Chaucer, ethics, and gender / Alcuin Blamires.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Blamires, Alcuin.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400. Canterbury tales.

Chaucer, Geoffrey.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400--Ethics.

Chaucer, Geoffrey, -1400.

Ethics, Medieval, in literature.

Virtues in literature.

Sex role in literature.

Ethics.

Physical Description:

263 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2006.

Summary:

This book makes a vigorous reassessment of the moral dimension in Chaucer's writings. For the Middle Ages, the study of human behaviour generally signified the study of the morality of attitudes, choices, and actions. Moreover, moral analysis was not gender neutral: it presupposed that certain virtues and certain failings were largely gender-specific. Concentrating mainly on The Canterbury Tales, Alcuin Blamires discloses how Chaucer adapts the composite inherited traditions of moral literature to shape the significance and the gender implications of his narratives. Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender is therefore not a theorization of ethical reading but a discussion of Chaucer's engagement with the literature of practical ethical advice. Working with the commonplace primary sources of the period, Blamires demonstrates that Stoic ideals, somewhat uncomfortably absorbed within medieval Christian moral codes, penetrate the poet's constructions of how women and men behave in matters (for instance) of friendship and anger, sexuality and chastity, protest and sufferance, generosity and greed, credulity and foresight.

The book will be absorbing for all serious readers or teachers of Chaucer because it is packed with commanding new insights. It offers illuminating explanations concerning topics that have often eluded critics in the past: the flood-forecast in The Miller's Tale, for example; or the status of emotion and equanimity in The Franklin's Tale; the 'unethical' sexual trading in The Shipman's Tale; the contemporary moral force of a widow's curse in The Friar's Tale; and the quizzical moral link between The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. There is even a new hypothesis about the conceptual design of The Canterbury Tales as a whole. Deeply informed and historically alert, this is a book that engages its reader in the vital role played by ethical assumptions (with their attendant gender assumptions) in Chaucer's major poetry.

Contents:

Fellowship and detraction in the architecture of the Canterbury tales : from 'The general prologue' and 'The knight's tale' to 'The parson's prologue'

Credulity and vision : 'The miller's tale', 'The merchant's tale', 'The wife of Bath's tale'

Sex and lust : 'The merchant's tale', 'The reeve's tale', and other Tales

The ethics of sufficiency : 'The man of law's introduction' and 'Tale'; 'The shipman's tale'

Liberality : 'The wife of Bath's prologue' and 'Tale' and 'The Franklin's tale'

Problems of patience : 'The Franklin's tale', 'The clerk's tale', 'The nun's priest's tale'

Men, women, and moral jurisdiction : 'The friar's tale', 'The physician's tale', and the pardoner

Proprieties of work and speech : 'The second nun's prologue' and 'Tale', 'The canon's yeoman's prologue' and 'Tale', 'The manciple's prologue' and 'Tale', and 'The parson's prologue'.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [239]-256) and index.

ISBN:

0199248672

OCLC:

62532446

Publisher Number:

9780199248674