Chaucer's Pardoner and gender theory

Robert Stuart Sturges

"Chaucer's Pardoner and Gender Theory, the first book-length treatment of the Pardoner, examines the character in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales from the perspective of both medieval and twentieth-century theories of sex, gender, and erotic practice. Sturges argues for a discontinuous, fragmentary reading of this character and his tale that is genuinely both promodern and postmodern. Drawing on theorists ranging from St. Augustine and Alain de Lille to Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Sturges approaches the Pardoner as a representative of the construction of historical - and sexual - identities in a variety of historically specific discourses and argues that medieval understandings of gender remain sedimented in postmodern discourse."--BOOK JACKET.