Chaganti, Seeta. "'Merciless Beauty' and carceral justice." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/merciless-beauty-and-carceral-justice. [Date accessed].
"Merciless Beauty" and carceral justice
Introducing students to Middle English and the untimely juxtaposition.
“Merciless Beauty” is a poem written in a late 14th-century English that may or may not be Chaucer’s but is highly comparable to Chaucer’s usage. Several of its features make it an excellent poem to begin a Chaucer class that is reading the texts in Middle English. By asking students to translate the poem, they develop their skills for reading Middle English and become intimate with the formal structure of the rondel. Once they've gained an intimacy with the poem and feel comfortable with its language, the untimely juxtaposition is introduced: the film The Prison in 12 Landscapes. In this moment, students are asked to make connections between the poem and the film and their formal examinations of time, incarceration, and repetition.
Further learning
Recommended
The lap of whiteness in The Squire's Tale
In Chaucer's The Squire's Tale, a woman spreads her skirt to catch a falling falcon, all while setting a quiet lesson about whiteness in motion. Wan-Chuan Kao dives into Chaucer's imagery to show how empathy can be a lens for understanding and a tool of racialization.
White chivalry in The Faerie Queene
Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene aimed “to fashion a gentleman or noble person.” Reading the poem’s allegories alongside later narratives of white chivalry reveals how stories about vulnerable women, masculine protectors, and racialized threats have been adapted across centuries of literature, culture, and politics.
Language, race, and Chaucer adaptations
A reading list for teaching Chaucer through modern adaptations. This list focuses on scholarship for reading and understanding Chaucer from a premodern critical race studies lens, including global Chaucer adaptations to help students explore how medieval texts continue to inform questions of identity, power, and belonging.
