... to signify a range of personal and social desires and yet sufficiently mystified to dazzle. Alchemy is both the subject and the overar- ching metaphor of The Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale and The Alchemist. In both, the tenor of that metaphor gestures toward a capitalism yet to come...

... — which convention William Lang- land puts to sophisticated use in Piers Plowman, as does Chaucer in The House of Fame and “The Canon Yeoman’s Tale.” Linguistic obscurity is nec- essarily foregrounded in discussions of Wycliffite heresy: not only does lol- lard derive from the Middle Dutch word...

... in which the rebels “would have gonne to Rabons howse a yeoman & spoiled him likewise, and from thens to Mr George Whitton and spoille him, And thens to Sir Henry Lea and spoile him likewise, and thens to Sir William Spencer & spoille him, And so to Mr ffrere, and so to my Lord Norreis, and so...

... realm we can already see the beginnings of the transformation of Robin Hood from Sponsler / In Transit 33 rough yeoman outlaw into the figure of gentlemanly largesse and aris- tocratic patronage he would become in the sixteenth and seventeenth...

...: Geological, Climatological, and Archaeological Background (New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1995). Similarly, Chaucer’s Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale describes the hot, goatish stench of alchemical transformations that accrued to practitioners: “And evere­moore, where that evere they goon, / Men...

..., was to go to his “welbeloved wife” Joan and his daughter Mary. While many of his ties suggest embeddedness in the Dutch community in St. Martin le Grand, the title Williamson gave himself in his will, “Yeoman,” seems very English. Over the nearly four decades Williamson lived in St. Martin’s...

..., Gentlemen, and Yeomen, there to recreate and delight themselues with Cocke-fighting. (C3r) If Henry’s addiction does not found cities in and of themselves, it provides their unifying cores in the utopian space of the cockpit — that site where, for Wilson, king and yeoman not only...

... was writing a dialogue of his own, The Discourse of the Commonweal, from which workers are conspicuous by their absence — his “husbandman” is a yeoman who employs wage laborers. Smith’s work resembles less an estates debate than an exercise in constituting a new English ruling class...

..., 1991), 15–42. 47 For references to these authors, see the bibliography in Rigby, Chaucer in Context. For Harwood, see B. J. Harwood, “Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon’s Yeoman’s Tale,” PMLA 102 (1987): 338–50; and Harwood, “Building Class and Gender in Chaucer’s...