Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Publishers Acknowledgements. Editor's Acknowledgements. Editions and Abbreviations Used in the Text. 1. Introduction 2. H. MARSHALL LEICESTER, JR, Structure as Deconstruction: 'Chaucer and Estates Satire' in the 'General Prologue', or Reading Chaucer as a Prologue to the History of Disenchantment 3. MARK A. SHERMAN, The Politics of Discourse in Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale' 4. PEGGY KNAPP, Robyn the Miller's Thrifty Work 5. CAROLYN DINSHAW, The Law of Man and its 'Abhomynacions' 6. ARTHUR LINDLEY, 'Vanysshed Was This Daunce, He Nyste Where': Alisoun's Absence in the 'Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale' 7. ELAINE TUTTLE HANSEN, The Powers of Silence: the Case of the Clerk's Griselda 8. CAROLYN P. COLLETTE, Umberto Eco, Semiotics, and the 'Merchant's Tale' 9. JOHN STEPHENS & MARCELLA RYAN, Metafictional Strategies and the Theme of Sexual Power in the Wife of Bath's and Frankiln's Tales 10. LEE PATTERSON, The Subject of Confession: the Pardoner and the Rhetoric of Penance 11. ELIZABETH ROBERTSON, Aspects of Female Piety in the 'Prioress's Tale' 12. BRITTON J. HARWOOD, Signs and / as Origin: Chaucer's 'Nun's Priest's Tale' 13. PAUL STROHM, A Mixed Commonwealth of Style Further Reading. Index

Reviewed by: Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras by Nancy Bradley Warren Kathleen Forni Nancy Bradley Warren. Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2019. Pp. 228. $100.00 cloth; $45.00 paper. It will probably come as little surprise to most readers that Chaucer's ambiguity and malleability regarding orthodoxy and heterodoxy made him a useful figure in "religiopolitical conflicts" in his postmedieval reception. But while Chaucer's Lollard leanings and perceived proto-Protestantism have received abundant critical attention, his association with continental female spirituality in his own age and his role in premodern Catholic counter-tradition polemics have been less studied. Nancy Bradley Warren fills this lacuna in the poet's reception, situating Chaucerian invocation within efforts to "establish religious and national identities on both sides of the Atlantic" (13). Armed with meticulous research and careful close reading, Warren convinces that the political value of the Protestant Chaucer (which I and others have proposed) provides only a partial account of his postmedieval canonization. Using a "transnational and transperiod approach" (13), Warren suggests that Chaucer represented a masculine cultural authority who could "save the English Catholic past from feminization" (4). The pejorative feminine [End Page 457] here is associated with both mystical spiritualism and (surprisingly) vernacular religious texts. While Warren's narrative is not a corrective to those who link his postmedieval canonization to his perceived Wycliffite leanings, Chaucer occasionally emerges as "a figure who masculinizes and rationalizes the English Catholic Middle Ages" (99). Warren maintains that his female monastic pilgrims reveal Chaucer's "awareness of and interest in the emergence of Lollardy—the greatest English religious controversy of his lifetime—as well as his cognizance of the burgeoning visionary, mystical, and prophetic spirituality of Continental holy women" (9). Chapter 1, "Female Spirituality and Religious Controversy in The Canterbury Tales," revisits The Prioress's Prologue and Tale and The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale within the context of the Brigittine spirituality associated with St. Birgitta of Sweden (1349–73), whose revelations emphasize the power of the Virgin Mary and maternal intercession, as well as the efficacy of vernacular religious translation and female spiritual instruction. The Second Nun's Prologue not only emphasizes the power of Mary's virginal maternity but also posits the legitimacy of vernacular translation (the "mother tongue"). And St. Cecilia herself demonstrates that female "conseil" can lead to salvation; as such, the tale nicely "quits" the denigration of womanly counsel found in The Nun's Priest's Tale (which immediately precedes The Second Nun's Tale in the Ellesmere manuscript). Warren rereads The Prioress's Prologue as a reflection of the popular cult of the Virgin Mary in the fourteenth century, and highlights its "salvific power" of maternal suffering and the "the dynamics of Incarnation" (30), providing a layer of sophistication to what is sometimes seen as an infantilizing expostulation. Nonetheless, it is difficult to get around the notorious anti-Semitism of the tale; Warren concurs that the tale of the little "clergeon" lacks some "spiritual and intellectual sophistication," which is perhaps owing to "imperfect religious knowledge, imperfection that could be ameliorated by access to vernacular translations of religious texts" (36, 37). One might add, however, that St. Birgitta's Prophesies and Revelations itself is littered with denigrating references to the Jews—revealing a less salutary aspect of her spirituality, and an aspect of Marian devotion that continues to unsettle. Real nuns also read some Chaucer, or at least texts that mention Chaucer. Chapter 2, "Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers," explores Chaucer's literary legacy as attested to by the manuscripts owned by several prominent English nunneries with [End Page 458] Lancastrian affiliations (Warren meticulously traces the family back-grounds and surprising political connections of the women in these monastic houses). The Brigittine nuns at Syon possessed a miscellany (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Laud misc. 416) that included—in addition to Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and several other texts on ethics, political advice, history, and philosophy—The Parliament of Fowls (or at least lines 1–142 of the poem, since the manuscript...

