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Abstract
This dissertation re-examines the passive, pathetic image of the child in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, an image that has long been understood by critics as the medieval norm. In contrasting Chaucer's child to the child in the Middle English miracle tale and romance, this dissertation exposes a greater variety of child characters available to medieval literature, characters with voice, agency and subjectivity. Ultimately this dissertation argues that Chaucer canonized a negative image of childhood that infantilizes, or deems as puerile, the popular Middle English genres of metrical romance and miracle tale, while at the same time masking other more positive images of childhood in medieval literature. Reading “Child Slain by Jews” and “The Jewish Boy” against Chaucer's Prioress' Tale and Havelok the Dane against Chaucer's Tale of Sir Thopas, I argue that the child subject who engages with devotion and adventure does exist in non-Chaucerian medieval texts. The shift to a more objectified literary child is allied with the Chaucerian shift to the idea of vernacular literature as self-consciously artistic. Chaucer restricted the notion of “literature” to particular “adult” genres and characters. The subsequent infantilization of the Middle Ages in modern literary criticism can be traced in part to Chaucer's use of childhood to infantilize certain medieval genres.
Chaucer's infantilization has obscured an alternative aesthetic which informs Middle English romances and miracle tales, an aesthetic found in these texts' exploration of the literary and social power of childhood. Havelok, “Child Slain By Jews,” and “The Jewish Boy,” actively engage with childhood and its ambivalent relationships to societal power structures, social identity, and social vulnerability. Rather than being childish, these works imagine, with the narrative freedom of the boundary-crossing child, more egalitarian generic possibilities.