Author: Glenn D. Burger, Department of English, City University of New York - Academia.edu

Abstract: »Rather than leave behind the uncertainties produced by the raptus charge, we need to linger in the discomfiting feelings it has occasioned, and also to recognize how similar negative feelings around male (sexual) violence circulate in the Canterbury Tales. Its emphasis on masculine misrule means that “What kind of man are you?” becomes a question asked with increasing urgency as the tales progress. Chaucer’s focus on the “matter of woman” thus toggles back and forth between the “happy” affects of a poet prized for his genial humanity and the disruptive feelings produced when male/female interactions are represented as weirdly deformed by the violence inhering in late medieval sexual politics. This complex push-pull of affect is crucial to recognizing how the Canterbury Tales develops a specifically Chaucerian ethics by providing its own archive of feeling, one we need to bring alongside any documentary archive of Chaucer the man.« (Source: The Chaucer Review)

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Wikipedia: History of Europe: History of England / England in the Late Middle Ages | Literature: English literature / Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales | Sex and the law: Sexual violence