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Physiognomy and Chaucer's Summoner and Alisoun

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2017

George B. Pace
George B. Pace*
Affiliation:
University of Missouri
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Extract

Chaucer's character descriptions contain details from the medieval science of physiognomy which create a stratum of meaning hidden to the modern reader. Curry and others have pointed out a number of these details; for instance, the significance of the physical traits ascribed to the Pardoner; the very different implication of those assigned to the Miller; the Wife of Bath's ‘gat-tothedness.’ in knowledge of physiognomy was widespread in the Middle Ages, Chaucer's contemporaries presumably recognized not only the details which modern scholars have identified but quite possibly many more also.

Type
Miscellany
Information
Traditio , Volume 18 , 1962 , pp. 417 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © 1962 New York, Fordham University Press 

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References

1 Canterbury Tales A 626-627 (ed. F. N. Robinson [2nd ed. Cambridge, Mass. 1957] 23).Google Scholar

2 A 3244–46 (Robinson 49).Google Scholar

3 The Works of John Metham (ed. H. Craig, EETS Original Series 132; London 1916) 44.Google Scholar

4 ‘Lasciviousness is indicated by … a heavy growth of straight, thick, black hair over the body’ (Aristotle, Physiognomica, trans. T. Loveday and E. S. Förster [The Works of Aristotle Translated into English, ed. W. D. Ross, 6; Oxford 1913] 808b).Google Scholar

5 Skeat, W. W., The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer 4: The Canterbury Tales (Oxford 1894) 19. The disjunction implied by the semicolon after ‘sparwe’ is emphasized in translations: ‘He was as hot and lecherous as a sparrow. / Black scabby brows he had, and a thin beard’ (N. Coghill); ‘He was as lecherous and hot as a cock sparrow. / His brows were scabby and black, and thin his beard’ (T. Morrison).Google Scholar

6 Walter Clyde Curry, diagnosing the Summoner's malady as leprosy, writes: ‘His eyebrows have nearly all fallen out, and in place of them is discovered a scabby, scurfy mark of black color’ (Chaucer and the Mediaeval Sciences. [2nd ed. New York 1960] 44).Google Scholar

7 Opposing Curry's view of the Summoner's disease, Pauline Aiken contends that the Summoner's naturally black eyebrows have simply ‘been invaded by the scurf incident to [medieval] scabies’ (‘The Summoner's Malady,’ Studies in Philology 33 [1936] 42). The objection is well taken.Google Scholar

8 Donaldson, È. T., Chaucer's Poetry (New York 1958) 858. Cf. Bloomfield, M. W., ‘Chaucer's Summoner and the Girls of the Diocese,’ Philological Quarterly 28 (1949) 503-507, where this idea is presented, with support.Google Scholar

9 Modern dictionaries define the fruit of the sloe as purplish or bluish black, but to Chaucer it clearly represents the ultimate in blackness. Cf. also the citations in the Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford 1933) s. v. Sloe, e. g., ‘slowes black as ieat’ — R. Greene, Menaphon (ed. E. Arber, London 1880) 86.Google Scholar

10 Muscatine, C., Chaucer and the French Tradition (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1957) 230.Google Scholar

11 A 3271–76 (Robinson 49).Google Scholar

12 Op. cit. 56.Google Scholar