“To Late for to Crie”: Female Desire, Fabliau Politics, and Classical Legend in Chaucer's Reeve's Tale

Abstract

This article proposes that Chaucer's Reeve's Tale is a fusion of classical legend plot with fabliau setting and characters. This fusion helps Chaucer push the fabliau beyond its own limits, allowing the Reeve's Tale to reveal late medieval culture's conflicting attitudes towards female desire and masculine control and thus to interrogate more fully the gender politics of the Knight's classical romance. The article argues that because the Reeve's Tale revises many of the traditional features of medieval obscene discourse — features that the Miller's Tale embodies — it is a crucial part of Chaucer's meditation on issues of gender and genre in Fragment One.