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groundwork for politically invested uses of the idea of the pilgrimage road.10 Allegory, in particular, demonstrates the manner in which this intellectual tradition could be adapted to take the complexity of an individual life and distil its triumphs and its adversities into the iconic image of the pilgrim on the road; Guillaume de Deguileville’s fourteenth-century Pilgrimage of the Life of Man or the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy are two of the better known medieval examples.11 Augustine’s ontological and historical-allegorical image of the pilgrim drives much of this
experienced. Dante embarked on his literary descent into Hell at the age of thirty-five, opening his Divine comedy with the line ‘in the middle of the journey of our life I came to myself within a dark wood’. Similarly, Christine de Pizan began her semi-autobiographical Vision at the point where ‘I had already finished half of my pilgrimage’. 20 Both were ‘interior’ journeys. For Christine it was an
devil enticed to fall in love with Theodora, and an old woman who acts as go-between (a ‘karlyng’; XXX, 15740). The passage in general is heavily influenced by classical and medieval literary traditions, most notably satire, comedy, and romance, which frequently draw on the character of the garrulous old woman who acts as a bawd. Dame Sirith is a prime example of this character-type in Middle English literature.41 The beginning of the life of Theodora, then, is set not so much in the hagiographic as in the satirical and tragicomic traditions. Only after her adultery
playwright who took the name Ruzzante from one of his own characters. 4 His father came from the branch of a Milanese noble family that had moved in the 1450s to Padua, where Ruzzante was born. His family and the people they associated with were wealthy and cultivated, so Ruzzante grew up with a refined literary education. He founded a theatrical company in about 1520 and is known to have staged a rustic comedy, the Pastoral , in Venice at that time. He restricted his many plays to one area, centred on Padua and extending as far as Venice and Ferrara, in which the local
his treatment at one ‘Mrs Fumpkins’ who ‘looking scornfully askew over her shoulders’ suggested that he might sleep in the field. He continues ‘the said ungentle gentlewoman (with her posterior, or but end towards me) gave me a final answer’. 79 His ire was thus directed at those who refused him hospitality and in some measure his mockery of ‘Mrs Fumpkins’ has an acute observation, a comedic effect, which draws attention to the body and posture of the woman. His view of Wales and the Welsh thus turned on his perception of their hospitality and manners. His view
English countryside , p. 67; Arnold, Kind und Gesellschaft , p. 25; Smith, ‘Proofs of age’, p. 139; Boswell, The kindness of strangers , p. 28. 10 Dante, The divine comedy : Paradise , canto 27, lines 127–9. 11
uncommon in late medieval society. Positive views of death as the start of a ‘new life’ are found in Italian writings. In contrast to the doom and gloom of English and French visionary literature, Purgatory in Dante’s Divine comedy is a place of hope that leads to Heaven. Memoir writers from Verona and Vicenza noted deaths with the lines ‘left this life and gained a life which is true life’ or
, follies or dissipation’. From his university in Montpellier about 1300, Bernard de Gordon warned that children under twelve should not read the bawdy twelfth-century comedy Pamphilus (a basic school text in many European schools), and he condemned indecent songs, evil music and dances as corrupting influences. As supervisor of several schools in Paris, Gerson was equally worried about corrupt images. In
.) These are the words of Adam Tesák Brodský at the beginning of his father Juraj Tesák Mošovský's Comedy from a Book of God's Testament Named Ruth ( Komedie z Kníhy Zákona Božího, jenž slove Ruth ; Ruth 1604), printed in Prague in 1604. What is more, Tesák Brodský admonishes that ‘nadto nesluší těmi, kteréž ex fontibus Israel, to jest, z studnic Písem svatých jsou sebrané, pohrdati’ (‘above all, it is unbeholding to scorn those comedies that are composed ex fontibus Israel , that is, from the springs of the Holy Scriptures’, A2r). 1
far closer to the level of fabliau than epic romance. In The General Prologue, Robin the Miller is compared to a fox, and twice to a pig. His beard is as red as a sow, and the hairs on the wart on the top of his nose are as red as the bristles inside a sow’s ears (I.552–6). Released from The Knight’s Tale, Pirithous takes delight in lowering the tone of elevated conversation. His obsessive commentary on male body parts reproduces the sodomitical comedy of the end of The Miller’s Tale. As we have already seen in the discussion of Chaucer’s hands, the denouement of