E-Thesis 13 views
Representations of the Enclosed Garden in Chaucer and His Contemporaries / MARIA ZYGOGIANNI
Swansea University Author: MARIA ZYGOGIANNI
DOI (Published version): 10.23889/SUThesis.72144
Abstract
This thesis explores gardens in three of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and one of the Chaucerian apocryphal texts as privileged sites where gender, power, nature, and temporality intersect. Drawing on eco-feminism, queer phenomenology, disability theory, and theories of time, the project examines how g...
| Published: |
Swansea
2026
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| Institution: | Swansea University |
| Degree level: | Doctoral |
| Degree name: | Ph.D |
| Supervisor: | Magnani, R., McAvoy, E., Williams, A., and Gamble, S. |
| URI: | https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa72144 |
| Abstract: |
This thesis explores gardens in three of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and one of the Chaucerian apocryphal texts as privileged sites where gender, power, nature, and temporality intersect. Drawing on eco-feminism, queer phenomenology, disability theory, and theories of time, the project examines how gardens both reflect and contest medieval structures of social control, embodiment, and desire. Chapter One focuses on Emelye’s flower garden in The Knight’s Tale, reading it alongside the prison, amphitheatre, and forest as spaces of surveillance and restricted movement. It argues that Emelye’s garden embodies tensions between femininity, natural imagery, and coercive political structures, situating Theseus’ domination of women and the environment at the centre of the tale’s reflections on power. Chapter Two turns to the enclosed garden of January in The Merchant’s Tale, proposing it as prosthesis for his failing body, social aspirations, and erotic inadequacies. Framed through disability theory, this chapter investigates the interplay between garden and bedroom, exploring how May’s healing parody of Marian tradition engages with medieval associations between women, nature, and curative practice. Chapter Three analyses Dorigen’s garden in The Franklin’s Tale, positioning it within the Breton lai tradition as a site of cultivation—both agricultural and social. Parallels between garden and coastline illuminate how the tale negotiates tensions between aristocratic ideals and emergent bourgeois identities, and between wilderness, labour, and human control over nature.Chapter Four shifts beyond The Canterbury Tales to the fifteenth-century Isle of Ladies. By situating this dream-vision poem within debates of canon, anonymity, and nationhood, the chapter explores the Isle’s enclosed paradise through heterochronyand queer time, revealing how coercive chrononormativity is bound to sexual violence and conquest. Taken together, these chapters demonstrate how medieval gardens operate as contested cultural landscapes, mediating issues of gender, embodiment, temporality, and ecology across canonical and apocryphal Chaucerian texts. |
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| Keywords: |
Chaucer, Medieval, Gardens, Queer Theory, Gender, Canterbury Tales, Knight’s Tale, Merchant’s Tale, Franklin’s Tale, Isle of Ladies, Romance, Fabliau, Lais, Heterotopia, Hortus Conclusus, disability theory |
| College: |
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences |