Wrestling with Ganymede - Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale' and the homoerotics ofepic history

Chaucer's Knight's Tale can be read as a historicist critique of the early humanist revival of the classical epic. In correcting a seemingly minuscule detail from Boccacio's Teseida by restoring the nakedness of the wrestler' s at the Arcite's funeral games, Chaucer highlights the homoerotic and miso gynist subtext of the classical genre and its specific claims to history-a problem he investigates also in The House of Fame, the Pardoner's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. If the classical epic was able to celebrate imperiali st politics in a narrative linking male homosexual desire to the effacement of the feminine, late medieval homophobia prevented an easy appropriation of the genre and its matter. The state formation process and its pointedly heterosexual court culture required that the epic material be recast in ter ms of romance. The violent homoeroticism of the Knight's Tale exposes Bocca ccio's classicism as a veneer under which the traditional medieval strategi es of court culture operate.