1. For a pointed example, see Susan Crane’s reading of the Franklin’s Tale that identifies Dorigen’s struggles with the class struggles of franklins: “The Franklin as Dorigen,” Chaucer Review 24 (1990): 236–52. In general, see David Aers and Lynn Staley, Powers of the Holy: Religion, Politics, and Gender in Late Medieval English Culture (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press, 1996).
2. This phrase is used by Glenn Burger in Chaucer’s Queer Nation (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), p. 44
3. Matthew Giancarlo, Parliament and Literature in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 138.
4. All Chaucer citations will be to the Riverside edition, using Benson’s abbreviations for work title and line number. Larry Benson, ed. The Riverside Chaucer, 3rd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987).
5. Christine Rose voices an all-too common approach to the problem when she wants to recover the body of the raped woman in Chaucer’s texts; “Chaucer’s audience discovers indeed that the rapes in his narratives are tropes for decidedly alternative purposes than highlighting violence to women,” and later “women... must read to recover the literal sense of the trope,” p. 22. As a feminist, I applaud Rose’s and similar critics’ awareness of how our own female bodies color our readings of Chaucer’s texts. However, I seek in this chapter a more culturally embedded way to read medieval narratives of rape. Christine Rose, “Reading Chaucer Reading Rape,” in Representing Rape in Medieval and Early Modern Literature, ed. Elizabeth Robertson and Christine Rose (New York: Palgrave, 2001), pp. 21–60.