Unlocked doors: Geoffrey Chaucer's writing rooms and Elizabeth Chaucer's nunnery

Journal article

In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf asserts that, “a lock on the door means the power to think for oneself” as part of her powerful argument that “a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” Literal physical separation from others is connected with mental independence. Demonstrating a similar understanding of the parallels between the self and the room, Lakoff and Johnson argue that “container” metaphors are ontological. They write that people are “bounded and set off from the rest of the world by the surface of our skin” and that: “Rooms and houses are obvious containers. Moving from room to room is moving from one container to another.” But all of these twentieth-century authors make certain assumptions both about the material conditions in which people live and about how personal space, privacy, and indeed the body and mind themselves are conceptualized. Our skin does not actually separate us from the world; through its openings and through our senses it connects us with the world. People do not always live in rooms and houses, and if they do, those rooms are sometimes not private spaces or are divided from other spaces by curtains rather than locks. The metaphors we live by are not the same in all places or times. As Matthew Boyd Goldie writes in his introduction to this essay cluster, “in other times and places, space itself can be different.” An exploration of the rooms that Chaucer imagined and of the structures his daughter inhabited illustrates the openness and flexibility of the spaces of later medieval London.

Authors: Turner, M

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: New Chaucer Society
• Journal: Studies in the Age of Chaucer
• Volume: 40
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 423434
• Publication date: 2018-12-22
• Acceptance date: 2017-10-02
• DOI: 10.1353/sac.2018.0014
• EISSN: 1949-0755
• ISSN: 0190-2407