From Riding the Black Ram: Law, Literature, and Gender by Susan Heinzelman

Chapter One: “Termes Queinte of Lawe” and Quaint Fantasies of Literature” Chaucer’s Man of Law and the Wife of Bath

This was an article that I didn’t end up using for my shorter paper, but one that I’ll likely use for my longer paper. In addition to the Wyf of Bath’s Tale, Heinzelman also talks about the Man of Law’s Tale as it relates to written auctoritee, lineage, and power. She notes that the Man of Law understands the tale of Constance to be authoritative because of it’s “association with antiquity” (6). It is written in the style of an oral narrative, reminiscent of stories told in the era before the printing press. It’s also in the style of a chivalric romance, an easily recognizable genre. 

Heinzelman argues, in part, that the Man of Law “fashions a nomos: a Christian romance, a tale of constancy, that asserts the immutability of Christian faith” (6). Part of what I’d like to address in my longer paper is this referencing of the “immutability” of Christian doctine as a way to render it unchangeable, nonnegotiable. Authors of narratives that appeal to Christian doctrine are, in a sense, tacking their stories onto a canonical source that, in the Christian tradition, is an immutable authority. I think this gives a helpful context to what the Wyf is doing in some of her Biblical references. Trouble is, she’s altering them, interpreting them incorrectly, and using them to support actions/thoughts the Bible doesn’t advocate. Is Chaucer highlighting the ability for readers to interpret texts? Does that highlight the patriarchal interpretation of the Bible in a critical way? Is Chaucer making fun of the Wyf and her poor interpretations? 

Performance and Dress

In our discussion of the Parson’s Tale today, we mentioned the condemnation of “inordinat scantnesse,” of scanty clothes, a distraction that is tied to vanity. The Tale also warns against baggy clothing, a wasteful use of cloth. This emphasis on clothing as having the potential to show pride, avarice, or one of the other deadly sins reflects back on Chaucer’s emphasis throughout his Tales on the pilgrims’ garb. The Wyf wears stockings of scarlet, an incredibly expensive dye in the 14th century, evidencing her wealth, and consequently, her greed. The Prioress is  holier-than-thou in her Tale, but she is described as wearing a “ful fetis,” a very elegant, cloak, and a gold brooch. Her clothing exposes her true nature as prideful and gluttonous. 

I find it interesting that Chaucer reveals personality through the clothing that the pilgrims choose to wear, while their Tales often work to portray themselves in the best light, while criticizing others. The choice of clothing, particularly for the women in the Tales, is often related to performative theory among Chaucerian feminist scholars. Most of the articles I read were anachronistic in their treatment of Chaucer’s intent, but the relation between women’s agency and dress is still a pertinent thread throughout the Tales. In our discussion of the Parson's Tale, it's an interesting reflection back on the General Prologue and the emphasis of occupation and dress. Does dress give us a true sense of the sins of each pilgrim, a subtle condemnation? Is it an ironic self-labeling by the pilgrims of their flaws?

I read an interesting chapter from Susan Crane’s book Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War that relates to this discussion entitled “Talking Garments.” It can be read online through JSTOR or EBSCO. Read it.

Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender

Hansen, Elaine T. Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992. Print.

This book, Chaucer and the Fictions of Gender, obviously has a lot to do with Chaucer's discussion of gender within The Canterbury Tales and some of his other works. I liked it because she seems to take an opposing view to what many of the critics say about Chaucer. For example, her discussion on the Wife of Bath has to do with the fact that the wife cannot escape the antifeminism within the culture because she only has the ability to use discourse that men have made popular in the primarily male-dominated culture. I have this book checked out right now, so just let me know if it sounds like it will help anyone with their papers. 

Alisoun Takes Exception

Houser, R.M. Alisoun Takes Exception: Medieval Legal Pleading and the Wife of Bath. Chaucer Review 48.1. (2013). Print

This article is found in the Chaucer Review 48.1 and it was a really interesting take on the Wife of Bath's arguments against the misogynist clerical glossing or interpretation of scripture. I am using a piece of it for my paper and found it interesting, so take a look if your paper has to do with the Wife of Bath and her arguments against authority. 

