The only other instance that connects the two names is a 1378 legal record, in which Chaucer hands power of attorney to Gower and the lawyer Richard Forster. It is in the Confessio and in the Troilus, that is, in works written in the second half of the 1380s, that Chaucer and Gower first refer to one another in a literary context.

In addition, Chaucer was probably finishing Troilus and Criseyde, which must have been available before March 1388, at least in part, to Thomas Usk, the poet and undersheriff of London, who names the poem and borrows from Chaucer’s Boece in his Testament of Love.

Chaucer, in turn, is believed to have been writing some of the material that would later form The Canterbury Tales. During the second half of the 1380s, John Gower, the leading fourteenth-century poet and an acquaintance of Geoffrey Chaucer, was working on his longest English poem, the Confessio Amantis. The queer cavity, then, acts as a space of becoming and transformation.īy showing that the General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales was inspired by Harry Bailey's 1381 poll-tax records for Southwark, this article offers a new interpretive context for Chaucer's best-known work. The process of becoming in the pilgrimage is connected to what the pilgrims touch, exchange, and say in relation to each other. As Glenn Burger has indicated in 'Chaucer's Queer Nation', Chaucer's pilgrimage to Canterbury is more a process of becoming and suggests itself through the trans -ness of travel, of telling and giving an account, of a fusion of various groups within medieval society who all repurpose and process in the 'middle' of the journey to Canterbury. Queer cavities rely on self-sufficient methods of creation independent from heteronormative models of production reliant on beginnings and endings. I argue that queer cavities offer sites of transformative possibility that motivate and reorient modes of production and reproduction. Yet, Chaucer plays with this image of the swallowing purse to critique models of transactional productivity. Cavities in 'The Canterbury Tales' cache what enters them - removing contents from social, economic, sexual, and spiritual circulation. This essay looks to the purse as a site of queer aperture, an opening that refuses socially prescribed models of production: that is, the purse as queer cavity swallows and repurposes what it placed inside of it. The purses, bags, sacks, and wallets that the Pardoner and Summoner bear metaphorize, perhaps obviously, their owners as morally vacuous cavities. The Pardoner's wallet lay on his lap 'bretful of pardoun,' brimming with the material of his vocation, while the Summoner admonishes men who keep their souls in their purses. While many of the pilgrims carry purses to Canterbury, it is the riding companions, the Pardoner and the Summoner, who carry and broadcast their purses and opinions about the utility of such items. In 'The Canterbury Tales' the image of the purse, a hollow orifice that hoards or expels what enters into it, becomes the template for all cached items exchanged and publicized on the pilgrimage. Accordingly, this paper aims to dwell on Harry Bailly in the Canterbury Tales to present him as the inalienable yet neglected character of the masterpiece of Geoffrey Chaucer. Although his commanding position is impeded by his domineering wife, taken as another Wife of Bath in the paper, Bailly occupies a unique position as the maestro of the pilgrims. Throughout the text, he performs divergent roles as a host, a leader, a judge, a critic and a governor.

He is the authoritative figure, and a know-it-all. The Canterbury Tales can be envisaged without any of its pilgrims, but not without a Harry Bailly. He is also very cautious about the traditional three estates order which constitutes the backbone of the medieval society. Bailly does not tell a story himself yet, he becomes so successful in handling of the disputes among the pilgrims and putting all of them in order and every time he has a say for the stories as well as the story tellers. As the main framework of the text, Bailly asks pilgrims to tell stories on their way to Canterbury. Bailly guides a group of medieval people of different ranks to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket in Canterbury which introduces the reader to the greatest panorama of the medieval period. Nevertheless, little attention has been paid to Harry Bailly, the striking innkeeper of the text. Geoffrey Chaucer's pilgrims in his monumental work The Canterbury Tales have been widely treated by the scholars who produced copious articles and books on the countless matters focusing on each pilgrim.

Tavern keeper pardoners tale pilgrim