2 - Chaucer’s Physicians: Raising Questions of Authority

Summary

As Naoë Kukita Yoshikawa indicates in the introduction, this volume is situated in the dialectic space created by the intersection of a number of coterminous discourses: medicine, religion and gender. The concepts of Christus medicus and Mary the Physician testify to the interconnectedness of spirituality and medical practice, while posing questions about authority and power hierarchies that are overtly gendered, as the Virgin assumes an equal healing or salvific potency in relation to the Trinity. In the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, the interconnection of these three coextensive discourses and the ensuing preoccupation with authority and truth become apparent in the centrality of Marian figurations. This essay, which is structured in three parts, aims at exploring and exploding received ideas of authority, whether spiritual, medical, textual or gendered. After engaging with Chaucer's orthodox depiction of Mary as nurse, that is, as assistive and exemplary agent whose ideological function is to disseminate a regimen of desirable subject positions, I will attend to Chaucer's heterodox representations of the Virgin. In line with variant strands of Mariology, which Diane Watt examines in detail in her essay above, the poet's texts open up to a dramatisation of the Virgin's power that transcends her feminine assistive role and aligns her to the visions of Mary the Physician narrated in Christina of Markyate's Life. Chaucer's unravelling of the absolute authority of patriarchal structures that underpin the Trinity and orthodox doctrines of salvation culminates in the portrait and Tale of his secular Physician. Consistent with his training in speculative and discursive disciplines such as theology, the Doctour of Phisik weaves a fractured narrative in which concepts of truth and authority are rigorously interrogated. In his search for a stable physical and spiritual regimen sanitatis, the Physician identifies the Virgin's feminine potency as principle of truth.

THE VIRGIN MARY: THE ASSISTIVE AGENT OF ‘BIO-POWER’

Since the fifteenth century Chaucer's literary reputation has been profoundly imbricated in his devotion to the Virgin Mary. As part of his personal tribute to ‘fadir’ and ‘maistir Chaucer’ in The Regiment of Princes, Thomas Hoccleve associates the poet's moral and literary excellence to his Marian output:

As thow wel knowist, o blessid Virgyne,

With lovyng herte and hy devocioun,

In thyn honour he wroot ful many a lyne.