Papers by Samantha Katz Seal
This article has been peer reviewed through the journal's standard double blind peer-review proce... more This article has been peer reviewed through the journal's standard double blind peer-review process, where both the reviewers and authors are anonymised during review.
Digital philology, Sep 1, 2022
Routledge eBooks, Nov 22, 2022
The Chaucer review, Jul 1, 2024
The Practice and Politics of Reading, 650-1500, Sep 6, 2022
Studies in the Age of Chaucer
Routledge eBooks, Nov 22, 2022
The Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures
The Chaucer Review, 2019
This article surveys the critical history of scholarship on Philippa Chaucer, the wife of the fam... more This article surveys the critical history of scholarship on Philippa Chaucer, the wife of the famous English poet. Beginning with the late Victorian work of Frederick Furnivall and ending with contemporary biographies of Geoffrey Chaucer, this article argues that male critics have constructed their depictions of Philippa Chaucer with little reference to historical fact. Instead, male critics have formed an intellectual community with one another (and with the medieval poet) by the act of denigrating Philippa, with an appeal to a supposedly universal knowledge about disagreeable women and their effect on men of genius. From harpy to harlot to cold careerist, Philippa Chaucer's life and relationship with her husband have proved flexible media for male critics to manipulate. The biographical evaluations published over the last century therefore have much to reveal about the intellectual priorities and gender prejudices of her husband's critics.
The Chaucer Review, 2017
Drawing from medieval Christian depictions of Jewish literalism and materialist reading, this art... more Drawing from medieval Christian depictions of Jewish literalism and materialist reading, this article offers a reevaluation of Chaucer's Physician and his tale's protagonist Virginius, as men who read like Jews, even though they remain distinct from the racialized characterization of the Prioress's Tale. This article argues that Chaucer depicts “reading Jewishly” as an intellectual flaw, one into which Christian and pagan men might fall, with tragic results for themselves, but potentially edifying ones for those who witness their failures of perception. The Physician's Tale is thus to be read as a narrative of conversion, and it concerns the conflict between a literalist “Jewish” hermeneutic and a figural Christian epistemology premised on faith.
Magistra, Dec 1, 2010
John Capgrave states in his fifteenth-century Life of St. Catherine that her subjects lamented, &... more John Capgrave states in his fifteenth-century Life of St. Catherine that her subjects lamented, "she loveth not ellis but bookys and scole ... this will turne us alle to wrake and to do ole."1 This attitude to female literacy and scholarship is perhaps not surprising to find in fifteenth century England. However, it is surprising to see it appear in a Life of St. Catherine, that virgin saint whose Passio celebrated her rhetorical triumph over fifty famous pagan philosophers. When calculating Catherine's virtues, Capgrave glosses over her erudition and learning in favor of her purity and humility; she speaks truth, but she does not learn it through a process of study, but rather through divine grace.2 When the English prose Life instructs its readers how they should imitate St. Catherine, the author shies away from Catherine's scholarly achievements and instead claims that his work teaches "all virgins and maidens to despise and flee all worldly vanity and greatly and truly love our lord Jesus Christ. It teaches you to persevere in his love to the death, trusting in that comfort and reward he gives all his lovers."3 In order to examine precisely how the fifteenth century venerators of St. Catherine reconciled this advice to "flee worldly vanity" with a hagiographie tradition that praised the saint for her deep knowledge of worldly scholarship and rhetoric, this study will delve not only into the prose Life and Capgrave's vita, but will particularly focus on a text in direct opposition to those above: the twelfth century Life of St. Catherine by Clemence of Barking. The focus here will be on the hagiographie Catherine vitae prepared largely for an audience of women. The disparity between the narrative details of virgin saints' lives and the virtues their female readers were supposed to come away with has been observed by scholars before. In her book, Her Life Historical: Exemplarity and Female Saints' Lives in Late Medieval England, Catherine Sanok addressed this very question, and did indeed conclude that young women were intended to read much more typical feminine virtues of obethence, humility, and purity from stories of even the most rebellious female saint.4 Margery Kempe is the classic example of a woman who attempted to imitate Catherine's independence, public authority, and preaching, only to meet with great resistance from her contemporary medieval society.5 However, although much critical attention has already been directed towards Catherine as scholar, there remain several inconsistencies, which would benefit from a broader chronological look.6 Catherine's incarnation as purveyor of husbands and model of stable, unlearned faith is not merely an invention of the fifteenth century, in response to specific contemporary pressures, but instead perhaps a manifestation of trends begun long before, a crisscrossing of centuries and texts which allowed Catherine's role as mystic bride to find birth within the Legend. While Catherine as scholar and Catherine as philosopher do remain recognizable components of the text throughout its many permutations, these versions of the saint seem to have become marginalized in the hagiographie tradition and cult by the fifteenth century; the goal of this paper is to begin to ask why and how that happened.7 The rise of Catherine as "mystical bride of Christ," a narrative twist which coincided with a surge in female lay spirituality and a new focus on the religious potential of both the somatic and the erotic experience, was, it may be argued, used to move aside and redirect attention from aspects of the text with which hagiographers had felt uncomfortable from its earliest dissemination in Western Europe. The Anglo-Norman Life of St. Catherine which was written by Clemence of Barking, a twelfthcentury nun at one of the most prestigious English convents, was, it seems, a notable exception in this general trend.8 This text takes a far more lenient view towards Catherine's studies, as well as academic study more broadly, in a sense tying together spiritual and earthly wisdom so that Catherine can remain a scholar even as she experiences divine truth. …
The Chaucer Review, Oct 1, 2022
While Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki's new archival discovery absolves Geoffrey Chaucer of the ... more While Euan Roger and Sebastian Sobecki's new archival discovery absolves Geoffrey Chaucer of the supposed rape of Cecily Chaumpaigne, it does not offer an absolution for the literary critics and historians who have exploited and appropriated the imagined figure of Cecily Chaumpaigne for the sexual titillation of themselves and their reading public. Briefly recounting the last century and a half of Chaucerian historiography, this article argues that the study of Chaucerian literature remains a place in which sexual violence has been exalted, before concluding that the transformations that feminist scholarship has brought to the field-especially in relation to the Chaumpaigne release-will never be erased.
