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This book on Geoffrey Chaucer explores the relationship between Chaucer's poetry and the change and conflict characteristic of his day and the sorts of literary and non-literary conventions that were at his disposal for making sense of the society around him. Critics who consider the social meaning of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales fall into two main schools: those who present his social thought as an expression of the dominant spirit or ideology of his day and those who see Chaucer as possessing a more heterodox voice. Many of the present generation of Chaucer critics have been trained either as 'Robertsonians' or as 'Donaldsonians'. For D. W. Robertson, even those medieval poems which do not explicitly address religious issues were frequently intended to promote the Augustinian doctrine of charity beneath a pleasing surface; for E. Talbot Donaldson, there are 'no such poems in Middle English'. The book sets out the basics of the Augustinian doctrine of charity and of medieval allegorical theory and examines 'patristic' interpretations of Chaucer's work, particularly of the 'Nun's Priest Tale'. It looks at the humanist alternative to the patristic method and assesses the strengths and weaknesses of the patristic approach. The book also outlines some of the major medieval discourses about sexual difference which inform Chaucer's depiction of women, in particular, the tendency of medieval writers to polarise their views of women, condemning them to the pit or elevating them to the pedestal.
, Chaucer takes our sinfulness for granted and is more interested in ‘the marvellous variety of life in a world which, however sinful, is the only world we’ve got’. For Robertson, even those medieval poems which do not explicitly address religious issues were frequently intended to promote the Augustinian doctrine of charity beneath a pleasing surface; for Donaldson, there are ‘no such poems in Middle
to detect and explore the non-representational capacities and orientations of medieval poems without immediately reinscribing them within a representational teleology, we are able to perceive them at work in an energetic world. In understanding medieval poems as active in this way, we also have that much more of a chance of doing what I believe Brodeur wanted to do for Beowulf in constructing a fragile framework for the study and appreciation of its aesthetics at mid-century: that is, to translate the poem—in the sense of allowing it to recrystallize—in the
within its own post-war intellectual geologies and literary histories—as a comparative horizon for the Old English poem will suggest the usefulness of cultivating a greater critical capacity to detect, comprehend, and explore the non-representational capacities and orientations of medieval poems without immediately re-inscribing them within a representational teleology. As a return to aesthetics that cannot be reduced to formalism, a naive account of a Kantian exhibition of aesthetic ideas, or a transhistorical sensualism, this effort will remain tied to language
way, with you. The chapter’s title modernizes, as a kind of choreography of stillness, a term the medieval poem uses to express the limits of arithmetic when coping with who we are, alone, together. Chapters 7 and 8 , “Lyric medievalism” and “Lyric theology,” are two sides of the same coin, or, perhaps, two coins of the same side, as they each read closely a handful of modern lyric poems devoted, in various ways, to medieval objects and experiences. “Lyric medievalism” shows how B. H. Fairchild, Lynda Hull and Rynn Williams evoke the Middle Ages as a way of
of Chevy Chase’, chosen as the first ballad in the collection, might have presented problems because of the events it commemorated. It could be perceived as a medieval poem about a border skirmish between English and Scottish factions, which occurred because the then Lord Percy arbitrarily decided to make an illegal incursion into Scotland to hunt deer (1; 1, I, i). However, the ballad depicts this action as a holy and righteous exercise of Percy’s power as an English nobleman: The Persé owt of Northombarlande
medieval Scandinavians. In place of regnal genealogies and migration myths, he uses imagery that stresses raw and starkly drawn emotional power of a kind that recalls Frithjof’s saga , a wildly popular pseudo-medieval poem of the early nineteenth century that was translated many times, including by the Robert Latham who wrote so much about Norway. 12 ‘I am the God Thor’, begins one of Longfellow’s poems: I am the War God, I am the Thunderer Here in my Northland, My fastness and fortress, Reign I forever! Here amid icebergs Rule I the nations
-budget British version Robin Hood (1990); the American blockbuster Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves (1991), starring Kevin Costner; and Mel Brooks’s spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993). A further eighteen films were adapted from an assortment of other literary sources, from the medieval to the postmodern. Medieval poems and letters and the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe accounted for The Wanderer
in the darkest imaginable fashion, reminding of a time dominated by war and epidemics … the time of torture, gallows, and François Villon’s poetry’. 35 Other late medieval poems singled out by the band reinforce this bleak vision of the Middle Ages. Folkfuck Folie bases one song on the devil’s speech about the superiority of the
high Renaissance. Sources and analogues like the Variorum ’s need hardly be abandoned, but they cannot exclude a verbal parallel in English in a medieval poem known to be familiar to Spenser. This time, the evidence is incontrovertible. The seventy-ninth sonnet devalues the lady’s ‘fayre’ (1) appearance and ‘glorious hew’ (6), on both of which the lady prides herself. The speaker supersedes these outer qualities with what alone ‘is permanent and free / from frayle corruption, that doth flesh ensew’ (7–8). But unlike