ABSTRACT
Cleanness is a late fourteenth-century alliterative poem retelling some episodes from Biblical history, generally supposed to be written by the same anonymous author as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which appears in the same manuscript. The narrator is suspicious but unsure of the nature of the Pardoner's physical identity, gender identity, and sexual orientation. The Pardoner's lack of a beard, his squeaky voice, and the stuffed pouch in his lap are all suspicious signs. Chaucer's poem explicitly owes a great deal to its antifeminist source material, and modern commentators debate whether or the Wife's powerful satirical performance can transcend the source material that it explicitly critiques. As Marion Turner notes, Chaucer's life 'gave him multiple experiences of women as thinking and independent beings, strong women, even though they underwent all kinds of legal and social constraints,' but Chaucer's own sexual relationships that we know of, inside and outside of marriage, ended badly.
