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Locating Authorial Ethics: The Idea of the Male or Book-Bag in the Canterbury Tales and Other Middle English Poems Oure Hooste lough and swoor, "So moot I gon, This gooth aright; unbokeled is the male. Lat se now who shal telle another tale; For trewely the game is wel bigonne." --miller's prologue (I 311417) 1 Occurrences of the word male as `bag or pouch' are curiously rare and distinctive in the Chaucerian canon. The term appears in only five instances, all of which are in the Canterbury Tales,2 where it seems to carry connotations different from the mundane meanings of its synonyms. In the Host's proclamation, "unbokeled is the male," this physical object is configured as a conceptual analogue for Chaucer's incipient Canterbury storytelling project. In addition to this self-reflexive locus, Chaucer associates males with religious "authors" who present radically different attitudes toward, and radically different models of, authorship: the Pardoner (twice), the Parson, and the Canon. This article reads Chaucer's selective deployment of the signifier male as a strategic juxtaposition of certain figures and moments whose interrelation of sinful and salvific discourse interrogate authors' roles and the moral implications of their work. Male can mean not only
The Chaucer Review – Penn State University Press
Published: Apr 20, 2012
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