Table Of ContentTHE NEW MIDDLE AGES
BONNIE WHEELER, Series Editor
The New Middle Ages is a series dedicated to transdisciplinary studies ofm edieval cultures, with particular
emphasis on recuperating women's history and on feminist and gender analyses. This
peer-reviewed series includes both scholarly monographs and essay collections.
PUBLISHED BY PALGRAVE: Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in
the Later Middle Ages
Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, by Laurel Amtower
Patronage, and Piety
edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly Robes and Honor: The Medieval World of Investiture
edited by Stewart Gordon
The Ethics of Nature in the Middle Ages:
On Boccaccio's Poetaphysics Representing Rape in Medieval and Early
by Gregory B. Stone Modem Uterature
edited by Elizabeth Robertson and Christine M.
Presence and Presentation: Women in Rose
the Chinese Literati Tradition
by Sherry J. Mou Same Sex Love and Desire among Women in the
Middle Ages
The Lost Letters of Heloise and Abelard: Perceptions edited by Francesca Canade Sautman and
of Dialogue in Twelfth-Century France Pamela Sheingom
by Constant J. Mews
Sight and Embodiment in the Middle Ages: Ocular
Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault Desires
by Philipp W. Rosemann by Suzannah Biemoff
For Her Good Estate: The Ufo of Elizabeth Usten, Daughter: The Speculum Virginum
de Burgh and the Formation of Religious Women in
by Frances A. Underhill the Middle Ages
edited by Constant J. Mews
Constructions of Widowhood and Virginity in the
Middle Ages Sdence, the Singular, and the Question of
edited by Cindy L. Carlson and Angela Jane Theology
Weisl by Richard A. Lee, Jr.
Motherhood and Mothering in Gender in Debate.from the Early Middle Ages to the
Anglo-Saxon England Renaissance
by Mary Dockray-Miller edited by Thelma S. Fenster and
Clare A. Lees
Ustening to Heloise: The Voice of a
Twelfth-Century Woman Malory's Morte Darthur: Remaking Arthurian
edited by Bonnie Wheeler Tradition
by Catherine Batt
The Postcolonial Middle Ages
edited by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen The Vernacular Spirit: Essays on Medieval
Religious Literature
Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of edited by Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski,
Discourse Duncan Robertson, and
by Robert S. Sturges Nancy Warren
Crossing the Bridge: Comparative Essays on Medieval Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages:
European and Heian Japanese Women Writers Image Worship and Idolatry in England
edited by Barbara Stevenson and 1350-1500
Cynthia Ho by Kathleen Kamerick
Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, and Queering Medieval Genres
Literary Structure in LAte Medieval England by Tison Pugh
by Elizabeth Scala
Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism
Creating Community with Food and Drink in by L. Michael Harrington
Merovingian Gaul
by Bonnie Effros The Middle Ages at Work
edited by Kellie Robertson and
Representations of Early Byzantine Empresses: Image Michael Uebel
and Empire
by Anne McClanan Chaucer's Jobs
by David R. Carlson
Encountering Medieval Textiles and Dress: Objects,
Texts, Images Medievalism and Orientalism: Three Essays on
edited by Desiree G. Koslin and Literature, Architecture and Cultural Identity
Janet Snyder by John M. Ganim
Eleanor of Aquitaine: Lord and LAdy Queer Love in the Middle Ages
edited by Bonnie Wheeler and John Canni by Anna Klosowska
Parsons
Performing Women: Sex, Gender, and the Iberian
IsabelLA Catolica, Queen of Castile: Lyric
Critical Essays by Denise K. Filios
edited by David A. Boruchoff
Necessary Conjunctions: The Sodal Self in
Homoerotidsm and Chivalry: Discourses ()[ Male Medieval England
Same-Sex Desire in the Fourteenth Century by David Gary Shaw
by Richard E. Zeikowitz
Visual Culture in the German Middle Ages
Portraits ()[ Medieval Women: Family, Marriage, and edited by Kathryn Starkey and
