What Is a Woman? Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale

Abstract

What Is a Woman?Enclosure and Female Piety in Chaucer's The Knight's Tale Roberta Magnani and Liz Herbert McAvoy Early responses to Geoffrey Chaucer's works and his position in the burgeoning canon of English literature cast him as a patriarchal foundational figure and literary production as an exclusively patrilineal genealogy.1 Chaucer-the-Father thus validates the authorial agency of his literary "sons," and this masculinist way of accounting for canon formation as a father-to-son "straight" trajectory has endured to the present day. Indeed, women's wider intellectual agency and its influence have been largely overlooked. This article, therefore, aims to begin such a process of reparation and posit the profound cultural relevance that women's intellectual practices had on the canon—and on Chaucer, in particular. Accounting for the role of female-coded forms of literacy would derail the conveniently linear patriarchal paradigms on which traditional criticism is founded. Recuperating the centrality of the feminine would unseat male dominance over the canon and demand, at best, its total dismantling and reconstruction, or, at the very least, a concerted interrogation and repudiation of its hegemonic validity. In other words, a radical revisioning of canon formation is made possible by positioning women as queering agents. Recentering "woman" as category and unpacking the question "What is a woman?" in capacious ways extricate it from binary epistemologies. As Sara Ahmed asserts, the queer deviates [End Page 311] from the "straight" lines of heteronormativity founded on an ineluctable patrilinear progression that, through marriage (so central to the narrative and ideology of medieval romance) and reproduction, trace a teleological sequence from birth to death.2 "Woman" reorients the epistemologies of the canon. Far from being marginal, the bodily and the excessive are celebrated for their salvific and generative power; in fact, they turn out to be the shared vocabulary harnessed by the intellectual fathers of medieval culture. We will focus on romance, a genre that is markedly invested in reproducing heteronormative structures couched in a narrative of apparent male subservience to a superior lady, and will demonstrate the extent to which widespread female-coded discourses of spirituality and literacy are profoundly embedded in the modes of writing that Chaucer deploys and the epistemologies he inhabits. The Booke of Gostlye Grace, the Middle English translation of the Liber specialis gratiae produced at the Benedictine nunnery of Helfta in northern Germany under the spiritual direction of the visionary nun Mechthild of Hackeborn (d. 1298), will serve as our case study because of its exemplarity; the centrality of Mechthild to the mystical tradition; and the wide circulation of her writing across Europe, both in Latin and in multiple vernacular translations. We are not interested in assimilating Mechthild into a patrilineal genealogy, however: quite the opposite. Nor do we claim any direct influence of Mechthild upon Chaucer, although that is entirely possible. For our purposes, Mechthild functions as an example of the importance and ubiquitous quality of women's literacy and spirituality that saturate the narrative fabric of Chaucer's texts—The Knight's Tale in particular—and that become ostensible in the Amazonian women populating the tale, and the tropes of enclosure and flourishing associated with them, but embedded in non-binary ways in the narrative as a whole. While there is evidence that the book attributed to Mechthild had, indeed, reached England at the time Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales, we cannot know for certain whether he was familiar with it, but there is evidence of her widespread renown during the fourteenth century.3 Instead [End Page 312] of claiming direct influence upon Chaucer, we harness Mechthild's spiritual and literary authority as a model for queering traditional theological discourse predicated upon feminine modes of literacy, which, rather than linear, hierarchical, paternal and filial, are collaborative and entangled; as such, they serve as ideal tools for a wider examination of issues such as the discursive elision of gender nonconformity and queer cultural agency.4 And we contend that what is defined as the literary canon, here exemplified by the works of one of its fathers, was profoundly influenced by (and participated in) this model—but in ways that...