“Angry as a pissemyre”: Churlish Anger in Chaucer’s <i>The Summoner’s Tale</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although The Summoner’s Tale currently tends to be read as anti-fraternal satire that gives the last laugh to aristocratic characters, this study argues that Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) included another layer of irony that appealed to members of his own social station serving as courtiers to England’s volatile aristocracy. Guided by the study of medieval obscene comedy, it is attentive to how lower-status characters express criticism of the social order and power relationships between other social stations. This study reconsiders the anger of Thomas the “churl” as a model for those who must resist their superiors passive aggressively and dissemble their anger. Thomas is characterized with anti-peasant stereotypes, including animal metaphors, that warn against provoking seemingly docile subordinates. These stereotypes reflect subordinated people’s tactics for hiding their indignation from those who deny their agency. Scholastic analysis the emotions and pastoral discourse about the vices help explain how indignation can be expressed sometimes as sadness and other times as anger. Friar John’s sermon against Wrath brings the discussion to the level of Chaucer’s peers by considering the options available to the courtiers of tyrants. Although the friar’s advice is to placate the powerful instead of correcting them, both Thomas and Jankyn know how to resist overbearing masters while appearing to give in to their unreasonable demands. Thomas’s fart is a form of scatological resistance that is on the boundary between agency and reflex. Subjects expose the folly of their superiors’ unreasonable demands by dissembling indignation and artfully concealing correction as compliance.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".