemplify what is meant here by "messiness; this article surveys possible comparanda in rhetorical theory-theories of sublimity or grandeur, varietas, and dispositio-to demonstrate that none of these constitutes a true theory of literary structure that admits messiness as a critical component of writing. From these rhetorical models, this article turns to another theoretical category that is outside of rhetoric strictly speaking: the exegetical category of the forma tractatus, which allowed medieval readers to resolve, repair, or accept the "messiness" that confronted them in classical and sacred texts.
Although Chaucer's citation of Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova in Troilus and Criseyde has been frequently acknowledged, it has rarely been considered a potential source for the poem's rich psychological characterization. This article argues that Chaucer repurposes Geoffrey's advice on careful rhetorical control as a motif for investigating and illustrating psychological interiority in his major characters. The limitations of Pandarus's model of rhetorical control are exposed through the unscripted scenes of Troilus and Criseyde's initial infatuation and through the "sodeyn" success of Diomede's rhetoric in Book 5.
This article explores various kinds of maternal rhetoric featured by a series of female speakers in Fragment VI of the Canterbury Tales: from the Physician's Tale, the Goddess Nature fostering new birth and the maiden Virginia imitating Christ's mother; and from the Pardoner's Tale, Mother Earth enabling both germination and burial in her womb of clay. Each figure represents a point in the life cycle and advances a rhetoric related to it: the repetitious garrulity that marks Nature's maternity, the disciplined brevity that indicates Virginia's youthful chastity and foreshortened life, and the silence that withholds Mother Earth's knowledge of divine secrets regarding death. In Fragment VI, amplification and abbreviation, as well as methods for them taught by trivium masters such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland, are aligned with moments in the human lifespan, and examples of maternal rhetoric showcase word painting, Marian speech, and more.
This article responds to A. S. G. Edwards's assessment of the Oxford Chaucer and "whether it constitutes an improvement over its predecessors." It describes a set of errors by Edwards that fundamentally undermine his critique. There is much to suggest that he failed to read parts of the edition that would have pre-empted many of his concerns, including clear statements of the editorial principles that govern it. Many criticisms seem unaware of past practice in the editing of Chaucer, especially in Edwards's overwhelming concern with the edition's chosen orthography. His recurrent concern with orthography also fails to grasp the clearly stated metrical principles by which the Oxford Chaucer proceeds.
Chaucer's rhetoric extended to devices that not only evoked sound but captured it, as if his verse were a kind of recording device and his poetry a form of playback. These devices isolated what Aristotle identified as the inarticulate "sound" (psophos), as distinct from language and what is often called "voice, and represented it by overlaying more traditional methods for evoking an imagined sound with that sound itself. Three such devices are identified here-a uniquely inventive onomatopoeia, the materialization of sound, and collective speech-for three reasons: to describe this rhetoric; to explain how it might be used as a heuristic for identifying other such devices; and to show, in general terms, the role each device played as an element of Chaucer's style. All have some precedent in Chaucer's sources and other Middle English writers, but, as is so often the case with techniques Chaucer inherited, he makes each one his own.
A study in the history of sentimentality. Chaucer's interest in the language of the emotions is manifest throughout his career in his explorations of the rhetoric of affective piety, which he uses in a great variety of ways, as his serious early studies in this rhetoric later give way to more complicated experiments. In the religious prologues and stories of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer's sense of the power of affective religious language mingles with an acute sense of how that power can be abused. Critical responses to these texts have been more conflicted than in almost any other part of his work. However, in the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer also investigates the secular and social use of the rhetoric of religious sentimentality, turning it into matter for high comedy. This article argues that, in his later writings, including the religious Tales, Chaucer's view of this rhetoric is always potentially disengaged and critical.
In the literature of medieval Christian Europe, the moon often signifies inconstancy, brokenness, and limitation. Painful wounds, attachments, deficiencies, mirages-all become written on the moon's body. No clearer is this than in two Middle English texts: the prose Ancrene Wisse and the alliterative poem Pearl, works rarely studied alongside one another but which engage in a powerful lunar dialogue. In both texts, the moon signifies the changeability of life on earth, the loss or woundedness born from such mutability, and devotional deficiency. Such signification is underpinned by Scripture, particularly in vital references from Revelation. But through eucharistic emphases in Pearl, the moon also gestures towards the fullness and stability of communion. Readings of the moon in Ancrene Wisse and Pearl may be further enhanced by touching on a Latin analogue in the recorded visions of Juliana of Cornillon (ca. 1192/93-1258), another text with eucharistic devotion at its core.
