Download or read book Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity written by Alastair J. Minnis and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 1982 with total page 214 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Professor Minnis argues that the paganism in Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Taleis not simply a backdrop but must be central to our understanding of the texts. Chaucer's two great pagan poems, Troilus and Criseyde and The Knight's Tale, belong to the literary genre known as the `romance of antiquity' (which first appeard in the mid 12th century), in which the ancient pagan world is shown on its own terms, without the blatant Christian bias against paganism characteristic of works like the Chanson de Roland, where the writer is concerned with present-day rather than classical forms of paganism. Chaucer's attitudes to antiquity were influenced, but not determined, by those found in the compilations, commentaries, mythographies and history books which we know that he knew. These sources illuminate the manner in which he transformed Boccaccio. Much modern criticism has concentrated on the medieval veneer of manners and fashions which are ascribed to the heathen protagonists of Troilus and The Knight's Tale; Dr Minnis examines the other side of the coin, Chaucer's historical interest in cultures very different from his own. The paganism in these poems is not mere background and setting, but an essential part of their overall meaning.
Download or read book Chaucer s The Knight s Tale and the Limits of Human Order in the Pagan World written by Carl C. Curtis and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucer's A Knight's Tale is primarily a poem about the world, symbolized by Athens, based upon ancient ideals of philosophy, politics, and, ultimately, theology, in which men who try to act upon these ideals find themselves in crises that undermine the very ideals in which they have placed their confidence. This failure emphasizes the pagan misunderstanding of the nature of the world, implicitly a misunderstanding that can be rectified only by Christianity. Hence, Chaucer's tale is placed squarely within the context of the Christian pilgrimage of The Canterbury Tales. The study of Chaucer's plan for approaching and understanding this deficient world follows involves five major points: first, the medieval interest in classical thought; second, the presence in the poem of the pagan concerns for heroism, fame, virtue, and immortality, all contributing to the ancient search for the best life; third, Chaucer's use of allegory; fourth, the ordering of Athens in accordance with the classical concept of order (chiefly the order of the soul); the fifth, the collapse of that order, underscoring the deficiencies of classical antiquity mirrored in its failure. In pursuing this train of thought, Chaucer does not merely dismiss paganism as ungodliness, but rather offers an analysis of its virtues-those of order and love-and shows how they might be more fully realized within the order of Christendom
Download or read book Risking Desire written by Alexandra Kollontai Cook and published by . This book was released on 2006 with total page 330 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Risking Desire" considers how late antique and medieval poets and scholars represent the pleasures, risks and dangers at stake in their encounter with pagan antiquity. For medieval authors from Augustine to Chaucer, the classical past haunted the Christian present, offering a treasury of cultural and intellectual goods that could not be refused, but threatened nonetheless to infect readers with the contagion of pagan ideologies. Chaucer follows in the wake of a series of seminal writers---Augustine, Boethius, Jean de Meun---who grapple with the risks that attend encounters with pagan materials. Some protect themselves by moralizing classical tales, collapsing the entire set of meanings that pagan literature might signify into narrowly moral terms, but Chaucer calls these techniques of safety into question. His poetry illuminates the medieval fascination with classical materials; paradoxically, he shows that this fascination is fueled by the very potential of pagan materials to destabilize Christian constructs of safety. Chaucer scholars commonly suppose that Chaucer's aim is to settle his readers' questions about pagan thought and to offer them safe ethical havens. I argue instead that his strategic refusal to endorse such methods is designed to make readers suspicious of the formulas that promise ethical certainty in relation to the past. Further, I show that in his pagan poems Chaucer confronts his readers not only with the dangers of pagan antiquity but also with their desire for those very dangers. For Chaucer, risk is a source of the pleasure that medieval culture takes in contemplating its history.
Download or read book The Mythographic Chaucer written by Jane Chance and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Representing Righteous Heathens in Late Medieval England written by F. Grady and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book surveys the appearances of righteous heathens or virtuous pagans in travel literature, chronicles, romances, and sermons, as well as in the work of Langland, Chaucer and Gower. Grady also illustrates the way these figures have been used to explore a variety of historical, cultural and formal literary issues.
Download or read book Tropes of Engagement written by Leah Schwebel and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2024-06-03 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: While scholars have long explored connections between Chaucer and Boccaccio, relatively few have asked why Chaucer makes such a habit of obscuring the influence of his favourite vernacular author. Tropes of Engagement asks the question of what motivated Chaucer to camouflage his debt to his most prominent, yet never named, Italian source: Giovanni Boccaccio. Leah Schwebel boldly claims that when Chaucer erases Boccaccio, he is mimicking strategies of translation practiced by his classical and continental predecessors. Tracing popular narratives from antiquity to the late Middle Ages, including the Knight’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, the Monk’s Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate’s Fall of Princes and Troy Book, Schwebel argues that authorial erasure, invention, and manipulation are recognizable literary tropes of engagement that poets employ to suggest their connection to, and place within, a broader authorial tradition. Combining an attention to the cultural, historical, and material circumstances surrounding literary production with a mode of source study that looks beyond discernable influence, Tropes of Engagement recognizes authors self-consciously erasing and misreading each other as part of a process of mutual and self-promotion.
