• DOI:10.1353/SAC.1991.0005
• Corpus ID: 166062069

Shades of Incest and Cuckoldry: Pandarus and John of Gaunt

@article{Kelly1991ShadesOI,
  title={Shades of Incest and Cuckoldry: Pandarus and John of Gaunt},
  author={Henry Ansgar Kelly},
  journal={Studies in the Age of Chaucer},
  year={1991},
  volume={13},
  pages={121 - 140}
}

• H. Kelly
• Published 3 January 2018
• Linguistics
• Studies in the Age of Chaucer

ON TilE SUBJECT OF INCEST in Ch,um's wo<ks, schol,rn in th, past have generally alluded only to the Man of Law's assertion that Chaucer wrote no word of the wicked example and cursed story of Canace, who sinfully loved her own brother. They have not always remembered that Chaucer named Canace in The Legend of Good Women as an example of "trouthe," clearly intending to write a legend about her. 1 But more recently many Chaucerians speak of incest in a perceived or suspected sexual encounter between Pandarus and his niece Criseyde on the morning after the consummation of her love for Troilus. 2 Incest enters Chaucer's real world with the speculations that John of Gaunt actually fathered Thomas Chaucer, and perhaps a daughter, Elizabeth Chaucer, on Geoffrey's wife, Philippa, who was allegedly the sister of Catherine Swynford,3 John's