Saints' Legends, by Gordon Gerould

Greetings,

Surprise: I have another resource.

As a caveat, I acknowledge that Doug is encouraging us to use a certain number of texts written since 1990. If you are looking for one of those, this won't be very helpful to you.

Otherwise, though--and especially if you're interested in the developments that affected saints' legends during the medieval period--Gordon Gerould's Saints' Legends (1916) provides a good introduction to the history thereof. Gerould also attempts to reveal to what extent saints' legends have affected our literary history as a whole, which directly relates to the fact that Chaucer borrowed heavily in form and content from numerous saints' tales.

Additionally, if your second text has been influenced by saints' tales, it is likely that Gerould will make mention of or delve into a study of the culture and context surrounding the work.  I did cite another of Gerould's works on the saints in my last paper, but have not yet gone through this one intensively. Nonetheless, it is clear that it is another well of information in history if any of you need or want that.

Gordon Gerould's Saints' Legends

Nicholas Trivet's The Life of Constance

Hello,

I haven't heard that anyone else focused on "The Man of Law's Tale" for their first paper, but it is possible that someone will need to spend time with it for the longer paper we will be working on sooner or later. If you turn out to be one such person I highly recommend a resource that is available for free on GoogleBooks because, well, it's awesome.

F.J. Furnivall, W.A. Clouston and Edmund Brock published Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales all the way back in 1872, but their work is awe-inspiring. I specifically used the book for its information about Nicholas Trivet's The Life of Constance, which was the primary resource Geoffrey Chaucer obviously drew from for "The Man of Law's Tale." Believe it or not, Brock's translation my still be the only available English translation of Trivet's Norman French. Moreover, the three co-editors have also translated and/or provided editions of sources Chaucer used for his other texts.

If you want to or need to do source analysis, I think this may be one of the best resources you can get your hands on. It was a major help to me, and I'm sure it could well be for you, as well.

Originals and Analogues of some of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Mysticism and Julian of Norwich

The following book entitled Mysticism and Space: Space and Spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, the Cloud of Unknowing Author, and Julian of Norwich (real pithy I know) is a book I found on the ProQuest ebrary through the Whitworth library. The only reason I looked it up is because it has to do ALOT with the section in Cannon about religious communities. I skimmed the three chapters on Richard Rolle (pg. 141), the Cloud author (pg. 177) and Julian of Norwich (pg. 213) just to make sure I understood what Cannon was referring to a little bit better. If any of you are writing your essays on mysticism or Julian of Norwich I would at least take a look at the three chapters I mentioned! 

Davis, Carmel Bendon. Mysticism and Space: Space and Spatiality in the Works of Richard Rolle, the Cloud of Unknowing Author, and Julian of Norwich. Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Print. 

http://ftp1.whitworth.edu:2350/lib/whitworth/detail.action?docID=10393146

"Chaucer's Discussion on Marriage"

Here is the article I did my presentation on today along with the notes and quotes outline that I passed out.

Kittredge, G. L. “Chaucer’s Discussion of Marriage.” Modern Philology 9.4. (1912): 435-467. Web.

Main Argument:

 Within The Canterbury Tales, there lies a Marriage Act of the Human Comedy, beginning with the Wife of Bath and ending with the Franklin’s Tale. Throughout this Marriage Act we can understand Chaucer’s own views on marriage.

The pilgrims are the dramatis personae.

“We should also inquire whether the tale is not determined, to some extent, by the circumstances – by the situation at the moment, by something that another pilgrim has said or done, by the turn of discussion already under way” (1).

The Wife of Bath

“She addresses her heresies not to us or to the world at large, but to her fellow pilgrims…The words of the Wife were a kind to provoke comment…” (440)

The Clerk

“Clerks can “speak well” of women (as our clerk has shown), when women deserve it ; and he now proceeds to show that they can likewise speak well (with biting irony) of women who do not deserve it – such women as the Wife of Bath and all her sect of domestic revolutionists” (448).

