The Merchant's Tale

Question 1

“In warm wex she hath emprented the clyket”

Answer 1

• Male perception of female malleability
• Deception
• connotations of sexuality/inversion of power and gender dynamic as female exercises agency
• The Parian Love Garden
• Hortus conclusus

Question 2

“He swelte and swowned ther he stood”

Answer 2

• Damian as courtly lover
• the merging of fabliau and courtly love
• Male intense emotion manifested as love sickness/intense sexual desire
• what leads May to “pitee” him

Question 3

“Heigh fantasye and curious bisynesse”

Answer 3

• Januarie’s self-deception
• “fantasy” and its association with dream vision poetry
• Deschamps: Miroir de Mariage
• januarie’s hubris
• hyperbole & elevated style of courtly romance

Question 4

“Love is blind alday”

Answer 4

• blindness (literal and metaphorical)
• deception
• Andreas Capellanus De Amore

Question 5

The Garden of Eden

Answer 5

• legacy of Eve was prolific
• she was beguiled by the devil, disguised as a serpent, into eating the forbidden fruit and blamed for the loss of Paradise

Question 6

The Novellino (1280)

BLINDNESS

Answer 6

“There was once a wealthy man and he had a very beautiful woman as his wife. And this man loved her with all his heart and was very jealous of her. Now it happened, as God ordained it, that this man contracted a malady in his eyes, from which he became blind so that he did not see the light of day.”

Question 7

“Who peyntede the Leon, tel me who?”

Answer 7

Alison, Wife of Bath’s Tale

Question 8

“Estaat”

Answer 8

Rank
Social standing
Status/Power

Question 9

“Auctoritee”

Answer 9

Legal power
Authority
Power to inspire
Written authority

Question 10

“Maistrye”

Answer 10

Mastery, dominion
Skill
Admirable achievement

Question 11

“The slakke skin aboute his nekke shaketh”

Answer 11

• Male sexual appetite
• grotesque depiction of sex
• sacrament of marriage being undermined by Januarie’s carnal desires (fornication) = sin

Question 12

“God never created it to be like this, but Adam and Eve perverted it through their sin and corrupted our nature”

Answer 12

Holy Virginity (from an early C13 text)

Question 13

“The power of the scene in the Pavian love Garden comes from its inversion of the traditional or conventional order of such things and its lack of refinement and elegance”

Answer 13

Maurice Hussey

Question 14

Virgin Mary and May:

“Both women were frequently conflated in terms of popular representations of the enclosed, contained - and therefore “ideal” woman, walled-up in a space that not only reflected the naturalness of patriarchal order, but the dictates of divine order too”

Answer 14

Liz Herbert McAvoy

Question 15

Hortus conclusus

Answer 15

Christians saw the enclosed garden as a symbol of the perpetual virginity of Christ’s mother, Mary

Question 16

Song of Solomon

“A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed” (4:12)

Answer 16

Allegory of the mystical union between Church and Christ
The “Fons signatus” became imbued with Marian iconography
The immaculate conception
The female body was “a fountain sealed up”, enclosed in turn by the horticultural surroundings

Question 17

Roman de la Rose - Guillaume de Lorris

Answer 17

• garden imagery
• the lover’s quest for the Rose (symbol of the female)
• the lover strolls along a river bank and ends up at a lush orchard enclosed by a high wall

Question 18

“He made a gardyn, walled al with stoon”

Answer 18

• Hortus conclusus
• Male attempt to “contain the female body”
• becomes synonymous with female body
• ironically where the cuckolding takes place