ABSTRACT This article considers two copies of the Pardoner’s Prologue, VI 424–61, preserved in New York, Morgan Library and Museum, MS M.249 (Mg): the passage that appears in sequence in the text, and the scribe’s first, canceled attempt at this passage (now included in the endleaves). The text on the canceled leaf, not collated by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert, includes two variant readings, which are noted here. The duplicate passages are also considered for what they can tell us about the scribe’s professional practice: his overall accuracy, the kinds of orthographical variation he was prepared to admit, and his treatment of metrical punctuation.
ABSTRACT The first description in the Miller’s Tale is an ekphrastic tour of Nicholas’s room, beginning with tools for astrological calculation: his Almageste, his astrolabe, and his augrym stones. Listed through anaphora on three successive lines and scaffolded alphabetically on A, these objects are agentic props that gain instrumentality through their prosodic arrangement. Drawing on scholarship on the list, which points to the ways that lists mystify and resonate with scientific taxonomies, and discussing practices of alphabetizing by Chaucer and his contemporaries, this article argues that the form, both alphabetical and listological, in which these objects are sequenced in the Miller’s Tale introduces a private room at home as a site of poesis as it sets the tale’s plot in motion.
ABSTRACT The foundling romance Sir Degaré is unusual in having its central protagonist conceived in an act of rape. While much criticism has argued that the poem marginalizes the mother’s traumatic experience of rape, this article argues that her experiences are structurally and thematically central to the narrative. The poem centers her affective experience and showcases the possibilities of, as well as the constraints upon, a young woman’s ability to navigate her life after rape. This article also examines the way that a nobleman’s violent disregard of a woman’s will shapes not only the foundling’s development but also his very identity as a defender of women. Degaré’s heraldic device aligns him with his female kin and performs a public disidentification with his father—a stunning departure from the genre’s prioritization of the son’s patrilineal blood relations in his achievement of a place within chivalric society.
