Something from Nothing: Melancholy, Gossip, and Chaucer's Poetics of Idling in the Book of the Duchess (original) (raw)

"The Mystery of the Bed Chamber": Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess

in The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, 2000

This paper addresses visionary and invention practices deriving from both Latin rhetoric and monastic prayer in reference specifically to Chaucer's dream vision poem, "The Book of the Duchess". In so doing, it also shows how private grief is re-composed as public mourning in the interchange of the narrator and the Man in Black. This essay was published in The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, ed. J.M. Hill and D.M. Sinnreich-Levi (2000): 67-87.

'Ycrammed ful of cloutes and of bones': Chaucer’s Queer Cavities

Medieval Futurity: Queering Time and Space, 2020

In 'The Canterbury Tales' the image of the purse, a hollow orifice that hoards or expels what enters into it, becomes the template for all cached items exchanged and publicized on the pilgrimage. While many of the pilgrims carry purses to Canterbury, it is the riding companions, the Pardoner and the Summoner, who carry and broadcast their purses and opinions about the utility of such items. The Pardoner's wallet lay on his lap 'bretful of pardoun,' brimming with the material of his vocation, while the Summoner admonishes men who keep their souls in their purses. The purses, bags, sacks, and wallets that the Pardoner and Summoner bear metaphorize, perhaps obviously, their owners as morally vacuous cavities. This essay looks to the purse as a site of queer aperture, an opening that refuses socially prescribed models of production: that is, the purse as queer cavity swallows and repurposes what it placed inside of it. Cavities in 'The Canterbury Tales' cache what enters them - removing contents from social, economic, sexual, and spiritual circulation. Yet, Chaucer plays with this image of the swallowing purse to critique models of transactional productivity. I argue that queer cavities offer sites of transformative possibility that motivate and reorient modes of production and reproduction. Queer cavities rely on self-sufficient methods of creation independent from heteronormative models of production reliant on beginnings and endings. As Glenn Burger has indicated in 'Chaucer's Queer Nation', Chaucer's pilgrimage to Canterbury is more a process of becoming and suggests itself through the trans -ness of travel, of telling and giving an account, of a fusion of various groups within medieval society who all repurpose and process in the 'middle' of the journey to Canterbury. The process of becoming in the pilgrimage is connected to what the pilgrims touch, exchange, and say in relation to each other. The queer cavity, then, acts as a space of becoming and transformation.

Review of Tison Pugh, Chaucer's (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages

Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 2015

REVIEWS interminably grasps at a distilled formula for tragedy, suggesting the incompleteness of the Canterbury Tales as a whole, the Parson signals ''an abandonment of the tale-telling competition. .. and/or a disruption of the framework of the fictional pilgrimage'' (136). Indeed, the earlier chapters' self-sufficient Chaucer who reveled in making game of textual authority here gives way to a maker who ''takes his leave, having humbled himself before his Maker'' (138). The ''Afterword'' surveys Chaucer's popular and critical reception, from fifteenth-century successors and Victorian admirers eager to establish ''English Literature,'' to twentieth-century critical contests between New Criticism and Robertsonianism. Minnis also considers the twentyfirst-century Global Chaucer project, which demonstrates the ways that ''Chaucer is deeply embedded in the mashup, the meddle, the muddle, the mingle, of world language'' (144). As Minnis points out, despite shifting priorities and configurations in higher education, Chaucer remains an institution, an author whose ''canonical weight must inevitably be felt'' (144). Indeed, Chaucer remains one of only two named authors to head divisions of the MLA-the other being, of course, Shakespeare. The retention of that honor required energetic efforts on the part of medievalists, efforts that Minnis helped lead. When Minnis is at his best in this book-tracing critical debates, inviting further interpretation, showing the ways Chaucer weaves together compelling literary and philosophical strands-he provides a forceful argument for why Chaucer continues to merit introduction to today's students and interested readers.

Sex and the (hetero) erotic in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde

Ph.D, 2013

The present study investigates Chaucer’s use of the erotic in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. The study addresses an oversight within Chaucerian scholarship. Scholars have largely ignored his use of the erotic as a literary device. The thesis argues that his use of the erotic allows for both a celebration and a critique of the often conflicting mores of his days. The study argues that, by subverting traditional literary genres, and inventing new ones, Chaucer provided alternative life-views. These alternatives served as subtle but powerful critiques both of institutional hegemony and of the power structures the hegemony protected. The study locates Chaucer in relation to a number of ancient and medieval currents of thought in which, by the late Middle Ages, questions of sexuality, agency, and autonomy had come to intersect. It also examines Chaucer’s sources for the construction of erotic relationships in his poetry. The study’s viewpoint is that, if one is to understand Chaucer, one needs to understand the culture in which he lived. The scope of the study is broad. It draws together cultural, historical, psychological, philosophical, and literary material to offer both depth and breadth in its arguments. It is hoped that this will stimulate new debate about the relationship between eroticism and genre in Chaucer’s poetry.

“For yet under the yerde was the mayde”: Chaucer in the House of Fiction

The Chaucer Review, 2022

In a scene near the beginning of Chaucer’s Shipman’s Tale, a maid child stands as silent witness to a conversation between a wife and a monk within the garden of a wealthy French merchant. By using her as an observer to the scene in the garden, Chaucer, perhaps for the first time in English literature, employs the gaze of a child to highlight the narrative of experience. In this article I explore the maid child as a sign of Chaucer’s experiments with perspective. Since Chaucer probably first wrote the Shipman’s Tale with the Wife of Bath as narrator, the maid child looks forward to the old hag in the Wife of Bath’s Tale. In placing or keeping her in the tale, Chaucer anticipates modernist experiments with perception, looking forward to Henry James, whose What Maisie Knew describes the gaze of another child upon the unsavory bartering of an adult world.