Politics in England 1225-1350 Horst Wenzel
by Linda E. Mitchell
Medieval Paradigms: Essays in Honor ()[J eremy
Eloquent Virgins: From Thecla to Joan ofA rc duQuesnay Adams, Volumes 1 and 2
by Maud Burnett McInerney edited by Stephanie Hayes-Healy
The Persistence of Medievalism: Narrative Adventures False Fables and Exemplary Truth in LAter Middle
in Contemporary Culture English Literature
by AngelaJane Weisl by Elizabeth Allen
Capetian Women Ecstatic Transformation: On the Uses ()[ Alterity in
edited by Kathleen D. Nolan the Middle Ages
by Michael Uebel
Joan of Arc and Spirituality
edited by Ann W. Astell and Bonnie Wheeler Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern
Cultures: New Essays
The Texture of Sodety: Medieval Women in the
edited by Lawrence Bessennan
Southern Low Countries
edited by Ellen E. Kittell and Tolkien's Modem Middle Ages
Mary A. Suydam edited by Jane Chance and Alfred K. Siewers
Charlemagne's Mustache: And Other Representing Righteous Heathens in LAte Medieval
Cultural Clusters ()[ a Dark Age England
by Paul Edward Dutton by Frank Grady
Troubled Vision: Gender, Sexuality, and Sight in Byzantine Dress: Representations of Secular Dress in
Medieval Text and Image Eighth-to-Twelfth Century Painting
edited by Emma Campbell and Robert Mills by Jennifer L. Ball
The Laborer's Two Bodies: Labor and the The Flight from Desire: Augustine and Ovid to
"Work" ,!!the Text in Medieval Britain, Chaucer
1350-1500 by Robert R. Edwards
by Kellie Robertson
Minrlful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in
The Dogaressa '!! Venice, 1250-1500: Wifo and Honor'!! Elizabeth D. Kirk
Icon edited by Bonnie Wheeler
by Holly S. Hurlburt
Medieval Fabrications: Dress, Textiles, Clothwork,
Logic, Theology, and Poetry in Boethius, and Other Cultural Imaginings
Abelard, and Alan,!! Lille: Words in the edited by E. Jane Bums
Absence of Things
by Eileen Sweeney Was the Bayeux Tapestry Made in France?: The
Case for St. Florent of Saumur
The Theology of Work: Peter Damian and the by George Beech
Medieval Religious Movement
by Patricia Ranft Women, Power, and Religious Patronage in the
Middle Ages
On the Purification of Women: Churching in by Erin L. Jordan
Northern France, 1100-1500
by Paula Rieder Hybridity, Identity, and Monstrosity in Medieval
Britain: On Different Middles
Writers '!! the Reign '!! Henry II: Twelve Essays by Jeremy Jerome Cohen
edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon
Meecham-Jones Medieval Go-betweens and Chaucer's Pandarus:
Choreographing Lust and Love
Lonesome Words: The Vocal Poetic'!! the Old by Gretchen Mieszkowski
English Lament and the African American Blues
Songs The Surgeon in Medieval English Literature
by M.G. McGeachy by Jeremy J. Citrome
Peiforming Piety: Musical Culture in Medieval Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the
English Nunneries Canterbury Tales
by Anne Bagnell Yardley by Lee Patterson
TEMPORAL CIRCUMSTANCES
FORM AND HISTORY IN THE
CANTERBURY TALES
Lee Patterson
palgrave
macmillan
* TEMPORAL CIRCUMSTANCES
© Lee Patterson, 2006.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2006 978-1-4039-7481-5
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2006 by
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ISBN 978-1-349-73736-9 ISBN 978-1-137-08451-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-137-08451-4
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Patterson, Lee.
Temporal circumstances: form and history in the Canterbury tales I
Lee Patterson.
p. cm.-(The New Middle Ages)
Includes bibliographical references and (p. ) index.
ISBN 978-1-349-73736-9 (alk. paper)
1. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 140O-Criticism and interpretation-History.
2. Chaucer, Geoffrey, d. 1400 Canterbury tales. 3. Tales, Medieval
History and criticism. 4. Christian pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature.