Download or read book Humanism and Good Books in Sixteenth Century England written by Katherine C. Little and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores sixteenth-century humanism as an origin for the idea of literature as good, even great, books. It argues that humanists located the value of books not only in the goodness of their writing-their eloquence—but also in their capacity to shape readers in good and bad behavior, thoughts, and feelings, in other words, in their morality. To approach humanism in this way, by attending to its moral interests, is to provide a new perspective on periodization, the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance / early modern. That is, humanists did not so much rupture with medieval ideas about literature or with medieval models as they adapted and altered them, offering a new confidence about an old idea: the moral instructiveness of pagan, classical texts for Christian readers. This revaluation of literature was a double-edged sword. On the one hand, humanist confidence inspired authors to invent their own good books—good in style and morals—in morality plays such as Everyman and the Christian Terence tradition and in educational treatises such as Sir Thomas Elyot's Boke of the Governour. On the other hand, humanism placed a new burden on authors, requiring their work to teach and delight. In the wake of humanism, authors struggled to articulate the value of their work for readers, returning to a pre-humanist path that they associated with Geoffrey Chaucer. This medieval-inflected doubt pervades the late sixteenth-century writings of the most prolific and influential Elizabethans-Robert Greene, George Gascoigne, and Edmund Spenser.
Download or read book The Riverside Chaucer written by Geoffrey Chaucer and published by American Chemical Society. This book was released on 2008 with total page 1386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A re-editing of F.N. Robinson's second edition of The works of Geoffrey Chaucer published in 1957 by the team of experts at the Riverside Institute who have greatly expanded the introductory material, explanatory notes, textual notes, bibliography and glossary. The result of many years' study. The Riverside Chaucer is the most authentic and exciting edition available of Chaucer's complete works.
Download or read book Chaucer and the Art of Storytelling written by Leonard Michael Koff and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2023-04-28 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.
Download or read book Pagans and Philosophers written by John Marenbon and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2017-02-28 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An ambitious history of how medieval writers came to terms with paganism From the turn of the fifth century to the beginning of the eighteenth, Christian writers were fascinated and troubled by the "Problem of Paganism," which this book identifies and examines for the first time. How could the wisdom and virtue of the great thinkers of antiquity be reconciled with the fact that they were pagans and, many thought, damned? Related questions were raised by encounters with contemporary pagans in northern Europe, Mongolia, and, later, America and China. Pagans and Philosophers explores how writers—philosophers and theologians, but also poets such as Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, and travelers such as Las Casas and Ricci—tackled the Problem of Paganism. Augustine and Boethius set its terms, while Peter Abelard and John of Salisbury were important early advocates of pagan wisdom and virtue. University theologians such as Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Bradwardine, and later thinkers such as Ficino, Valla, More, Bayle, and Leibniz, explored the difficulty in depth. Meanwhile, Albert the Great inspired Boethius of Dacia and others to create a relativist conception of scientific knowledge that allowed Christian teachers to remain faithful Aristotelians. At the same time, early anthropologists such as John of Piano Carpini, John Mandeville, and Montaigne developed other sorts of relativism in response to the issue. A sweeping and original account of an important but neglected chapter in Western intellectual history, Pagans and Philosophers provides a new perspective on nothing less than the entire period between the classical and the modern world.
Download or read book Medieval Venuses and Cupids written by Theresa Tinkle and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1996-06-01 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Medieval Venuses and Cupids analyses the transformations of the love deities in later Middle English Chaucerian poetry, academic Latin discourses on classical myth (including astrology, natural philosophy, and commentaries on classical Roman literature), and French conventions that associate Venus and Cupid with Ovidian arts of love. Whereas existing studies of Venus and Cupid contend that they always and everywhere represent two loves (good and evil), the author argues that medieval discourses actually promulgate diverse, multiple, and often contradictory meanings for the deities. The book establishes the range of meanings bestowed on the deities through the later Middle Ages, and draws on feminist and cultural theories to offer new models for interpreting both academic Latin discourses and vernacular poetry.
