Content warning: issues of consent, violence

Description

“The Reeve’s Tale” is a complicated tale — a hodgepodge of different accents, stumbling actions in the dark, and no clear moral for the modern audience. In this episode, we get together to sort out the wheat from the chaff with our guest, Elisha Hamlin (PhD student, UC Davis). We open with the nutso astroweather and the Kings of Swords before moving onto whether or not the Reeve was a cringe Brony! If you aren’t familiar, “The Reeve’s Tale” (his rebuttal to “The Miller’s Tale”) centers around the misadventures Symkyn the miller, his wife, and kids experience when they host two Cambridge students, John and Aleyn, before there’s a dark turn where the lines of consent are notoriously blurred. Despite this, this tale was a favorite of J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote on it as an undergraduate as well as a professor.

If you’d like follow up on some of the quotes or line numbers, please see the edition on the Chaucer Harvard website: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/reeves-tale

Show Notes

https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/reeves-tale

Crocker, Holly A. "Affective Politics in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale: “Cherl” Masculinity after 1381." Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 29, 2007, p. 225-258. Project MUSE, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/sac.2007.0000.

Feinstein, Sandy. “The ‘Reeve’s Tale’: About That Horse’. The Chaucer Review, Summer, 1991, Vol. 26, No. 1 (Summer, 1991), pp. 99-106. Available at: jstor.org/stable/25094185.

Waymack, Anna Fore. Speaking Through the “Open-Ers”: How Age Feminizes Chaucer’s Reeve. 2013. University of Texas at Austen, Master’s thesis. Available at: repositories.lib.utexas.edu/items/ea72fe5b-c927-47da-a434-b875ac69ee73/full