Chaucer, Ethics, and Gender

Abstract

This book, mainly concentrating on the Canterbury Tales, reassesses the moral dimension in Chaucer’s writings. For the Middle Ages, the study of human behaviour was quintessentially moral. It was not gender neutral: certain virtues and certain failings were explicitly or implicitly gender-specific. The book demonstrates how crucial Chaucer’s engagement is with the composite moral/ethical traditions available to him. By recourse to commonplace primary sources of the period, it is shown that Stoic ideals that had been somewhat uncomfortably absorbed within medieval Christian moral codes are invoked to complicate the poet’s representations of how women and men aspire to behave in matters of friendship and anger, sexuality and chastity, protest and sufferance, generosity and greed, and credulity and foresight. Focus on such concepts and on the networks of thought in which they are embedded yields insights both into specific interpretative issues in individual Tales, and into the concept that informs the work as a whole. Topics covered included the ethical implications of the flood-forecast and the ethical status of the heroine in the Miller’s Tale; the collision of emotion with equanimity in the Franklin’s Tale; the surprisingly positive connotations of the Wife of Bath’s allegiance to liberality, which explain the continuity between her Prologue and her Tale; and the questioning of what ought to be ‘enough’ for humanity, which suffuses the Shipman’s Tale and several others. As for the whole poem, a nuanced appraisal of ideals of fellowship and friendship is shown to be fundamental to its structure.

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