The 'woman reader': Gendering interpretation in Boccaccio and Chaucer

This study examines Boccaccio's and Chaucer's considerations of medieval interpretive strategies as their response to the increasing social complexity of readership in the fourteenth century. I argue that these authors use the figure of the "woman reader" to represent changes the interpretive process was undergoing as a result of the entrance of newly literate vernacular readers. Whereas the figure of the "woman reader" in the Middle Ages was commonly used to illustrate the potential sexual and spiritual dangers of reading to audiences and the need for authorial control of interpretation, Boccaccio and Chaucer revalorize women readers to figure a new reading position associated with the vernacular (or "mother tongue") and defined in resistance to the authoritative, scholastic interpretive tradition.;Boccaccio and Chaucer dramatize the interpretive process and redefine the interpretive roles of writers and audiences in the Teseida, Decameron, Legend of Good Women, and Canterbury Tales, and both writers use the "woman reader" to represent the entrance to literary audiences of not only some women but also newly-literate men from the middle social strata. Rather than responding with anxious attempts to control the interpretations of their texts by new vernacular readers, Boccaccio and Chaucer welcome and facilitate these audiences. They model interpretation within their works for these readers, reveal the inadequacies of the received interpretive approaches, and revise perceptions of the "woman reader." While Boccaccio imagines women as readers and characterizes literature's potential threat to readers primarily as a sexual one, Chaucer in contrast focuses more on women as read or represented by literary texts and characterizes a different kind of threat posed to women by texts: not a sexual one, but the spiritual threat posed by heretical interpretation and the physical threat one posed by literary misogyny.