Misogyny and Economic Person in Skelton Langland, Langland, and Chaucer

Skelton’s “Tunnyng of Elynour Rummynge” draws on PPl not only formally in its division into passus but in its characterization and voicing, as a fragmenting of the personification of Lady Meed. To WL, Meed, who stands for a kind of surplus value, serves as a conceptual tool to analyze the exchange of services for money; the legal question of her marriage suggests the need for royal control of the money economy in a poem that investigates the relationship of labor to value. For Skelton, the crisis exists in the unstable value of commodity and money. Whereas Meed per se is not immoral, Skelton’s poem suggests that woman cannot be redeemed; her immorality is the female body itself.