Chaucer’s Prioress: Elegant Hypocrisy (original) (raw)
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EFD / JFL Geoffrey Chaucer's Hybrid Woman: The Prioress in The Canterbury Tales
Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales presents pilgrims whose status in the medieval three estates is not clearly defined. The Prioress is one of those pilgrims who experiences in-betweenness as she lives in what Bhabha terms the " territories " (1994, p. 28) of her former and present estates, the nobility and the clergy respectively. In fact, the members of medieval monasteries were mostly of the noble origin. Generally, it was not the choice of the members of the nobility to enter monasteries; yet, it was the wish of their families. Thereby, most of the noble men and women had to leave their previously secular and worldly life behind and live in full compliance with the monastic rules which required an entirely ascetic life. Accordingly, in most cases, the noble members of monasteries had difficulty in adjusting to monastic life which put them in between the territories of their former and present estates, in what Bhabha terms " a third space " (1994, p. 28). As they neither completely belonged to the nobility nor to the clergy, those nobles of monasteries lived in a third space contesting the territories of both estates. Thus, they became medieval hybrids. Similar to her historical counterparts, Chaucer's Prioress of noble birth can find a fixed status or identity neither in the nobility nor in the clergy, and she has to live in between them. That is, the Prioress develops a hybrid identity at the interface between her former and present estates. Within this context, this paper aims to discuss Chaucer's Prioress in The Canterbury Tales as a medieval hybrid who occupies a medieval third space on the borders between the nobility and the clergy. Öz Geoffrey Chaucer'ın Canterbury Hikayeleri Ortaçağ'ın üç sınıfında yeri tam olarak belli olmayan hacıları resmeder. Eski (soylular) ve yeni (ruhban) sınıfları arasındaki Bhabha'nın deyişiyle " alanlarda " yaşam sürdüğü için arada kalan Başrahibe bu hacılardan biridir. Ortaçağ'da manastır mensupları genellikle soylulardan oluşurdu. Soylular manastırlara çoğunlukla kendi tercihlerinden değil, ailelerinin istekleri doğrultusunda girerlerdi. Bu yüzden, bu asil erkek ve kadınların çoğu laik ve dünyevi hayatlarını arkalarında bırakıp, bütünüyle dünyaya kapalı bir hayat gerektiren manastır kuralları doğrultusunda yaşamak zorunda kalırlardı. Dolayısıyla, manastırın asil mensupları çoğunlukla manastır hayatına ayak uydurmakta zorluk çekerler ve Bhabha'nın " üçüncü alan " olarak tanımladığı eski ve yeni sınıflarının arasında yaşamak zorunda bırakılırlardı. Tam anlamıyla ne soylu nede ruhban sınıfına ait olmayan manastırın bu soylu mensupları iki sınıfında alanlarını kapsayan üçüncü bir alanda yaşayarak Ortaçağın melez bireylerine dönüştüler. Tarihteki emsallerine benzer bir şekilde, kendine ne soylular nede ruhban sınıfında
Chaucer's Clergeon, or towards Holiness in the Prioress's Tale
Studia Anglica Posnaniensia International Review of English Studies, 2007
The brief appearance and subsequent disappearance of the child are illogical, ominous, and loaded with significance beyond the understanding of the other characters and of the reader (Shahar 1991: 135).
Medieval Religious Officials in Geoffrey Chaucer’s Prologue to Canterbury Tales
KnE Social Sciences, 2019
Chaucer is a great humanist who gently unmasks the roguery, foolishness and corruption of the medieval religious officials in Geofrey Chaucer’s Prologue to Canterbury Tales withour malice, spite or animosity. His attitude is that of benevolence and tolerance, even his satire is in the form of tender shafts of irony, which neither hurt nor destroy. He gives us a direct transcription of reality and a true picture of the medieval social condition as it actually lived in the age in most familiar aspects in his masterpiece work, The Canterbury Tales. He uses humour, irony, exaggeration and ridicule to satirize the medieval religious officials’ follies and foibles. The research focuses on the seven medieval religious officials by the name eof the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Clerk of Oxford, the Parson, the Summoner, and the Pardoner. This research aims at revealing the follies, the absurdities, the monetary greed, the hypocrisy, and, on the whole, the irreligious natures of these m...
