CHAUCER'S CANTERBURY MARE

• Published in: Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 1987-01, Vol.88 (2), p.192-199
• Main Author: Gillam, Doreen M. E.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: English speaking literatures; French speaking and English speaking literatures; Geldings; Great Britain. Ireland; History and sciences of litterature; History of literature; Homosexuality; Horses; Insults; Male homosexuality; Men; Middle Ages; Narrators; Poetry; Sagas; Tale; Taunting
• ISSN: 0028-3754; 2736-9714

This article seeks a lexical context for Chaucer's use of 'mare' to describe his Pardoner. 'Mare' has long been a derogatory epithet for a woman. The problem is whether, in Chaucer's day, a lexical situation existed in which it was applied to men exhibiting what was felt to be typically female sexual behaviour. Its appearance, at a later period, in advertisements describing gelded horses is noted. A twelfth century, Latin metaphor, parallel to Chaucer's is known and there is a later, English, usage by John Ford. A persistent element in modern bucks' night jokes accuses the evening's hero of playing a woman sexually and, pre-dating Chaucer, is a well-attested tradition in early Scandinavian literature of taunting cowardly men with effeminacy by calling them 'mares'. This fragmentary evidence offers, perhaps, a glimpse of a common European metaphorical tradition on which Chaucer could rely for effect when he brought the physical description of his Pardoner to a climax with the word 'mare'.