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

ABSTRACTThis article will explore ideas about marriage and the domestic sphere in the Late Middle Ages in relation to the Wife of Bath's prologue and Tale. While Chaucer's Wife of Bath has been read by many critics as offering a protofeminist defence of women, researchers who attempt to illuminate how the Wife of Bath and her ideas would have been perceived by a medieval audience, through recourse to medieval discourses on women, have tended to focus on the antifeminist clerical tradition in order to show that the Wife of Bath is a character made up of stereotypes from misogynist writings; these critics therefore argue that a contemporary audience would not have taken the Wife seriously. However, this article aims to show that it is conceivable that a medieval audience or reader could have interpreted the Wife of Bath's prologue and Tale as providing a serious defence of women. It illustrates that the Wife of Bath's ideas about mutuality and domestic partnership in marriage are in line with a discourse and social practices that actually existed in the late medieval period. The Wife's ideas about marriage are shown to coincide with ideas which were developing in Chaucer's society as a result of social and economic changes in fourteenth-century England, resulting in changing situations and roles for women in the context of the home. Furthermore, the article demonstrates that similar ideas about marriage are expressed in marriage sermons from the late thirteenth to the sixteenth century.

1. How many pilgrims are there in The Canterbury Tales? Where are they going? Why are they traveling together? 2. In the portraits of the pilgrims in "The General Prologue," can you see any examples where Chaucer seems to be gently satirizing the institution of the church? Cite an example or two. 3. In the story-telling contest proposed by the Host in "The General Prologue," what are the criteria that will be used to judge the stories told by the pilgrims? If those criteria were used to judge the story told by the Wife of Bath, would it be considered a good story? Why? Use some specific details from the text to support your views. 4. In the "Prologue" to her tale, what does the Wife of Bath reveal to us about her character? What kind of person is she? Use a word, a phrase, or a paragraph—with examples from the text—to describe her. 5. What is the message conveyed in "The Wife of Bath's Tale"? What kind of connections can we make between the prologue, the tale, and the teller of the tale? 4. What is the crime of the knight in "The Wife of Bath's Tale"? What is his punishment? Does the punishment fit the crime? Why? 6. Judging by what Chaucer's text tells us, what do the dominant cultural expectations about women during the medieval period seem to be? Do you see any instances of misogyny in Chaucer's text?