The Merchant

“Thus, its very lack of restraint – the savagery of the whole, which has revolted so many readers – is dramatically inevitable” (451).

The Franklin

“This, then, is the Franklin’s solution of the whole puzzle of matrimony, and it is a solution that depends on love and gentillesse on both sides” (464).

Final Thoughts:

“There is no connection between the Wife’s Prologue and the group of stories that precedes; there is no connection between the Franklin’s Tale and the group that follows. Within the Marriage Group, on the contrary, there is a close connection throughout. That act is a finished act. It begins and ends an elaborate debate. We need not hesitate, therefore, to accept the solution which the Franklin offers as that which Geoffrey Chaucer the man accepted for his own part (467).”

http://www.jstor.org/stable/432643?seq=21#page_scan_tab_contents

Quest for Authority in Tale of Sir Topas

Berry, Craig A. "Borrowed Armor/Free Grace: The Quest for Authority in 'The Faerie Queene' and Chaucer's 'Tale of Sir Topas'". Studies in Philology 91.2. (1994)

This article talks about Chaucer's Tale of Sir Topas and texplores the idea that Chaucer pilgrim himself told the story in order to allow Chaucer to close the gap between him and his audience. He is able to laugh, make fun of, and undermine himself, but Craig. A Berry claims that he does this so that the authority of the tales as a whole increases. He talks about how the poet becomes an "innocent bystander" of the stories and shifts the responsibility for the stories off of himself. This may also connect with the idea of censorship that we have been talking about from Cannon as well.

This was just a small summary of what he talks about, but the rest can be found in the link below.



http://ftp1.whitworth.edu:2087/stable/4174481?seq=20#page_scan_tab_contents

The Franklin's Tale in regards to Medieval Marriage

As I was reading The Frankin's Tale, it reminded me of the chapter on marriage I read in Medieval Women's Writing on the Reserved list. Some of the research I have been doing revolves around medieval marriage and I had just recently read the chapter on marriage by Dylan Elliot (Chapter 3). This was an interesting chapter to read in regards to The Franklin's Tale because it talks about how women did not have the right to make a vow without their husbands consent because men had such authority over their wives. Therefore, Dorigen's husband could have simply revoked her vow if he chose too, but he does not. This is because this is one of the first examples we see in The Canterbury Tales of a marriage based on equality. In order to uphold the equality that their marriage is based on, he cannot simply revoke her word, even though she made a bad decision. I thought this was an interesting connection and a new way to look at marriage within the Canterbury Tales as well.

"Virginities" and "Marriage"

Two Resources
I know that a two or three of you are looking into the roles of women within one or more of the tales we have read from Chaucer. That being the case, I highly recommend two articles provided Cambridge's Medieval Women and Writing, which Doug has put on reserve for us in the library. Not only do "Virginities" (Ruth Evans) and "Marriage" (Dyan Elliott) provide a good introduction to the two categories. They also supply in-depth analysis of the history surrounding the idea of womanhood so far as womanhood is connected to virginity and marriage.

How it Impacts my Research 
Especially fascinating in regard to the subject that I am researching (how Custaunce and Grisilde embody the high value placed on constancy and chastity) is the following insight Evans hands on to the reader: "the feminized virgin (twelfth to fourteenth centuries)" replaced "a woman [virgin] acting like a man (ninth to eleventh centuries)" (25). In other words, there were at least two very distinct conceptions of an ideal woman, although both emphasized her virginity. As I am considering how the concept of an ideal woman was differentiated from the concept of an ideal man, Evans' suggestion is very thought provoking.

I hope these two articles will also be helpful for some of you.

