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Witnesses believed that the Black Death and subsequent fourteenth-century plagues threatened profound social change. However, Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340-1400) does not appear to accord the plague a place of any importance in his works. This is especially surprising in the case of the Canterbury Tales , which presents a complex portrait of plague-era society. Chaucer's silence on the plague is reinforced by critical positions that deemphasize the effects of the plague and emphasize Chaucer's supposed lack of interest in his world. This thesis contends that the plague is in fact present in the Canterbury Tales in the guise of the changes that it threatened. By situating the Canterbury Tales in a network of literary and non-literary responses to the plague, I demonstrate that Chaucer participated in a discourse that attempted to restore order to a world that was seen to have been disordered---morally, socially, and physically---by the plague.

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Inaug.-Diss.--Würzburg. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. [i]-iv.

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Few of Chaucer’s works provoke such animosity as does his “Clerk’s Tale.” Modern critics are divided by the social and gender issues that to which the tale lends itself. However, the tale was immensely popular to Middle Age audiences and was one of the best loved of the Canterbury Tales. Therefore, to dismiss this tale’s literary values outright, as some critics have done, is a mistake. By examining the history of the Griselda story, Chaucer’s use of his source materials, and the tales placement within the Canterbury Tales, this thesis is an attempt to examine the tale in more culturally, religiously, and historically appropriate way.

Queer theory emphasizes the circulation of power through sex-gender-sexuality systems to trace methods of normalization for the purposes of political intervention. Within literature, queer theory functions as a lens into historical gender and sexual ideologies. My thesis attempts to bridge queer theory with medieval studies to highlight queer and non-normative sensibilities within a particular medieval text: Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Chaucer's Canterbury Tales develops characters who straddle the line between the queer and the licit, and he creates situations that disrupt the expected hetero-normative, masculine ideology of medieval England. Queering Canterbury explores how queer-gender, queer-bashing, queer humor, and the queynte function within Chaucer's Canterbury Tales while relating the overarching struggle for masculinity and power.

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Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale has been largely ignored in comparison to the rest of The Canterbury Tales due to the rhetorical embellishment in the tale. However, examining the tale in the cultural context of its narrator, as well as in the context of the textual and oral rhetorical strategies of the fourteenth century, reveals that the Man of Law creates an argument out of his fictional tale that ties the developing fourteenth century common law system to divine justice, thereby justifying his profession to his audience