Text and Image Relations: Canterbury Tales' Women Narrators and Unruly Storytellers in Fifteenth-Century Manuscript and Print

In this study I offer an insight into the fifteenth-century reception of the Wife of Bath’s, Prioress’s, Miller’s, Cook’s and Squire’s portrayals in the General Prologue and of their respective tales through the analysis of the relationships between text and image in the illuminated manuscripts and Caxton’s illustrated edition of the Canterbury Tales. It is an attempt to account both for the dialectic of production and reception, and for the historical continuities and discontinuities in the fifteenth-century response to Chaucer’s tales. The thesis of this study is that the images which illustrate the manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales and Caxton’s 1483 printed edition are not mere transpositions from one medium into another, from words into pictures, but are the result of an act of interpretation which is ideologically connoted. The illustrations are a means of reinforcing authority, power and the prevailing ideological system in fifteenth-century England. In the first two chapters, the Wife of Bath’s and the Prioress’s tales are considered within the framework of medieval discourses on marriage, widowhood and virginity and Chaucer’s original contribution to the topic is examined. In chapters three and four, the pictorial representation of the Cook and the Miller, as well as the poet’s use of the words ‘fool’ and ‘folye’ in the Canterbury Tales are discussed within the context of medieval discourses on fools and folly. In chapter five, the Squire’s portrait is analysed in connection with medieval medical theories about amor hereos and the description of the Great Khan’s court is discussed as part of Chaucer’s attempt to offer an encomiastic representation of royalty.