Rumors About Women in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterberry Tales”

The object of the gender oriented historiosophical and philological analysis carried out in the article is the body of rumors about women active in the Renaissance Europe everyday life and presented in G. Chaucer’s “Canterberry Tales”. Rumor is understood as the phenomenon formed and functioning on the everyday life level and actualized in folklore and literary texts, stereotypes, the system of the permitted and the prohibited as well as in the general axiological and aesthetic paradigms of a certain culture. The author presents the functional paradigm of rumors consisting of the following functions: the memorial, the protective (censoring), moral, aesthetic, reputational, and the power ones, each of them conditioning the productivity and frequency of rumors in culture in general and in the text under analysis in particular. The author argues that the basis for rumors is formed by female virtues and vices, the latter being much more actualized than the former, though, taken as a whole, both of them present all stereotypes connected with women and reflect the patriarchal worldview of the epoch.