The Discourse of Gender Violence in Middle English Literature: A socio-linguistic analysis of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

Abstract

Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have been widely studied and analyse by many scholars (Ashton, 1998 Ellis, 1998 and Phillips, 2000) as they are an extraordinary portrayal of the English Middle Ages, depicting people from different social strata (knights, wives, clerks, nuns, kings, etc). Among all these studies, two aspects of The Canterbury Tales have received comparatively more attention: on the one hand, the symbolic illustration and narrative imagery of English medieval society (Olson, 1996; Mann, 1987; Knapp, 1990), on the other, feminist and antifeminist interpretations of some of the tales and the pilgrims (Wright, 1989; Butler, 1990; Ashton, 1998; Martin, 1990; Stephens and Ryans, 1998; Bissow, 1998). Occasionally, both aspects (English medieval society and gender relations) have been associated with a third aspect that will be the focus of our article, i.e., the representation of violence against women in medieval literature.