ABSTRACT

Geoffrey Chaucer’s Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale offers a rich case study of the dynamic materiality of food and its relation to literary practice. A particularly complex version of what Jane Bennett describes as “edible matter,” spices challenge our assumptions about material passivity, both because of their well-documented allure and because of their charismatic but finally insubstantial quality as a foodstuff. Typically ground, sieved, and combined with other ingredients in such a way that their tangible material substance virtually disappeared, their presence was known only by the traces of flavor, aroma, and color that they imparted. Spices thus model a recombinative materiality that was attractive to Chaucer precisely because spice can do what rhetorical and literary language can do: it can color, it can add flavor, it can obscure, it can augment, it can make one thing appear to be another thing.

摘要

杰弗里·乔叟的《赦罪者的序言和故事》提供了关于食物的动态物质性及其与文学实践的关系的丰富案例研究。香料是简·贝内特（Jane Bennett）所描述的“可食用物质”的一个特别复杂的版本，它挑战了我们对物质被动性的假设，这既因为它们有据可查的吸引力，也因为它们作为食品的魅力，但最终缺乏实质性的品质。通常研磨、筛分并与其他成分混合，其有形物质实质上几乎消失，人们只能通过它们所赋予的味道、香气和颜色的痕迹来了解它们的存在。因此，香料塑造了一种重组的物质性，这对乔叟有吸引力，正是因为香料可以做修辞和文学语言可以做的事情：它可以着色，它可以添加风味，它可以模糊，它可以增强，