| Long abstract | As medievalists, we often do our training in graduate programs with several medievalists on staff, only to find ourselves teach-ing in places where we are the lone medievalists. As a conse-quence, we may find ourselves fielding questions from students, colleagues, and administrators about the value — cultural, aes-thetic and economic — of studying the Middle Ages. I remem-ber one such question early in my career, during my first se-mester at Mills College, a small liberal arts college in Oakland, California, with a woman-identified, undergraduate popula-tion. How, a student asked, could I love Chaucer? Initially, her question surprised me: I not only love Chaucer, but also often wonder how anyone could not love Chaucer. Yet, I also under-stood the source of her question. We had just finished reading “The Reeve’s Tale,” a short and troubling story that, like many of the Canterbury Tales, presents women’s bodies as the terrain on which male rivalry is fought. Does teaching such stories per-petuate the idea that sexual violence is inevitable? Does it repro-duce misogyny and gender bias, she pressed? What value, if any, do texts like these hold for us as readers today? |
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