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. As a result, ‘her performance is a kind of transvestism’. 66 Here, in contrast to those critics who argue that Chaucer intends us to sympathise with the Wife’s reflexive exposure of clerical misogyny, I will argue that Chaucer himself satirises her performance. Even though Alisoun relies on familiar clerical and scholastic modes of argument, such as appealing to traditional
Later Middle Ages , ed. by Isabel Davis, Miriam Müller and Sarah Rees Jones (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), pp. 63–76 and Neil Cartlidge, Medieval Marriage: Literary Approaches, 1100–1300 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1997), pp. 1–32. 14 See Twycross, ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, 123–80; Peter Happé and others, ‘Thoughts on “Transvestism” by Divers Hands’, METh , 5.2 (1983) 110–22; Richard Rastall, ‘Female Roles in All-Male Casts’, METh , 7.1 (1985), 25–50; Robert L. A. Clark and Claire Sponsler, ‘Queer Play: The Cultural Work of Crossdressing in Medieval
Davidson, Gesture in Medieval Drama and Art (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2001) and Meg Twycross’ initiation of debates concerning cross-playing in her article ‘“Transvestism” in the Mystery Plays’, METh , 5.2 (1983), 123–80. 88 See Jody Enders on the transmission of biblical and social ‘truths’ through violence in medieval drama in Jody Enders, The Medieval Theater of Cruelty: Rhetoric, Memory, Violence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999). 89 See Raphael Falco, ‘Medieval and Reformation Roots’, in A Companion to Renaissance