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Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender

Alcuin Blamires author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Published:6th Apr '06

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Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender cover

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. Alcuin Blamires - mainly concentrating on The Canterbury Tales - 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 as Chaucer realized, 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.

In each of these chapters, Blamires' analysis leads to rich, new, and often provocative readings of the tales or passages within the tales... Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender _ richly demonstrates how generative it can be to read Chaucer's writings in dialogue with the ideas expressed in the moral and ethical treatises that inform the complicated world view of the late fourteenth century. * Ann Dobyns, Medieval Review *
[A] stimulating book...I look forward to returning to it repeatedly with different questions and new curiosities. * K.P.Clarke, Review of English Studies *
...a significant contribution to ethical discourse in Chaucer Studies. * Medium Aevum *
A great strength of Blamires's book is that it shows how norms are realized and relativized in particular narratives...a fresh and vigorous perspective on the genealogy of ethics and gender in Chaucer. * J. Allan Mitchell, English Studies *

ISBN: 9780199248674

Dimensions: 224mm x 144mm x 22mm

Weight: 480g

276 pages