"Of Goddes pryvetee nor of his wyf": Confusion of Orifices in Chaucer's Miller's Tale

Louise M. Bishop

23 citations0/0 files storedTexas Studies in Literature & Language

No readable copy stored yet — this record is metadata only.

No open-access location is known for this record yet.

Literature note Cite in a project Citation map

Medieval Literature and History Renaissance Literature and Culture Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies

Abstract

Other critics have connected the word "pryvetee" in the Miller's Tale, referring to both human genitalia and secrets, to the Biblical story of Moses seeing God's "back parts" (posteriora). 1 There appears to be general agreement that the complex of secrets, genitalia, and divinity points to many levels of meaning in the Tale, including a parody of the Knight's Tale 2 and an invocation of theological commonplaces such as the Holy Family. 3 I would suggest an even more challenging and terrifying, certainly blasphemous and heretical reading of the Tale's meaning, taking a different tack from Frederick Biggs and Laura Howes to tie Chaucer's purposeful confusion to epistemological questions and, in turn, gender issues. This train of thought inflects the word pryvetee's purposeful confusion between "secret" and "genitalia" with a Biblical story in Exodus 33: God, after hiding Moses in a rock's cleft, shows him His back parts. Augustine's commentary on the Biblical episode illuminates the Tale's connections between (and confusion about) the body and knowledge. The Tale's confused orifices—backsides taken for mouths—parody the Bible story's concern with the unseen and seen, and Augustine's understanding of the Bible story as an allegory of the means and limits of human knowledge. By successfully concatenating divine and female "pryvetee," the Tale plays with concepts of bodily knowledge by alluding to divine genitalia. Combining confused orifices—holes—and the desire to "know" in its varied intellectual and bodily meanings with purposeful punning on "secret" and "private parts" leads to a blasphemous conclusion—or purposeful lack of conclusion—about God's private parts. Alison's escape from injury in the Tale forms part of this complex of meaning. The connection between divine knowledge and the knowing of women's secrets—so powerful a theme in the Wife of Bath's Tale 4 —here finds a different "end."

Paper brief

Loading…

Cite this work

Citation unavailable for this work.

BibTeX RIS CSL-JSON

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Citations in this library

Citation map →

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 23 citations exist upstream.

References

1990Hard core: power, pleasure, and "the frenzy of the visible"1986The Riverside Chaucer 1984Biblia Sacra Iuxta Vulgatam Versionem 1997Writing on the body : female embodiment and feminist theory 1982The literal meaning of Genesis 1993Christ's Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings 1965Revised Medieval Latin Word-List from British and Irish Sources.1997The sexuality of Christ in Renaissance art and in modern oblivion

Cited by

2006Extimacy in the Miller's Tale 2019Becoming One Flesh, Inhabiting Two Genders: Ugly Feelings and Blocked Emotion in theWife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale 2006Private Practices in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale 2008Cynicism and the Anal Erotics of Chaucer's Pardoner 2019Weeping Like a Beaten Child: Figurative Language and the Emotions in Chaucer and Malory

Explore the map →

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.

Imported from OpenAlex (CC0) — nothing here is generated.