Chaucer's Wenches

Q2 Arts and Humanities
Carissa M. Harris
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Abstract:This essay analyzes the eighteen occurrences of the word wenche in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and argues that the idea of the "wenche" persists today, most notably as implicit justification for the rescinding of the constitutional right to an abortion in the US Supreme Court's monumental decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization (June 2022). It takes a Black feminist approach by situating Chaucer's wenches in the context of Black women's history and tracing how the word's resonances continued their pernicious work of making meaning and shaping material realities long after the Middle Ages. It first gives a careful history of wench's origins and accretion of meaning from the early to the late Middle Ages, paying particular attention to its relationship with the Latin ancilla. It uses the Wycliffite Bible as a lens to explore the term's rapidly accruing connotations of youth, servitude, femininity, and transgressive sexuality, and discusses the connections between "wenche" and reproduction in An Alphabet of Tales and Geoffrey the Grammarian's Promptorium parvulorum before tracing its symbolic freight across the Canterbury Tales and pointing to its underlying role in struggles for reproductive justice in our own time.
乔叟的女仆
摘要:本文分析了“wenche”这个词在乔叟的《坎特伯雷故事集》中出现的18次,并论证了“wenche”这个概念今天仍然存在,最引人注目的是作为美国最高法院在2022年6月的“多布斯诉杰克逊妇女健康组织”一案中废除宪法规定的堕胎权的隐含理由。它采用了黑人女权主义的方法,将乔叟笔下的少女置于黑人女性的历史背景中,并追溯了这个词的共鸣是如何在中世纪之后很长一段时间里继续它们制造意义和塑造物质现实的有害工作的。它首先详细介绍了从中世纪早期到中世纪晚期,“wench”一词的起源和含义的演变,特别注意了它与拉丁语“ancilla”的关系。它以《威克里夫圣经》为视角,探索了“wenche”这个词迅速积累起来的内涵,包括年轻、奴隶、女性气质和越界的性行为,并讨论了“wenche”与《故事字母表》和《语法学家杰弗里的Promptorium parvulorum》中的生殖之间的联系,然后追溯了它在《坎特伯雷故事集》中的象征意义,并指出了它在我们这个时代为生殖正义而斗争的潜在作用。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
Studies in the Age of Chaucer
Studies in the Age of Chaucer Arts and Humanities-Literature and Literary Theory
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
0.00%
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0
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