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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Women, Writing, And Storytelling In Medieval England And The Canterbury Tales, Sadie O'Conor
Women, Writing, And Storytelling In Medieval England And The Canterbury Tales, Sadie O'Conor
The Criterion
For a woman to succeed in an academic sphere, it is never enough for her to be clever-- she must be brilliant. “The Second Nun’s Tale” in Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales explores the metaphorical brilliance (in sexual purity, intelligence, and faith) of St. Cecilia. The tale is also a mechanism for the Second Nun to advocate for her own vocation of “holy work,” for the sake of the learned religious women who preserved such writings. The themes of her tale are quite different from those espoused by the Wife of Bath, but the Wife also argues to have her voice …
Gawain, Women, And The Hunts: How The Body Influences Human-Animal Relationships In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Meghan Gavis
Gawain, Women, And The Hunts: How The Body Influences Human-Animal Relationships In Sir Gawain And The Green Knight, Meghan Gavis
The Criterion
In the narrative poem, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, women and animals appear, on the surface, to function in a quintessential medieval sense — as physical objects to bolster Sir Gawain’s chivalric image. However, the dynamics between women, animals, and Gawain in this text challenge the human hierarchy presented by other medieval standards. By reading the ritualized hunts as devolving in honorable attention to the animal body and mapping their language onto the Lady’s temptations in Gawain’s bedroom, a feminine reclamation of the body appears. Though Gawain undercuts the Lady and Morgan by reducing them to physical presences, …