Further evidence for Chaucer's representation of the Pardoner as a womanizer.(in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales)

Publication: Medium Aevum

Publication Date: 22-SEP-02

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COPYRIGHT 2002 Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature

Twenty years ago I argued that the hints of effeminacy to be found in Chaucer's portrait of the Pardoner should not be taken to indicate either homosexuality or a physical condition (whether that of a eunuch or a hermaphrodite), but rather an inordinate preoccupation with women. (1) To be effeminate in the Middle Ages, I suggested, was primarily the mark of a womanizer. This position has recently been endorsed by H. A. Kelly, who has adduced a plethora of evidence from theological, legal, and physiological texts to support it. (2) My purpose here is merely to add a brief footnote to Kelly's characteristically learned and exhaustive survey, one intended to point out that the idea of the womanizing effeminate was not restricted to the schoolroom and the cloister, but can also be found in a milieu with which Chaucer himself is likely to have been familiar. Robert S. Sturges has taken me to task for offering evidence from `the wrong period', (3) so it is gratifying to be able to offer confirmation of my position from a pair of literary texts written during the first phase of the Hundred Years War (1337-6), when Chaucer was a young man.

The charge of effeminacy seems in fact to have been rather commonly employed by the English in polemical attacks on...

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