Synopses & Reviews
While most Chaucer critics interested in gender and sexuality have used psychoanalytic theory to analyze Chaucer's poetry, Mark Miller re-examines the links between sexuality and the philosophical analysis of agency in medieval texts such as the Canterbury Tales, Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy, and the Romance of the Rose. Chaucer's philosophical sophistication provides the basis for a new interpretation of the emerging notions of sexual desire and romantic love in the late Middle Ages.
Synopsis
Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended meditation on agency, autonomy, and practical reason. Through readings of the Consolation of Philosophy and the Romance of the Rose, Miller charts Chaucer's relation to the association in the Christian West between problems of autonomy and problems of sexuality and uncovers Chaucer's debt to Boethius, Augustine, and other philosophers. The literary experiments of the Canterbury Tales represent a distinctive philosophical achievement that remains vital to our own attempts to understand agency, desire, and their histories.
About the Author
Mark Miller is Associate Professor of English at the University of Chicago.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Chaucer and the problem of normativity; 1. Naturalism and its discontents in the Miller's Tale; 2. Normative longing in the Knight's Tale; 3. Agency and dialectic in the Consolation of Philosophy; 4. Sadomasochism and utopia in the Roman de la Rose; 5. Suffering love in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale; 6. Love's promise: the Clerk's Tale and the scandal of the unconditional; Bibliography.