Ugly Beauty: Chaucer's Poetic Ecclesiology
Over the last several decades, the "religious turn" in Chaucer studies has opened up numerous avenues for analysis of Chaucer's poetics without completely resolving questions about their specifically Christian character, or lack thereof. Approaches to answering such questions include biographical analysis, which in Chaucer's case seems least likely to yield substantial conclusions: we simply don't have enough biographical data to be confident that Chaucer held strongly to one, or another, or no version of Christian faith. Our limited sources of knowledge about Chaucer's distinctly secular professional life certainly give us no basis for confident assertions about his own personal piety. Unlike his contemporary John Lydgate, for example, Chaucer was no monk. On the other hand, given the numerous, lively and vigorous forms of lay piety in Chaucer's era, his lack of religious vocation and/or sacerdotal ordination is not per se a limiting factor on the possibility that his poetics is robustly Christian at a deep philosophical level. One important movement of lay piety, founded on protest against ecclesial corruption, was inspired in large part by the indignation and influence of another Chaucer contemporary, John Wyclif, and this movement has been the focus of a substantial body of scholarship over the last several decades. Not surprisingly, possible allusions to Wyclif's ideas found in Chaucer's poems, placed under various scholarly lenses, have led to recurrent speculation as to the possibility of a generally heterodox or, indeed, a decidedly Wycliffite bent in Chaucer's poetic oeuvre. ii In order to test the notion that Chaucer's poeisis reflects a Wycliffite bent, scholars must consider most especially the Wycliffite doctrines themselves, many of which are more negative than positive: that is, they express a piety that is characterized above all by objection to and protest against real or perceived ecclesiastical abuses of a divine calling. Many scholars have speculated that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with their pungent, pointed satire directed at the foibles of errant clergy and vowed religious, could well share a common spirit with the Wycliffite reformist agenda. That Wyclif's ideas and the movement he sparked have long been considered a type of "premature reformation" is no surprise, and if in fact Chaucer's poetics is distinctively Wycliffiteleaning, we should be unsurprised by the manifestation of a "Protestant Chaucer" across prior generations of Chaucer scholarship. On the other hand, in spite of the pungent anticlerical satire that features so prominently in the Tales, there is much evidence to suggest that Chaucer's poetics is more genuinely Catholic than heretical, and scholars are quite right to continue to subject the "Wycliffite" Chaucer to careful, multivalent scrutiny. The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, a late fourteenth century precursor to Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, provides a handy summary of the accusations leveled by Wyclif and his followers at the late medieval church. Among the aspects of Wycliffite thought and polemic which are represented in the Conclusions and relevant to the Canterbury Tales, the third and eleventh conclusions rail against the celibacy mandated for secular clergy, for monks, and for nuns, while the ninth conclusion rejects the sacrament of penance. Certainly Chaucer had a keen eye for manifestations of clerical corruption, but it is doubtful that his Tales, taken as a reasonably complete and unified work of art, reflect the outright heretical loathing of ecclesial foibles that characterizes iii the most savage aspects of Wycliffite polemic. Furthermore, there are some important indicators, deserving of deeper investigation, that Chaucer's poetic ecclesiology as crafted in the Tales, is consciously an orthodox ecclesiology characterized especially by the theological virtue of hope, as against the heretical ecclesiology of suspicion, fear, and contempt proffered, all too often, by Wyclif and the polemicists whom he inspired.
Modern Philology, 2013
A 443-page book on a 626-line poem about a rooster must be up to something, and one can tell pretty quickly that it must be something good, for Peter Travis writes with authority, ambition, generosity, and wit. He makes clear from the outset that the reach of his project extends well beyond the tale itself; he models a way of reading that applies to other Chaucerian texts as well and includes the recovery of significantly close reading, combined with a deconstructive approach. Such a fusion should not come as any surprise (except that it has never been so effectively applied to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale), for as Terry Eagleton recently reminded readers of poetry, the best theorists exemplify close reading and challenge others for not reading closely enough (How to Read a Poem [Oxford: Blackwell, 2007], 2). Travis is fully aware of the difficulty of prizing apart the ‘‘nominals’’ (25) of Chaucer, the Nun’s Priest, and the narrator, nicely complicating (in dialogue with A. C. Spearing, among others) easy distinctions between author and narrator. In attempting to revitalize the ‘‘rather tired gerund’’ (25) of rereading, citing a host of contemporary theorists in the process, the author restates one of the basic tenets of allegorical reading, with which his practice has much in common. He very rightly emphasizes Derridean dissemination as the ‘‘critique of the idea that any text, literary or otherwise, can be owned, controlled, limited, or appropriated in the name of some legitimate reading or authoritative source’’ (17). Anxiety over control is always suggestive of an idolatry against which Travis, like Derrida, consistently warns one off. His emphasis runs the risk, however, of returning deconstruction to the level of facile, romantic petulance, which Derrida strenuously opposed when he defended reconstructing a dominant reading as an indispensible moment. In a book of this seriousness and weight, it
Selçuk Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi, 2021
Geoffrey Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales, which contains 24 stories, presents a panorama of his society through the pilgrims‘ stories. These tales engage themselves with numerous issues such as the representation of women and men, courtly love, knighthood, honor, and pious life. These stories have different sources like fabliau, romance, the courtly love tradition, and saint‘s legend. The portrayal of gender plays a highly significant role in these tales that highlight the suppression of women. This study will, in this respect, discuss the problematic depiction of gender and gender roles through the detailed discussion of the female characters in the three selected tales in Chaucer‘s The Canterbury Tales, namely ―The Franklin‘s Tale,‖ ―The Physician‘s Tale,‖ and ―The Man of Law‘s Tale.‖ This discussion will ultimately reveal what kind of attributes these female characters are given in line with the historical, social, and literary context through numerous specific examples from the tales and relevant secondary sources.
An Androgynous Nun's Eye View: Feminine Piety and Masculine Determination in The Prioress's Tale
2001
Historically, Chaucer's Prioress has been considered a woman of careful delicacy and refinement, of actual or pseudo-fastidiousness, and of traditionally feminine deportment. For Muriel Bowden, she is the "eternal feminine;" Priscilla Martin claims she "is indeed extremely 'feminine' ... emanat[ing] an excess offemininity"; H. F. Brooks finds her "ultra-feminine"; and George Lyman Kittredge calls her "the perfection of medieval daintiness."' Certain of her actions and the demeanor described in the General Prologue suggest an over-concern with protocol, manners, and deportment consonant with her "Stratford-atte-Bowe" French dialect, a traditional kind of feminine mystique. In contrast to her expert simulation, her construction of femininity as precisely detailed by the narrator, there emerges an unacknowledged underlying harshness of sensibility, a proclivity to embellish violence in the most concrete fashion, and a st...