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Articles 1 - 5 of 5
Full-Text Articles in Medieval History
Homoerotic Medievalism: Looking At Queer Desire In The Homosocial Relationships Of Chaucer’S “The Knight’S Tale” And Fletcher And Shakespeare’S The Two Noble Kinsmen, Juan P. Espinosa
FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
The purpose of this thesis is to explore queer interiority within the heteronormative social constructions of late medieval England. Queer interiority is not an occurrence of modernity, but rather a response to social constructions that date back to the Middle Ages. It is essential to account for queerness in the Middle Ages because authors like Chaucer promote the successive resurfacing of queer characters within heteronormative social constructions. Writing during the queer reign of Richard II, Chaucer constructs the interior identities of Palamon and Arcite as a reflection of the king and the political norms of England. Inspired by Chaucer, authors …
Chaucer's Pardoner: The Medieval Culture Of Cross-Dressing And Problems Of Religious Authority, Larissa Tracy
Chaucer's Pardoner: The Medieval Culture Of Cross-Dressing And Problems Of Religious Authority, Larissa Tracy
Medieval Feminist Forum: A Journal of Gender and Sexuality
One of the most ambiguous and contentious characters in Geoffrey Chaucer’s fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales is the Pardoner, the last (and arguably worst) of the pilgrims described in the General Prologue. The Pardoner accused of being a gelding or a mare endowed with several effeminate traits, plays on multiple gendered associations—including that of a cross-dressing woman. Throughout the Canterbury Tales Chaucer manipulates gender expectations and assumptions in the figure of the Pardoner without fully clarifying the Pardoner’s sex, sexuality or gender, leaving the text open to potentially subversive interpretations. By the fourteenth century, cross-dressing was a relatively common literary motif, …
Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse
Literary Theories Of Circumcision, A. W. Strouse
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
“Literary Theories of Circumcision” investigates a school of thought in which the prepuce, as a conceptual metaphor, organizes literary experience. In every period of English literature, major authors have employed the penis’s hood as a figure for thinking about reading and writing. These authors belong to a tradition that defines textuality as a foreskin and interpretation as circumcision. In “Literary Theories of Circumcision,” I investigate the origins of this literary-theoretical formulation in the writings of Saint Paul, and then I trace this formulation’s formal applications among medieval, early modern, and modernist writers. My study lays the groundwork for an ambitious …
Lords Of Retinue: Middle English Romance And Noblemen In Need, James Trevor Stewart
Lords Of Retinue: Middle English Romance And Noblemen In Need, James Trevor Stewart
Doctoral Dissertations
This study shows how medieval poets adapted the romance genre to address contemporary concerns about the regulation and exercise of noble power. Analyzing romances alongside chivalric chronicles, medieval didactic texts, and modern historical studies of the English nobility, this dissertation explores the ideals and practices of chivalry in medieval England from the reign of Edward I (1272-1307) through the deposition of Richard II (1399). Chapters on Guy of Warwick (c. 1300), Ywain and Gawain (mid-fourteenth century), and Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (c. 1388) argue that Middle English poets promote ideals of both prowess and lordship in their narratives of chivalric heroism.
Introduction To Innovative Approaches To Teaching Chaucer, Alison (Ganze) Langdon, David Sprunger
Introduction To Innovative Approaches To Teaching Chaucer, Alison (Ganze) Langdon, David Sprunger
English Faculty Publications
Many a medievalist has been seduced by Chaucer. Perhaps it’s the totality of Chaucer’s enduring characters, memorable tales, elusive narrator, and fragmented whole that keeps us coming back. We are fascinated and delighted, too, by his linguistic play and the lyrical cadence of Middle English. Chaucer may have led us to graduate study in the first place and remains a treat that organizes our pedagogical lives. For some who teach in smaller programs or two-year colleges, Chaucer’s canonical status may provide the only guaranteed place for medieval texts in the curriculum and thus represents one small chance to share our …