When most scholars think about Chaucer and religious controversies, what first comes to mind are his references to the dissenting Lollard movement and his Reformation-era rebranding as a forerunner of Protestantism. In this book, however, Nancy Bradley Warren tells a story that is at once broader and more nuanced. She acknowledges the familiar proto-Protestant Chaucer, but looks beyond him to find a persistently Catholic Chaucer, as well as a distinctively Puritan twist on the Chaucerian tradition in colonial America. Ambitious in both geographical and chronological scope yet detailed in its tracing of intertextual connections, her book offers a fresh perspective on Chaucer as a powerful and contested figure throughout centuries of religious conflict.Beginning in the first pages, Warren takes the Wife of Bath as a touchstone for her argument—not only because the Wife’s prologue addresses religious controversies but also because her larger-than-life presence in the reception of Chaucer’s works positions her as a representative of the Chaucerian tradition. The introduction sketches the outlines of how both the Wife and the wider tradition became “potent cultural signifiers available for appropriation and transformation” (5) by readers with divergent religious agendas. Warren identifies two forces driving this process: Chaucer’s “religious malleability,” which “makes him readily accessible to competing factions in religious controversies,” and his “authority,” which “makes him a highly desirable resource for rival religious causes to mobilize” (5).Before tracing subsequent mobilizations of Chaucer, Warren begins with the poet himself, and specifically with the two nuns on his Canterbury pilgrimage. Her reading of the Second Nun and Prioress emphasizes their “affinities with the Brigittine tradition and the Lollard movement” (16), but stops short of asserting a direct influence; the point is rather to demonstrate Chaucer’s attunement to contemporary religious movements and their gendered implications. Warren reads the Second Nun’s Prologue and Tale as converging with Lollardy in issuing a “rebuke” to clerics (26), articulated through a positive portrayal of female leadership and vernacularity. Turning to the Prioress’s Tale, she examines how it valorizes “maternal suffering as well as maternal intercessory, salvific power” in ways that resonate with Brigittine thought (28). Throughout, this chapter notes convergences between Lollard and Brigittine elements, demonstrating the blurriness of the boundary between orthodoxy and heterodoxy in Chaucer’s world.Before turning to the more polarized world of the Reformation, Bradley Warren recounts an overlooked chapter in the story of Chaucerian reception by examining the reading practices of English nuns. Extensive libraries at Amesbury and Syon held volumes of “courtly, politically oriented Chaucerian material” (41) by authors such as Bokenham, Hoccleve, and Lydgate, revealing the nuns’ aristocratic reading habits and their investment in a Chaucerian tradition aligned with Lancastrian political power. The chapter concludes with the suggestion, based on an excerpt of Troilus and Criseyde in a Syon volume, that these nuns also found in Chaucer a vindication of the aesthetic pleasures of reading.Addressing the tumultuous sixteenth century, chapter 3 demonstrates that the Protestant Chaucer did not emerge either as quickly or as definitively as many scholars have assumed. The focal point of this chapter is the polemically Catholic writing of William Forrest, who recast Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale in order to present Mary I with a “model of meek, humble queenship and Catholic female virtue” (87). Forrest also points to the Chaucerian tradition in his fervent promotion of Marian piety as a political and social good. In examining Forrest’s “religiopolitical vision of a Catholic future that reanimates the medieval past” (96), this chapter provides an illuminating counternarrative to the familiar story of Chaucer’s early modern reception.That counternarrative continues in the next chapter, which turns to the seventeenth-century rediscovery of Chaucer and Julian of Norwich. In a context that saw Catholicism as feminine in a pejorative sense, Julian’s defenders proceeded by “regendering Catholicism and the language of its medieval texts as predominantly masculine” (107), not least by pointing to Chaucer as a respectably paternal medieval voice. Father Chaucer looms large in Dryden’s Fables Ancient and Modern, which Bradley Warren reads as an effort to “re-Catholicize” England’s founding poet (113). After showing how Dryden positions himself as a poetic reincarnation of Chaucer, the chapter offers a subtle close reading of the frontispiece to the Fables, in which Dryden casts himself in “Marian,” “Christlike,” and “priestly” roles simultaneously (130). Even as it traces the persistence of a Catholic Chaucer, this chapter also unfolds the complex intersections of gender and religious identity in attitudes to the medieval past.The final chapter returns to the more familiar Protestant Chaucer, but with a transatlantic twist: among Puritan colonists, the Chaucerian tradition, which in this context encompassed Piers Plowman and related texts, signifies both “reformed legitimacy” and “English authenticity” (134). For instance, Cotton Mather, outlining a distinguished sequence of English religious dissenters, places Chaucer “at the head of a chain of the sacred, reformed dead” (143). The chapter’s main focus falls on the poetry of Anne Bradstreet, who comes into direct contact with the Chaucerian tradition when a commendatory verse aligns her with Alison of Bath. This moment, in which a Puritan female poet is linked to Chaucer’s “rebellious, quasi-Lollard Wife of Bath” (157), provides a fitting endpoint to this ambitious survey of all that Chaucer could represent across these religiously tumultuous centuries.Chaucer’s presence in many of the texts discussed here is fleeting or oblique, felt in brief name-dropping asides or mediated through subsequent authors. The book’s achievement is to unfold the implications of these Chaucerian resonances thoroughly and sensitively. One place with room for more unfolding is the chapter on Chaucer himself: connecting the Prioress to the Brigittines would seem to reveal new depths in her apparently simple devotion, but the chapter gestures toward that revisionist reading without developing it. What the book does develop compellingly, however, is a revision to the received narrative of Chaucerian reception as an exercise in promoting Protestantism. Warren shows that the reality is far more complex and multiple.In addition to telling new chapters in the story of Chaucer’s reception, the book illuminates the profoundly gendered nature of both literary reception and religious controversy. Perhaps most importantly, at every turn it highlights the deep connection that centuries of readers perceived between their engagement with Chaucerian writing and the formation and articulation of their religious identities. If Chaucer could be congenial to both militant Massachusetts Puritans and nostalgic English Catholics, one thing he could not be was a secular, literary figure, the figure that dominates current reception of his works. This bracing reminder of Chaucer’s religious significance is the book’s most fundamental contribution.

