Chaucer Canterbury Tales

Much of the most exciting recent work on medieval gender and sexuality has emerged from literary studies of the figure of the Pardoner in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Robert S. Sturges continues this work in this book-length study that emphasizes especially the Pardoner's complexities and self-contradictions in the realms of gender, the sexed body, and erotic practices. In doing so, Sturges attends both to medieval traditions and contexts that may have shaped the representation of the Pardoner and to contemporary gender theory that may provide new insight into the literary figure and his medieval contexts. As Sturges notes in his preface ("The Pardoner in Discourses: Theories, Histories, Methods"), he "attempts both a historical argument, one that seeks to understand the Pardoner by means of the multiple discourses of gender available to Chaucer in fourteenth-century England, and a theoretical (and transhistorical) argument, one that assumes that such modes of thought, and especially the disjunction s among them, remain sedimented in our own ways of thinking about gender" (xvi).

In his "Introduction: The Pardoner, the Preacher, and (Gender) Politics," Sturges makes his fullest attempt to place Chaucer's Pardoner in relation to the material history of late-fourteenth-century England. He presents a series of quite general and often unpersuasive parallels between the fictional Pardoner and the rebels of 1381 to argue that Chaucer's representation of the Pardoner and the anomalies of his gender, like fourteenth-century discourses of class revolt, concerns itself "with disorder in the body politic, and . . . connects that disorder to the presence of the feminine". (The introduction ends with a reading of Chaucer's "Complaint to His Purse" that makes much of a shift in this brief lyric from "heterosexual desire" to "a sodomitical, male-male desire"; here, Sturges's reading ignores to its detriment both historical work that shows the interimplication of "courtly love" and a licit [nonsodomitical] male-male homosociality [e.g., between lord and retainers], and queer theoretical work, especially Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's, that would place such socially sanctioned homosociality into dynamic relation with disallowed sodomitical male-male relations.)

Following the introduction, Sturges's argument falls into two main parts ("Contexts: The Pardoner's Genders, Sexes, Erotic Practices" and "Readings: Bodies, Voices, Texts"), each of which contains three chapters. Chapter 1, "The Pardoner's Genders: Linguistic and Other," places Chaucer's depiction in relation to medieval mythological and grammatical discourses centrally concerned with gender and argues that the complexities of these traditions allow Chaucer to position the "drunken, effeminate, boyish" Pardoner as "both weak and strong, both unnatural and a force of nature". In chapter 2, "The Pardoner's (Over-) Sexed Body," Sturges reviews some of the earlier critical attempts to identify the Pardoner--as eunuch, hermaphrodite, "normal"--by reading the signs of his body. Considering that each of these conflicting interpretations has a certain basis in medieval discourses, Sturges himself argues that "we might . . . go so far as to say that the Pardoner's description tends to dissolve sexual difference: he problematizes the very concept of sexual dimorphism because he makes it so difficult to decide where ...