| In my dissertation, I explore the connections between interpretation, authority, and female sexuality in late medieval and early modern literature. The debate regarding women readers increased in intensity as more early moderns gained access to power through literacy and the merchant economy. I examine the ways in which Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Sir Philip Sidney engage with this debate in their works. They feel the need to justify their writing of "dangerous" texts, and their defenses of their works affect their representations of women.;The first two chapters are dedicated to the historical contexts of this debate regarding reading women and examine a variety of documents, including gynecological manuals, broadsides on monstrous birth, tracts on education, pamphlets on witchcraft, and defenses of fiction.;In my third chapter, I discuss Boccaccio's Decameron in light of Henri Bergson's theories on laughter. Boccaccio addresses the Decameron to "ladies" and promises them "useful advice." The nature of this advice is questionable, since many of the fabliau stories model ways in which to fool and cuckold a husband. However, the brigata ladies serve as model readers, and their laughter ensures critical distance from the exempla of the narratives.;The next chapter focuses on Chaucer. It examines Troilus and Criseyde; Criseyde fails to "reread" in Barthes' sense of the term, and therefore romance narrative becomes her primary seducer. I then turn to The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale. I argue that Chaucer uses Alisoun as a positive model of rereading texts and the genre conventions of romance.;The final chapter centers upon Sidney's Old Arcadia. I use sixteenth-century notions of good huswifery---which include a facility to read rhetoric accurately and therefore resist it---to analyze Sidney's text. None of the women in the Arcadia are consistently good huswives, and this leads to serious political consequences, including civil dissention. While political stability is regained at the end of the romance, the narrative does not finally allay anxieties about women's reading. |
