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Geoffrey Chaucer, the “Father of English Poetry,” has always posed a unique challenge to feminist critique. Constructed as a poetic figure according to his so-called paternity of a long line of literary sons, Chaucer stood for generations as the paterfamilias of the English canon, a bulwark of masculinity fit to fight against the incursions of the female sex. Indeed, as Carolyn Dinshaw reminded the audience at the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration of her foundational book, Chaucer's Sexual Poetics, the very idea of a feminist re-visioning of medieval England's most famous poetic son was profoundly threatening to the medievalist community of 1989.1 While previous scholars had studied Chaucer's female characters, Dinshaw—and the feminist scholars who followed her—demanded something far more radical. They argued that one could not read the poetry of Geoffrey Chaucer without a consideration of gender, that Chaucer's treatment of sex and gender was inseparable from his larger literary project. In a sense, these feminists claimed Chaucer for the first time, and refused to cede him back to the male readers who had so long possessed him in exclusivity.Chaucerian feminism has always been, first and foremost, a communal enterprise, comprised of many different scholars who approach the topic of gender in Chaucer from a variety of different angles. In the early days of Chaucerian feminism, a few well-known monographs were key to establishing the legitimacy of feminism as an area of study, but as time went on, the power and the vigor of Chaucerian feminism lay increasingly in its spirit of community, of many scholars, housed at many different kinds of institutions, working towards a common goal together.2 A search of the Modern Language Association Bibliography pairing Chaucer with the key words gender and feminist theory from 1980 to 1989 yields ten works by nine different scholars. For the 1990s, the same search reveals fifty-five works by fifty different scholars.3As the feminist Chaucerian movement has grown, it has diversified in myriad ways, reflecting a similar diversification in medieval feminist studies as a whole: studies of “women in Chaucer” in the 1970s and early 1980s gave way in the 1990s to studies examining the gender politics of medieval romance, obscenity, rape, the fabliau, and even how the process of reading and writing is imagined in Chaucer's oeuvre.4 Elements of Chaucer's biography were reevaluated. While the earliest generation of Chaucerians had ignored the accusation of rape lodged against Chaucer by Cecily Chaumpaigne, and scholars of the mid to late twentieth century had treated this evidence of “infidelity” as a joke, feminist scholars reordered the accepted doctrine of Chaucerian biography by arguing that it was not Chaucer but Cecily with whom the critic should identify.5 During the 1980s and 90s, feminist Chaucerians were bolstered by feminist work elsewhere in medieval studies as well as by the foundation of the Medieval Feminist Newsletter in 1986 and of The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship in 1992.The new millennium has seen Chaucerian feminism continuing to expand. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, scholars emerged who interrogated the historicist focus of earlier feminism and examined Chaucer using psychoanalytic theory.6 In the mid to later 2000s, Chaucerian feminism became increasingly interdisciplinary, bringing a variety of theoretical approaches to bear on Chaucer's life and writing, including theories relating to performativity, masculinity, queerness, orientalism, ethics, marriage, and sexuality.7 In the current decade of the 2010s, Chaucerian feminists examine Chaucer in light of cultural ethics, evaluate the politics of his texts' obscene misogyny, explore more deeply his engagement with rape, and expand the study of his gender politics to include spheres like marriage, ideals of virtue, class identities, the history of emotion, and definitions of womanhood.8 As the articles in this issue reveal, intersectional feminism is in a nascent stage in Chaucer studies but is of great importance in the current work of Chaucerian feminists as we move to confront Chaucer's role in a racist, as well as sexist, society.Our intent as editors of this special issue is to give a brief glimpse into the goings-on in feminist Chaucerian studies today. No single journal issue can reflect the wide variety of scholars or the wide variety of approaches that are currently being pursued. Thus, the issue is less a definitive list than a sampling of some recent approaches. The contributors to this volume earned their Ph.D.s between 1998 and 2013; they are the students and the readers of those scholars who first sat down to rewrite Chaucerian criticism. This new generation of feminist scholars has had an enormous advantage in the institutional and intellectual edifices established for it by its predecessors. However, many forms of discrimination still remain in the academy and must be challenged—gendered pay and hiring disparities, the lack of support for parents, sexual harassment and assault, discrimination against women of color and against queer and trans scholars and students—but this new generation of scholars has the advantage of a preexisting vocabulary of academic activism, and a history of the feminist struggles that have already been won. Most of all, they have had extensive evidence laid before them of the feminist right to claim and reimagine Chaucer.In the articles in this issue, we see the current field as characterized by the symbiotic forces of interdisciplinarity and intersectionality. While all the articles are explicitly feminist in their methodology, they unite their critique of gender with additional modes of engagement. The intellectual restrictions of earlier decades have worn off, and the analytical space has been rendered as wide open as possible. These articles move into new theoretical realms while also challenging the idea of what is the proper object and historical period of study for a Chaucerian. Suzanne Edwards's work on Gloria Naylor's