Chaucer’s Viragos: A Postcolonial Engagement?

The Chaucerian attitude to the set of viragos of his Man of Law's Tale, Monk's Tale, and Knight's Tale is enigmatic. By discrediting the reliability of his narrators, he blurs the categories of difference that they strongly advocate, thus creating a space in which the medieval racial and racist clichés concerning Oriental viragos may be reconsidered. Attention has been drawn to Chaucer’s formation of ‘English’ identity in the poet’s late writings. The writer’s exclusive use of London English, a colonized language, was a political decision, but he resists easy binaries of identification and his English nationalism is a ‘present-looking and eclectic multiculturalism.’ The Knight’s as well as the Man of Law’s tales are retellings of imperial aggression but also accounts of failed imperialist ambitions. In a way, the Monk addresses a similar issue, but here the initial imperial belligerence comes from the Orient and there is a return to Western imperial order. Needless to say, narratives dealing with military campaigns and crusades, and deviant women were of high relevance to a late fourteenth-century audience. The period marked a turning point from universal forms of truth to a greater interest in individual identities; and late medieval English society was not monolithic, and neither was the social sample going to Canterbury. Chaucer steers a delicate course between opposite trends and raises a number of crucial issues