The Practice and Politics of Reading, 650-1500
Father Chaucer, 2019
Chapter 2 addresses the idea of male lineage as a stable, intergenerational source of authority f... more Chapter 2 addresses the idea of male lineage as a stable, intergenerational source of authority for medieval men. Continuing the argument of the book as a whole, it argues that Chaucer seeks to shake men’s faith in such modes of earthly power, deploying the Wife of Bath to undermine the system of lineage itself. The Wife intrudes into typical models of male heredity, criticizes the linear male temporality upon which lineage depends, and has the hag of her Tale offer a speech against the very mechanisms of male descent and likeness. This chapter also contrasts the Wife of Bath’s Tale to the ballad, the Knight and the Shepherd’s Daughter, arguing that while the scene of rape in each is very similar, the Wife of Bath renders her narrative deliberately less procreative in its orientation. Finally, the chapter argues that Chaucer also has the Wife of Bath attack modes of poetic genealogy, alienating poets from their literary forebears.
Paternity is a powerful metaphor for literary authority and legitimacy, and thus Geoffrey Chaucer... more Paternity is a powerful metaphor for literary authority and legitimacy, and thus Geoffrey Chaucer has been granted the supposedly supreme honor of being termed the “father of English poetry.” And yet, as this book argues, the idea of paternity as unchallenged authority is a far more modern construct. For Chaucer, the ability to create with certainty, with assurance in one’s own posterity, was the ardent dream that haunted human men. It was, however, a dream defined by its impossibility. For Chaucer and his peers occupied a fallen world, one in which all true authority belonged to God alone. This book argues that man’s struggle to create something that would last beyond death is at the very heart of The Canterbury Tales. Chaucer faces his own desire as a poet and a man to sire something that will last within the world. But Chaucer also knew deeply that such a dream would remain always out of reach for mortal men. And so Chaucer’s Tales taunts men with the multiple breakdowns of human...
Father Chaucer, 2019
In conclusion to this book, Chapter 6 looks at the Middle Ages’ model of reproductive perfection—... more In conclusion to this book, Chapter 6 looks at the Middle Ages’ model of reproductive perfection—fathers producing sons—to identify how even in the most ideal of circumstances, men cannot gain a true authority upon the earth. For from the Monk’s Tale to the Knight’s Tale to the Nun’s Priest’s Tale, Chaucer makes men confront how poorly they resemble the quality of their fathers. Each generation becomes a siring of loss, a gradual descent into something worse than its progenitor. And yet, Chaucer agues, there is nothing else for men within the world. To reproduce in the pursuit of authority is a doomed quest, one that he himself will repent of in the Retractions. But there is nothing more human than the desire to create something that will last beyond one’s death, to hope in a future posterity even knowing the odds against its realization.
Father Chaucer, 2019
Chapter 5 approaches the obstacle that daughters posed to male reproductive authority. Daughters,... more Chapter 5 approaches the obstacle that daughters posed to male reproductive authority. Daughters, in their limited resemblance to their fathers, became an embodiment of “unlikeness,” terrifying doubles of men who could neither disown them, marry them, nor accept them fully as their heirs. Analyzing the Man of Law’s Tale, this chapter argues that Chaucer’s heroine, Custance, moves through the consequences of her own unlikeness, as the men and women around her are challenged to improve their capacity for perception. It is only when Custance has a son of her own that she can finally be recognized by father and husband alike, and therefore reintegrated into her own lineage. Analogy thus becomes the dominant intellectual desire within this story, replacing the longing for certainty that was tied to men’s production of sons. The chapter concludes by noting that the Man of Law himself claims that while he cannot serve as Chaucer’s heir, perhaps he could serve as an analogous reminder of hi...
Uploads
Papers by Samantha Katz Seal
Chaucer knew that God had set sharp limits upon man's ability to create with certainty, and to determine his own posterity. Yet, what could be more human than the longing to wrest some small authority from one's own mortal flesh? This book argues that this essential intellectual, ethical, and religious crisis lies at the very heart of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Within this masterpiece of English literature, Chaucer boldly confronts the impossibility of his own aching wish to see his offspring, biological and poetic, last beyond his own death, to claim the authority simultaneously promised and denied by the very act of creation.
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/father-chaucer-9780198832386?cc=us&lang=en&