Cunterbury is a scholarly arts & comedy podcast hosted by two Gen Z academics — Alice Fulmer-Zelinka and AJ Scott — exploring the major works of Geoffrey Chaucer and friends. In our first season, we are providing witty commentary and multiplicity of yassified voices to discuss The Canterbury Tales — and its pilgrims like you’ve never heard them before. If interested in supporting our work, please refer to the show notes, where among other things you’ll see you can follow us on Bluesky at “cunterburypod”, “cvnterburypod” on Instagram, and/or our Patreon. If you’re a scholar, comedian, or another type of clown interested being a guest on our program, please contact us at cunterburypod@protonmail.com.We are joined by Shannen Escote, our guest host from the English PhD program at UC Davis! In this episode, we move onto the first tale in the Tales: “The Knight’s Tale”. It’s a chivalric romance told by an elder knight (relative to medieval life expectancy); a love triangle between two knights who are cousins. Its setting is ripped from the Theban cycle, French romances adapting stories from it, and Giovanni Boccacio’s Teseida. Philosophically, it bears resemblance to Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. We also discuss popular (and unpopular) adaptations of the tale, including William Shakespeare and John Fletcher’s Two Noble Kinsmen (1613) and the MGM film Challengers (2024) starring Zendaya.

Text of Francis Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle

“Crusoe, Classic works and Copyright”

From Alice’s Substack:

The Knight's Wail: Homosociality in King Richard II's Courts, Poetry, John of Gaunt, & Pan

Fumo, Jamie C. “The Pestilential Gaze: From Epidemiology to Erotomania in The Knight’s Tale.” Studies in the Age of Chaucer, vol. 35, no. 1, 2013, pp. 85–136. Project Muse, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/102/article/524017.

Ingham, Patricia Clare. “Homosociality and Creative Masculinity in the Knight’s Tale.” Masculinities in Chaucer: Approaches to Maleness in the Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. Edited by Peter G. Beidler. D. S. Brewer, 1998, pp. 23–35.

Pugh, Tison. “Necrotic Erotics in Chaucerian Romance: Loving Women, Loving Death, and Destroying Civilization in the Knight’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde.” Chaucer's (Anti-) Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages. Ohio State UP, 2014, pp. 98-126. Project Muse, muse.jhu.edu/book/35091.

Shimomura, Sachi. “The Walking Dead in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 48, no. 1, 2013, pp. 1–37. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5325/chaucerrev.48.1.0001.