2026-09-24T01:44:56Z https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh

oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81379 2023-07-11 col_2142_5131 col_2142_8906 com_2142_5130 com_2142_8904 com_2142_8903

Lisa Lampert Lartigue, Rebecca Powell 2015-09-25T20:14:55Z 2015-09-25T20:14:55Z 10000-01-01 2001 2001 269 p. Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001. Boccaccio and Chaucer dramatize the interpretive process and redefine the interpretive roles of writers and audiences in the Teseida, Decameron, Legend of Good Women, and Canterbury Tales, and both writers use the ""woman reader"" to represent the entrance to literary audiences of not only some women but also newly-literate men from the middle social strata. Rather than responding with anxious attempts to control the interpretations of their texts by new vernacular readers, Boccaccio and Chaucer welcome and facilitate these audiences. They model interpretation within their works for these readers, reveal the inadequacies of the received interpretive approaches, and revise perceptions of the ""woman reader."" While Boccaccio imagines women as readers and characterizes literature's potential threat to readers primarily as a sexual one, Chaucer in contrast focuses more on women as read or represented by literary texts and characterizes a different kind of threat posed to women by texts: not a sexual one, but the spiritual threat posed by heretical interpretation and the physical threat one posed by literary misogyny. Restricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETDs U of I Only (MiAaPQ)AAI3030450 http://hdl.handle.net/2142/81379 eng Literature, English The "Woman Reader": Gendering Interpretation in Boccaccio and Chaucer text English English University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Dissertation Ph.D.