Alcuin Blamires
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780199248674
- eISBN:
- 9780191714696
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199248674.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Early and Medieval Literature
To be content with ‘enough’ was one kind of virtue; to be liberal with surplus was another. Chaucer found liberality applauded in Boccaccio’s writings. But the classical concept of cautious ...
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To be content with ‘enough’ was one kind of virtue; to be liberal with surplus was another. Chaucer found liberality applauded in Boccaccio’s writings. But the classical concept of cautious liberality transmitted through Cicero had undergone a strained assimilation into Christian ‘largenesse’ and charity, and as Chaucer shows through figures such as Dido and Dorigen, its gendering was also complicated. It is argued that the Wife of Bath’s Prologue offers a beguiling model of generosity through female sexuality, and that her Tale, in which women cannot hold back the answers to the knight’s predicament, further explores generosity as a gendered virtue of unlocked speech.Less
To be content with ‘enough’ was one kind of virtue; to be liberal with surplus was another. Chaucer found liberality applauded in Boccaccio’s writings. But the classical concept of cautious liberality transmitted through Cicero had undergone a strained assimilation into Christian ‘largenesse’ and charity, and as Chaucer shows through figures such as Dido and Dorigen, its gendering was also complicated. It is argued that the Wife of Bath’s Prologue offers a beguiling model of generosity through female sexuality, and that her Tale, in which women cannot hold back the answers to the knight’s predicament, further explores generosity as a gendered virtue of unlocked speech.