twentieth-century reimagining of the Canterbury Tales, for example, offers a profound vision of the transformations that Chaucer's work has taken in female hands, while Carissa Harris's article ties Chaucer and his poetry to the personal experiences and anger of contemporary women grappling with the aftermath of sexual assault. These are works of scholarship that identify a vital urgency to Chaucer's poetry in the current moment, that acknowledge the medieval structures of the poems while nevertheless drawing attention to how the contemporary moment—and the contemporary reader—pounds upon the artificial, arbitrary distinctions of historical distance.The relationship of past to present is the theme as well of Samantha Seal's article on the critical reactions to Philippa Chaucer. Seal argues that the biographical treatments of Chaucer's wife have privileged male critics' desire for bonding with one another over any attempt at historical veracity. Witnessing the interdisciplinarity that characterizes Chaucerian feminism today, Seal's article weaves together biographical data, feminist theory, and literary criticism. Likewise, Nicole Sidhu's article on horizontal and vertical forms of governance in the Merchant's Tale brings gender analysis together with intersectionality, political theory, and the historical moments of class struggle at the end of the fourteenth century. In both pieces, the constructions of gender become inseparable from the structures of larger oppression.Testifying to the broad theoretical reach of Chaucerian feminism, Tara Williams's article takes time as its subject, noting the moments of temporal asynchrony, and the overlapping threads of linear, circular, and recursive time within the Legend of Good Women. Ironically, perhaps, in a special issue devoted to the question of passing time, to the iterations and transformations of successive generations, the ties between gender and temporality appear increasingly fraught in many of these articles, as scholars seek to move past the inherently male systems and institutions of linearity.Even as feminist scholars have rewritten the interpretations of Chaucer, the systems of analysis have remained persistently and stubbornly male. Holly Crocker argues that much of what scholars have identified as subjectivity has been bound up in masculine expectation and modeling, allowing even feminist scholars to overlook more feminized modes of subjectivity and personhood within Chaucer's works. Emma Lipton identifies overlooked modes of female self-construction and activity, arguing that a focus on traditional, retributive mechanisms of justice in the Wife of Bath's Tale has prevented scholars from perceiving the collective forms of justice and activism practiced by the female community within the tale. In both articles, the contributors transform the expectations of what feminism can offer to a medievalist reading practice, noting that it is not the way we read women against traditional patterns that must change, but rather the patterns themselves that must be overthrown, for the very way we think about time, subjectivity, or justice has been hopelessly entangled in models of male exemplarity.These critical approaches not only embrace a vision of unrestricted intellectual freedom, beyond the confines of disciplinarity; they also treat gender as an inseparable component of larger struggles against oppression. The patriarchy is no longer the only institution of injustice to be overthrown, and the war against the patriarchal structures of the academy and the objects of study themselves cannot be fought without initiating a simultaneous confrontation with the forces of racism, environmental violence, and economic inequality. If there is a uniting ethos for this new generation of Chaucer scholars, it is that feminist Chaucerian scholarship must be unequivocally intersectional, for our work is only one small part of the kaleidoscopic striving for human dignity. Some of these articles mention activism more explicitly than others, but all the articles are informed by a sense of urgency for what must be done in daily life to reinforce the aspirations of our scholarship. Our writings on Chaucer, our ways of claiming him for a new generation of feminist scholars, are the published, public parts of our daily struggles with the specters of entrenched cruelty and inhumanity within our political and social spheres. And so, in these academic articles, one may identify but a piece of the new feminist approaches to Chaucer. It is a piece that shares much with the approaches of our predecessors, for the essential way to approach Chaucer from a feminist perspective is often simply to exist as a feminist Chaucerian, to teach, live, and write with a simple belief in comprehensive human equality.Chaucer does not share our beliefs, we know. His historical persona, his ill-hidden prejudices, drift to the surface again and again within his works. He is a rapist, a racist, an anti-Semite; he speaks for a world in which the privileges of the male, the Christian, the wealthy, and the white are perceived to be an inalienable aspect of human existence. Many feminist scholars now ask—most recently at the “Feminizing Chaucer” panel at the 2018 New Chaucer Society Biennial Meeting—whether the time has come for feminists to move past Chaucer, to demand a new object of study less burdened by the weight of moral insufficiency. And perhaps that will be the conversation of future years, of future incarnations of medievalist feminism. But, for now, we wish, with this special issue, to demonstrate the continuities and opportunities of these feminist generations. Like our pioneering foremothers, we wish to seize Chaucer from the comforting bosom of the patriarchs in which he all too often rests, to bend this poetic father away from the privileges of his sons, to make him yield instead towards that vision of justice demanded by his daughters. We bring our aspirations, our commitments, our activisms to Chaucer; we make him a bigger, better poet as we endow our readings of him with the unending passions of the feminist struggle.
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