Chaucer and the Late Medieval World
Chaucer and the Late Medieval World

Author: Lillian M. Bisson

Publisher: MacMillan

Published: 2000-02

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780333800362

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Divided between the outer world of affairs and the inner world of poetic insight, Chaucer sought to make sense of his changing, conflicting world. In this volume, the author examines the societal issues that the poet explored in his work. She focuses on three major areas of medieval life: religion; class/commerce; and gender, all of which were experiencing considerable change in the 14th century. The book builds a bridge between an unmediated encounter with Chaucer's texts and the more specialized discussions found in most contemporary criticism, and provides a detailed analysis of Christian culture. By placing each topic in a broad cultural context, should help the reader to better understand the questions that teased Chaucer's imagination into poetry and to enter into the cultural conversation with which he engaged his audience.

Chaucer and the Late Medieval World
Chaucer and the Late Medieval World

Author: Lillian M. Bisson

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 294

ISBN-13: 9780333619643

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Bisson places Chaucer's work in the context of some of the major cultural and social currents of his day, a time when the underpinnings of medieval society were undergoing substantive challenges and revision. Students will find this book particularly useful as a historical companion to The Canterbury Tales. It seeks to bring to nonspecialists some of the excitement that the new interest in social history and popular culture is generating among scholars, and it attempts to serve the growing interest in interdisciplinary approaches to medieval studies.

Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras
Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras

Author: Nancy Bradley Warren

Publisher:

Published: 2019

Total Pages: 228

ISBN-13: 9780268105815

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Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras adopts a comparative, boundary-crossing approach to consider one of the most canonical of literary figures, Geoffrey Chaucer. The idea that Chaucer is an international writer raises no eyebrows. Similarly, a claim that Chaucer's writings participate in English confessional controversies in his own day and afterward provokes no surprise. This book breaks new ground by considering Chaucer's Continental interests as they inform his participation in religious debates concerning such subjects as female spirituality and Lollardy. Similarly, this project explores the little-studied ways in which those who took religious vows, especially nuns, engaged with works by Chaucer and in the Chaucerian tradition. Furthermore, while the early modern "Protestant Chaucer" is a familiar figure, this book explores the creation and circulation of an early modern "Catholic Chaucer" that has not received much attention. This study seeks to fill gaps in Chaucer scholarship by situating Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition in an international textual environment of religious controversy spanning four centuries and crossing both the English Channel and the Atlantic Ocean. This book presents a nuanced analysis of the high stakes religiopolitical struggle inherent in the creation of the canon of English literature, a struggle that participates in the complex processes of national identity formation in Europe and the New World alike.

Chaucer and the Subject of History
Chaucer and the Subject of History

Author: Lee Patterson

Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 508

ISBN-13: 9780299128340

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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.

Chaucer's Gifts
Chaucer's Gifts

Author: Robert Epstein

Publisher: University of Wales Press

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 266

ISBN-13: 1786831708

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Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the most celebrated literary work of medieval England, portrays the culture of the late Middle Ages as a deeply commercial environment, replete with commodities and dominated by market relationships. However, the market is not the only mode of exchange in Chaucer’s world or in his poem. Chaucer’s Gifts reveals the gift economy at work in the tales. Applying important recent advances in anthropological gift theory, it illuminates and explains this network of exchanges and obligations. Chaucer’s Gifts argues that the world of the Canterbury Tales harbours deep commitments to reciprocity and obligation which are at odds with a purely commercial culture, and demonstrates how the market and commercial relations are not natural, eternal, or inevitable – an essential lesson if we are to understand Chaucer’s world or our own.

Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising
Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising

Author: Lynn Arner

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2015-01-14

Total Pages: 210

ISBN-13: 0271062037

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Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising examines the transmission of Greco-Roman and European literature into English during the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, while literacy was burgeoning among men and women from the nonruling classes. This dissemination offered a radically democratizing potential for accessing, interpreting, and deploying learned texts. Focusing primarily on an overlooked sector of Chaucer’s and Gower’s early readership, namely, the upper strata of nonruling urban classes, Lynn Arner argues that Chaucer’s and Gower’s writings engaged in elaborate processes of constructing cultural expertise. These writings helped define gradations of cultural authority, determining who could contribute to the production of legitimate knowledge and granting certain socioeconomic groups political leverage in the wake of the English Rising of 1381. Chaucer, Gower, and the Vernacular Rising simultaneously examines Chaucer’s and Gower’s negotiations—often articulated at the site of gender—over poetics and over the roles that vernacular poetry should play in the late medieval English social formation. This study investigates how Chaucer’s and Gower’s texts positioned poetry to become a powerful participant in processes of social control.

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages
Excrement in the Late Middle Ages

Author: S. Morrison

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-09-15

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 0230615023

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This interdisciplinary book intergrates the historical practices regarding material excrement and its symbolic representation, concluding that excrement is a moral and ethical category deserving scrutiny.

Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature
Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature

Author: Will Robins

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2010-01-01

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1442640812

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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.

World of Echo
World of Echo

Author: Adin E. Lears

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2020-09-15

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 1501749617

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Between late antiquity and the fifteenth century, theologians, philosophers, and poets struggled to articulate the correct relationship between sound and sense, creating taxonomies of sounds based on their capacity to carry meaning. In World of Echo, Adin E. Lears traces how medieval thinkers adopted the concept of noise as a mode of lay understanding grounded in the body and the senses. With a broadly interdisciplinary approach, Lears examines a range of literary genres to highlight the poetic and social effects of this vibrant discourse, offering close readings of works by Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, as well as the mystics Richard Rolle and Margery Kempe. Each of these writers embraced an embodied experience of language resistant to clear articulation, even as their work reflects inherited anxieties about the appeal of such sensations. A preoccupation with the sound of language emerged in the form of poetic soundplay at the same time that mysticism and other forms of lay piety began to flower in England. As Lears shows, the presence of such emphatic aural texture amplified the cognitive importance of feeling in conjunction with reason and was a means for the laity—including lay women—to cultivate embodied forms of knowledge on their own terms, in precarious relation to existing clerical models of instruction. World of Echo offers a deep history of the cultural and social hierarchies that coalesce around aesthetic experience and gives voice to alternate ways of knowing.

Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England
Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England

Author: Helen Barr

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2001-12-06

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 0191540862

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Socioliterary Practice in Late Medieval England bridges the disciplines of literature and history by examining various kinds of literary language as examples of social practice. Readings of both English and Latin texts from the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries are grounded in close textual study which reveals the social positioning of these works and the kinds of ideological work they can be seen to perform. Distinctive new readings of texts emerge which challenge received interpretations of literary history and late medieval culture. Canonical authors and texts such as Chaucer, Gower, and Pearl are discussed alongside the less familiar: Clanvowe, anonymous alliterative verse, and Wycliffite prose tracts.