| Abstract | Paper -a:
In The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer shades the speech between the Dreamer and the Black Knight with the dual discursive modes of confession and of gossip. In doing so, he confirms the continuity of each man's melancholic infirmity to the end of the poem. Yet ultimately, Chaucer offers a partial consolation that embraces melancholic idleness through a circular figure evoking creative production. This 'poetics of idling' moves the flat and repetitive formulations of grief previously conveyed toward spiral dimensionality and relief. Indeed, through the queer relational network among the two men and the dead Whyte Chaucer articulates a kind of redeeming productivity in the melancholy and the idle.
Paper -b:
Chaucer is notorious for his creative use of multiple terms for intercourse and genitalia in the Canterbury Tales, ranging from the ambiguous 'queynte' to the unequivocally obscene 'swyvit'. One particular scribe of the British Library's late-15th-century Harley MS 1758 enthusiastically expands upon Chaucer's obscenity, embellishing the already-explicit Merchant's Tale by adding his own additional iterations of 'swyvit' and a rich variety of genital terms. This paper examines how one medieval reader responded to Chaucer's obscenity, offering insight into the workings of prurient creativity and obscene literary innovation in 15th-century England.
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