TheMan of Law's Taleand Rome

Abstract

This essay examines Rome and materialism in Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. Opening with a reflection on place/thing associations in American modernist poetry, especially Eliot's "Prufrock," this essay argues that the tale locates Rome in a world of both Mediterranean trade as well as devotional commerce to critique image-based devotion, offering Custance as a foil to "dead" images. From the outset the tale associates Rome with commerce—or place and things—as it draws on a reformist tradition that condemned Rome for the traffic in indulgences and relics. Writing at the time of the papal schism, Chaucer concludes the tale with a picture of Rome, as in the Second Nun's Tale, as a renewed papal home.

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