I. Title. II. Series: New Middle Ages (Palgrave Macmillan (Firm))
PR1924.P332006
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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First edition: December 2006
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Priface viii
Introduction: Historicism and Postmodemity 1
1. Putting the Wife in Her Place: The Place of Philology 19
2. Putting the Wife in Her Place: The Place of History 37
3. Freedom and Necessity: The Example of the Clerk's Tale 51
4. Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in
Medieval Literary Studies 67
5. "What Man Artow?": Authorial Self-Definition in the
Tale of Sir Thopas and the Tale of MeI i bee 97
6. "The Living Witnesses of Our Redemption": Martyrdom
and Imitation in the Prioress's Tale 129
7. Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and the Technology of the Self 159
Notes 177
Index 267
PREFACE
T
he chapters in this book originally appeared as '''What Man Artow?':
Authorial Self-Definition in the Tale if Sir Thopas and the Tale if Melibee,"
Studies in the Age if Chaucer 11 (1989), 117-76; "Perpetual Motion: Alchemy and
the Technology of the Self," Studies in the Age cifChaucer 15 (1993), 25-57; Putting
the Wife in Her Place, The Matthews Lectures (London: Birkbeck College, 1996);
"'Witnesses of Our Redemption:' Jewish Martyrdom and Christian Sacrifice in
Chaucer's Prioress's Tale," Journal if Medieval and Early Modern Studies 30 (2001),
507-60; "Chaucer's Pardoner on the Couch: Psyche and Clio in Medieval Literary
Studies," Speculum 76 (2001), 638-80; "Freedom and Necessity: The Example of
Chaucer's Clerk's Tale," Minrlful Spirits in LAte Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor if
Elizabeth Kirk, ed. Bonnie Wheeler (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). I am
grateful to the various publishers for permission to reprint them here.
lowe many debts to many colleagues and friends for advice and support in the
course of writing the various chapters of this book. I would like to thank especially
Jerry McGann, Leo Braudy, Anne Middleton, David Aers, Ralph Hanna, Ivan
Marcus, Traugott Lawler, and Stanley Fish for their friendship and their intellec
tual comradeship; chapters 1 and 2 would not have been written without the
encouragement of Isobel Armstrong and Tom Healey of Birkbeck College,
University of London; chapter 4 would never have seen the light of day were it not
for Rick Emmerson, editor extraordinaire; and my University of Toronto col
leagues and friends-David Blostein, Andy Silber, John Baird, Sandy Johnston,
Chaviva Hosek, Robin Jackson, and Brain Merrillees, and many, many others
supported me during the early years of my career when I needed it most. I would
especially like to thank Annabel Patterson for generously sharing with me her
remarkable editorial skills and for her patient forbearance with a cranky author.
INTRODUCTION
HISTORICISM AND POSTMODERNITY
W
hat path leads to a career teaching and studying medieval literature? Mine
was devious. In 1963, I was awarded a one-year Woodrow Wilson
Fellowship, which required me to attend graduate school at a university other than
where I had been an undergraduate, which was Yale-and Yale at its New Critical
prime. At the time I wanted, like all good New Critics, to be a modernist, so I
chose what I thought was the appropriate university. Regardless offield, all Ph.D.
candidates were required to take a year of Anglo-Saxon. After a term of language
study, the class turned to the literature, including Beowulf. I found the poetry fasci
nating, but the professor-a learned scholar and kind man-was a philologist to his
finger tips, a true "word man." Every time an idea would crawl out on the table,
he would brush it away with a certain impatience. Rather than being dismayed,
I responded to this behavior with low cunning. If, I thought, someone so uninter
ested in literature could become a full professor at a distinguished university, then
obviously medieval literature was the field to cultivate. Armed with this shame
lessly careerist plan, I returned to Yale to complete my degree. I immediately asked
Talbot Donaldson if it were possible at this relatively late stage-in those days
graduate school took four years or else-to switch fields and become a medieval
ist. Donaldson looked at me with the genial disdain for which he was famous, and
asked: "Can you tie your tie?"1 But I remonstrated: what about all those things I
was supposed to know? All those languages, all that paleography, all that history?
The reply was: "Just know a little bit about everything-you'll pick up the rest as
you go along." This was in fact excellent advice, and graduate students still need to
realize that they are not supposed to know everything before they even begin their
careers. But they are certainly supposed to know more than I did. Since
Donaldson's mission was to rescue medieval literature from medievalists, I was not
taught the disciplinary tools of the trade-despite the fact that Donaldson's own
philology was impeccable, his historicism detailed and sophisticated, his paleogra
phy superb, and his textual criticism magisterial. On the contrary, it was
Donaldson's edition of Chaucer's Poetry: An Anthology for the Modem Reader, with its
apparently effortlessly established text and its deceptively slight commentary, that I
knew-without knowing that it was a product of profound scholarship and a
deeply intelligent critical mind.2
