TY - JOUR
T1 - Bodiam Castle and The Canterbury Tales
T2 - Some Intersections
AU - Johnson, Matthew
N1 - Funding Information:
Penny Copeland, John Hines, Rebecca Johnson, Aleks McClain, Susie Phillips and two anonymous reviewers read earlier versions of the text and made invaluable comments. I thank my present and former collaborators at Northwestern University, particularly Kathryn A Catlin, Eric Johnson and Ryan Lash; at the University of Southampton, particularly Tim Sly, Kris Strutt, Dom Barker, Penny Copeland, Catriona Cooper and Becky Peacock; the present and former staff of the National Trust, particularly George Bailey, Nathalie Cohen, David and Caroline Thackray, Gary Enstone, and Pauline Wall; and all the students who have worked on the project, too numerous to name here. The AHRC and EPSRC funded different elements of the project. The views expressed in this paper remain my responsibility alone.
Publisher Copyright:
© Society for Medieval Archaeology 2020.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE is to explore some of the biographical, material and ideological intersections between two of the most important cultural productions of late 14th-century England. The first is a monument in its landscape, the castle of Bodiam in East Sussex, and the second is a text, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. My analysis will begin with traditional biography: the historical exploration of links and intersections between the lives and experiences of the ‘builder’ and owner of Bodiam, Sir Edward Dallingridge, and those of Geoffrey Chaucer. It will move on to a more theoretically informed engagement with the meanings and values that lie, I argue, behind both text and monument — the way they converge as ideological constructions. I excavate the anxieties, tensions, gaps, silences and contradictions that lie below the surface of the formal, normative values they apparently proclaim so stridently. Ultimately, I argue that both text and monument are deeply implicated in different registers, levels and scales of violence.
AB - THE AIM OF THIS ARTICLE is to explore some of the biographical, material and ideological intersections between two of the most important cultural productions of late 14th-century England. The first is a monument in its landscape, the castle of Bodiam in East Sussex, and the second is a text, Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. My analysis will begin with traditional biography: the historical exploration of links and intersections between the lives and experiences of the ‘builder’ and owner of Bodiam, Sir Edward Dallingridge, and those of Geoffrey Chaucer. It will move on to a more theoretically informed engagement with the meanings and values that lie, I argue, behind both text and monument — the way they converge as ideological constructions. I excavate the anxieties, tensions, gaps, silences and contradictions that lie below the surface of the formal, normative values they apparently proclaim so stridently. Ultimately, I argue that both text and monument are deeply implicated in different registers, levels and scales of violence.
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U2 - 10.1080/00766097.2020.1835273
DO - 10.1080/00766097.2020.1835273
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85097996399
SN - 0076-6097
VL - 64
SP - 302
EP - 329
JO - Medieval Archaeology
JF - Medieval Archaeology
IS - 2
ER -
