This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture's mounting obsession with vision, constructing a model of 'manhed' that blurs the distinction between agency and passivity in a traditional gender binary.

"Builds expertly and significantly on several earlier feminist analyses of Chaucer's works. . . . An important addition to the growing body of work devoted to Chaucer and gender. . . . One of the real strengths of this work is the way in which it ties medieval notions of gender both to ancient, Aristotelian views and to modern and postmodern feminist theories."--Laura Howes, University of Tennessee, Knoxville "A seminal critical text in Chaucer and medieval studies. . . . Thoroughly enjoyable."--Liam Purdon, Doane College, Crete, Nebraska Catherine S. Cox considers the significance of gender in relation to language and poetics in Chaucer's writing. Examining selections from The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, The Legend of Good Women, and the ballades, she explores Chaucer's concern with gender and language both within the context of fourteenth-century culture and in light of contemporary feminist and poststructuralist theory. Cox argues that Chaucer's attention to gender and language exposes the contradictory notions of woman in medieval culture. Further, resisting the imposition of modern, reductive theoretical concerns on medieval authors, Cox makes a compelling case for a Chaucer who both confirms and challenges the orthodoxy of his day, thereby countering recent arguments that insist upon a wholly feminist or wholly patriarchal Chaucer. Informed by a broad range of traditional literary and historical scholarship (including Aristotelian philosophy, medieval Latin culture, and the writings of the Church fathers) as well as by recent psychoanalytical debates related to postmodern feminist critical theory (including those of Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva, and feminist film theorists), Cox's study demonstrates the significant interplay among ancient, medieval, and modern issues of scholarship and learning. Catherine S. Cox is assistant professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh, Johnstown, and the author of articles on Dante, Henryson, and other medieval writers.

This volume presents a feminist approach to the Canterbury Tales, investigating the ways in which the tensions and contradictions found within the broad contours of medieval gender discourse write themselves into Chaucer's text. Four discourses of medieval masculinity are examined, which simultaneously reinforce and resist one another: heroic or chivalric, Christian, courtly love, and emerging humanist models. Each chapter attempts to negotiate both contemporary assumptions of gender construction, and essentialist readings of gender common to the middle ages; throughout, the author argues that the Canterbury Tales offer a sophisticated discussion of masculinity, and that it strongly indicts some of the prevalent medieval notions of ideal masculinity while still remaining firmly homosocial and homophobic. The book concludes that on the question of gender issues, the Tales are best studied as male-authored texts containing representations and negotiations revealing much about late medieval masculinities. Dr ANNE LASKAYA teaches in the English Department at the University of Oregon.

Alcuin Blamires explains how Chaucer shapes human problems in terms of the uneasy mix of moral traditions at the time. He looks at the main ethical and gender issues that dominate Chaucer's work

"Eleven essays that explore how modern scholarship interprets Chaucer's writings"--Provided by publisher.

"Remarkably readable, often witty. . . . This book breaks new and interesting ground by using the life of Ovid as a 'mirror' in which Chaucer saw and perhaps shaped himself. It will have a wide audience of both Chaucerians and classicists."--Julian Wasserman, Loyola University in New Orleans "Thoughtfully and carefully demonstrates how neo-Ovidianism affects Chaucer's poetic outlook."--Liam Purdon, Doane College More than any other poet in Chaucer's library, Ovid was concerned with the game of love. Chaucer learned his sexual poetics from Ovid, and his fascination with Ovidian love strategies is prominent in his own writing. This book is the fullest study of Ovid and Chaucer available and the only one to focus on love, desire, and the gender-power struggles that Chaucer explores through Ovid. Michael Calabrese begins by recounting medieval biographical data on Ovid, indicating the breadth of Ovid's influence in the Middle Ages and the depth of Chaucer's knowledge of the Roman poet's life and work. He then examines two of Chaucer's most enduring and important works--Troilus and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale--in light of Ovid's turbulent corpus, maintaining that both poems ask the same Ovidian question: What can language and game do for lovers? Calabrese concludes by examining Chaucer's views of himself as a writer and of the complex relations between writer, text, and audience. "Chaucer, like Ovid, saw himself as vulnerable to the misunderstanding and woe that can befall a maker of fictions," he writes. "Like Ovid, Chaucer explores both the delights and also the dangers of being a 'servant of the servants of love.'. . . Now he must consider the personal, spiritual implications of being a verbal artist and love poet." Michael A. Calabrese is assistant professor of English at California State University, Los Angeles. His works on Chaucer have appeared in Chaucer Review, Studies in Philology, and other journals.

Conservative thinkers of the early Middle Ages conceived of sensual gratification as a demonic snare contrived to debase the higher faculties of humanity, and they identified pagan writing as one of the primary conduits of decadence. Two aspects of the pagan legacy were treated with particular distrust: fiction, conceived as a devious contrivance that falsified God’s order; and rhetorical opulence, viewed as a vain extravagance. Writing that offered these dangerous allurements came to be known as “hermaphroditic” and, by the later Middle Ages, to be equated with homosexuality. At the margins of these developments, however, some authors began to validate fiction as a medium for truth and a source of legitimate enjoyment, while others began to explore and defend the pleasures of opulent rhetoric. Here David Rollo examines two such texts—Alain de Lille’s De planctu Naturae and Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s Roman de la Rose—arguing that their authors, in acknowledging the liberating potential of their irregular written orientations, brought about a nuanced reappraisal of homosexuality. Rollo concludes with a consideration of the influence of the latter on Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale.

In Queer Fictions of the Past, Scott Bravmann explores the complexity of lesbian and gay engagement with history and considers how historical discourses animate the present. Characterising historical representations as dynamic conversations between then and now, he demonstrates their powerful role in constructing present identities, differences, politics, and communities. In particular, his is the first book to explore the ways in which lesbians and gay men have used history to define themselves as social, cultural, and political subjects.