New Chaucer Studies: Pedagogy and Profession

This paper reads the Man of Law’s Tale at the intersection of logistics, cultural capital, and psychoanalysis. It argues that Custance’s acts of religious observance participate in the late medieval culture of good wifely conduct and private devotion. Conduct is an embodied state of cultural capital in which self-improvement is indistinguishable from self-investment. In Custance’s case, her wifely conduct becomes a racialized cultural capital that she brings to distant lands and effects conversion. Her ship is the space of the Lacanian Imaginary, and her body and flesh are what Anne Anlin Cheng would term a “zone of contamination,” a psychic space in which subjecthood and objecthood are merged. As a form of governance, conduct is an effect of capitalism on the self and the collective. The racialized cultural capital that Custance traffics in, rather than offering any pure and stable technique of self-making, is at best a symptom awaiting analysis.