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Chaucer and Malory are the only Middle English writers whose literary afterlife has been pretty well continuous from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Study of Chaucer in particular reveals the pressures and contours of Middle English studies with especial clarity. Many recent studies have focussed on aspects of Chaucer's reception, especially in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the present chapter is devoted to that same period. It will in part confirm the conclusions of previous work, in part challenge them. In particular, I challenge the notion that Chaucer's fifteenth-century followers were inertly unresponsive to the possibilities opened up by Chaucer's oeuvre . Indeed, it is precisely the need to isolate Chaucer's genius that produces a dismissive account of Chaucer's fifteenth-century followers; that need began in earnest in the sixteenth century. A complete conspectus of the way in which Chaucer’s works were revised and remade would need to cover the following areas: the changing nature of the texts in which his works were presented; the way in which he was cited in broadly ‘literary’ texts; the way in which his name was deployed in political and religious controversy. I give examples of each of these areas, but a complete conspectus would occupy a large book. Instead, I propose an argument designed to account for the structure of Chaucer’s reception between 1400 and 1550 (the date of the third edition of William Thynne’s Workes of Geffray Chaucer).

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Introduction

This article reads the representation of rape in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale in light of the renegotiation of laws governing raptus in late-fourteenth-century England, a juridical reform that began with a case concerning a nobleman's daughter in 1380 and culminated in the 1382 Statute of Rapes. This statutory reform sought to protect patriarchal control of female sexuality and to punish women for autonomous marriage choice, but it did so with a surprisingly insistent rhetorical focus on the harms of rape as a violation of women's bodies and wills. This article argues that Chaucer, through the Wife of Bath, explores the paradoxical cultural consequences of this rhetoric of rape to expose the risks of appealing to gender difference as an interpretive framework. Engaging the complex relationship among representation, desire, and the politics of gender in legal discourses of raptus, the Tale imagines new possibilities for bodies and desires not marked by the violence of gender, even as it registers the social realities of gendered violence.

There is no question that Emerson knew and admired the works of Chaucer, though his references to Chaucer tend mostly to be general, as in my two epigraphs above. Only once does he make a more extended allusion to Chaucer. That allusion comes in his 1844 essay, "The Poet." In 1925 Caroline Spurgeon briefly mentioned this allusion to Chaucer, 3 but so far as I have been able to determine, virtually no one, among either Emerson scholars or Chaucer scholars, has discussed the allusion. Indeed, most editions of Emerson's essay "The Poet" do not bother to give the reference for Emerson's allusion. Although Spurgeon did not tell what incident Emerson is alluding to, it is not hard to discover that the reference is to the old wife's pillow lecture in the Wife of Bath's Tale. My central point in this essay is that in his brief allusion to the Wife of Bath's Tale in "The Poet," Emerson quite misreads the Chaucerian passage that he refers to. I shall begin by discussing what Chaucer was about in the passage, then show in what ways Emerson misreads that passage, then suggest some reasons [End Page 86] why Emerson may have misread it, and, finally and perhaps most interestingly, indicate why I believe Emerson may well have known that he was misreading the passage, and may, indeed, have done so willfully.

Eisner's book is primarily a source study of Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Tale, but he includes a chapter on Gower's Tale of Florent. Both stories are traced back (somewhat independently) to Irish myth and legend in which loathly lady stood for sovereignty of Ireland. This material was elaborated in Wales, was carried by bilingual Bretons to France and thence to Norman England (15). Gower's version is very close to Chaucer's, but differs in including following four motifs: the stepmother who has enchanted heroine, hero who is identified as a nephew of his emperor, choice offered hero, and anger displayed by Branchus's grandmother when Florent returned with correct answer (65). Especially fact that Florent is nephew of emperor shows that source text likely had Gawain as hero and so belongs to Matter of Britain. [CvD]

The chapter examines Chaucer’s fascination with the ethical antithesis between credulity and visionary prudence, together with complex attendant genderings. In the Miller’s Tale, the human power to match the sweep of providence is queried through the problem of escaping from unpredictable floods. The tale mischievously mocks a peasant’s credulousness, his wife’s instinctuality, and a student’s pretension to prudential foresight. In the Merchant’s Tale credulity, arrogant imperviousness, and lust are more tartly explored as impediments to human vision. That the scales eventually drop from January’s physical sight correlates wittily with a Stoic idea that the cataract of ethical ignorance has to be removed to acquire mental vision. But it is in the Wife of Bath’s Tale that male vision is more productively improved, when an old woman becomes an instrument of moral enlightenment, bidding her knight-husband to ‘cast up the curtain’ and see ‘how it is’.

In Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (c. 1387), the Wife of Bath appears “as a woman of very strong opinions who believes firmly in marriage” and as well “in the need to manage husbands strictly” (Thornley & Gwyneth 1993, p.16), and hence her story is about an Arthurian knight who rapes a maiden and has to face the consequences of his deed. The pilgrims of Chaucer’s masterpiece undergo transformations, which are chronicled in this literary text. These transformations occur in a variety of forms and take different shapes. The Wife of Bath is one of these travellers. In the following discussion, I'll look at how the ‘Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale’ handles metamorphosis. By reading this article, readers will realize that transformation is not limited to the one of the hag that occurs at the end of the tale.