Chaucer's Visions of Manhood

This book argues that Chaucer challenges his culture’s mounting obsession with vision through his varied constructions of masculinity. Because medieval theories of vision relied upon distinctions between active and passive seers and viewers, optical discourse had social and moral implications for gender difference in late fourteenth-century England. By exploring ocularity’s equal dependence on invisibility, Chaucer offers men and women access to a vision of “manhed,” one that fragments a traditional gender binary by blurring its division between agency and passivity.?

Holly A. Crocker is Assistant Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. Her articles appear in Chaucer Review, Shakespeare Quarterly, Medieval Feminist Forum, and a number of edited collections. She recently edited a collection of essays entitled Comic Provocations: Exposing the Corpus of Old French Fabliaux (Palgrave Macmillan 2006).