Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse (review)

Abstract

Much of the most exciting recent work on medieval gender and sexuality has emerged from literary studies of the figure of the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Robert S. Sturges continues this work in this book-length study that emphasizes especially the Pardoner's complexities and self-contradictions in the realms of gender, the sexed body, and erotic practices. In doing so, Sturges attends both to medieval traditions and contexts that may have shaped the representation of the Pardoner and to contemporary gender theory that may provide new insight into the literary figure and his medieval contexts. As Sturges notes in his preface ("The Pardoner in Discourses: Theories, Histories, Methods"), he "attempt[s] both a historical argument, one that seeks to understand the Pardoner by means of [End Page 530] the multiple discourses of gender available to Chaucer in fourteenth-century England, and a theoretical (and transhistorical) argument, one that assumes that such modes of thought, and especially the disjunctions among them, remain sedimented in our own ways of thinking about gender" (xvi).