Download or read book Biblical Paradigms in Medieval English Literature written by Lawrence Besserman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-03-01 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the intricate and unusual relationship between the sacred and secular spheres of English medieval culture, positing that the assimilation of sacred and secular motifs could be in either direction, or even in both directions. That is, medieval English writers could appropriate biblical paradigms to express secular themes, and vice versa. Codicological, psychoanalytic, feminist, and new historicist insights inform readings of Beowulf, Middle English lyric poetry, the Gawain-poet, Chaucer, and Malory, among others. Besserman elucidates the structural and thematic complexity of the integration of biblical and biblically derived sacred diction, imagery, character types, and themes in the works under consideration, identifying within them new biblical sources and analogues and providing fresh insights into the contextual meaning and significance of the biblical paradigms they deploy. This book highlights the shaping influence of biblical and biblically derived sacred paradigms on exemplary literature produced in the middle Ages.
Download or read book Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature written by Will Robins and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2010-01-01 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Literary depictions of the sacred and the secular from the Middle Ages are representative of the era's widely held cultural understandings related to religion and the nature of lived experience. Using late Medieval English literature, including some of Chaucer's writings, these essays do not try to define a secular realm distinct and separate from the divine or religious, but instead analyze intersections of the sacred and the profane, suggesting that these two categories are mutually constitutive rather than antithetical. With essays by former students of John V. Fleming, the collection pays tribute to the Princeton University professor emeritus through wide-ranging scholarship and literary criticism. Including reflections on depictions of Bathsheba, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women, Chaucer's Pardoner, and Margery Kempe, these essays focus on literature while ranging into history, philosophy, and the visual arts. Taken together, the work suggests that the domain of the sacred, as perceived in the Middle Ages, can variously be seen as having a hierarchical or a complementary relationship to the things of this world.
Download or read book Geoffrey Chaucer written by Steve Ellis and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 98 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fresh study of Chaucer which embraces modern critical theory to provide a stimulating re-evaluation of the full range of his work. Feminist criticism and the work of Bakhtin receive particular attention and new readings that reconsider the political and social context of his writings are also discussed.
Download or read book Chaucer and the Subject of History written by Lee Patterson and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1991 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chaucer's interest in individuality was strikingly modern. He was aware of the pressures on individuality exerted by the past and by society - by history. Chaucer investigated not just the idea of history but the historical world intimately related to his own political and literary career. This book has shaped the way that Chaucer is read.
Download or read book A New Companion to Chaucer written by Peter Brown and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-03-19 with total page 568 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extensively revised and expanded version of the acclaimed Companion to Chaucer An essential text for both established scholars and those seeking to expand their knowledge of Chaucer studies, A New Companion to Chaucer is an authoritative and up-to-date survey of Chaucer scholarship. Rigorous yet accessible, this book helps readers to identify current debates, recognize historical and literary context, and to understand how particular concepts and theories affect the interpretation of Chaucer’s texts. Chaucer specialists from around the globe offer contributions that range from updates of long-standing scholarship on biography, language, women, and social structures, to original research in new areas such as ideology, the afterlife, patronage, and sexuality. In presenting conflicting perspectives and ideological differences, this stimulating volume encourages readers to explore additional paths of inquiry and engage in lively and informed debate. Each chapter of the Companion, organized by issues and themes, balances textual analysis and cultural context by grounding the reader in existing scholarship. Key issues from specific passages are discussed with an annotated bibliography provided for reference and further reading. Compiled with all students of Chaucer in mind, this important volume: Presents contributions from both established and emerging specialists Explores the circumstances in which Chaucer wrote, such as the political and religious issues of his time Includes numerous close readings of selected poems Provides points of entry to a wide range of approaches to Chaucer’s works Incorporates original research, fresh perspectives, and updated additions to Chaucer scholarship A New Companion to Chaucer is a valuable and enduring resource for scholars, teachers, and students of medieval literature and medieval studies, as well as the general reader interested in interpretations and historical contexts of Chaucer’s writings.
Download or read book Oxford Guides to Chaucer The Canterbury Tales written by Helen Cooper and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-13 with total page 691 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recognised on its first appearance as the most comprehensive single-volume guide to The Canterbury Tales yet produced, this third edition brings the Tales up to date in relation both to recent criticism and to the changing expectations of modern readers. The Guide provide tale-by-tale information on textual variations and sources, together with a readable commentary on thematic issues, structure, style, generic affiliations, and the contribution of each tale to the work as a whole. It concludes with a survey of the many imitations of the tales down to the early seventeenth century. This new edition also takes account of the latest scholarship, theory, and criticism and new interpretations of the tales, including such matters as gender identity, consent, and racial and religious difference. The book is the most comprehensive single-volume guide to the Tales yet produced, bringing together a wide range of disparate material and providing a readable commentary on all aspects of the work. It combines the comprehensive coverage of a reference book with the clarity and coherence of a critical account. Since its first publication in 1989, the Guide has established itself as an indispensable aid for any reader looking to develop their understanding of The Canterbury Tales.
