Chaucer Critics

Question 1

Mickey Meally on the dreaded scene.

Answer 1

‘Truly disturbing deflowering scene that is equal parts nausea and black comedy […] our sympathy firmly relocates to his young bride.’

Question 2

Mickey Meally on May’s lack of sexual agency. Or just lack of agency in general.

Answer 2

‘Her status as a passive sexual object and suggesting her paralysed horror at the nightmare of her wedding night.’

Question 3

Mickey Meally on May’s lack of a voice

Answer 3

‘Chaucer delays May speaking until line 976, barely 200 lines from the end of the tale’

Question 4

Peter Ackroyd on the Women in Chaucerian poetry.

Answer 4

‘The women of his poetry also tend to be deserted and betrayed.’

Question 5

Peter Ackroyd on Chaucer’s views of piety.

Answer 5

‘Chaucer is in one sense limning a portrait of late mediaeval piety which extolled the virtues of female suffering.’

Question 6

Mickey Meally on the conventions of the Old Husband in Mediaeval literature

Answer 6

‘Through generic conventions of the mediaeval fabliau tradition a familiar figure comes into focus: the old husband ready for a humiliating gulling.’

Question 7

Mickey Meally on Januarie’s age.

Answer 7

‘Even by Mediaeval standards, where the average life expectancy was approximately 48, Januarie is ridiculously old for marriage.’

Question 8

Peter Ackroyd on Chaucer’s own married life (or lack there of it)

Answer 8

‘He declared his intention never to remarry […] It would seem that he had no very high opinion of the matrimonial state’

Question 9

Peter Ackroyd on the tropes of anti-feminism in Chaucerian literature.

Answer 9

‘Chaucer also uses much of the anti-feminist literature of the period but lends it a new and ironical lease of life.’