The Merchant's Tale and Fabliau

In doing some background reading for "The Merchant's Tale," I came across a word, fabliau, that I hadn't yet heard before. It may be that I am slow in coming to this word, but I don't think that I had ever read anything before this class that was accompanied by the use of this phrase. In a broad sense, a fabliau is a short tale usually characterized by overly sexual or lewd themes, which brought to mind a question. Is "The Merchant's Tale" anything more than a fabliau, or is it simply a story told for obscene effect and the criticism of women? (Another characteristic is the criticism of women.) I realize that there are numerous instances where claims could be made for both support or denial of the fabliau concept, and in researching this idea, found an article that deals with this claim, offering interesting support of the fabliau, but also bringing new theories to light. The merchant was newly married after all, and, as the article suggests, could be responding to his own "shrewish wife."

Stevens, Martin. "And Venus Laugheth: An Interpretation of the Merchant's Tale." The Chaucer Review 7.2 (1972): 118-31. Jstor. Web. 7 Oct. 2015. <jstor.org>.

Bernard Huppe's "A Reading of the Canterbury Tales"

Hello, all,

While doing my research, one of the resources I found was Bernard Huppe's A Reading of the Canterbury Tales (it is a book, not an article, but I couldn't italicize the title in the headline of this post). This may be helpful to a number of you because Huppe looks at most of the major stories that Chaucer writes in The Canterbury Tales. I have found the book particularly helpful because I disagree with some of the main hypotheses that Huppe is trying to support. For example, Huppe is convinced "that Chaucer would have wished to convey a fairly specific kind of doctrinal truth because he wrote in a literary tradition, older to be sure than St. Augustine, but certainly stemming in the Middle Ages from his vast authority" (5). Especially if any of you are considering how the form of The Canterbury Tales contributes to the meaning of the work, Huppe's statements will be valuable to consider. I, for one, think that Chaucer is using the traditional forms of rhetoric (such as saints' legends) to actually undermine the sense of an objective doctrinal truth--but I'm also still developing that thought.

Anyway, I thought this might be helpful to some of you as it has been for me. Let me know if you'd like to look at the text, as I currently have it checked out from the library.

Huppe, Bernard. A Reading of the Canterbury Tales. New York: State University of New York, 1967. Print.

"Quiting" Eve: Violence Against Women in The Canterbury Tales

For those focuses on antifeminism or lack thereof within the Canterbury Tales, this book might be an interesting one to take a look at. I only read Chapter 6 titled "Quiting" Eve: Violence Against Women in the Canterbury Tales. According to this book, men looked as women in the medieval era as the offspring of Eve or of evil and were always prepared for them to return to their deceitful ways. Women were seen as deceitful because Eve tempted Adam with the forbidden fruit. God gave Adam the authority to rule over Eve and this chapter states that, because of this, men show violence towards women time and time again within The Canterbury Tales.

We most recently read the Clerk's Tale and it fits perfectly with this idea of violence against women because Griselda is mentally and emotionally tortured by her husband even though she continually proves herself to be patient and true to him.

Check out Chapter 6 and even the rest of the chapters if you would like to!


Roberts, Anna M. Violence Against Women in Medieval Texts. University Press of Florida. 1998.


https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=c-ipcQSPurMC&oi=fnd&pg=PA115&dq=women+in+canterbury+tales&ots=IjHvFz2qHq&sig=cfeFIbzHV2VzemeIpr0PxvqbQUE#v=onepage&q=women%20in%20canterbury%20tales&f=false

"Women's Voices and Roles" - The Source I discussed in Class

I found this article to be really thought provoking especially when it comes to the status of women and how class could have an effect on this. 

Meale, Carol M. "Women's Voices and Roles." A Companion to Medieval English Literature and Culture c. 1350-1500. Ed. Peter Brown. Victoria: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. 

These are the notes that I took on it, but I would highly suggest reading the whole article, especially if you are considering writing a paper on something related to this topic.

