“Gender and Class in Fifteenth-Century Canterbury: The Prologue to The Tale of Beryn”
Robert S. Sturges

The Prologue to The Tale of Beryn, a continuation of The Canterbury Tales dated to the 1420s, concerns the Pardoner’s pursuit of a Canterbury tapster. This paper continues the discussion of it begun in my recent book Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory. Whereas that discussion was primarily theoretical, this paper is rooted in the historican and material for its analysis of the intersections of class and gender in a fifteenth-century unrban setting. I will first demonstrate the ways in which this text draws on urban culture, particularly fifteenth-century unrbanization patterns and Canterbury’s specific spatial environment (the cathedral, the tavern, and the town walls) in its anxious construction of the Pardoner and Kit as transgressors of traditional class boundaries; I will also show how the text allays these anxieties  with contrasting references to the Knight, which reposition the Pardoner as an ignorant rustic. I will then show how such class anxieties are also linked to concerns about gender: both are related to relatively short-lived shifts in women’s status in fifteenth-century English cities, and specifically to late medieval constructions of the figure of the urban whore.  While the text allays anxieties about class trangressions, it is unable to do so for the equally troubling gender transgressions resulting from Kit’s appropriation of the phallus, an appropriation made possible by the transformation of these particular fifteenth-century social  configurations.