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SUMMARY:The Pardoner's Passing and How it Matters: Gender\, Relics and Spe
 ech Acts - Dr Alex da Costa (University Lecturer at the Faculty of English
 \; Fellow of Newnham College)
DTSTART:20170314T174500Z
DTEND:20170314T191500Z
UID:TALK70128@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Dr Rachel E. Holmes
DESCRIPTION:For decades\, critics have been ignoring the particular doubt 
 'Chaucer'\, the narrator\, raises over the figure of the Pardoner in the C
 anterbury Tales when he says 'I trowe he were a geldyng or a mare' (l.691)
 . Even as the Pardoner has been embraced as a 'a complicated sort of gay "
 ancestor"' by first gay and lesbian studies and later by queer theorists\,
  just one critic has been prepared to doubt his essential masculinity\, th
 ough several have accepted his masculinity as neutered or castrated. The q
 uestion of whether the Pardoner is a 'mare'\, a woman passing as a man\, h
 as thus been ignored\, despite being the most straightforward gloss\, unti
 l Jeffrey Rayner Myers ventured to suggest in 2000 that 'this sexually amb
 iguous character might be a woman.' This critical lacuna is all the more p
 uzzling given that when Chaucer was writing there were several texts in wh
 ich writers presented women passing as men. The widely circulated Gilte Le
 gende included two saints lives in which a female dresses\, lives and pass
 es as male\, without suspicion\, until her death. Gower included the legen
 d of Iphis and Achilles' successful disguise as a maid in the Confessio Am
 antis. There were also Old French texts with similar episodes\, such as Yd
 e et Olive and the Roman de Silence\, while Boccaccio included the tale of
  Pope Joan in De mulieribus claris\, as well as the stories of a female di
 sguised as an abbot and a steward in the Decameron (Day II\, Tales III and
  IX). In this paper\, I want to explore the possibility that the Pardoner 
 is a woman passing as a man and to show how such a reading allows a parall
 el to emerge between the figure of the Pardoner\, relics and oaths\, bring
 ing out a narrative interest across general prologue\, prologue and tale i
 n accident and substance\, doubt and complicity.
LOCATION:Gatsby Room\, Wolfson College
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