______________________________________________________________________________

·        Women thought to be very emotional (thanks Eve!) which was dangerous to women and mankind in general… the nature of women according to popular books like Acrene Wisse was to act in an emotional way that was a gateway to evil and damnation unless they were vigilant

·        Question when investigating women’s history: complex one of how women contended with this ethos within their own lives – internalize this gendered construct or negotiate with it?

·        Suggests that by looking at social, cultural and economic realities for women you can see that negotiating was primary strategy despite fact that they were considered inferior to men in MANY ways – from birth until death, women considered property of one man or another

Women, Education and Writing

·        Weird to think of women and writing during this time period together since most women illiterate, but it can be done- Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe = two best known female authors of time, Kempe illiterate, Norwich debated, used other avenues to write

·        Most educated girls trained in nunneries, can be seen in fact that with the rise of universities (not open to women) the knowledge women had of any language besides English declined

·        Opportunity for some within elementary schooling in individual households conducted by the woman of the house or by the resident chaplain

·        Letter collections are the best representation of the voices of medieval women -à through them we see that women were aware of the local/national politics that could affect them/their families. One of best examples found in the Armburgh Papers when Joan Armburgh wrote to John Horell of Essex chewing him out for what she saw as an act of treachery by him towards her and her maternal family… not sure if she wrote or dictated the letter, but a very clear voice.

o   The Wyf of Bath and her distinct voice

·        Uniting factor in this correspondence/the books by Kempe and Norwich = mixture of colloquial and technical (legal/religious) which characterizes language used

Patronage, Books and Social Networking

·        Assessing women’s roles in patronage of the arts easier in some areas than others. Architecture mainly for men but also heavily dependent on class and wealth of the woman … lower class women typically patronized places of devotion

·        Interpretation of the patronage of manuscripts/paintings not so difficult… usually written names in/on them, better records

·        But well documented lives of women are RARE

Women, Power and Status

·        Power/privilege came with cost – widowhood, had to involve themselves in admin/management of their estates, making sure that all was in order until their HUSBAND’s heir came of age

·        Men away from land because abroad in war with France or seeing to affairs elsewhere, so had to shoulder the burden of management

·        Urban women more free to make choices about their lives than gentry/noble contemporaries…some women able to carry on the trades of their husbands while they did not remarry, but paid less

·        Women the most marginalized when they became prostitutes à stigmatized by not being allowed to live within the enclosed walls of the city, other ways of marking women who were prostitutes written into city ordinances

·        Viewed as morally debased by the sin of lust à the “Daughters of Eve”

·        May have come from lower social classes, but not necessarily exclusive to lower class

Conclusion

·        Two predominant themes: dynamic changes took place in English society from 1350à, due to these changes, women’s roles were diverse and themselves were in a state of flux

·        The varying fortunes of women discussed here demonstrate that all generalizations must be deconstructed… by doing this we start to recover the history of women

Tying it into Canterbury Tales

·        The Wyf of Bath à a very distinctive voice despite not being literate and “dictating” her story to Chaucer. This is similar to the Armburgh paper which shows the distinctive voice of Joan (the writer of the letter) and her awareness of the local/national issues of the time

·        Despite not being literate, it’s very apparent that the Wyf isn’t stupid and knows what’s going on. She realizes the injustices being done to women, and she calls people on it… the “Thou sayest passages”

·        The idea that while men want women because they are pretty or chaste or good around the house etc (AND not because of who they are as people) but yet women are the evil influence

·        Going back to the idea that women were considered to be emotional and “Eve-like” ‘Thow seyst’ passage p. 223 l. 337-339… she’s acknowledging this idea and calling it ridiculous by comparing women to cats in order to show how ridiculous it is

·        Class of women matters too

·        Reeve’s tale the women are objects to be slept with and aren’t given names (lower class women) but the Wyf of Bath who has a higher status is given an entire tale and auto-bio prologue for herself

·        Other women of higher status are also named… like Emelye in the Knight’s Tale and even the Prioress is named (high position as probable daughter of a member of the upper class/aristocracy AND as a nun/member of the church)

I hope this is somewhat helpful!!