Chaucer’s Measuring Eye by Linda Tarte Holley (original) (raw)

"The Mystery of the Bed Chamber": Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer's The Book of the Duchess

in The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, 2000

This paper addresses visionary and invention practices deriving from both Latin rhetoric and monastic prayer in reference specifically to Chaucer's dream vision poem, "The Book of the Duchess". In so doing, it also shows how private grief is re-composed as public mourning in the interchange of the narrator and the Man in Black. This essay was published in The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne, ed. J.M. Hill and D.M. Sinnreich-Levi (2000): 67-87.

Ugly Beauty: Chaucer's Poetic Ecclesiology

Over the last several decades, the "religious turn" in Chaucer studies has opened up numerous avenues for analysis of Chaucer's poetics without completely resolving questions about their specifically Christian character, or lack thereof. Approaches to answering such questions include biographical analysis, which in Chaucer's case seems least likely to yield substantial conclusions: we simply don't have enough biographical data to be confident that Chaucer held strongly to one, or another, or no version of Christian faith. Our limited sources of knowledge about Chaucer's distinctly secular professional life certainly give us no basis for confident assertions about his own personal piety. Unlike his contemporary John Lydgate, for example, Chaucer was no monk. On the other hand, given the numerous, lively and vigorous forms of lay piety in Chaucer's era, his lack of religious vocation and/or sacerdotal ordination is not per se a limiting factor on the possibility that his poetics is robustly Christian at a deep philosophical level. One important movement of lay piety, founded on protest against ecclesial corruption, was inspired in large part by the indignation and influence of another Chaucer contemporary, John Wyclif, and this movement has been the focus of a substantial body of scholarship over the last several decades. Not surprisingly, possible allusions to Wyclif's ideas found in Chaucer's poems, placed under various scholarly lenses, have led to recurrent speculation as to the possibility of a generally heterodox or, indeed, a decidedly Wycliffite bent in Chaucer's poetic oeuvre. ii In order to test the notion that Chaucer's poeisis reflects a Wycliffite bent, scholars must consider most especially the Wycliffite doctrines themselves, many of which are more negative than positive: that is, they express a piety that is characterized above all by objection to and protest against real or perceived ecclesiastical abuses of a divine calling. Many scholars have speculated that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, with their pungent, pointed satire directed at the foibles of errant clergy and vowed religious, could well share a common spirit with the Wycliffite reformist agenda. That Wyclif's ideas and the movement he sparked have long been considered a type of "premature reformation" is no surprise, and if in fact Chaucer's poetics is distinctively Wycliffiteleaning, we should be unsurprised by the manifestation of a "Protestant Chaucer" across prior generations of Chaucer scholarship. On the other hand, in spite of the pungent anticlerical satire that features so prominently in the Tales, there is much evidence to suggest that Chaucer's poetics is more genuinely Catholic than heretical, and scholars are quite right to continue to subject the "Wycliffite" Chaucer to careful, multivalent scrutiny. The Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, a late fourteenth century precursor to Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, provides a handy summary of the accusations leveled by Wyclif and his followers at the late medieval church. Among the aspects of Wycliffite thought and polemic which are represented in the Conclusions and relevant to the Canterbury Tales, the third and eleventh conclusions rail against the celibacy mandated for secular clergy, for monks, and for nuns, while the ninth conclusion rejects the sacrament of penance. Certainly Chaucer had a keen eye for manifestations of clerical corruption, but it is doubtful that his Tales, taken as a reasonably complete and unified work of art, reflect the outright heretical loathing of ecclesial foibles that characterizes iii the most savage aspects of Wycliffite polemic. Furthermore, there are some important indicators, deserving of deeper investigation, that Chaucer's poetic ecclesiology as crafted in the Tales, is consciously an orthodox ecclesiology characterized especially by the theological virtue of hope, as against the heretical ecclesiology of suspicion, fear, and contempt proffered, all too often, by Wyclif and the polemicists whom he inspired.

Chaucer: Real-Life Observation Versus Literary Convention

Chaucer in Context, chapter 1. , 1996

Argues that a historical approach to Chaucer's work does not depend on seeing the characters of the General Prologue as being based on real-life models or as constituting 'reflections' of reality.

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries

Contemporary Chaucer across the centuries, 2018

This edited collection explores how knowledge was preserved and reinvented in the Middle Ages. Unlike previous publications, which are predominantly focused either on a specific historical period or on precise cultural and historical events, this volume, which includes essays spanning from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, is intended to eschew traditional categorisations of periodisation and disciplines and to enable the establishment of connections and cross-sections between different departments of knowledge, including the history of science (computus, prognostication), the history of art, literature, theology (homilies, prayers, hagiography, contemplative texts), music, historiography and geography. As suggested by its title, the collection does not pretend to aim at inclusiveness or comprehensiveness but is intended to highlight suggestive strands of what is a very wide topic. The chapters in this volume are grouped into four sections: I, Anthologies of Knowledge; II Transmission of Christian Traditions; III, Past and Present; and IV, Knowledge and Materiality, which are intended to provide the reader with a further thematic framework for approaching aspects of knowledge. Aspects of knowledge is mainly aimed to an academic readership, including advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students, and specialists of medieval literature, history of science, history of knowledge, history, geography, theology, music, philosophy, intellectual history, history of the language and material culture.

Imagination and the Cosmic Consciousness in Chaucer’s The House of Fame

Religions

The aim of this article is to situate Chaucer’s House of Fame in the tradition of exercising the self as practiced by ancient philosophers and theorized by Pierre Hadot. It shows that Chaucer’s poem contains echoes of an ancient exercise referred to as ‘the view from above’, which engages the faculties of the imagination in order to enable an individual to review their life and to situate it in the context of universal nature. The poet’s creative use of the ancient motif of the celestial flight, I will argue, distances him from those writers who use the theme to develop the contemptus mundi topos and affiliates him with those ancient thinkers who, like Marcus Aurelius, employ it to turn their attention to their own self, which may be achieved via meditations on the identity and homogeneity of all things (homoeides). It is Chaucer’s use of the view from above topos that vindicates the role of imagination by showing how it contributes to self-knowledge, that is, to an awareness of whe...

A Pictorial Utopia: The Kelmscott Chaucer

Ankara University The Journal of the Faculty of Languages and History-Geography, 2017

William Morris (1834-1896) was not only a prolic writer and artist of the Victorian Age, but also the embodiment of Neo-medievalism, which dominated the age, with his interest in medieval manuscripts, sagas, romances and the gothic tradition as reected in his professional life. Trying to avoid the inuences of the Industrial Revolution on individuals, Morris turned to medieval ideals and materialised them in his paintings and drawings as a Victorian medievalist. Yet, it was the foundation of the Kelmscott Press that endowed Morris with the best means to display his interest in medieval arts and literature. The Kelmscott Chaucer (1896) can be regarded as the product both of Morris's idealisation of Chaucer as a medieval poet, and of what Karen Barad denes as the “intra-action” of matter and discourse. Accordingly, through an analysis of the illustrated pages of The Canterbury Tales section of the Kelmscott Chaucer, the aim of this article is to analyse this book as a pictorial utopia and argue that Morris displays the intra-action of matter and discourse through his search for medieval printing techniques. Keywords: William Morris; Neo-medievalism; Chaucer; The Kelmscott Chaucer; Pictorial Utopia Ankara University The Journal of the Faculty of Languages and History-Geography 57.2 (2017): 1055-1069.