The Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at Kings College London and the MMU in Munich. Online at

at www. History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode will be an interview about attitudes towards sexuality and marriage in the works of Jeffrey Chaucer.

For this topic I'm being joined by Isabel Davis, who is senior lecturer in medieval and renaissance literature at Birkbeck College at the

University of London.

Hi Isabel.

Hi, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for watching.

Yeah, okay. Chaucer is an exciting subject which I guess people might not expect to hear about on a history of philosophy series and so we'll talk maybe a bit later about why it might be an idea to include him, but let's first

just make sure the listener knows what we're talking about. So I guess pretty much everyone has heard of

Jeffrey Chaucer. He lived in the 14th century. He died in 1400 and he's the author of the

Canterbury Tales which is a collection of stories which are put into the mouths of

pilgrims who are having a competition basically basically, who can tell the best story as they go on this pilgrimage together.

And one of the things that actually people do talk about quite a lot with the Canterbury Tales and Chaucer's other works is this theme that we're going to be concentrating on which is sexuality, marriage, intimacy and so on.

So I was wondering if you could start by telling us about which aspects or parts of the

Canterbury tales are most relevant here and maybe also what other things Chaucer

wrote that you might want to consider.

Sure, I mean before Chaucer was the author of the Canterbury Tales he had written his

great romance, Troyes and Crusade, which is very much about the erotic and intimate life.

It's not really focused as much on marriage and where we might think about marriage is much more in Canterbury Tales and that's where he thinks about that relationship in particular.

So he's capable of thinking about erotic relationships within or outside of marriage.

And he distinguishes the two things.

That's right.

...