Although critics often read Chaucer's House of Fame as a mock pedagogical journey, this article aims to redeem the poem's didactic progression. The article argues that, through his adaptations of Virgil's Aeneid, Chaucer constructs an educational allegory. The act of viewing the murals in the Temple of Venus threatens to transform Geffrey into a protagonist in the Carthaginian story, but he learns in the House of Fame to interpret the Aeneid as a metatextual commentary on the constructedness and mutability of literary fictions. In turning to Virgil as his pedagogical guide, Chaucer echoes Dante, yet he ultimately reads the Aeneid as confirming the fickleness of human fame rather than the permanence of heavenly glory. By locating in the Aeneid a precursor to the House of Fame's own meditation on the contingencies of reception, Chaucer writes himself into to the European canon and retrospectively fashions Virgil into his literary predecessor.
In the "Tale of Virgil's Mirror," Gower shows the titular mirror to be remarkable not because it functions as a miraculous device but because of the way it is simultaneously central and tangential to the tale. The mirror appears as an agentic object that resists neat relegation to an allegorical system of meaning, yet, at the same time, it functions exactly in this way, symbolizing sight, wisdom, and self-reflection. Acknowledging this agentic "thingness" of Virgil's mirror and its paradoxical "tangential centrality" allows us to see how the Confessio Amantis registers the systemic problems that Avarice, the subject of Book 5, poses both to society and to the efficacy of narrative, and, furthermore, how Gower's particular mode of exemplary instruction in the Confessio attempts to provide an analogic remedy to these systemic problems.
Critics have used Chaucer's literary nominalism to read the Clerk's Tale allegorically by either interpreting Walter as the nominalist God or by reframing Walter's testing as the nominalist epistemological mode of knowing Griselda. To develop these critical analyses further, this article focuses on realist and nominalist allegorical personifications in the tale. It argues that Chaucer's Walter acts like a nominalist and insists on interpreting Griselda, the Neoplatonic personification, as if she were a nominalist personification constantly in the making. Controversies surrounding this kind of interpretative violence of nominalism arose in fourteenth-century intellectual circles, when the principle of Ockham's razor-"not multiplying entities beyond necessity"-was under attack by realists. By contrasting and merging these two metaphysical systems in the Clerk's Tale, Chaucer creates a nominalist anti-allegory and stirs affective imagination from Walter's nominalist impulses to remove the relational entities.
Discovery that Geoffrey Chaucer's legal entanglement de raptu with Cecily Chaumpaigne did not involve sexual assault, but rather accusation of violating the Statute of Laborers, suggests that other familiar elements of the author's biography, based on incomplete life-records, are also open to fresh consideration. This article speculates that Chaucer was much richer than evidenced by official records and that his playful begging poem Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse has overdetermined our sense of the poet's poverty, or what Paul Strohm has termed his "chronic insolvency." To the contrary, his generous royal annuities were supplemented by invisible income, including corrupt income, which enabled Chaucer and his household to live grandly. This article engages in a second line of speculation that he did not lead such a rootless existence as the standard biographers believed, but steadily maintained a series of affluent households in London and nearby Greenwich.
This article studies the politics of translation in two Chinese versions of the Wife of Bath's Tale in the early twentieth century. Lin Shu and Zhou Zuoren were members of two different schools in the New Culture Movement, and their distinct translation theories and methods reflected their diverse cultural and political concerns in the socially transitional period. Lin Shu's translation of the tale (1917) as a yu yan reinforced native Chinese cultural tradition, while Zhou Zuoren's rendering of the tale (1935) as an example of "human literature" remapped Western modernity. The difference between Lin Shu's reformist and Zhou Zuoren's revolutionary approaches indicates that translation was an important political practice and a means of exploration of cultural transformation and social criticism.
The Nine Worthies tradition hinges on the form of the list. Taking seriously the fact that nine worthy men are enumerated, this article argues that the ways in which medieval poets engaged with the list of the Nine Worthies is indicative of a spatial poetics, that is, a poetics that shows heightened awareness of the list-form's potential. Drawing on cognitive literary studies and the notion of "affordance, this article suggests that spatial effects characterize a spatial poetics. Analyzing A Disputacioun betwyx the Body and Wormes, The Parlement of the Thre Ages, and the Alliterative Morte Arthure, it shows how the list-form activates such effects and can alter the temporal structure of texts, inviting an audience both to reflect on the transience of the world and to recognize the power of storytelling.
