| Beginning with late fourteenth-century priests and penitential writers who browbeat their congregations with the "Sins of the Tongue" and concluding with the drunken gossips---suspect women carousing in the taverns and streets of early sixteenth-century carols and ballads---the dissertation explores the religious, cultural, and literary work of "idle talk" in late medieval England. The project engages in questions both of gender and of the gendering of discourse, that is, how gossips as idle women are translated into "gossip" as idle speech. The dissertation participates in current critical debate about the vernacular, exploring gossip as a "common," "popular," and oral discourse, and engages with recent scholarship on pastoral practice, investigating confession as being simultaneously the site for the containment of "idle talk" and the space for its performance. While questions of gender, the vernacular, and confessional discourse run throughout the project, it is Chaucer's poetry which provides a focal point for my discussion, raising questions about the literary uses of gossip in texts like the House of Fame and the Wife of Bath's Prologue, about gossip's involvement with traditional pastoral practice in the Parson's Tale, and about the wifely co-optation and vernacularization of that practice in the Shipman's Tale.; The first chapter investigates the problem that gossip poses for ecclesiastic authority. Drawing on texts such as Jacob's Well, Handlynge Synne, Instructions for Parish Priests, Piers Plowman, and the Parson's Tale, it explores the ways in which medieval preachers and moralizing poets depict the paradox of "idle talk" and its "evele werke." Chapter two details Chaucer's depiction of gossip. Focusing on the House of Fame and the Canterbury Tales, it argues that Chaucer incorporates gossip into his narratives not only as a way of exploring, theorizing, and celebrating an often derided social practice, but also as a way of experimenting with narrative itself. Taking the Wife of Bath's secret-sharing as its template, the third chapter examines the conversational communities of the merchant-class wives and widows depicted in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale, Dunbar's Tretis of Twa Mariit Wemen and the Wedo, the Gospelles of Dystaues, and the Fyftene joyes of Mariage. The final chapter attempts to answer the question of what happened to gossip (and the Gossips) by turning from the Gossips' conversations to their circulation. |
